“Tan Cavalier, Texas plates.” She rattled off the license number. “Soon as it comes in, you get first crack at it, honey. So sit tight.”
She disappeared into the back office behind the counter.
Serena sat nearby on a metal chair, her elbows propped on her knees. Her black hair fell messily across her face. She pushed herself up wearily and came up behind Stride, kneading the knotted muscles in his neck.
She leaned forward and whispered, “We don’t have to do this.”
“I do. I need to know.”
Serena sighed. “Whatever you want.”
Stride knew she was right. It was better to walk away. He knew what they would find when the car came in, and when he had the truth, he would wish he had left the mystery back in the desert to die with Bob.
But he couldn’t stop. The photograph had led him here. From the desert to the airport to the rental agency, following the trail that had been left for him. It was so obvious that he wondered if it had all been laid out that way for him to find.
Serena borrowed his cup of coffee, took a drink, and made a face. “Oh, man. Two words for you, Jonny. Star. Bucks.”
Stride couldn’t help but smile.
“That’s better,” she said.
“Look, you don’t need to worry about me,” Stride told her. “I’ll be fine. You’ve got your own shit to deal with.”
“You mean, because I killed a guy? Because I just spent six hours reliving it five hundred times with IA? Just a day in the life.”
“Ha.”
Serena shrugged. “They’ll make me talk to a shrink. It’ll be like old times. I’ll cry later.” She looked down at her shoes, which were still dirty with dust and blood. “You want the truth, Jonny? It was easy. Too easy.”
Stride didn’t need to say anything.
The plus-sized agent emerged from the office with a walkie-talkie at her ear. “Your car just came in, honey. One of my boys is driving it over here.”
Stride felt his insides seize with tension. “What’s the routine when a car comes back? Vacuum the interior? Wash the mats?”
“You got it,” she said.
“Trunk, too?”
She shrugged. “If someone barfs in it. Which happens, honey.”
“And you’re sure this is the first rental since it came back last weekend? No one else had it in between?”
“Nobody.”
An attendant parked the Cavalier near the rental building a few minutes later, leaving the driver’s door open and the engine running. Stride and Serena both put on gloves and went outside. He carried a halogen flashlight from Serena’s car, which he directed into the backseat of the Cavalier.
It was clean, no trash, no stray papers. Stride got down on his knees and shined the flashlight carefully under both seats, examining the floor. Then he and Serena spent half an hour studying the fabric on the rear seats, going square inch by square inch, finding nothing.
Stride straightened up. “Let’s do the trunk.”
“She was probably wrapped in a blanket,” Serena reminded him. “It was missing from the bed.”
“Blankets leave tracks,” Stride said.
It didn’t take them long. When they popped the trunk, Stride lit up the interior, and almost immediately he zeroed in on a dime-sized brownish stain on the carpeted fringe. He kept the light on the stain while Serena leaned in and took a closer look.
“Could be blood,” she said quietly. Then she added, “I’ve got something more here.”
He watched her reach into a pocket and slide out a tweezers. She extracted something trapped in the metal edge of the trunk, then backed out and held the tweezers in the beam of the flashlight. Stride leaned closer and saw a wispy strand of blonde hair that spiraled down to a jet black root.
“It might be nothing,” Serena said. “Lots of dye jobs in this town.”
But they both knew what it meant.
“I have to go back,” Stride said.
The rental agent waved her clipboard at them from the doorway. “Hey, officers, what’s the word? Am I getting my tan Cav back? Otherwise, I need to find another car, or someone’s going to be walking, know what I mean?”
Stride and Serena exchanged a long, sober look. It was her call, but Stride knew there was only one decision she could make. Impound it, call for forensics, bag the evidence, and bring his whole world crashing down.
Serena tore her eyes away. She slammed the trunk and waved at the agent.
“Take it,” she said.
50
He found Andrea secluded in her office on the second floor, grading papers amid the tomblike silence of the school. Her door was open. She had her head down, deep in concentration, not having heard his footsteps on the stairs.
He couldn’t help but think of the first time he had met her here. They had both been so wounded then, two people suddenly alone after they had envisioned a lifetime with someone else. He had really believed then that he could wash away her hurt, but her bitterness never seemed to fade, no matter how much time they spent together, even after they stumbled into marriage. They had made a mistake. He never imagined how costly that mistake would prove to be.
“Hello, Andrea,” he said.
She looked up from the papers on her desk. He wasn’t sure what he expected to see in her eyes: fear maybe, or anger, or sadness. Instead, he saw almost nothing, as if in this short time she had become a stranger to him.
“Welcome back,” Andrea said evenly. “I didn’t expect to see you so soon.”
She looked older, although it may have been the lack of makeup on her face. She wore a gray college sweatshirt she had owned for years. Her blonde hair was pinned back away from her face, and she wore half-glasses, pushed down her nose.
“Did you find out?” Andrea asked, a cold edge rising in her voice. “Was it worth it?”
Stride could feel the blame spitting out of her, as if it were his own fault.
He entered the office and sat down heavily in the wooden chair opposite her desk. He hated to tell her.
“He’s dead, Andrea.”
She sucked in her breath and pushed back sharply from the desk. She stripped off her glasses, and he could see her terrified eyes.
She was waiting for him to say it.
Stride nodded. “Robin.”
He almost wanted her to lie, to paste a look of shock on her face at the idea that Robin, her ex-husband, was Rachel’s lover.
But there was no surprise. Andrea closed her eyes. “That stupid bastard,” she whispered. “How did it happen?”
Stride explained briefly what happened in the trailer. Andrea didn’t break down, but a single tear worked its way out of her eye and slid in a streak down her face. He let her grieve in silence for a few seconds before his anger caught up with him. “You knew,” he said. “Goddamn it, you knew, and you didn’t tell me. You let me go down there, knowing what I’d find.”
“I told you not to do it,” Andrea retorted, wiping her cheek. “You were the one who couldn’t let it go.”
“Because that’s my job!” Stride said. He got up, pacing, and slammed the office door. He confronted her again. “How long? How long have you known? Did you know back then? We were running around in circles, and you knew Robin had run off with Rachel.”
“No, I didn’t know!” Andrea insisted. “He left me months before Rachel disappeared. Don’t you see? That was how she wanted it. No connection. It was all her, all part of her plan. She told him to come back for her in the fall.”
“Then when did you find out? How?”
Andrea stared down at her desk. “He sent me a letter last month.”
“And he told you about Rachel?”
“Are you kidding?” Her mouth twitched as if she had bitten into something vile. “Everything was Rachel, Rachel, Rachel. How she seduced him. How she dumped him. The pathetic shit was obsessed with her.”
“Where’s the letter?”
Andrea hesitated. “I burned it.”
“Why?” Stride asked. “Why would you do that?” He suspected he could open her desk drawer and find it there.
“I don’t know why, I just did it. I wanted to erase him. I wanted to forget what he did to me.”
Stride shook his head. “Now you’re lying. Don’t lie to me. Robin was obsessed? My God, what about you? He threw you away for a seventeen-year-old, and you still love him.”
She didn’t deny it. He saw her jaw jutting out in defiance.
“Explain it to me, Andrea,” Stride insisted. “He writes you a letter and grinds his affair into you like broken glass. And what do you do? You run to him. You go crawling to him in Vegas and try to get him back.”
Now he saw fear.
“I didn’t—” she began.
Stride cut her off. “Don’t insult me. Do you think I’m stupid? First you beg me not to go, and when I do go, I find your ex-husband drinking himself to death in a trailer. What’s my first thought, Andrea? You. I went to the airport. I called the credit card company. I know you flew from your sister’s in Miami to Las Vegas last weekend.”
“It’s not what you think,” Andrea told him. “I didn’t want him back. But I was scared. His letter talked about suicide. I couldn’t sit here and do nothing. That’s why I went—to talk to him.”
“I don’t care about that,” he interrupted. “This isn’t about you and Robin.”
The sudden silence between them was pregnant with anxiety.
“I want to know what happened between you and Rachel,” Stride said.
He studied her as if she were a suspect, watching for every flicker of a muscle in her face. He saw what he expected to see.
Guilt.
“I want to know why you killed her.”
Andrea was calm. “Do I need a lawyer?”
“You think I’m going to turn you in? You don’t know me at all. As far as the police in Las Vegas are concerned, a drifter named Jerky Bob killed Rachel. Case closed.”
“How do you know it didn’t happen that way?”
Stride exhaled in disgust. “Please, no games, Andrea. Robin would have killed himself before he killed Rachel. We both know that. And you left a trail a mile wide. I tracked down the car you rented. There was blood and hair in the trunk from when you drove Rachel’s body out to the desert.”
“I wanted him to see her,” she said bitterly. “He wanted her so badly. Let him have her.”
“Tell me about it,” Stride said. “I need the truth.”
Andrea nodded. She nervously tucked a stray hair behind her ear and bit her lip. “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
She stood up and came out from behind the desk. She stood close to Stride but didn’t look at him. Instead, she stared at photos on the wall. Of her and Stride. Of her and Robin. She kept them up even now.
He smelled tobacco. She was smoking again.
“The letter almost destroyed me, Jon,” she said. “I knew you and I were in trouble. I was already dealing with that. Or not dealing with it. And then to hear from Robin and find out what really happened—I just had to see him. I didn’t go there to see her, for God’s sake. That never even crossed my mind. I went to see him.”
She turned back to Stride. “You were there. You saw what he was like. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe what she’d done to him.”
“He did it to himself,” Stride said.
“No, this wasn’t his fault. Robin was always weak. I knew that about him. And Rachel saw it, too. She used him. He told me how she read his poetry and told him he was such a genius. How she made him believe they were meant for each other. But it was just another lie, and he swallowed all of it. Once Graeme was dead, she threw him out. She just cut him out of her life. She didn’t need him anymore. It was like she was ripping his heart out. He started drinking, sliding downhill. He didn’t have anything left to live for.”
“Tell me about Rachel,” he persisted.
“Yes, all right. The crazy thing is, I never planned to see her. Robin told me where she worked, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t there for her. Robin and I talked for a couple of hours, if you can call it talking. He was too far gone. I couldn’t take it anymore.”
“So you went to confront Rachel.”
“No, it wasn’t like that. I was heading back to the airport, coming home. But more and more, I kept thinking about Rachel and what she did to us. To me. It’s not like I consciously decided I was going there, but somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn’t driving to the airport. I wound up at the club. I just wanted to see her, see what she looked like. Look into her eyes. When she came out onstage, it took me a minute, but I knew. I knew it was her. And she was everything that Robin said she was. Beautiful. And cold as ice.
“That was when I realized it wasn’t enough just to see her. I needed her to look at me and admit what she’d done. So I waited in the parking lot and followed her. When I got to her apartment, I almost couldn’t go through with it. What do you say to someone you’ve never met who ruined your whole life? But I thought about Robin wasting away in that trailer, and what our lives had been like, and I got angry all over again.”
“Did she recognize you?” Stride asked.
“Oh, yeah. Right away. She laughed. She said if I’d come to take Robin back, I could have him now. And she knew all about the investigation. About me and you. She thought it was funny. ‘I caught a husband for you and a murderer for him.’ That was what she said. That we should thank her.”
Andrea began crumbling.
“I don’t know what—I mean, none of it was going the way I wanted. She had no regrets, no shame. She stared at me with those horrible green eyes like I was an insect. Something to play with and then swat away.”
Stride saw Andrea’s hands trembling. He wasn’t sure how far he could push her before she lost control entirely. “What else did she say?” he asked.
“She lied,” Andrea retorted, balling her fists. “All she did was lie.”
“Lie about what?”
“About everything! I told her she had no right to break us up. Robin loved me.” Her eyes narrowed to slits, almost reptilian. “And do you know what she said? She said Robin was going to divorce me anyway. He was so fucking easy to seduce because he could barely keep it up in bed with me. Making love to me was like humping a corpse. I couldn’t get pregnant, because there was nothing alive between my legs.”
“Son of a bitch,” Stride murmured.
“That’s when I knew. She wasn’t lying. It was all true. I’d been the one lying to myself all along. About Robin. About myself. So I stood there, with this rage bubbling over like nothing I’d ever felt before, and all she could do was smirk at me. Like my life was a joke to her. Like everything she’d taken from me meant nothing.”
“What did you do?” Stride asked quietly.
“There was a vase on the bookshelf. I grabbed it, swung it. I wanted it to shatter. I wanted glass flying all over the apartment. But I didn’t let go. I hung on to it, and it hit something. My eyes were closed. I didn’t even know what I’d done. But I hit something, and then there was this heavy sound, of something falling…”
Stride had heard these stories too many times, from people he had arrested, from defendants pleading for mercy. He had hardened his heart to them. But not this time.
“She was dead. I couldn’t believe it, but she was dead. I had killed her.”
“Rachel’s been dead a long time,” he murmured.
Andrea stared at him, her eyes pleading. “I never expected you to be pulled back into this, Jon. You have to believe that. I never thought anyone would make the connection to Rachel.”
Stride knew there was no gray area here. If they were in court, she would be guilty. But it occurred to him that Andrea wasn’t entirely responsible. Neither was Robin. He, too, had to bear some of the blame. Maybe that was why he knew he could never give up the secret. Who would it satisfy?
“What now?” Andrea asked.
Yes, what
now? he asked himself.
“Now we both have to live with it.”
“I know what a difficult thing this is for you to do,” she whispered. “To walk away.”
“The truth is, it isn’t difficult at all. I guess that should tell me something.”
He was anxious to go now, to say good-bye, to be alone with his own guilt. But he knew he needed to tell her something, to give her something to hang on to. So that the past wasn’t entirely a lie.
“Robin knew you killed Rachel,” he told her, as he turned to leave. “He took the fall. He wanted us to blame him. That was for you, Andrea. He did it for you.”
Stride realized he had nowhere to go. He was homeless in his own hometown.
He wound up on the bridge over the canal, standing where Rachel had stood on her last night in the city. Before she went home and planted evidence in Graeme’s van. Before she stole Graeme’s shoes. Before she met Robin waiting for her on a back street and lured him to the barn to play their little game.
Chase her into the meadow. Cut her clothes. Cut her skin. Blood. Fabric. Clues.
I played right into their hands, he thought.
Stride stared into the dark water, which barely stirred tonight under the cool lake breeze. He took hold of the railing with both hands and imagined Rachel balancing there. If a gust of wind had pitched her into the frigid canal that night, his life would be very different today. Better or worse, he didn’t know.
At least he knew Rachel’s secrets. Except for one. He still didn’t know why.
Why the game. Why the bitter war between Graeme and Rachel. It surprised him that Rachel hadn’t left a clue, when she had dropped a trail of bread crumbs for everything else. Unless the cryptic postcard was her message to him. He deserved to die.
Stride turned and leaned against the railing, watching the cars come and go between the city and the Point. He reconstructed the timeline in his head, now that he knew Robin was the missing link. He thought about Rachel sitting in Robin’s class in September. Launching her plot.
I caught a husband for you and a murderer for him.
He was closing in on something. He could feel the confusion in his brain clearing, like fog on the lake.
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