“Lieutenant Colonel Kelsey Mercer-Hale.”
His eyes flickered at the second surname.
My husband’s surname.
Hale.
“Sergeant Christopher Dwyer.”
“I’m seeing my mother.”
“There are procedures—”
“My seventy-one-year-old mother says she was struck with a baseball bat, she has not been medically evaluated, and I have been informed she may be treated as a suspect. I am seeing her now.”
He studied me.
Then he stepped aside.
My mother was sitting in an interview room beneath a camera mounted in one corner of the ceiling.
She looked twenty years older than she had the previous Sunday.
One side of her blouse was stained dark. An ice pack rested against her left shoulder. Her silver hair, usually pinned neatly behind her ears, hung over her forehead in damp strands.
Her glasses were broken.
The right temple was snapped.
The left lens was gone.
When she saw me, her mouth trembled.
