Jemima glanced over at her children, then back at Anahera. “What if… what if I knew something? What if I suspected in the darkest part of night? What if I saw a speck of blood on one of Vincent’s polo shirts one night after he came home?”
Holding those eyes of sea green, Jemima’s pupils hugely dilated, Anahera kept her voice quiet as she said, “What did he do to you after he came home those nights?”
Jemima’s hand flew to her mouth, muffling a cry. “How did you know?” she whispered through white-knuckled fingers.
Because she’d looked into a friend’s face and seen a monster hot with sexual arousal. Death, fear, it had been erotic to Vincent. “He wears masks, Jemima. Husband, friend, reliable member of the town. But beneath it all, he’s fundamentally twisted.”
Tears shimmered in Jemima’s eyes. Dropping her hand, she said, “Do you think it was because of what his father did?”
“I don’t know.” The elder Bakers weren’t here to defend themselves against the accusations. “But to have two sons turn out… wrong. It’s tough to believe that’s coincidence.”
“I know it’s a horrible thing to say, but I want the abuse story to be true.” Jemima threw a desperate glance toward where Jasper and Chloe were involved in an animated discussion about building a castle. “Then my babies can be free. They’ll never have to worry about being born with evil inside them.”
“I remember playing with Vincent on the beach when we were maybe six. He used to make disgusting noises with his armpit, laugh at how the seagulls fought, make me crazy by putting sand down my back then running like hell when I chased him, all normal little-boy things.” Anahera had nearly forgotten that distant childhood summer.
It hurt to remember it now, to remember that bright-eyed boy who might not have been born a monster. “He got quieter slowly. I never really thought about it, it was so gradual, but he changed in a deep way from the wild little boy who collected shells for our sandcastle and who only watched the hermit crabs but didn’t catch them.”
“Thank you,” Jemima whispered, her hand clutching at Anahera’s. “Thank you.”
They watched the children for several long minutes.
“It wasn’t rape,” Jemima said so low it was barely audible. “It couldn’t be rape. I loved him.”
But in Jemima’s face, Anahera saw that she didn’t believe her own words. “Promise me one thing,” she said. “You’ll talk to someone about all of this once you’re safe. A therapist, a priest, someone.”
“Will you… will you stay in touch?” A hunted, flinched look.
“Try to get rid of me.” She made eye contact, held it. “Kia kaha, Jemima. You’ve survived evil that sought to crush you. You will endure.”
65
Will went straight to Dominic de Souza’s surgery after separating from Anahera. The Closed sign was on the door, but when he walked over to Dominic’s place, no one responded to his knock.
“He left a while ago,” a neighbor yelled out to Will. “Poor fella. Just walking, shoulders all hunched in.”
“Did you see which direction he went?”
It was inevitable that she’d point toward the ocean.
That was where this had begun. And that was where it would end.
Making the drive to the cliffs, Will headed down to the part of the beach where Anahera had dragged up Miriama’s body. It was now marked by flowers put there by her friends and family. The crime scene tape had been blown away that first night, but—and though both Pastor Mark and the local kaumātua had come and said a blessing over the area—nothing could erase what had taken place there.
Dominic knelt beside the flowers, his shoulders shaking as he sobbed. Will made no attempt to hide his footsteps. The sand absorbed all sound regardless. So he did a wide circle that would bring him within Dominic’s peripheral vision, but the doctor didn’t show any awareness of his presence.
He didn’t react even when Will sat down on the sand next to him, having already mentally patted him down—Dominic was wearing only a thin white shirt and a pair of dark brown pants that looked like they might go with a suit jacket. The wind pasted the clothing against his body with every small gust. It was obvious he had nothing hidden on him, and all he held in his hands was a bracelet.
It sparkled silver and gold and bronze in the sunlight.
“Is that Miriama’s?” Will had seen the shine of it on her wrist more than once.
Dominic gave a jerky nod before lifting the bracelet to his mouth and pressing a kiss to it while tears ravaged his face. “Her favorite,” he said. “She left it at my place the last time she stayed over.”
Dropping his hands to his thighs, the bracelet still clutched in the fingers of one hand, the young doctor stared out at the water. “I still can’t believe she’s gone. She was so alive, so vibrant. My sunshine.”
Will had situated himself so he could see Dominic’s face. Now he saw that the grief was real. “I just came from talking to Dr. Richard Symon.”
It seemed as if it was relief that swept across Dominic’s face. “Oh,” he said, staring down at the bracelet again. “I knew someone would, eventually.”
“We all just assumed you were Miriama’s doctor,” Will said. “Small town and all that.”
“I could’ve had my registration yanked if someone had wanted to make trouble and say that I’d seduced a patient.” Dominic swallowed hard. “She never had reason to come to the clinic after I took over from Dr. Wong. Once we got together and I figured out she was on the clinic roll, I referred her to Dr. Symon. Keep all the ethical lines clear, you know.”
Will nodded. “It was a good thing you did,” he said. “You should’ve left it at that.”
Another burst of sobs, Dominic’s face breaking apart in front of Will. Falling back to sit on the sand with his knees raised, he banged his head against the bracelet. “I just got so worried,” he said after a long time, his voice raw. “She was going to see the doctor more times than she should. When I asked her, she’d say, ‘Kāore he raru. Don’t worry, lover.’ She was just feeling a little off, and wanted to check her iron levels since she used to have low iron as a girl.”
Raising his head, the other man stared out at the water again. “I didn’t quite believe her, but I let it go. I thought it might be something a woman would consider embarrassing—it’s funny how people can be, even with a doctor. I never wanted her to feel that way with me.”
“When did you find out?” Will asked.
“We’d been dating a couple of days shy of three months when she came to me all nervous and said, she was sorry, but that her birth control looked like it had failed. She was pregnant, and did I mind very much?”
His laugh was wet with tears. “Mind? I was ecstatic. I thought that meant she belonged to me now. I promised her we’d marry before she began to show, so none of the gossips would have a go at her. I said I’d give her a proper proposal, not cheat her out of anything. I already had the ring, knew how I wanted to ask.” The echo of happiness weaving through his voice.
Will didn’t interrupt. Sometimes, the best way to interrogate someone was to just let them talk. And it looked like Dominic de Souza had been waiting to talk for a long time. Unlike with Vincent, it wasn’t bragging. It was a desperate catharsis.
“I was so excited that we had this secret between us. I felt as if I’d burst if I didn’t tell someone, but the only other person I could talk to about it was Dr. Symon.” He played compulsively with the bracelet. “I resisted for a week, then finally picked up the phone. He congratulated me after I told him that Miriama had shared the news. I didn’t want to put him in a tough situation, wanted him to know I already knew.”
Will nodded, though the two men had been skirting ethical lines at best at that point. Still, if it had ended there, everything would’ve been fine and Miriama would still be alive.
“I was joking about how I was acting like all the silly expectant fathers we heard stories about
in medical school. How I had the same fears and the same worries even though I knew Miriama was young and fit and probably in the best condition possible for a woman to give birth.”
“You were happy.”
Dominic’s smile was twisted. “I was. That’s why it took a little while for it to sink in when Dr. Symon said I must’ve gotten Miriama pregnant the first time we were together, for her to be three months along.” He stared at the bracelet with a fixed gaze. “He was doing that nudge-nudge wink-wink thing between guys, congratulating me on my prowess. And he was so involved in it that he didn’t notice I’d gone silent.”
Dropping his head, he said nothing for long, wind-lashed minutes. When he looked back up, tears—silent and hot—ravaged his cheeks. “I hung up soon afterward, then I went through all our photos together just to be sure I wasn’t wrong. I knew I wasn’t wrong. But I had to be sure, you see, I had to be absolutely sure.”
His breathing was uneven now. “I always took photos on our dates. And I took a photo the night Miriama and I first… when we were first together that way. It was of the two of us sitting on the beach, her hair blowing back in the wind while I wore this goofy look on my face. Just after that photo was taken, she put her arms around my neck and kissed me and said, ‘Let’s go to your place.’ ”
One hand dug into the sand by his side, clenched hard. “I’d been hoping, but I’d never pushed because I knew how much her faith meant to her. But that day, the same day she got back from an appointment with Dr. Symon, she said yes. And I didn’t know how brainless I was then, didn’t know how she was using me. I was happy.”
“Why?” Will asked, so that Dominic de Souza could no longer lie to himself about ending the sunshine.
“Because she already knew she was pregnant,” he said. “Before we ever slept together. I wonder how she planned to explain the baby to me when it arrived two months early. Did she think I’d buy a premature birth story? I’m a fucking doctor.”
“According to her journal,” Will said, “she thought you were a good man, a man she could have a future with, a man she was starting to love. I think she would’ve told you the truth if you’d given her a chance.”
Dominic turned eyes mad with grief toward him. “Please don’t say that. Please don’t say that.”
“Tell me what you did, Dominic.” It was time. “Miriama deserves that. She trusted you not just with herself, but with her child.”
Dominic’s entire self just crumpled. “After I spoke to Dr. Symon, I didn’t know what to do. I thought about breaking it off with her, but how could I let Miriama go? She was mine. The most beautiful woman I’d ever seen and she was mine.”
Perhaps he had loved Miriama, Will thought, but it had been about possession as well. Just like Vincent, Dominic had wanted to capture a beautiful, precious creature and brand her as his.
“She kept asking me what was wrong and I kept saying nothing. I tried to make things like they were before I knew. More than a week passed and it was okay. The day—” Gulps of air. “I made her a picnic lunch that final day and we laughed together and I thought it would be all right.”
He exhaled. “But as soon as I left her, all I could think was that she was lying to me each and every minute we were together. The scream kept building inside me until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I came to the cliffs planning to call and ask her to meet me there… and then there she was, running toward me.” A sick smile. “It was like our meeting was meant to be. She smiled when she saw me.”
“You had an alibi.” Though it wasn’t a perfect one; the timeline was difficult, but not impossible.
“She must’ve sprinted that last part to the cliffs. She did that sometimes. She was out of breath when she arrived… And my car was right there.”
An extra two, three minutes. The cost of a life.
“Did you go directly to the whirlpool?” That black maw of water and rocks was the only possible scene of death, given the time frame.
“No. We took a short forest track that runs parallel to the cliffs and there’s this bit where it kind of opens up and you’re right by the whirlpool. Not near the edge,” Dominic whispered. “Safe, by the trees.”
Will had looked under the trees, but the wind-tossed leaf fall there had made it impossible to spot a disturbance.
“Miriama stopped smiling when I accused her of tricking me.” Dominic dashed away tears with the back of his hand. “She begged me to listen, said she’d never wanted to use me. Said I was the best man who’d ever come into her life. I couldn’t hear her, I was so angry. I told her she had to choose—the baby or me. I told her she had to get an abortion, that I wasn’t going to raise another man’s bastard. She was mine.”
Will could see the scene in his mind’s eye, wildly alive Miriama on the edge of the cliff, arguing fiercely with this man who thought he’d captured a star in his hands and wanted to own it body and soul. “What happened?”
“The way she looked at me when I said that,” Dominic whispered, “the way she crossed her arms around her middle and just looked at me. Like I was a monster. And I got this red haze across my vision and I don’t remember what happened next. What I remember is that when the haze passed, Miriama was dead in my arms. There were marks around her neck, one side of her face crushed in like I’d punched her, the rest of her face all puffed up, and her eyes bloody.”
Will wasn’t buying the idea of rage-induced memory loss. Oh, there had been rage, of that he was sure. Dominic hadn’t gone out with a plan to kill Miriama. He’d done so in a fit of anger. Paradoxically, his lack of planning was why he’d almost gotten away with it—he’d made no call that could be traced back, altered no plans, bought no weapons.
And he’d been genuinely devastated in the aftermath.
But, it took a lot to strangle a woman to near death with your bare hands; it wasn’t a thing of seconds but minutes. Dominic remembered what he’d done, even if he was too cowardly to look into the past and into his own horror.
But the punch… that explained why Dominic had no scratches on his face or arms, why there’d been no signs of a struggle. Will would never know for certain, but he had the strong feeling Dominic’s punch had knocked Miriama out cold. Easy prey for a man determined to strangle her to death. “Was there blood?”
“I don’t know.” Dominic swallowed hard. “But I always have a change in the car in case a patient throws up on me or something when I’m out at the farms. I dressed in my car on a lonely part of the road, threw the used clothes in a bin the council sets out for campers.”
No one, Will realized, had noticed because Dominic consistently wore white or light-colored business shirts and dark pants as his work uniform.
“I picked her up and threw her into the whirlpool,” Dominic whispered. “I threw my beautiful Miriama into the whirlpool before sprinting back to my car. I just had to carry her a few feet. She was tall, but she wasn’t heavy. I threw my Miriama into the black water.”
“She drowned.”
Dominic screamed and screamed and screamed. “I’m a doctor! I checked her pulse!”
And yet Will trusted Ankita’s call. Miriama had drowned. Maybe Dominic had made a mistake in his shock… and maybe he’d made a cold-blooded decision that he would have to live with for the rest of his life.
The screams went on and on until Dominic’s throat turned raw, and then there was only a wind-stirred silence for a half hour.
“Can I say good-bye to her before you take me in?” Dominic’s voice, so hoarse it was a croak.
When Will nodded, the young doctor rose and picked up a large bouquet he must’ve brought with him. Taking the flowers and the bracelet, he walked to the edge of the waves. Will was up on his feet a second later, even as Dominic de Souza tried to run into the ravenous ocean.
Dragging the other man back from the water that tried to suck them both in and under, Will slammed Dominic down on safe ground. “You don’t get to
take the easy out,” he said. “You’ll answer in court for your crime, and you’ll look Matilda in the face while you tell her what you did to Miriama.”
Dominic de Souza sobbed into the sand, the bracelet still clutched to his chest and his mouth shaping a single word. “Sunshine.”
EPILOGUE
Two months and a lifetime after they’d laid Miriama to rest, Anahera stood on the cliffs, staring out at the water crashing onto shore below as the wind rippled through her hair. “I can’t stay here,” she said to the man who stood beside her. “I came to hide, but that was never what my mother wanted for me.”
“Where do you want to go?” Will closed his hand over her chilled fingers.
Anahera shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“How about San Diego, for starters?”
Turning to face him, Anahera said, “What aren’t you telling me?”
“I’ve had requests to consult with police departments all over the world. Apparently, since he keeps asking to talk to me, they consider me the Vincent Baker expert—and they have a lot of cold cases to close.”
“What about your job here?”
“I think I’ve had enough of hiding, too.” Gray eyes that let her in, let her see the man within. “There’ll be a lot of travel back and forth—I have to keep talking to Vincent, see if I can help find the bodies of his other victims.”
“Is he giving you anything?”
“He wants credit.” A whisper of rain in the air, hitting the side of Will’s face. “He’ll play games, drip feed us information, but he knows the only way to stay in the spotlight is to remain relevant. One by one, I’ll locate the bones of his victims.”
Relentless, like water on rock, that was Will.
“I can work with San Diego.” Her wings unfolded inside her as the rain hit her own face, and with the cold droplets came a surge of music, pure and rising in a crescendo.
A Madness of Sunshine Page 33