One of the troopers stepped into the street, holding up a hand. She stopped and powered down her window.
“Are you Marcia Maitland, ma’am?”
“Yes. I can’t get into my garage with those vehicles in my driveway.”
“Park at the curb there,” he said, pointing behind one of the cruisers.
Marcy felt an urge to lean through the open window, get right up in his face, and scream, MY driveway! MY garage! Get your stuff out of my way!
Instead, she pulled over and got out. She needed to pee, and badly. Probably had needed to since the cop had handcuffed Terry, and she just hadn’t realized until now.
One of the other cops was talking into his shoulder mic, and from around the corner of the house, walkie-talkie in one hand, came the crowning touch of this evening’s malignant surrealism: a hugely pregnant woman in a sleeveless flower-print dress. She cut across the Maitland lawn in that peculiar duck-footed walk—almost a waddle—that all women seem to have when they arrive at the far end of their last trimester. She did not smile as she approached Marcy. A laminated ID hung from her neck. Pinned to her dress, riding the slope of one enormous breast and as out of place as a dog biscuit on a communion plate, was a Flint City police badge.
“Mrs. Maitland? I’m Detective Betsy Riggins.”
She held out her hand. Marcy did not shake it. And although Howie had already told her, she said, “What do you want?”
Riggins looked over Marcy’s shoulder. One of the state cops was standing there. He was apparently the bull goose of the quartet, because he had stripes on his shirtsleeve. He was holding out a sheet of paper. “Mrs. Maitland, I’m Lieutenant Yunel Sablo. We have a warrant to search these premises and take out any items belonging to your husband, Terence John Maitland.”
She snatched the paper. SEARCH WARRANT was printed at the top in gothic type. There followed a bunch of legalistic blah-blah, and it was signed at the bottom by a name she at first misread as Judge Crater. Didn’t he disappear a long time ago? she thought, then blinked water from her eyes—maybe sweat, maybe tears—and saw the name was Carter, not Crater. The warrant bore today’s date and had apparently been signed less than six hours ago.
She turned it over and frowned. “There’s nothing listed here. Does that mean you can even take his underwear, if you want to?”
Betsy Riggins, who knew they would take any underwear they happened to find in the Maitlands’ dirty clothes hamper, said, “It’s at our discretion, Mrs. Maitland.”
“Your discretion? Your discretion? What is this, Nazi Germany?”
Riggins said, “We are investigating the most heinous murder to occur in this state during my twenty years as a policewoman, and we will take what we need to take. We have done you the courtesy of waiting until you got home—”
“To hell with your courtesy. If I’d turned up late, you would have what? Broken down the door?”
Riggins looked vastly uncomfortable—not because of the question, Marcy thought, but because of the passenger she was lugging around on this hot July night. She should have been sitting at home, with the air conditioning on and her feet up. Marcy didn’t care. Her head was pounding, her bladder was throbbing, and her eyes were welling with tears.
“That would have been a last resort,” said the trooper with the shit on his sleeve, “but within our legal right, as defined by the warrant I have just shown you.”
“Let us in, Mrs. Maitland,” Riggins said. “The sooner we get started, the sooner we’ll be out of your hair.”
“Yo, Loot,” one of the other troopers said. “Here come the vultures.”
Marcy turned. From around the corner came a TV truck, with its satellite dish still folded against the roof. Behind it was an SUV with KYO decaled on the hood in big white letters. Behind that, almost kissing the KYO vehicle’s bumper, came another TV truck from another station.
“Come inside with us,” Riggins said. Almost coaxed. “You don’t want to be on the sidewalk when they get here.”
Marcy gave in, thinking this might be the first surrender of many. Her privacy. Her dignity. Her kids’ sense of security. And her husband? Would she be forced to surrender Terry? Surely not. What they were accusing him of was insane. They might as well have accused him of kidnapping the Lindbergh baby.
“All right. But I’m not going to talk to you, so don’t even try. And I don’t have to give you my phone. My lawyer said so.”
“That’s fine.” Riggins took her by the arm, when—given the size of her—Marcy should have been taking hers, to make sure she didn’t trip and fall on her enormous belly.
The Chevy Tahoe from KYO—“Ki-Yo,” as they styled themselves—stopped in the middle of the street, and one of their correspondents, the pretty blond one, got out so fast that her skirt slid most of the way to her waist. The troopers did not miss this.
“Mrs. Maitland! Mrs. Maitland, just a couple of questions!”
Marcy couldn’t remember taking her purse when she exited the car, but it was over her shoulder and she got the house key out of the side pocket with no trouble. The trouble came when she tried to get it into the lock. Her hand was trembling too badly. Riggins didn’t take the key, but closed her hand over Marcy’s to steady it, and it finally slid home.
From behind her: “Is it true that your husband has been arrested for the murder of Frank Peterson, Mrs. Maitland?”
“Keep back,” one of the troopers said. “Not one step off the sidewalk.”
“Mrs. Maitland!”
Then they were inside. That was good, even with the pregnant detective beside her, but the house looked different, and Marcy knew it would never look quite the same. She thought of the woman who had left here with her daughters, all of them laughing and excited, and it was like thinking of a woman you had loved, but who had died.
Her legs gave out and she plopped onto the bench in the hall where the girls sat to put on their boots in winter. Where Terry sometimes sat (as he had tonight) to go over his lineup one final time before leaving for the field. Betsy Riggins sat down beside her with a grunt of relief, her meaty right hip thwacking against Marcy’s less padded left one. The cop with the shit on his sleeve, Sablo, and two others passed them without a look, drawing on thick blue plastic gloves. They were already wearing booties of a matching blue. Marcy assumed the fourth one was doing crowd control. Crowd control in front of their house on sleepy Barnum Court.
“I have to pee,” she said to Riggins.
“As do I,” Riggins said. “Lieutenant Sablo! A word?”
The one with the shit on his sleeve returned to the bench. The other two continued on into the kitchen, where the most evil thing they’d find was half a devil’s food cake in the fridge.
To Marcy, Riggins asked, “Do you folks have a downstairs bathroom?”
“Yes, through the pantry. Terry added it himself last year.”
“Uh-huh. Lieutenant, the ladies need to pee, so that’s where you start, and make it as fast as you can.” And, to Marcy: “Does your husband have an office?”
“Not as such. He uses the far end of the dining room.”
“Thank you. That’s your next stop, Lieutenant.” She turned back to Marcy. “Mind one little question while we wait?”