“Rebecca said you can’t trust the phones.”
I thought of the old saying: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get you. I said, “Did Rebecca know you had it?”
“I didn’t tell her everything. But I told her I had proof. I think Joel must have found out somehow. Maybe he thought she had it, and while he was trying to get it back, he killed her. I told that cop all of this already.”
“I know. I’m just nosy,” I said, and he smiled. “You really can’t describe the guy in the hat?”
“It happened really fast.”
“How old was he?”
“Old. Older than me.”
“Older than me?”
“I don’t know how old you are.”
“Thirty-six.”
“Really?”
“I am aware that I don’t look my best right now.”
“I don’t know. I didn’t really see his face much. But he had rough hands. Oh, and glasses. I broke them.”
* * *
Mariella Zervos had already seen the black-eye situation, and she handed me a gift—a pair of mirrored aviators made from metal so thin the earpieces practically bent when I folded them open. I said, “Are these from the Dollar Tree?”
“Dollar General. Just put them on. You look like a Halloween costume.”
“Nice.”
“Think of the children, Roxane.” She gestured around the half-empty food court in the bowels of the hospital.
“Fuck off.”
“Glad to hear you’re feeling better, although I’m surprised that you’re out and about.”
I wasn’t feeling particularly better when I made the decision to leave the house that morning, but I was feeling bored and irritable. My doctor had told me to refrain from driving for a week but hadn’t said anything about Uber. “I just wanted to check on Nadine and the kid. Are you going to help her?”
She nodded. “I can’t talk about the details, but yeah. She’s willing to make a statement about Creedle, and to testify if it comes to that. I doubt it will, but good to know all the same.”
“Why do you doubt it?”
“I just said I can’t talk about it.”
I lifted the sunglasses up.
“Okay, fine,” she said, either persuaded or shamed by my appearance. “He’s not talking much yet, but you can see him starting to crack. A guy like that is not going to hold up in jail pending a trial.”
“Not talking much, you say.”
“He’s a righteous man, that’s pretty much all I got out of him. He didn’t do anything wrong, blah blah blah. He didn’t break into any hotel rooms, he didn’t plant any bombs. Oh, and he took particular offense to the idea that he murdered your girl, Rebecca Newsome. Apparently she used to be married to a buddy of his who still carries a torch. Did you know that?”
“What kind of question is that? Of course I did. This buddy of his was murdered in Toledo earlier this week. Does he know anything about that?”
“He says he doesn’t.”
“Here’s a thought,” I said, feeling petty and mean, “have you considered trying harder?”
“Excuse me?”
“This guy has all the answers. If he doesn’t, we’ll never know who killed Rebecca. Or who did this to Aiden. And what about Benjamin Gaskell? Doesn’t his family deserve answers too?”
“What family?”
That got me. “Everybody has some family.”
“Not this guy.”
“No one?”
“An ex-wife who said, and I quote,” Zervos said, fanning the pages of a notebook, “‘I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m not too broken up, neither.’” She flipped the notebook closed like that settled it, and maybe it did.
CHAPTER 38
But I couldn’t stop thinking about a few things. One, Benjamin Gaskell’s body, unclaimed in the Franklin County morgue, at least until it got donated to science—an actual thing—or the city paid some local funeral home a few hundred bucks to deal with it. I preferred not to think much about what happens when we die, but in no way should it involve being stuck in a drawer on the corner of the Ohio State campus until the facility needed the space back.
And I also couldn’t stop thinking about the break-in at Constance Archer-Nash’s hotel room. It had struck me as odd at the time but I’d had other things on my mind. Now, it really stood out—how had this happened, given her security detail?
It was with this in mind that I dragged myself to the Hilton across from the convention center and had the front desk call up to her room.
She sounded wary when I announced myself but she said I could come up to her room on the fourth floor. She was washing a blouse in the sink when I got there, soap bubbles clinging to her forearms.
“Trip wound up being longer than you expected, huh?” I said.
Constance nodded. “I’m leaving tomorrow, but first, yet another interview.”
“Hashtag blessed.”
“What do you want?”
“I’m just curious about something.”
She turned back to the sink, swirling the top around in the soapy water.
I watched her reflection in the mirror. “This break-in you mentioned. Was it this room, here?”
She nodded again and didn’t look up.
“Where were you?”
“I was at a dinner.”
“Mighty late dinner, assuming it was after you and I met.”
“Yeah, it was late. Is that a crime now?”
“And you didn’t notice the computer was missing until the morning?”
“Do you always check your computer after a late business dinner?”
“What happened that night? Really?”
She looked up, caught herself, and resumed focus on the shirt.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
But she wouldn’t meet my eye.
“You didn’t sleep here. Did you?”
She looked up again, and our eyes met in the mirror.
“Constance, I don’t care. I just want to find out what happened.”
She closed her eyes. “I didn’t— I was embarrassed, after our conversation. Yours and mine. I had a few more drinks. Too many. I don’t know how many.” Constance held the shirt underwater like she was trying to drown it. “I didn’t go back to the room. I spent the night with a woman I met, after you left. My security guy—he stood outside in the hallway all night. It was— I’m such an idiot.”
“When did you realize the computer was missing?”
“I went back to the room in the morning and my key didn’t work. I had to go to the lobby for a new key. It was just this nightmare walk of shame, the whole morning. And when I finally got inside, I thought, okay, I can relax for two seconds. And then I noticed my bag was gone, and you were calling me—I was thinking about my reputation, my campaign, my company. I don’t know, okay? I don’t know what happened. But I didn’t want anyone to know. I still don’t. I can’t.” She wrung out the shirt and dropped it on the counter with a thwack. “So whatever you’re asking about now—no. I can’t.”
“This is an element of a massive crime, Constance—”
“You think I don’t know that? I ruined everything.”
“You don’t know—”
“Can you please leave?”
She bit her lip, her eyes squeezed closed.
I patted her shoulder. “Sure. Best of luck.”
* * *
It took two days for Tom to get the security tape from the Hilton, a process enmeshed in corporate bureaucracy and, apparently, cashing in on some long-due favor. “These are the highlights,” he told me when he brought the video over to my place, along with a few key frames printed out.
“Nice and big for the gal with the blurry vision,” I said, squinting at the jumbo time stamp in the corner of the page. I kept forgetting that squinting hurt.
The security camera had gotten a good look at Joel Creedle coming through the revolving do
or, almost head-on. I flipped through the first few sheets of paper and watched in stop-motion as he crossed the lobby just after one in the morning and into the elevator.
“Well, that’s probably the closest thing there is to proof.” I tossed the papers onto my coffee table. “Can we go to bed?”
“It’s nine thirty.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
Tom took a breath. “I think we need to talk about some things.”
“I know, and I just can’t right now.”
We looked at each other for a long time.
“I really am sorry. What you said the other day is totally right. Frank’s gone. You’re the one whose feelings I need to think about.”
“I literally just said that I can’t do this right now.”
Another silence rolled out between us, this one hard-edged and tense.
Finally, he said, “Then maybe I should go. Until you can.”
I got this tightness in my chest. “What does that mean?”
“It means, I want to do this with you. All of it. The good and the bad. I will never not be here for you, no matter what, and like we talked about earlier this year, this might not work.” He gestured at the space between us. “But if it doesn’t, it needs to be because we tried and failed. Not because you didn’t try.”
The tightness was creeping up my throat, into my sinuses. Yet another thing that hurt. “You’re saying that I don’t try?”
“I’m saying that you’re half in, half out. I love you and I can’t pretend that it doesn’t bother me how you didn’t return my calls for thirty-six hours after all this happened and when you finally did, it was to ask for this. Another bullshit favor. I can’t go down this path with you again, where you act like you could take it or leave it because it’s just sex and it doesn’t matter.”
“I never said it doesn’t matter. All I said was that I can’t have this conversation right now, and here you are, trying to make me have it. Maybe you should go.”
“That’s what you want.”
It wasn’t. “Yeah.”
Tom stood up and got his coat and put it on slowly and I knew I should stop him, but I didn’t. Instead, I kicked over the coffee table, the printed-out frames cascading across the floor.
* * *
The doctor had said something to the effect that there were no guidelines regarding how much alcohol was safe following a concussion, which technically could be interpreted conversely—there were no guidelines about how much was unsafe, either. I did a shot in my kitchen, experimentally, and didn’t drop dead. A positive sign. But somehow it made everything seem more impossible, not less, a cheap fucking trick—for my only coping mechanism to fail me at this very moment.
Instead, I took a sleeping pill and lay in bed on top of the blankets. The glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling were fuzzy and pale yellow-green blobs. The blurred vision was going to go away in time. Would there be anything worth seeing when it did?
CHAPTER 39
I slept for fifteen hours and woke up feeling both better and worse. Better because I could see my phone clearly, and worse because I didn’t have a text from Tom that said You are impossible and I’m fine with it so please, continue treating everyone however you see fit.
I made tea and went onto the back porch, where the air was crisp and cold. Fall was almost over now, that distinct but undefinable shift between deliciously cool and winter. After a few minutes, I heard Shelby open her back door and come down the steps with an actual basket of muffins folded into a cotton kitchen towel.
“You don’t have to eat them if you don’t want to, but I wanted to make sure you had something you could eat,” she said. “Oh my god, Roxane, you look awful.”
I took the basket from her outstretched hand. “I know. Thank you. For the muffins, and the compliment. Sit with me.”
She came the rest of the way down the steps, avoiding the broken one two from the bottom.
“I saw that you texted me. I’m an asshole for not responding.”
“It’s okay. I was just worried. Like what if you were dead in there?”
“I wasn’t here. I should’ve responded to tell you that.”
“You don’t have to tell me anything. It’s okay.”
I caught her eye. “It’s really not. I don’t want to be like this step,” I said, pointing at the offending slat, “someone that everyone has to make special allowances for.”
“You’re not.”
“You made me muffins because you thought I might not have any food.”
“But I like making muffins.”
I had to smile. “That’s not the point.”
“You’re super banged up. I think you’re allowed to take a break from texting, if that’s what you need.”
“There’s always going to be some reason that I don’t want to talk about my feelings.”
Shelby looked confused. “I never know what to do. That’s why I brought the muffins.”
She’d been through a lot, but she was still just a nineteen-year-old kid. What Tom had said about Shelby and her father was right. I hadn’t agonized over that, or debated telling her. Never in a million years would I burden her with that crap, even if I thought she knew already. Because bringing it up would mean that I knew, too. I took a muffin out of the basket and broke off a piece.
“They’re carrot, like you used to get from the Angry Baker.”
“Shel, you’re amazing.”
“I think you are.”
“How are you doing, after all that excitement?”
Here she blushed a little. “It was scary, but also, right after? We kissed. Miriam and me.”
It was the best news I’d ever heard. I threw an arm around her shoulders and squeezed. “Finally,” I said.
After a shower, three aspirins, and a load of laundry, I returned to the scene of the crime—the living room—and returned the coffee table to its proper position and picked up the papers. Then I sat on the sofa and flipped through the rest of the pages, feeling a little guilty that Tom had taken the boredom hit and watched the security footage for me. Okay, a lot guilty, especially since all I had offered in return was the displeasure of my company and a fight about nothing.
I was going to need to figure out how to get over myself.
I turned a page and saw Joel Creedle coming in through the front doors of the hotel, face in profile as he turned to look over his shoulder.
The next page showed a view of the sidewalk: Creedle with a hand up, pointing into the building. There was another person with him, a guy with glasses and a baseball cap, a medium-colored coat. Aiden’s assailant? I couldn’t see his face, but there was one more printout in the stack.
I flipped to it and drew in a breath and the papers all fell to the floor.
* * *
“You didn’t tell me you wanted a ride way out to East Jesus,” Kez said, frowning through the windshield at the tree-lined Powell Road.
“I think technically this is West Jesus.” I stared at my phone—with a minimum of squinting—and willed Maggie to call me back.
James Holmer had struck me as a nobody, but it all suddenly made sense. The chemistry degree I’d noticed on his wall would’ve given him the know-how to make the Tannerite explosive. Marathon Petroleum, his employer, prominently featured in those clippings on the wall in the St. Clair Club.
“We need to discuss a mileage reimbursement situation.”
“Why are you always trying to get more money from me? I’m not exactly rolling in it.”
“After what just went down, I bet you’re gonna be.”
She might have been right about that. I had already scheduled three new client meetings for next week and had half a dozen phone messages that I still needed to return. My brother Matt reported that his giant, hero truck had done the same for his own business—all the shots on the news with his name and phone number had generated a lot of leads—but for the moment his broken arm precluded him from doing anything about it.
These were good problems to have.
Kez added, “I just have to do right by me, you know?”
“You’re doing a great job, working for me. With me. I really appreciate it. I know I’m trash at saying so, but I do. You’re smart as hell and I hope you know that.”
She glanced at me, a smile twitching at the corner of her mouth. “Shit, I wasn’t trying to make this into a whole thing, I was just hoping for my fifty-eight cents a mile.”
“Fifty-eight cents?”
“The IRS standard rate?”
I made a mental note to start requesting mileage reimbursement from my clients. “Make a left here.”
Kez swung her tiny car onto Maggie’s street.
“So what’s the plan?”
I pointed to the white house. Rebecca Newsome’s car was still parked in the driveway, while James Holmer’s truck was not.
Good.
I said, “I don’t have one. We’re just going to talk to her and see what’s what.” I handed her Deputy Carter Montoya’s business card. “If anything gets wonky, call him. Okay?”
“Okay.”
I was hoping she’d answer the door—a gamble, since she wouldn’t answer my phone calls, but a doorbell and a pathologically stubborn detective could really wreak havoc on an infant’s sleep schedule if we had to.
It turned out I didn’t need to worry. Maggie opened the door right away, baby Bea squalling in her arms. My former client was pale and disheveled in flannel pajama pants and a yellowing undershirt. She didn’t seem angry at me, though, just a little stunned.
“Maggie, this is my associate, Kezia Denniere. Can we talk to you for a second?”
“It’s a mess in here,” she said, but stepped aside to let us into her house.
Kez beamed at the screaming baby. “How old?”
“Five weeks. No, six.”
“Can I take a turn?”
Maggie thrust the child into Kez’s arms. In one of the most shocking twists of the week, the baby settled almost immediately. Kez shrugged with one shoulder. “I’m the oldest of five.”
The two of them drifted into the living room, Kez cooing baby talk and letting Bea’s sticky little hands grasp at her braids. Maggie said, “I suppose I should apologize to you.”
Once You Go This Far Page 26