Play Dead by David Rosenfelt Page A

loud so I would definitely hear it.”
    “Warning system?” Kevin asks. He knows as little about boating as I do.
    Richard nods. “If there are weather warnings, a general alert is sent out. We were only about four miles out, so we’d have plenty of time to get back if we had to.”
    “And you never heard a warning?” I ask.
    “I never heard anything. I went to sleep and woke up in the hospital.”
    “Do you remember taking the sleeping pills?” Kevin asks.
    Richard shakes his head vigorously. “I never took sleeping pills. Not that night, not ever in my life. I didn’t even have any. They were not mine.”
    “Were they Stacy’s?” I ask.
    “I don’t believe so. If they were, she never mentioned it. I never knew her to have trouble sleeping.”
    “So you have no idea how they got in your system?”
    He shakes his head. “None at all.”
    We talk some more about the night of the murder, but he has little else to add. While the important things were happening, he was asleep. All he remembers is a pleasant night out on the water, dinner, some wine, and an early trip to bed since he was tired from working all day.
    I turn the focus to his job, that of a senior customs inspector at the Port of Newark. I ask him if there was anything about his job that could have made him a target.
    “No, nothing,” he says. “It was a slow time.”
    The answer is a little quick for my tastes. “Richard, I want you to understand something. You may not have committed this murder, but someone did. Someone with a reason. Now, that reason could involve you or Stacy, or the two of you together. So you need to open your mind to anyone who could have possibly hoped to gain from putting you in this position.”
    “Don’t you think I’ve done nothing but think about that for five years? If someone was trying to get rid of me because I knew something, they shouldn’t have bothered, because I sure as hell don’t know that I know it. Besides, if I was a danger to someone, why not just kill me?”
    It’s a good question, and one I eventually must answer. But for now I take him through a description of day-to-day life on his job. Border security in this era of terrorism has taken on an obviously extreme importance, and it was Richard’s task to make sure that the Port of Newark was as free of contraband as possible.
    Finally, I turn the conversation to Stacy, and even five years later, it’s evident that his grief over her loss is still powerful. “How did you meet?” I ask.
    “At a counter, having lunch. She was sitting next to me, and before I knew it we were having a conversation. We had dinner that night, and it just went from there.”
    “Where was she from?” Kevin asks.
    “Minnesota… a town just outside of Minneapolis. Her parents were killed in a car crash when she was eighteen. She worked there and then decided to move east.”
    “What did she do?”
    “She was a teacher, but what she really wanted was to be a chef. The things she made were incredible. She wanted to open her own restaurant.”
    He talks about Stacy for a while longer, answering every question but never getting much below surface platitudes. He makes her sound so perfect she reminds me of Laurie.
    “Were you in the Army?” I ask.
    He nods. “National Guard. Served three months in Kuwait during the first Gulf war.”
    “Do the names Archie Durelle or Antwan Cooper mean anything to you?”
    His facial expression shows no recognition at all. “No, I don’t think so,” he says. “Who are they?”
    I’m not ready to tell him that they took a shot at me on the highway. “Just some names I’ve heard; I’m checking out everything I can.”
    The last ten minutes of our visit are devoted to the obligatory questions he has about progress we might be making and strategy we might be employing. I fend them off because basically we’re not making any progress and don’t yet have a strategy.
    Once Kevin and I are in the car, I ask, “So, what do you