by Lisa Gardner
I’m not nervous anymore. I’m ready.
* * *
—
ARRIVING AT BPD headquarters, I spot Keith first. He is standing awkwardly to the side, gazing up at the glass structure as if he’s not sure its existence is such a good idea. When he sees me walking toward him, his face immediately brightens and I feel an unexpected tug inside my chest.
He’s dressed upscale metrosexual. Open dark wool coat. Black skinny jeans topped with a deep purple sweater over a lavender-and-pink-checked shirt. He looks like an Abercrombie model. Which is to say, an updated Ted Bundy. I wonder what SSA Kimberly Quincy will make of him.
Then I see her. Stepping out of an Uber vehicle. Long camel-colored coat to fight off New England temps that must feel shocking after Atlanta. A dark leather shoulder bag slung across her body. Nice brown boots, currently getting ruined by the wintry mix of salt and sludge.
I don’t even have to hear her voice to know it’s her. Something about the line of her body as she leans down to retrieve a smaller overnight bag. Then she straightens, turns.
And I realize why I blocked her face from my mind. Because for all intents and purposes, SSA Quincy looks almost exactly like me. Same lean profile, gray-blue eyes, dusty-blond hair, hard stare. Except she’s a slightly older, wiser version of myself. No dark shadows under her eyes. Real muscle mass lining her frame. A woman who sleeps at night, eats three to five healthy meals a day, and knows exactly who she is and where she’s going.
“Damn,” Keith says, taking in the two of us, and I realize I’m not ready for the day after all.
* * *
—
KEITH AND I let Quincy take the lead. She shakes my hand, then his. If she wonders about his presence, she doesn’t say anything. Maybe she thinks he’s my boyfriend. Maybe I don’t mind that impression.
She leads us into BPD, slaps down her credentials to announce her arrival, and crisply requests to see Sergeant D. D. Warren. Keith is looking all around the vast glass and steel lobby. I can already feel myself shrinking inside my down coat. As I’m a woman who’d once been confined to a box, you’d think I’d like large open spaces. But this kind of space makes me nervous.
A redheaded detective appears. I’ve met him before, Neil something or other. He chirps about do we need breakfast, coffee, anything? Quincy stares at him. He stops talking, leads the way up to the homicide unit.
Along the way, we pass an older man in a suit and a woman I recognize instantly from the news—Conrad Carter’s wife. The woman who supposedly shot and killed her husband. My feet slow on instinct. I open my mouth, feel like I should say something, anything. How well did you know your husband? Would it surprise you to know he was hanging out with a known rapist in a honky-tonk in the South? But Keith suddenly has a grip on my arm. He drives me forward, till she’s gone, and I’m left with a last impression of a woman who’s as anxious and exhausted as I am.
D.D. greets us with her normal chipper self. “What the hell?”
Quincy smiles. “Sergeant Warren. Nice to speak with you again. Shall we?” Quincy gestures to the conference room behind D.D. D.D. looks like she’s on the verge of arguing, probably on principle, but Quincy smiles again, says, “Not in front of the children,” and that does the trick.
The two female investigators enter the conference room, closing the door firmly behind them. Keith and I remain in the hallway, still in the company of the redhead, who’s fidgeting.
“Coffee?” he asks again. Most likely to have something to do.
Keith and I exchange a glance. “No,” we state in unison. Which makes me feel warm all over.
From inside the room: “A Boston shooting is a Boston case!”
“I’m not interested in your murder. I’m interested in the victim’s possible connection to Jacob Ness.”
“This has nothing to do with Ness. We’ve already charged the wife in the shooting.”
“Then my angle of inquiry won’t conflict with your own.”
“Like hell! You start digging in Conrad’s past, raise the specter of some serial killer bestie, and you’ve just handed the defense reasonable doubt. Evie Carter didn’t kill her husband. Clearly the ghost of Jacob Ness did it.”
“Do you know for sure someone else didn’t do it? Because a man who was known to go on frequent business trips, and at least spent part of them in the company of a serial rapist . . . As an investigator, these are questions I’d like to answer.”
“Me too. Which brings us back to the wife. Who in addition to shooting her husband, plugged even more bullets into his computer.”
“Anything recoverable?”
“Not yet.”
“The FBI forensic techs are the best in the industry—”
“Bite me.”
“Sergeant Warren, your case intersects with an ongoing FBI investigation. Period. You can invite me to assist gracefully. Or I can commandeer your case forcefully.”
“What ongoing investigation?”
“The disappearance of six women believed to be additional victims of Jacob Ness. With his death, we’ve lacked investigative avenues. However, this new information, that he might have met with other predators, could prove promising.”
“Conrad Carter can’t help you, he’s dead. And so is his computer.”
“Jacob Ness’s computer isn’t.”
For the first time, quiet. A long pause, where Keith and I lean forward. The redheaded detective as well.
“You have Ness’s computer?” D.D. asks.
“In all its mysterious glory.”
“What does that mean?”
“Invite me to play and I’ll be happy to share.”
“And Flora?” D.D. asks abruptly. “Why is she here?”
“She’s also agreed to help.”
“How?”
“A trip down memory lane. We’ve never found the house where Jacob originally held her. We have reason to believe it might be more significant than he let on. And that he took steps to mask its location.”
“You think Jacob Ness still has property out there? A personal cabin, residence?”
“I think finding such a thing could provide a great deal of information regarding six missing women, and, who knows, one recently deceased husband. Do you have all the answers for your case, Sergeant Warren?”
“No.”
“Neither do I. So, shall we?”
Heavy sigh. “You did help me with Charlene Grant.”
“And you did keep her alive.”
A change in tone. “How are the girls?”
“Amazing. Ten and seven. Ready to take over the world. Yours?”
“Jack is five. Has a new dog. They spring around the house going ‘roo, roo, roo.’”
“Never a dull moment.”
“Wouldn’t change it for the world.”
“Me neither.”
“Fine. You want in. Let’s do this. But I’m telling you now, there’s more about this case that doesn’t make sense than does.”
“My favorite kind.”
Just like that, the deal is struck, the hunt is on.
Quincy turns back toward us, motioning through the window for us to enter.
“Holy shit,” Keith whispers under his breath.
I don’t stop. I don’t think. I simply squeeze his hand.
Then we enter the conference room and the real work begins.
CHAPTER 19
EVIE
“YOU HONESTLY BELIEVED YOUR FATHER killed himself?”
After sitting in silence in the car for so long, the sound of my lawyer’s voice startles me. I’ve been staring out the window, watching perfectly normal people walk down the snowy streets of Boston, continuing on with their perfectly normal lives. I wonder if that’s how I look to others; like I’m normal and functional, too, when in fact, I fee
l completely emptied out. Stacks of money. Fake IDs. Not exactly a treasure trove of dead wives, and yet, I’d been right: Conrad had been hiding secrets from me.
Which I want to think is only fair, because I hid my secrets from him. Except it doesn’t feel okay at all. It feels awful and unjust, a final act of betrayal by a man I’d genuinely loved. True, I had my own suspicions. But then, maybe that’s what love was for me. An exercise in mistrust.
“Evie?” Mr. Delaney prods again, his voice gentle.
I pull my attention from the window.
“My mom never told you?”
“All I’ve ever known is what she said that afternoon. That your father had been showing you how to handle the shotgun. There was an accidental discharge. She saw the whole thing from the kitchen doorway.”
I nod. That was our story, and for sixteen years we’d been sticking to it.
“Do you think my parents loved each other?” I hear myself ask.
He doesn’t answer right away, tapping his finger on the steering wheel. I always thought of Mr. Delaney as one of my father’s friends. But all these years later, he continues to come around the house. Unmarried. Attentive to my mother’s moods. Now I can’t help but wonder.
“I met both your parents in college,” he says now, surprising me. I’d known that he and my father went way back, but I hadn’t realized it included my mother as well. “From the very beginning, their relationship was . . . volatile. And yet, the more they collided, blew apart, collapsed back, the more it seemed to work for them. You know your father genuinely loved math?”
I nod.
“Well, over the years, I’ve come to think of his relationship with your mom as his exercise in physics. She challenged him, in a wholly different way, and your father liked a good challenge. As for her . . . Your mother was never meant to live an ordinary life. Your father, in his overly intellectual, unquestionably brilliant, completely indulgent way, was perfect for her.”
“The cocktail parties. University functions. Build the legacy. Protect the legacy.”
Mr. Delaney smiles. “They fit together, Evie. Whether it made sense to outsiders or not, they were meant to be. And they both loved you.”
I return to the window. My father loved me. I know that. My mom, on the other hand, is a different story. A genius husband had fit the exotic story line of her life. A daughter of slightly above-average intelligence, who taught math at public high school, not so much.
“You can talk to me,” Mr. Delaney is saying now. “You’re my client. Our conversations are protected by privilege. Whatever you say stays with me.”
“And not my mom?” I can’t help it; I sound bitter, maybe even petulant.
“Mum’s the word,” he says so quietly, I almost miss the pun. When I catch it, I smile, and he smiles back. It occurs to me that Mr. Delaney has been one of the few adult fixtures in my life. First as my parents’ close friend and confidant, then as a substitute father figure, coming by the house regularly to check up on us in the months following the shooting. He’d been holding my mother together, though I hadn’t thought about it back then. But Mr. Delaney had been the one who’d appear three or four nights a week, quietly making sure food appeared in the fridge, vodka bottles disappeared from the cabinets. He’d tried to get my mom to sell the house, then failing that, at least remodel. For me, he always said. She should do these things to ease her daughter’s stress, help in my recovery.
She’d listened to him, certainly in a way she never would’ve listened to me. My father had been her world. Whereas she and I could never even agree on much of anything.
“We found him . . . dead, when we first arrived home,” I murmur now. “Clearly, it had just happened. You could smell the gunpowder. And the blood . . . it was hot on my hair.”
“I’m sorry, Evie.”
“There was no sign of anyone else. No cars on the drive, no one in the home. And my father, those past few months, his mood had grown darker.”
“On occasion, the genius in your father got the better of him. But he always came out the other side. He told me once, that was the power of fatherhood. Even when he felt he was failing at solving the great mysteries of the universe, he knew he would never fail you.”
“I thought he had.” Suddenly, I’m crying. I hadn’t expected to. But all these years later . . . I haven’t been carrying around just the shame of my secret, but the pain that my father chose to end his own life rather than stay with us. The father I loved so much. The father I would’ve done anything to make happy.
I turn back to the window, wipe hastily at my cheeks.
“You didn’t pull the trigger,” Delaney states now.
“No. He’d already shown me how to load and unload the Remington. I wouldn’t have made such a stupid mistake. But as it was, Mom and I weren’t even home.”
“Was he expecting anyone? A TA, a fellow professor?”
“Not that he told us. When we left, he was holed up in his study, standing at a whiteboard, muttering away. You know how he could be. We called out to him that we were off to run errands. I don’t even remember if he answered. We drove away. When we came back . . .”
Mr. Delaney nods. “You walked into the kitchen first,” he fills in quietly. “Then came your mother, who took one look and fell apart.”
“She told me what to say. She told me what had to be done. In the moment, I never questioned it. Maybe . . .”
“It’s okay, Evie. I understand. You’d just lost one parent. Of course you went out of your way to make your surviving parent happy.”
I’d never thought of it that way, but it made sense.
“You and your mother were together?”
“Yes.”
“But according to what we just heard from the police, your father didn’t commit suicide. There had to be another person in the house. Was the door open when you walked in?”
“The back door was always unlocked during daylight hours. Often because so many students were coming and going.”
“I think you should prepare a statement. Write down in your own words what you can remember from that day. Then give it to me for proofing. Ultimately, we’ll deliver it to the police.”
“So they can charge me in my father’s murder as well?”
“Did you shoot your father, Evie? Remember, anything you tell me is protected.”
“No.”
“Did you shoot your husband? Again, anything you tell me is protected.”
“No.”
“But you pulled the trigger.”
“I shot my husband’s computer.”
Delaney takes his eyes off the wheel long enough to give me a look. “Interesting. Well then, sounds to me like we have some work ahead of us.”
“Why do I only love men who leave me?” I whisper.
“I don’t know, honey. Some of us just aren’t lucky in love.”
* * *
—
MR. DELANEY TAKES me to lunch. A sandwich place he knows downtown. He doesn’t fuss over me as openly as my mother, but he adds orange juice to my salad order and refuses to utter a word until at least a quarter of my food is consumed. His own choice is a rare roast beef sandwich with horseradish mayo. Once, I would’ve ordered the same. Now, in my delicate state, the sight of the bloody beef makes me nauseous. I do my best to focus on my lunch, take small bites, chew thoroughly. Even if I have no interest in sustenance, the baby does. Everything I do next, the whole rest of my life, this is what—this is who—my life will be about.
Again, I wonder if my mom ever felt that way about me.
“Why didn’t my parents have more children?” I ask Mr. Delaney halfway through my salad. If my question surprises him, he’s an experienced enough lawyer to hide it.
“I don’t know. Have you ever asked?”
I give him a look. He grins back. The silve
r fox can be charming when he wants. Already, I’d noticed several female heads turning to admire the new lunch addition. Then they scowled at me, no doubt thinking I was his much-too-young trophy wife, because handsome men are never allowed to be merely friends with other women.
“Your father was nervous,” he says at last, picking up a napkin, dabbing at his meticulously trimmed mustache. “When your mother found out she was pregnant, he was excited, but concerned. As he put it, no genius in history has been noted for their parenting skills.”
“Was I a surprise?”
“Always.”
I roll my eyes at him again. “I mean, did they want to have children?”
“I don’t think they would’ve actively sought it out,” Mr. Delaney allows after a minute, “but I would also say, you were the light of your father’s life. Your turn.” He looks at me. “Is your baby a surprise?”
“Yes. No. Kind of. We’d been trying once. But had mostly given up. And then . . .”
“I’ve heard that. Sometimes, not trying is exactly what a new life-form needs most. Did you love Conrad?” he asks me softly.
“Yes. No. Kind of.”
That smile again, but a bit sad this time, as if he knows exactly what I mean.
“In the beginning,” I hear myself say. “I thought he was everything I could ever want. Outgoing, funny, compassionate. He sought me out. He looked at me. He wanted to talk to me. He wanted to be with me. I know it sounds awful. Like an exercise in narcissism. But in my whole life, it never felt like anyone wanted me. Then, after my father died—”
“And you took the blame.”
“Let’s just say if I was the quiet weird kid before, I was the scary weird kid after.” I shrug.
“You know, your father worried you’d be gifted like him.”
“He worried?”
“It’s a lonely life, in case you didn’t notice. His brain was exceptional because it didn’t work like anyone else’s. But it put him forever out of step with others. Even in elite math circles, he stood out.”
“One of the greatest minds of his generation,” I intoned. And suddenly, I feel like crying again, because I’d never wanted the genius, just the father, and I still missed him so much.