“It was a Sunday morning. Curtis and our other girls, we went to church. When we got back, Colleen wasn’t home. Her purse was gone. There was nothing unusual about that. It seemed like she just went out for the day. But then she never came home.”
I thought it over, not sure what I’d do in a situation like that. How were you supposed to know this time was different from every other time? “How long until you started worrying?”
“I was worried right away,” Erin said, “because I could never stop worrying about her. But it wasn’t until the next day that we started to feel like something was going on. She always came back in the early morning, four, five o’clock. But she didn’t. We filed a police report, but she was eighteen and they said she could come and go as she wanted. And given the history we’d had with her, it wasn’t exactly a secret she wasn’t happy at home.”
That sounded an awful lot like Mallory Evans’s story, with the police not caring enough to allow for the possibility that something was actually wrong here, to take some action. “What else did you do, besides filing the police report?” I said.
“We made signs. We posted online. We tried asking her friends, or all the friends we knew she had. Curtis went through the phone bill and we called every single number to ask if anyone had seen her or heard from her or knew about her plans,” Erin said. “But no one did. There was all this uncertainty, the kind that feels like it’s about to end, but it didn’t—and this is going to sound awful, but I have two other children, younger, and I have to be a mother to them too. I couldn’t fall apart. It wasn’t an option. I had to believe that she didn’t want me to find her.”
I wondered what my own parents would have done if I had disappeared like that at age eighteen. Even though my father was a cop, I suspected he would’ve been more angry than concerned, at least at first. “Where did you think she went?”
“She always talked about going out west,” Erin said. Then she looked at me. Her eyes were wide and bright with tears. “I’m sure it sounds like I didn’t even care, like we didn’t even look. But, of course, we looked. We did everything we could think of.”
I knew she cared. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t be talking to me now. “I understand.”
“So now, thinking that maybe she didn’t just walk away—it’s—I don’t want it to be her. But at the same time it would be such a relief, to know after so long. And I know, regardless, that the—whoever it is, if it isn’t Colleen, she was still someone to another family. So there is no happy ending here.”
Curtis came back into the room and just stood there without saying anything. His eyes were red.
“I think it might be best if you left now,” Erin said, her voice breaking. “Let me write down our number.” She patted at the surface of the end table, looking for a pen but not finding one. “Curt, hon, can you just give Roxane one of your cards?”
We both fumbled through our pockets for our respective business cards.
“Take care,” Erin said. “And good luck.”
Outside I sat in the car for a few minutes, not sure what to think. I pitied Erin Grantham for the impossible position she was in. She was right—there would be no happy endings, at least not for her. Either her daughter had been murdered and buried in the woods, or her daughter was still missing. Her husband didn’t appear to be of much help, though in my experience, no one was, not when it mattered. I wanted to be of help but I didn’t know how. Mallory and Colleen—if it was Colleen—were connected by where their bodies had been found. And Mallory and Sarah were connected, loosely, through Brad. But I couldn’t connect Sarah or Brad to Colleen, and I still had no idea how Sarah’s parents factored into all of it. It wasn’t even a theory at this point, and barely even a story. I needed lunch, caffeine, and a stroke of divine inspiration, and not necessarily in that order. I reached into my pocket for my phone and pulled out Curtis Grantham’s business card along with it, and that was when I noticed:
He worked for Next Level Promotions.
NINETEEN
I went back to the Greek restaurant—their melitzanosalata really was quite good—and sat in a booth with my laptop, pulling some background info on Kenny Brayfield. It was hard to imagine the velour-sweatpanted peddler of gold-flake vodka and ginkgo smoothies as a serial killer, but I couldn’t exactly ignore it: he could be linked in some way to all three women. He’d gotten shifty-eyed when I asked him about Mallory Evans. At the time I thought he was hedging about Mallory and Brad, not himself. I sat with that idea for a minute, trying to decide if it worked. The knife in Brad’s car, though. Why would Kenny frame his friend for the murders? Maybe it wasn’t a frame, but an oversight: maybe Brad was protecting Kenny all this time. Maybe he knew. And maybe that was why he told me about Clover Point. I’d thought he brought up the overlook because he was tired of lying after all this time, and maybe that was still true—he was tired of lying about Kenny. Lying for a friend was one thing, but being willing to die for him? Brad definitely gave me ride-or-die vibes where it came to Sarah, but I didn’t get the same feeling about Kenny.
I ordered pistachio baklava for dessert and looked over what I had found out about Kenny Brayfield so far. A woefully immature thirty-four, lifelong Belmont resident, two possession busts from when he was eighteen and nineteen, for both of which he received suspended sentences. No trouble in the decade-plus since.
The Brayfield family money was several generations old and seemed to come from a regional department store they founded, which Kenny’s grandfather sold to Macy’s in the late seventies. Kenny’s father was a venture capitalist and sat on the board of two local charities. Kenny, I imagined, with his Chuck Taylors and absurd business strategies, had to be a bit of a disappointment. Up until an hour ago, he struck me as a spoiled brat but generally well-intentioned. But that didn’t mean much. Anybody could seem like anything if they tried, at least for a while, and there were too many coincidences lining up to connect Kenny to the three—blond—women.
There was really only one question at the heart of every case: How can I prove it? This was going to be no different.
When I had talked to Joshua Evans the other day, I had specifically asked him if his young wife knew Brad. I hadn’t asked about Kenny. At the time, I had no reason to. But that seemed like a good next move to me.
* * *
Joshua Evans was happier to see me than Lassiter had been. “God, this news,” he said, ushering me inside his small house. “It’s really throwing me.”
“Surreal, I bet,” I said. I followed him into the kitchen, where I took him up on the offer of a beer. I could hear loud, pop-punk music blaring from elsewhere in the house. “Are you doing okay?”
“Yeah, yeah. It’s just crazy. I mean, first you were here asking questions about Mal after all this time. And then they find someone else in those woods. Hard to pretend they’re not connected,” Joshua said. He sat down across from me at the kitchen table, opening a beer that I didn’t think was the first of the day.
I didn’t want to get his hopes up, and I also didn’t want to speak out of turn. But I figured my presence was something of a giveaway anyhow. “I think they are,” I said. “I think the same person who killed your wife has killed other women, and I am going to figure out who it was.”
He nodded, his nostrils flaring slightly. “Like a serial killer.”
“I don’t know. Something,” I said. “Have the police been by to talk to you?”
“Nope.” He took a long swallow of beer. “And unfortunately, I don’t know what I could even add at this point. I told your dad everything I knew sixteen years ago and it wasn’t much.”
“I know, Joshua.” Thinking of what Erin Grantham had said, I added, “And I know you have to compartmentalize a little bit in order to move past something like this, just so you can function. But anything at all you can share might help. Even if you think it won’t.”
He nodded again.
“The other day you told me when Mallory didn’t come home,
you contacted some of her friends,” I said, thinking maybe Kenny was among them. “Can you remember who you called?”
He looked up at the ceiling for a minute. I followed his gaze and took in a spiderweb of plaster cracked with age. Then I looked back down. Finally he said, “Carrie. I called her, I’d say she was Mallory’s best friend. She lived down the street back then, but the family moved away.”
“Carrie what?”
Joshua shook his head. “Sorry.”
“Okay, who were some of her other friends?”
He played with the tab on his beer can. “Marisa something,” he said. “I don’t know her last name either but I see her sometimes, around town. I don’t know how close they were, but she called here a lot. Those two are who I reached out to. But they hadn’t seen her. And you have to remember, I thought she was pissed at me. So I left it at that.”
“Do you remember any of her other friends? Ex-boyfriends? The other day you mentioned you thought she was seeing someone at the end.”
“Yeah. But I didn’t know who. I’d just hear her on the phone sometimes, and it didn’t sound like she was talking to one of her girlfriends. And she’d go out at night, all dressed up, and Marisa or Carrie might call when she was out, so she wasn’t with them.” Joshua shrugged. “I confronted her about it a few times, and it never went well. I didn’t know how to talk to her. But I knew there was someone.”
The sound of the loud music from down the hall stopped and a door opened. “Dad,” Shelby called, “we’re going to Target, is that okay?”
“I promise we’ll be back before dinner, for completely selfish reasons,” her friend Veronica added, “because I want to eat here again.”
They both looked into the kitchen through the pass-through. “Oh hey, it’s Roxane-with-one-‘n,’” Veronica said. “So what do you think, Mr. E.?”
“Sure, go ahead,” Joshua said. “LOL.”
Veronica cracked up. Shelby rolled her eyes. “You’re so embarrassing,” she said. She looked at me. “He used to text LOL to me all the time and it, like, didn’t even make sense, a text that just says LOL in response to nothing. So I asked him what he thought it was supposed to mean.”
“Lots of love!” Joshua said. “I think my way is so much better.”
“Now he just says it on purpose to annoy me,” Shelby finished.
“It’s so easy, how can I resist?”
She laughed. “Okay, we’ll be back in a while.” She grabbed a set of keys off the counter and then walked away.
Joshua waited until the door opened before he called out, “LOL.”
His daughter groaned as she pulled the door closed behind her.
Chuckling to himself, Joshua got up and went to the fridge. “Veronica lives next door but we always joke she should get her mail forwarded, she’s over here so much. She doesn’t get along with her stepdad—I don’t blame her for that, really. One time he asked me to cut my grass more often because he didn’t like looking at my yard from his deck.”
“Some people,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Another beer?” he said.
“Sure.”
He handed me the beer. “Cheers,” I said.
“To what,” he said.
“To being bigger-hearted than your neighbor.”
Joshua liked the sound of that. He tapped his can against mine and we drank. “Now, where were we?”
It didn’t seem like Joshua was going to mention Kenny’s name spontaneously, so I decided to dig in. “Did Mallory ever hang around with this kid, Kenny Brayfield?”
His eyebrows went up. “Brayfield? Like the family that built the park?”
“What park?”
“Brayfield Park,” Joshua said. “It’s over by the high school.”
“I don’t know anything about a park,” I said. “But yes, them. Kenny was a classmate of Mallory’s.”
He looked doubtful. “East side and west side don’t really mix in Belmont,” he said. But then something rippled through his eyes. “But there was this one time. I found a ring on the bathroom sink, like a diamond ring, pretty nice. It wasn’t something I got her. We didn’t even have wedding bands. But this ring, it looked expensive. And I asked her about it, like who’s dropping money like this on you, and she got kind of weird.”
“Weird how?”
“Weird like she didn’t want to talk about it. But honestly, that’s how all our conversations went. I could ask her what she wanted on her half of the pizza and she’d act like I was smothering her.”
“You still have the ring?” I said. Half thinking maybe there was an engraved inscription; stranger things had happened.
But Joshua shook his head. “I don’t know what happened to it. I only saw it that one time. This Brayfield guy, you don’t think he’s involved, do you? That would be a hell of a thing.”
“Just following up on some ideas,” I said. “I don’t know yet.” This bit about the ring was obviously inconclusive, but I tended to disagree with what Joshua said about east side versus west side: Kenny had been tight with Brad, who had described the former as a wannabe gangster, not a country club kid like he was probably supposed to be.
“I wish I could help you more.”
“You’re helping a lot,” I told him.
He shook his head, his eyes filling up. “I still can’t believe it, when I think about it. That for seven months I was thinking she was a selfish bitch, when actually she was dead. It just makes me sick now, to think that there was more than one victim.”
I touched his shoulder. “I know people have told you not to blame yourself,” I said, “and I know that’s easier said than done. But Joshua. Do not blame yourself. You need to be strong for Shelby.”
He grabbed my hand. “I know,” he said thickly.
After I finished my beer, I went out to the car and sat there for a moment, thinking. I was doing that a lot lately. I could still smell Catherine’s perfume on the upholstery from the other night, though that mattered less to me now than it might have otherwise. I didn’t have a lot to go on: a pricey ring that may have come from Kenny or may have come from literally anyone else in the world, and the first names of two of Mallory’s friends. I imagined myself trying to find a Belmont High yearbook and paging through the black-and-white pictures until I saw the name Marisa next to one of them. I wrote it down in my notebook with a question mark beside it. Then I remembered what Kenny had told me about his Monday Night Football party in his parents’ absence today. Just some old friends, he said. I wondered if high school friends counted among the attendees, and if I was still invited. I put the car in gear and pulled out just as a Belmont cruiser turned down the street, slowing to a stop right beside me. I sighed. This was past the point of absurdity.
Sergeant Derrow rolled down his window and I did the same. “Everything okay here?”
“Yep,” I said.
He rested his hand on the doorframe, tapping lightly. “All right, I can see you’re leaving. So carry on.”
I nodded, glad he wasn’t going to make a thing of it. “Tell Lassiter I said hi,” I said.
TWENTY
The gate at the driveway of the Brayfield house was open, so I drove in without having to announce myself. There were a dozen or so cars parked on both sides of the curve. Since I might want to make a quick getaway, I made a three-point turn and wedged my car as close to the exit as possible. Then I went into the house, the door to which was unlocked too.
Kenny was apparently unfazed by the recent crime development in Belmont. Maybe because he knew too much about it.
I stood awkwardly in the two-story entryway and looked for signs of life—from the back of the property, I heard the muffled strains of a television and, elsewhere, someone tearing through an Everclear song on an out-of-tune acoustic guitar. I unzipped my coat and headed for the kitchen, the only room I could confidently locate in the massive house.
Once again conspicuously clean, the kitchen offered a giant bowl of chee
se curls and a tray of veggies. I helped myself to a red pepper slice and kept walking through a dining room with a long, polished table that could seat at least twelve people, and finally I found the den, which offered a leather sectional sofa with several good-looking women lounging on it. They were laughing about the misfortune of someone named Bridget. I’d been half expecting to see Danielle here, but I didn’t. Though it was just after seven, the coffee table was covered with beer bottles and cups of gold-flake vodka. No one looked up at me.
“Hi,” I said finally.
Six highly styled heads turned my way. I tried to decide if any of them looked like a Carrie or a Marisa. When I determined that I couldn’t, I finally said, “Is Kenny here?”
“He stepped out for a few minutes,” one of the women said. She had reddish-brown hair in a long ponytail, light green eyes.
The football game hadn’t even started yet, which made it seem a little weird that Kenny was stepping out already. But I thought there was a possibility that he was a murderer. That meant everything about him was a little weird.
“I’m Roxane,” I said, but no one seemed particularly interested in me. I took a seat in an armchair in the corner and they resumed their conversation about Bridget, but I noticed that the green-eyed woman was still looking at me.
“You don’t have a drink yet,” she said. “Let’s do something about that.”
That sounded good to me. She got up and stepped over someone sprawled on the carpet, a guy ignoring the group in favor of his phone, where he was furiously swiping right on Tinder.
“I’m Marisa,” the woman said, leading me into the kitchen.
That sounded even better. I tried to play it cool. “Hey,” I said.
“What are you drinking?” Marisa said as we stood in front of a liquor cabinet that put my father’s to shame. Then she looked a little embarrassed. “I’ve been bartending at Kenny’s launch parties for a few months, since I got laid off from my actual job. I apparently can’t stop getting people drinks.”
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