The Good Lie

by Torre, A. R.

  “Well, you’re defending his alleged murderer,” I pointed out. “So you’ve veered down a rather unorthodox path of healing, if that’s what you want to call it.”

  “It’s working for me.”

  “Okay.” I poured the final amount from the bottle of wine.

  “So, the boys were all only children.” He changed the subject. “What other commonalities did they have?”

  I rolled with the new topic, eager to talk it through. “There’s the obvious—they all fit a certain mold. Rich, good-looking, popular, seventeen years old, male. Are you familiar with the psychodynamic theory of criminology?”

  “Vaguely. It has to do with unconscious personalities, right?”

  I nodded. “Specifically, the development of those unconscious personalities by negative experiences. The unconscious personality, which we call the id, is the primitive drive that most of us are unaware of. The drive to eat. Sleep. Protect our loved ones. Have sex.” I colored slightly and continued on. “That id is normally kept in line by your ego and superego, which are the other pieces of your personality that govern your morals and societal expectations. It tells a man that though he wants to screw his wife, he shouldn’t do it in the middle of the grocery store. Or, in a less crude analogy, though you may hate your boss, killing him isn’t the solution that makes the most sense, given the consequences and moral turpitude of the act.”

  I had his full attention, his gaze on mine. His breathing slowed, senses fully engaged, food forgotten. It was intoxicating, and I struggled to maintain my momentum.

  “Serial killers are often overtaken by their id, due to a weak ego and superego. The psychodynamic theory blames those weak egos on a lack of proper development—typically during adolescence, and often from trauma. In this case . . .” I searched for the right way to explain it. “If the killer was bullied during his formative middle or high school years, it could have stunted his personal development of his ego and superego, which makes him at much higher risk for his id to manifest latent feelings of oppression toward an individual who reminds him of that bully.”

  “Wait.” He held up his hand. “So the killer was bullied by someone who fits this mold—rich, good-looking, popular.”

  “Maybe bullied. Maybe molested. Maybe manipulated. This is just a theory,” I stressed. “A possibility. But it would explain the resemblances between the boys, and the abuse. He’s not just killing them. He’s toying with them. He’s building a relationship with them. He’s fighting for their attention in every way he can get it. And then, either he loses control and they die, or he grows bored with the boy and he ends it. My profile points to the latter.” I paused and took a sip of wine.

  “He grows bored and kills them,” he confirmed flatly.

  “Yes.” It was my turn to change the subject. “Can I ask you something about Randall?” At his nod, I continued. “Have any other students come forward and said anything? Male or female?”

  He paused. “Not particularly. I mean, in the last twenty years? A few complaints from disgruntled students, but nothing major.”

  “Male or female students?” I thought of Luke, his eyes red, face trembling in rage. He couldn’t have been the only one. Surely there had been more.

  “All female.” He picked up his fork. “Now, can the inquisition stop long enough for me to enjoy these last few bites of home cooking?”

  I smiled. “Sure. Go ahead.”

  At the sink, Robert ran hot water as I packaged up the leftovers for him to take home. I glanced at him as I snapped a lid into place. He had abandoned the jacket and lost the tie, his stiff shirtsleeves now rolled up to the elbows, his posture relaxed. The change was nice.

  He reached past me for a dish towel, and our sides brushed.

  “So, the detective who came by earlier . . .” He picked up a sponge and began to scrub it against a pot. “What was that about?”

  I put the rest of the bread in a ziplock bag and sealed it closed. “I think he’s just keeping an eye on me.”

  “Why did you ask about John Abbott’s death? They’re investigating it?”

  “I think they investigate all deaths, especially when it’s a situation like that where two people are involved.”

  “Is it suspicious?”

  I hesitated. He’s a defense attorney, I reminded myself. Someone used to picking apart cases and looking at them from all sides. Still, my unease grew. What exactly had he seen in John’s file? I stacked the containers and put them into a bag with the bread. “I don’t think so,” I said carefully. “People have heart attacks all the time. Even though Brooke was fairly young, I think she had a family history of that.” John had said that to me once, hadn’t he? He’d said something about her medicine, something about her mother . . . I would have made a notation if he had, especially because poisoning had always been a common method in the laundry list of ways that John wanted to kill her. As a pharmacist, it had been one of the most logical paths for him to take, but also one of the most risky in terms of drawing suspicion.

  It was another reminder that I needed to do a full overview of John’s file. I should have looked already, but I’d been putting it off due to guilt and the newer, more exciting distraction on my time—the BH case.

  “Oh, so Brooke’s death is the one they find suspicious?”

  Too late, I realized the error in my response. I had replied to him while knowing the most likely true sequence of events: John kills Brooke, kills himself. Outside observers—both he and Detective Saxe—would put the bulk of attention and suspicion on the stabbing death, not the heart attack. It was why Detective Saxe had asked whether Brooke might have killed him, and what Robert had been referring to when he had asked about the case.

  So, maybe he hadn’t read John’s file. Maybe he hadn’t seen more than a line or two. Maybe all my paranoia was completely off base.

  “No,” I quickly amended. “They don’t find her death suspicious. I was just saying that heart problems ran in her family. And John was very close to her. People handle grief in strange ways.”

  “So, you think it’s possible that he killed himself?”

  “Yeah.” I turned to meet his eyes. “I do.”

  He nodded, returning his attention to the pot, and inside, my unease bloomed.

  CHAPTER 27

  I woke up alone, with the taste of regret, or potentially sour wine, in my mouth. Robert had left without incident or anything as bold as a kiss on the cheek. Now my body felt cheated. I stared up at the ceiling and realized, with a strong dose of self-loathing, that I had expected to have sex with him.

  So much for my stern stance on professional distance. Thank God I hadn’t made a move, though the conversation had certainly stuck to topics that doused any thoughts of romance.

  My unresolved libido aside, it had been a productive meal. We had journeyed into a few light conversations about Gabe, but not enough to appease my concerns about his grief management. Instead of focusing on healing, Robert was picking up loose women after funerals and constructing what, from all outward appearances, seemed to be a very strong defense for his son’s killer.

  And that was the other thing keeping me up at night. The victims. The agonized faces of the parents on the news. Was I helping to free their murderer?

  I wouldn’t do that. I had told Robert that I would speak the truth, and he seemed to accept it, but with this sly half-amused expression that indicated he knew my game. I wished I felt so confident. I was lost, in the middle of the board, with no idea if I was ahead in the score or behind. Probably behind. Most likely, I’d fallen off the board entirely.

  Clem was on my bedside table, lying on top of my cell, and I eased my hand under her belly and slid it out, prompting a hiss. Ignoring her, I unlocked my phone and checked the security alerts.

  No unauthorized entry. No security-cam motion alerts. A quiet night. I let out a sigh of relief and then, before I forgot, rearmed it. Normally I left the system off for the day, often keeping the doors open f
or a breeze, but until I spoke to Luke, or until the police did, I needed to be smart.

  Rolling out of bed, I took a hot shower, then dressed in cream khaki pants and a ribbed red tank top. Pulling out a new gray hair that had sprung onto the scene, I plaited my wet hair into a braid, then picked up Clem and headed downstairs, inhaling the smell of her. She spent most of her days in my laundry basket, and she smelled like the linen-scented dryer sheets.

  On his way to the door, Robert had pressed again to see the profile. I needed to send it to him by early afternoon if I was going to stick to my timeline. There was no point in sitting on it any longer. My core avatar—an organized, control-oriented killer who had been molested or raped during his teenage or adolescent years by a wealthy and popular teenager—had cemented. I needed to get the draft off my desk and into his hands so I could focus on a more urgent task—re-reviewing John Abbott’s client file. The questions about Brooke’s death had made me second-guess his mention of her family history of heart trouble. I wanted to pin down the possibility and was due for a re-review anyway. With Detective Saxe still lurking around, the possibility of my client file being subpoenaed was a plausible concern. I needed to copy the file and study every moment of it, from first appointment to last.

  Before diving in, I poured a bowl of cereal and watched a reality show on matchmaking. On the screen, a big-breasted blonde giggled at the male contestant. My mom loved this dumb show. On our last call, she’d spent ten minutes in a full recap of the most recent episode. That had been painful enough, but then it had segued into a critical dissection of my life. A childless, single woman in her late thirties was grounds for maternal panic, and she had bleated her concern at top volume for the bulk of the call. My job, in her opinion, was my biggest barrier to love. After all, where was I going to meet a man? The morgue?

  Life would be easier without my brother, whose wife was popping out kids like a toaster on Sunday morning. You’d think all those babies would keep my mother happy, but somehow it just increased the expectation that I perform.

  I ate a spoonful of cinnamon-flavored cereal. Maybe my love prospects were hampered by my job. While Robert’s eyes had lit up in the bar when I’d mentioned my occupation, the typical response was more of a wary shudder. A very nice-looking man at a speed-dating event had once asked if I’d ever killed anyone. Another had asked if I planned to “do the counselor thing” forever.

  Maybe I should start going back to church. According to my sister-in-law, that was a hotbed of eligible men. And I needed an eligible man—or a fresh batch of batteries—something to take my mind off the one bachelor I should be staying far, far away from.

  Robert Kavin was hiding something. I’d felt a few seeds of suspicion early on and was growing more convinced of the possibility as time progressed. And the weird thing was—the more certain I grew that he was hiding something from me, the more certain I grew that he suspected me of something.

  Initially, I thought his suspicion was around Brooke’s death, given that he’d seen at least part of John Abbott’s file. But which part? That was the big question. My second question was how well Robert had known John. He’d attended his funeral, so there had to have been at least an acquaintance relationship. I couldn’t tell you my pharmacist’s first name, let alone attend their funeral—but I also didn’t have a diabetic son. Had he and John grown close enough that he’d protect the dead man’s reputation and not come forward with suspicions about Brooke’s death? It was possible, maybe even probable, given that I should be under investigation by the Code of Ethics board right now.

  And I couldn’t ignore the possibility that Robert hadn’t seen anything at all. Maybe I had left open the file in an innocent place that hadn’t meant anything to him, and my fears were bred from paranoia and absolutely nothing else.

  I rinsed my cereal bowl under hot water and placed it in the dishwasher. Before I worked myself even further into knots, I needed to look at where I’d left John’s file open on my desk. I wouldn’t be able to remember the exact spot, but I had a general sense of where my review had ended and when the wine and sleepiness had won over.

  I dried my hands and moved to the study, pulling on the lamp’s stiff chain and illuminating the wide surface. It was clear of files, my lesson learned, my confidential documents now locked in one of the two sliding drawers of my desk. I moved the gold elephant beside the lamp to one side, revealing the small key. My security still had room for improvement.

  Settling into my chair, I opened up John Abbott’s thick file and flipped through the session notes until I found the area where I had last stopped. Pulling my chair tighter to the desk, I began to read.

  JA is testy and irritable. Suffering from VT about wife. Worse with temper. Incident with guest—air-conditioning.

  I remembered this. They’d had a guest staying with them, and the air-conditioning had gone out. John had tried to fix it himself and couldn’t.

  “I have a Mensa-level IQ.” He’d pinned me with a look that dared argument. “I’m better educated than ninety-nine percent of people in this city. I can kill or save someone with the knowledge right here.” He tapped his temple. “And she wants to call someone to fix it, doesn’t think I’m smart enough. And so what if the air is out? It’s not like he’s paying us to stay there! Let him sweat.”

  I hadn’t been able to figure out if his solution was to let the poor guest sweat, or if he had plans to try again with the repair. I nudged the conversation back to Brooke. “At what point did you feel like you were losing control?”

  “She just wouldn’t stop. Pecking at me, that’s what she was doing. Continually wiping her brow so I would understand she was sweating. Asking when I was going to go outside and take a look at it. Bringing up articles on her phone and making ‘helpful suggestions.’” He put air quotes around the words. “I just looked at her, sitting there on the couch, and I pictured her stomach cut open.”

  His words had drilled into me, as if it had been my own stomach at risk. So calm. So matter-of-fact. As if he cut into flesh on an everyday basis.

  “She’s getting fat,” he’d added. “It bounces when she moves. I thought about that, wondered if it’d make it harder to cut or easier.” He had looked at me. “What do you think?”

  I’d met his gaze without flinching, because most of my clients wanted a reaction. For some, that’s why they kill, because they’re standing there, screaming at the ones they love, and aren’t getting the feedback they want. I wasn’t going to give him a reaction. “I think we need to work on you not having that visual.”

  Now, I ran my finger down to the next handwritten line of the notes, and my heart sank at what it said.

  Not just looking for attention from me—he is a serious threat to her. High risk.

  CHAPTER 28

  Nita watched as her husband put their Range Rover in park, the movement deliberately slow, all of them dreading this moment. She twisted to unlock her belt and glanced into the back seat, where Scott sat, his body slumped against the window, his gaze out on the police parking lot.

  “I don’t want to go back in there,” he said quietly. “You know what they did to me last time.”

  She closed her eyes, blocking out the memory. The medical examiner had told her that it would be quick—a DNA swab of his genitals and a rape exam kit. It had just taken fifteen minutes, and Scott hadn’t met her eyes when he’d come back to the waiting room. He’d even walked differently. She thought of college, when her roommate had gotten drunk and blacked out and Nita had taken her the following day to the women’s crisis center to see if she had been raped. Her roommate had sobbed the entire way home and said that she would have rather not known than undergone that exam.

  “They’re just going to ask you questions.” Their attorney, who had gone to college with George, spoke up from behind her. “And I’ll be right there.”

  “But I have to answer all their questions?”

  “I’ll step in if they ask you anything that is i
nappropriate. But we need you to be honest with them, Scott. It’ll help with their case against Mr. Thompson.”

  Scott limply pulled on the door release handle and slowly stepped out of the car. Nita met her husband’s eyes.

  George gave her a reassuring smile. “It’ll be okay,” he said quietly.

  But would it? How could it ever be okay again?

  As they moved down the hall of the police station, the heel of Nita’s sandal caught on an uneven piece of flooring, and she stumbled forward. George caught her, helping her back upright, and she smiled at him in gratitude. She should have worn flats. After months in her pajamas and slippers, she felt off-balance in high heels. Assuming she didn’t fall flat on her face, they just needed to get through this questioning so they could get back home. They weren’t criminals, and Scott wasn’t under suspicion. While there would eventually be a trial, for now, they could knock out these inquiries, then get back in their Range Rover and go to lunch. She could sip an ice-cold mimosa and they could discuss college. Not Vanderbilt, not anymore. He should be closer to home, given everything that had happened. Pepperdine would be perfect. Small, private, and safe.

  Crowding into the small viewing room, she looked through the glass at Scott, who was seated, their attorney right beside him. Juan was good, though criminal law wasn’t his specialty. Still, he’d known Scott his entire life, and this questioning, as the detectives had assured them, was mostly fact-finding. Fifteen or twenty minutes, tops.

  Detective Erica Petts cleared her throat. “Scott, I need you to tell me about the place where you were kept.”

  Nita shifted on her heels. Scott had already told them that he didn’t know, that he’d been blindfolded. Blindfolded for seven weeks? they had asked. Seven weeks of darkness—no wonder he couldn’t sleep. It was amazing he didn’t need a lamp left on in his room.

  “I don’t know anything about it,” he mumbled. “I was blindfolded.”