His children must be thirty by this point. Which means the kid in front of him is surely his granddaughter.
“Hello?” Henry Wade’s face is round and ruddy. His neck, somewhat loose with skin. His hair, once dark and full, now leaning toward a salt and pepper look. “Er…” Henry sets one hand on the girl’s shoulder as though readying to tug her to safety. “Can I help you?”
“My name is Detective Archer Malone.” My injured arm is back in its sling, which means I use my good arm to reach across and reveal the badge on my belt. Then I nod toward Fletch. “Detective Charlie Fletcher. We’re with the Copeland PD. Are you Henry Wade?”
“Y-yeah.” His hand clamps tighter on the little girl’s shoulder. “What’s happened?” Like an animal trapped in the wild, his eyes flicker from me to Fletch. “Who’s been hurt, Detective?”
“Actually, we were hoping to discuss the late Holly Wade,” Fletch fills in. He’s kinder than me. I would’ve let the man sweat a minute longer. “Your late w—”
“Of course.” Clearing his throat and cutting Fletch off mid-word, Henry releases the girl’s shoulder and steps to the side. “Josie, honey. Can you go out back and play with your sisters? Grandpa needs to talk to these men in private.”
“You’re the police?” Josie looks a little like her grandfather. Her face is round, and her hair is dark. She’s about four feet tall, and at least half of that is leg. “What kind of police are you?” she wonders. “The kind that get bank robbers, or the kind that help de—”
“I said go outside.” Henry steers her away with a hand on her arm, then he turns back to us with a friendly smile. “I’m sorry.”
“Your granddaughter doesn’t know you were married before?”
He swallows so his neck skin jostles and his cheeks pinken. “She doesn’t know the woman I was married to died,” he amends. “She especially doesn’t know that my late wife ran herself in front of a truck while she was having a depressive episode.”
Interesting take on things.
“What can I help you with, Officers?”
“Detectives.” Fletch takes a step forward, inviting himself into the guy’s home. “Can we come in, Henry? Can we talk?”
“I mean…” Henry’s no hardened criminal. He doesn’t know how to handle himself with the cops around—and it would seem he has no clue he could ask us to leave and we’d have no option but to listen. “S-sure, I guess.”
He waits in the foyer for me to pass, then he closes the door and flips the locks until steel snicks into place. Taking the lead, he starts forward, only to make a sharp left and steer us toward a home office.
Bookshelves line the walls, and a rich mahogany desk takes up the middle of the room. An area rug brings it all together, and in the corner, a ball of discarded fur belonging to, I assume, the long-haired retriever who trots into the room after us.
“Take a seat.” Henry waves toward the chairs in front of his desk. He’s used to working on one side, I suppose. To welcoming a client in and taking his position of power on the other side.
Henry wears linen pants instead of a suit, and a button-up shirt instead of a jacket, but habits are hard to break, so as he comes around to sit, his hand automatically comes to his stomach, where, in another life, he would have unbuttoned his coat to free space for his weight.
Settling in, he snaps his fingers to get the dog’s attention when it comes over and sniffs at my boots. “Moby. Sit.”
“It’s alright.” Reaching across, I scratch Moby’s soft fur, and grin when he turns his face and slobbers on my wrist. “I hope we haven’t come at a bad time for you, Mr. Wade.”
“To discuss my late wife?” he counters with a lifted brow. “Is there ever a good time?”
“Where’s your current wife?” Fletch glances around the office. “She home?”
He nods, short and sharp. “She’s in the garden out back. Our granddaughters are here for the day, so my wife is pottering around and hoping to keep them busy while the sun is nice.” Linking his fingers together and setting them on the desk, Henry finds his business voice. “How can I help you?”
“We’re looking into Holly’s death,” I answer matter of factly. “My partner and I are homicide detectives who—”
“Homicide?” Henry’s face pales. “Wait a second. Holly died more than thirty years ago, and now you want to call it homicide?”
“We’re not labeling it,” Fletch cuts in. “We were simply made aware that the initial investigating officers had a reputation that doesn’t align with what my colleagues and I now try to achieve.”
“A repu…” Henry tries, so truly hard, to understand. “What?”
“We have reason to believe Holly’s case might’ve been mishandled.”
“Mishandled?” he blusters. “How the hell is a casemishandled? Holly put herself under a truck, Detectives. It was tragic, it was awful, but for whatever reason, it’s the choice she made that night. How is there room for mishandling in that?”
“The files skew heavily toward Mrs. Wade’s mental health conditions at the time.” Leaning back in the chair, I bring my ankle up to my knee, and leave my hand on Moby’s neck, since he likes it so much. “The detectives who ran the case, it turns out, were less than honest.”