Match Made in Court

Matt thought back to those Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners when they’d all been in that ugly, ostentatious house that was Tess and Finn’s pride and joy. Offhand he couldn’t remember brother and sister ever talking; in fact, he’d seen her quietly slide from a room when Finn entered it.

Okay, maybe she didn’t like him, either. That would be a point in her favor.

“I don’t know how they feel about each other. His parents think he walks on water, I can tell you that.”

Another note.

“When did you last see your sister?”

“Thanksgiving a year ago. I was here for a week. Finn was midtrial and hardly home. Tess took the week off and she and Hanna and I did tourist things. Rode the ferry, went up the Space Needle. We’d intended to ski, but there wasn’t enough snow for even Crystal to open.”

Delaney nodded. The previous winter had been wet but warm, a disaster for winter sports businesses.

“Finn was cordial enough when I saw him. We both … tried. For Tess’s sake.” Finn, Matt sometimes thought, disliked him in part because he felt obligated to be on his best behavior when his brother-in-law was in residence. Tess told him he was imagining things.

“I’d like a few answers, too,” he said, voice implacable. “You say Tess hit her head on the coffee table. What makes you think she didn’t stumble and wham into it wrong?”

“The medical examiner says there was too much force applied. Her skull was shattered.”

God,Matt thought.I didn’t want to know that.

He frowned. Yeah, he did. He owed it to his sister to find out the worst. He hadn’t been able to protect her, but he could be sure justice was served.

“He’s going to bring in an expert to testify that if she was hurrying when she stumbled she could have flown forward and hit hard enough.”

“Uh-huh, but here’s the compelling part. If you fell, you’d hit the top edge.” Delaney ran his hand along the rim of the conference table. “Right?”

“Yeah,” Matt agreed.

“Your sister didn’t. Tissue and hair embedded in the wood shows that the force of the blow was along the side and the sharp edge at the bottom of the tabletop rim. The only way that could happen is if she rose up from beneath the table and hit her head—”

“In which case there isn’t enough force.”

“Right. The alternative …”

“Is if somebody lifted the whole coffee table and swung it at her,” Matt finished softly.

Tissue and hair. Goddamn it.

“You got it.” The two men looked at each other, and Matt saw pure determination in Delaney’s eyes. He wasn’t going to let Finn walk.

Reassured, Matt held out his hand. “Thank you.”

One shoulder jerked. “Just doing my job.” But they shook, and Delaney walked him out. “Where can I reach you?”

“The Silver Cloud on Union Bay. I’m going to look at rentals today, though. I figure I’ll be staying in Seattle, at least through the trial. I intend to have Hanna with me.”

Those eyebrows rose again, but Delaney didn’t comment. “I’m going to ask you to stay away from Mr. Sorensen.”

“I have every intention of doing so.” Matt’s tone hardened. He’d been furious to find that Finn had walked out on bail within twenty-four hours of killing Tess. “Unless he tries to take Hanna home with him.”

Matt had been relieved by Linnea’s phone message, which made it clear that she still had the six-year-old. He was annoyed at himself for apparently sleeping through the ringing phone last night, but God knew he’d been exhausted. He’d see Hanna tonight. With a little luck, he’d have a house to move into within the week.

Normally if he’d planned to be in the area for a few months, he’d have gone for a condo. Why take on mowing and weeding? But a child should have a yard. A swing set, a playhouse, someplace to kick a ball. His ideas were vague. He didn’t actually remember seeing Hanna play outside in the yard in Laurelhurst. When he and she kicked around a soccer ball, they’d walked down to a nearby park.

His guess was that Hanna hadn’t had many opportunities to hang out during the day at home. Both her parents tended to work six days a week minimum and, except during the summer, probably picked her up from after-school care and got home after dark. She’d told him once that she was practically always the last kid picked up. She had sounded wistful, but when he tried to talk to Tess about it, she rolled her eyes and said, “Have you seen her day care? It’s an amazing facility with great teachers. Saturdays they go on field trips, and the rest of the time they do art and put on plays. She’s learning to speak Spanish and about architecture from walking tours and …”

She’d gone on and on, extolling the virtues of Rolls Royce of day-care centers. His guess was that a kid who’d been in school all day probably didn’t want to then go straight to language lessons or be organized to put on a play or do anything else supervised. That was not how he and Tess had grown up. They’d had a stay-at-home mom. Sometimes they’d been in organized activities—Little League for him and dance lessons for her. But mostly they’d been able to get off the school bus, have a snack then go to a friend’s house or read or watch TV. Their entire lives hadn’t been organized the way Hanna’s was.

But he also knew that Tess’s interior-design business had been her dream. It was important to her. What was she supposed to do? Close it down until Hanna was a teenager? She’d actually gone to part-time Hanna’s first year and had sounded restless the entire year, Matt remembered thinking. When he asked her once if she and Finn intended to have another baby, she’d shaken her head emphatically.

“We adore Hanna. How can we not? But look at us. We both love our jobs. We thrive on pressure, on being busy. Especially Finn. He was next to no help when she was little. And did I tell you how much I hated being pregnant?”

She had, although he’d forgotten.

“No.” Another shake of the head. “Hanna’s going to be an only child.”

He’d been dismayed, maybe because he remembered how important he and Tess had been to each other after their parents died in a car accident. He’d been in college and his sister a sophomore in high school, but he had managed to keep her with him. He hated to think how much more devastating the loss would have been if he hadn’t had her.

His jaw tightened at the realization that she was gone now. She’d been the one person in the world he knew loved him, always and forever. Until Finn Sorensen’s temper got the best of him.

Was the bastard even sorry? Did he wish he could call back the burst of rage that had him lifting the whole coffee table and slamming it into his wife’s skull?

Or was he self-serving enough to blame her because she’d provoked him? Or even to convince himself it had happened the way he was trying to tell police, that Tess was ultimately to blame because she’d somehow slammed her own head into the table?

Despite having been related to him by marriage for eight years now, Matt had no idea how Finn really thought. Despite Tess’s exasperation, they’d both resisted playing a round of golf together or even sitting down with a beer. Eventually, he’d thought, she’d become resigned to the fact that her husband and her brother would never be friends without really understanding how deep the chasm was.

Matt bought a Seattle Times in front of the station and took it to his car. He’d look at online classifieds later, when he got to his hotel, but he could start with what was in the newspaper.

Sitting in the parking garage, he worked his way through the rental section, making a few appointments to check out places.

By dinnertime, he’d seen a dozen, but nothing that struck him as perfect. He wished he had a better idea how important staying in the same school was to Hanna. Did she have good friends? He’d have to ask her tonight.

At five-fifteen, he called Linnea’s and a woman picked up. “Hello?”

“This is Matt Laughlin.” He’d pulled to the curb and set the emergency brake, even though he hadn’t expected her to be home quite yet.

“Oh,” she said softly. “You didn’t call back last night.”

“I’d had a long flight. I conked out and didn’t hear the phone ring.”

“Oh,” she said again. “Matt, I’m so sorry about Tess.”

He forced out a thank-you. “How is Hanna handling this?”

There was a small silence. He wished he could see her face. “I’m not sure. She’s so quiet. I’ve been trying to keep her busy, even though I don’t know whether that’s the best thing to do or not. Maybe I should be encouraging her to grieve. I just don’t know,” she said again.

“Busy sounds smart to me.”