Die for You by Lisa Unger Page B

raised by his mother’s sister in the Czech Republic. He came to the U.S. as soon as he was able to after communism fell in 1989, earned a scholarship to Columbia and worked various jobs as he went to school, got his master’s in computer science.” I found myself smiling a little. I had always been so proud of Marcus, of his intelligence, of his strength and fearlessness, of his machinelike drive toward getting what he wanted. Even when all these things had worked against us as a couple, I was still proud of him.
    “Was he having any problems with anyone? Colleagues? Clients?”
    “Not that he mentioned,” I said. Then: “Well… the earlier break-in? Whoever it was had a key and knew the alarm code. That was strange.”
    “A disgruntled employee?”
    I nodded. “There was an investigation. Still ongoing, I think. The police were looking at a programmer Marcus had fired a few weeks earlier. He’d made some threats. I don’t remember his name.”
    “I’ll look into it.”
    I was staring at the ceiling, willing myself to be strong, to be solid. But I kept seeing dark spots in front of my eyes, feeling that fuzzy, light feeling that comes right before you pass out. I tried to measure my breathing.
    “You okay?” I heard the detective ask.
    I opened my eyes and glanced toward the two of him—the solid one and the blurry, shadowy figure behind him. “Do I look okay to you?”
    “No,” he said, shaking his head. “Not really. I’m sorry.” He put the cap on his pen, let his hand drop to his lap.
    “If those people weren’t FBI agents,” I said when he didn’t say anything else, “then what happened to Rick Marino? He was there with me; they took him away. I thought he was being arrested.”
    “Rick Marino is dead,” he said simply. His delivery could have used a little work. I could tell he thought it was better not to soften the blow, that it was a policy he’d decided on long ago. He continued speaking into the stunned silence, where I was having trouble processing the information and forming an appropriate response.
    “We found his body in the office along with the bodies of two other employees—Eileen Charlton and Ronald Falco.”
    I tried to visualize their faces, to think of the last time I’d seen them. The company party we’d had at our apartment last year. Eileen was a game designer and artist. She was petite, bookish with round wire-rimmed glasses. I remembered Ronald, a sound engineer, as lanky and shy with a mild stutter. Were either of them married? Did they have kids? I couldn’t remember.
    “I’m sorry,” he added, an afterthought.
    “What’s happening?” I asked, my voice catching in my throat, coming out in a raspy whisper.
    “We’ll find out,” he said, putting away his pad and pen. I could see he believed it but I already had the sense of a yawning black abyss opening in my life. I was about to tumble in and I really didn’t think Detective Grady Crowe was going to be of much help. I could already see he was out of his depth. I just didn’t realize yet that I was, too.
    W HEN I TOLD my sister that Marcus and I were getting married, I didn’t get the reaction I expected. She didn’t know Marcus well yet, it was true. Our courtship had been short and intense. But I had fallen, hard and headlong. And he seemed to have, as well; he proposed just a few months after we’d met.
    He took me to Prague and we stayed in the Four Seasons near Mala Strana. We’d rented a car and driven about an a hour to the small town where he’d been born and had lived until he left for good. There was no family for me to meet. His mother’s sister, the aunt who’d raised him, had died a year earlier, he explained, after suffering from ovarian cancer.
    But we wandered through the quaint cobblestone streets with the tourists, stopping in shops and having a local beer at the pub. He knew everything about the history of the town, Kutná Hora, once the second most important town in Bohemia