Free A Widow's Guilty Secret by Marie Ferrarella

Nick that the sheriff’s widow was well aware of that.
    “The way I saw it,” she told Nick, “whatever Peter had in there was something he didn’t want me to see. Can’t say I wasn’t curious,” she admitted, then shrugged indifferently, “but then I thought that maybe it was like Pandora’s box—once it was opened, the things that I’d find there could never be put back and life might never be the same again. I decided not to risk it.
    “But I can’t say I liked him having secrets like that. It really bothered me. A lot.” She looked at Nick. “It’s one of the reasons I decided to divorce him,” she confessed with a sigh. “There were just too many secrets.”
    Whatever she could tell him might just make his job that much easier. “What were some of the others?”
    “The usual things.” When he looked at her, waiting, she elaborated. “Hang-ups when I would answer the phone. More and more late nights out. Inconsistencies in the things he told me.”
    “Such as?” he prodded.
    “Such as why he left the Dallas police force.” That was the biggest inconsistency—she didn’t want to call it a lie, but in her heart, she knew it had to be. Or at least, that one of the reasons—if not more—that he’d given her was a lie. “When he first told me about it, Peter just shrugged it off, said he felt it was just time for him to make a move, to try something different.
    “Another time he said that he left because he felt there were just too many corrupt cops on the force and rather than turn on them—and risk getting killed himself—he just resigned.
    “And then there was the time he ran into someone he knew from Dallas,” she continued. She wasn’t aware that her expression hardened somewhat—but Nick was. “I overheard the other man saying something about Peter having to disappear quickly because of some kind of scandal he was involved in.”
    Nick made a note to look up the sheriff’s record with the Dallas Police Department. “Do you know who the other man was?”
    She shook her head. “Never saw him before—or after. When I asked Peter if his friend was coming back, he cut me off by saying the man wasn’t a friend, he was just an acquaintance from the department. He seemed pretty upset, so I didn’t press the matter.” Suzy shook her head. She couldn’t help wondering if any of this was her fault. If she could have done something differently to keep Peter from getting killed. “Maybe I should have.”
    “You wouldn’t have known if he was telling you the truth or not, anyway,” Nick pointed out. “That’s the trouble with someone who keeps changing his story.”
    Suzy nodded sadly. “I know.” She indicated the locked door that was keeping them from looking through Peter’s things. “Do you want me to call a handyman to take that off its hinges?”
    He didn’t view the locked door as an obstacle. “No need,” he told her. “I’m kind of handy myself.” But rather than taking the hinges off, Nick merely took out his wallet and extracted two very thin looking metal tools. Using both, he inserted them into door’s keyhole and swiftly began working the lock.
    Glancing at Suzy over his shoulder, he asked, “I’ve got your permission to unlock the door, right?”
    The gesture she used told him to have at it. “Be my guest.”
    Before she’d uttered the last word, Nick already had the door unlocked and was turning the doorknob to enter the room.
    Suzy was suitably impressed at how effortlessly the detective had managed that. “They teach cat burglary at the police academy?” she asked, amused.
    “No, they don’t. That particular skill comes under the heading of extracurricular activity,” he answered with as straight a face as he could manage. “It’s something—if you’re lucky—that you pick up along the way from the criminals you wind up arresting.”
    Once in the room, Nick looked around slowly. His first impression was that there was nothing outstanding