Anniversary Day Read Free Page A

home.
    “I was coming home,” she said. “I opened the door, and there he was.”
    Nyquist nodded, but didn’t say anything. He had promised her time, so he wasn’t going to derail her with questions. Not yet.
    “I sent for help through the links, and then your people came. And the ambulance. They sent an ambulance.” As if she were surprised by that. He would have to listen to the link contact. He wondered if she had said the man was injured.
    Nyquist waited for a good minute, his gaze steady on hers. Her eyes were as odd as she was. The pupils seemed to vibrate ever so slightly. He wondered if that was a trick of the light, an enhancement of some kind that he wasn’t familiar with, an effect of a link, or some kind of drug interaction.
    But he didn’t ask that either. He’d learned long ago to take investigations slowly, to absorb the information as it came to him, to study the people surrounding the deceased and to make suppositions, but not to assume they were facts.
    When she didn’t say anything more, he realized that was her story. Remarkable in its brevity and lack of emotion.
    So he would have to ask questions after all. The trick now was to ask the right questions to draw out her story, not to direct it.
    “You said you were coming home.” He was careful to repeat her language. “From where?”
    “Work,” she said, folding her hands in front of him. The movement caught his eye. “I got the night shift.”
    Her hands were remarkably clean. They were probably the cleanest thing in this entire house, except for her dress, which was also clean, if a bit rumpled.
    “Where do you work, exactly?” he asked.
    She waved one of those very clean hands. “Near the Port. I’m a cocktail waitress.”
    No business near the Port employed actual cocktail waitresses. All of the bars there used robotic servers, especially late at night. Some places did employ women under the job description cocktail waitress, but they didn’t wait on anyone and they certainly didn’t serve cocktails.
    She was either a stripper or a sex worker. Neither profession was illegal, but neither was that socially acceptable either. He wanted to lean back and look at her body, but he didn’t. He hadn’t gotten the sense that she was enhanced the way strippers usually were. If she was a professional sex worker, her enhancements might not be visible.
    He tried not to shudder in distaste.
    “When does your shift end?” He didn’t ask where she was employed. He would circle back to that in a moment. He wanted her to focus on what happened here, not on her discomfort at her own job.
    “Six,” she whispered.
    The whisper caught him by surprise. She said it almost as if it were forbidden information.
    “And you came right home?”
    She bit her lower lip again.
    “Did you walk?” That was the only way to explain the time discrepancy. He had been told that uniforms arrived at eight. If she’d found the body and called, it couldn’t have been any later than six-thirty if she had come directly home.
    She shook her head once.
    “Car,” she said, almost as softly as that whisper.
    He nodded. Something else to circle back to. “And when you came in, he was here.”
    “Yes,” she said.
    “And who is he?”
    “He thinks he’s my boyfriend,” she said with so much venom that Nyquist resisted the urge to lean back. “But he’s not.”
    Nyquist let out a small breath. So many directions to take here, and given her emotion, only one was a good direction.
    He tried not to look at those really clean hands. He wanted her to stand, so that he could see the rest of her, but this wasn’t the moment to ask.
    Or was it?
    “Did you make some fresh coffee for the officer?” he asked. “Because I would love a cup.”
    She smiled at him. The smile warmed her face, made her seem young—almost childlike—as if his request pleased her somehow.
    “Sure,” she said, and stood up.
    She was taller than he expected. She smoothed her dress—which