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He expected her to try to stall, or to hesitate, even balk, given her history with the police department. Instead, she opened the door wide. “I’ve been expecting you,” she said. “I heard you visited my mother and brothers. Come on in.” To the dog she said, “Get on your blanket. Now.” With one last furtive glance at Paterno and Rossi, the mutt did as it was bid, claws clicking on the floor as it headed toward the kitchen where a puppy whined and the spicy smell of onions and green peppers erupted. As they passed by the archway he noticed a microwave meal, still steaming in its cardboard box, on a counter.

She led them into a small living room with a worn carpet. Pictures of her family and several dogs covered the tops of small tables scattered around the room. She curled up in a striped side chair with a matching ottoman, and tucked her bare feet beneath her. He sat on the edge of a beat-up old couch and Rossi took a seat in a rocker that creaked beneath his weight.

Shannon eyed the two men warily. “What do you want to know?” She’d known she wouldn’t be excluded from their interrogation, but as Rossi began taking notes and Paterno, with her permission, set a small recorder on the coffee table, she clenched inside. She was assaulted by a horrible sense of déjà vu, remembering the last time the police had interrogated her here, in this very room.

But this time she had nothing to hide, had done nothing suspicious.

Paterno started by asking her about her relationship with Mary Beth, and what Shannon had been doing on the night her sister-in-law had been killed. She explained everything including driving to the scene, seeing her sister-in-law’s body being removed from the house and her truck being blocked in so that she had to leave it parked on the street.

Yes, she had witnessed the fight between Robert and Mary Beth and seen them get in his car. No, she hadn’t called her sister-in-law, though Mary Beth had insisted she had and even Shea thought Shannon had called her.

“But you didn’t call her,” Paterno reiterated, watching her with hawklike eyes.

It hit Shannon like a ton of bricks. “Oh, Jesus,” she whispered, straightening in her chair. “No, I didn’t call her, but I lost my cell phone on the night of the fire in my shed. I called 9-1-1, but then dropped the cell when I was attacked. It had been missing for days, since that night. I just found it yesterday and, of course, the battery had run down to nothing. I haven’t used it since. Wait just a sec.” She unfolded herself from the chair, hurried into the kitchen and knew without a doubt what she would find. Heart pounding, she pulled the cell phone from its charger. Ignoring the puppy who whimpered for her, Khan who lay on his rug, waiting for the word to be released, and the microwave Chicken Oriental dinner she’d just heated, she switched on the phone. Walking slowly into the living room again, she stared at the small screen as it came to life. With a touch of a button she found the list of recently dialed calls.

“Oh, God,” she whispered. Hand at her throat she witnessed the familiar number on the display. Robert and Mary Beth’s number listed three times in succession. She handed the damning evidence to Paterno. “I found this in my truck, wedged under the seat, but I didn’t have it on the days those calls were made.” On a note of barely suppressed hysteria, she wondered aloud, “Who would do this? Who would take the phone, make the calls and then hide it in my truck?”

“You have no idea?” Paterno carefully placed her phone in a plastic evidence bag.

Shannon lowered herself onto the ottoman. “No.”

“No one you know who would want to set you up?”

“Oh, my God, you don’t think I…I…That I killed Mary Beth?” she asked, stunned.

“We don’t know what to think,” Paterno said with maddening patience. “But you asked ‘Who would do this?’…I think you’re the best one to answer.”

“I already gave Detective Rossi and his partner a list of people I thought might attack me and set my shed on fire. It hasn’t changed.”

“Could you elaborate on your relationship with your sister-in-law?”

Shannon gazed at him blankly. She had no idea what he was really thinking. “We were friends once, best friends, in grade school and high school. She met Robert through me. We all went to St. Theresa’s together. My brothers, me, Mary Beth, Liam, Kevin, and Margaret.”

“And your husband?”

Shannon clenched her hands. “Yes.”

“Ryan Carlyle was Mary Beth Carlyle Flannery’s first cousin.”

/> “That’s right.”

“Her adopted cousin.”

“Yes,” she said, “Ryan was adopted. It wasn’t something that he broadcast, but nothing he or his family had tried to hide.”

“He had a brother, too, didn’t he?”

Where was this going? “Yes. Teddy.”

“You knew him.”

“In grade school. He was a year older than me.”

Paterno checked his notes. “In the same class as your brothers Neville and Oliver.”

“Yes,” she said automatically and remembered Teddy Carlyle, a spoiled, loud-mouthed, athletic kid with freckles and slightly crooked teeth.

“They hang around with him?”


Tags: Lisa Jackson West Coast Mystery