He gave her space for a few days while she sat with the girls in the hospital, but now that they were getting better and were slated to go home the next day, he started to turn the screws on Irene. He finally coaxed her to the hospital’s coffee shop, but only after a floor nurse promised to page her when either daughter awoke. Irene drank her coffee black, while Anderson turned his to coffee syrup with a fistful of sugar packets. With eating habits like that, she wondered how he stayed so slim. They sat opposite each other, at a table set for four. “We still haven’t been able to find your friend Mayo,” Anderson said. Clearly, it was an icebreaker because it made no sense to open their chat with things he didn’t know. With a failure. “He was never a friend of mine,” Irene said. In the explanation she’d shared at the crime scene, and then again in the snippets of interviews over the past couple of days, Irene had pretty much come clean with all the details, starting with her interview with Amanda.
