Motion to Suppress by Perri O'Shaughnessy Page B

side. As she walked to the casino, letting the wind give her a nudge now and then, she sang to herself. "I’m gonna tell you how it’s going to be. You’re gonna give your love to me. My love for you has got to be real. I want you to know just how I feel." She crossed at a busy corner and resumed her song. "My love is real, not fade away." She walked for a few minutes before she stopped dead in her tracks. The booze wore off too damn quickly these days. That was his song and she was trying hard to forget.
    She hurried to her job, resolutely silent, and worked the entire shift with an ache that began in her head and cruised throughout her body in the course of the evening.
    At midnight, in the locker room, history repeated itself, as it had every night since she’d last seen her husband. She changed the clothes and wiped off the makeup, horribly conscious of her habits and the fact that tonight she would not be going to the house at the Keys, but to the Lucky Chip. Not even Tom would be there to keep her warm. He was avoiding her. Two police officers from South Lake Tahoe met her in the Lucky Chip parking lot. "Mrs. Patterson?" one said.
    "That’s me," she said. "What can I do for you?" She used the polite words she used at the casino every night with certain types of men to subdue her reaction to seeing them, which was fear.
    "We need to talk with you."
    "What about?"
    "Your husband."
    "What about him? Do you know where he is?"
    The cop cleared his throat. "When did you last see your husband?" he said.
    "Thursday night. We had a bad fight."
    "You haven’t seen him since?"
    "No. I didn’t want to see him again. Are you going to tell me what this is all about?"
    "I’m sorry. I have to give you some bad news. He’s dead, Mrs. Patterson."
    "Oh, no!" Misty wailed. "Where did you find him?"
    "At the bottom of the lake."
    And then Misty did something that surprised everyone. She took off at a fast trot across the parking lot.
    "Mrs. Patterson, wait. Come back here!" The two cops took off after her, one talking into a black box, the other running like a man who knew how to run fast.
    She got through the lot to a side street, and started up the hill toward Heavenly’s looming ski trails. Amazed at her own strength, she quickly outpaced her pursuers. She veered off onto Pioneer Trail, losing herself in a path she remembered.
    Hearing but not listening to sirens, she found the flat granite rock she and Anthony had picnicked upon when they first came to Tahoe. She stopped, panting, and wiped her wet face. On a blue-and-white cloth decorated with roosters, she had laid out the meal. They drank wine from the bottle and settled in to snuggle on the ground, leaning against the rock. Everything had been so perfect that day, hadn’t it? He must have told her he loved her a hundred times. Strange how, thinking back, the words had been so hard for her even then, the glare of his feelings eclipsing her own pale light.
    A long time later, they found her there. "I didn’t mean to kill him," she said. "I didn’t think I hit him that hard. I can’t believe he’s dead." They looked at each other. The tall one nodded.
    "You have the right to remain silent," said the small one, the one with the stiff hair, Sgt. Higuera. He talked on.
    The other one stood her up and put her hands behind her back. He clicked handcuffs neatly into place.
    They led her toward a police car with an open back door. She called up every technique she ever had for controlling herself, imagining herself elsewhere, imagining herself dreaming, imagining herself dead.
    She heard herself screaming, but couldn’t stop.
    The man in the front seat, the one scribbling into a notebook, looked back at her. "We’ll be there in just a couple of minutes. Settle down. Try to enjoy the ride."
    "It was just another fight like a million other fights!" But it wasn’t, she knew it wasn’t. She had hit him and now he was dead. "Guilty as sin," she murmured. That’s what her mother