by Dete Meserve
Ben’s eyes widen when he spots the gun in my hand. “Let’s go inside and I’ll explain,” I say under my breath.
He slowly pushes himself up to a standing position, then hobbles to the door. I follow him inside and swiftly lock the door then scan through the window for activity. But the area around us is quiet and serene, and the only movement is the birds flitting through the air and the trees swaying in the gentle wind as the sun hangs high in the sky.
Ben stands beside me and I know he sees what I see. Beauty. Most people assume the desert is lifeless and forbidding, with razor-sharp plants and hostile, sandy areas not meant for humans. But this part of the Anza-Borrego Desert hides many secrets that Ben and I had discovered together—secluded watering holes, sightings of bighorn sheep and golden eagles, and places of such austere beauty that they border on the mystical.
“I thought I saw movement in the chaparral across the road,” I say once I catch my breath. “Could have been a roadrunner, but . . . I feel like it might have been something—or someone—else.”
“We can’t be too careful,” he says, then closes the blinds. “I heard some noises outside the cabin last night. Sounded like a large animal. Or a person. Did you tell anyone you were coming here?”
“Just Rachel and Zack. And later in the afternoon, I’m meeting a reporter from Channel Eleven.”
I look around the rustic cabin—the rumpled sheets, stained with blood, on the bed by the window, a nightstand littered with paper cups. How had Ben survived a week here alone?
He takes the gun from me. “I bought this when I was released from the hospital. Sometime after you left on that Saturday, someone tried to poison me.”
“Matt told me.”
He turns the gun over in his hand. “After that, and then the backyard break-in, I figured the gun was the only way to keep us all safe. Did you see the deposit in your Indiana bank account?”
“A million dollars, Ben. Why?”
“I know I went overboard on that, but Sarah, I panicked. After I was poisoned, I worried about someone trying to do it again—but succeeding this time—so I transferred money from my trust account. For you and Zack. In case I didn’t make it.”
What he thought were just practical plans actually make my heart soar. While thinking his life was in serious danger, while readying for a trial against his partners, Ben’s first instinct was to make sure Zack and I were safe.
Ben slowly settles into the worn leather couch by the fireplace, rubbing his sore leg. “Show me what you recovered.”
I sit beside him and open the laptop, playing the footage from late Monday night when he was home. In the clip we can see a silhouette of someone blinding the camera with bright light.
I point at the action on the screen. “I think this is when they buried the gun by the lilac bush.”
“Is there other footage that might show who’s there?”
“Could be.” I click on the Final Recovery folder Aaron created, where there are hours of clips I haven’t reviewed yet. “But we’d have to look through lots of footage.”
It’s a daunting task and I doubt Ben has the energy or patience to do it, but he surprises me by clicking on a few. Some of the clips are brief—five seconds of the swimming pool, a boring clip of the liquor cabinet in my office, Zack making a grilled cheese sandwich in the kitchen. But one clip captures his attention. It’s a shot of the living room as he and Zack work on the Christmas tree, laughing as they toss tinsel on the branches while “Please Come Home for Christmas” plays in the background.
He plays it again, and this time his eyes shimmer with tears. “Look at the life we’ve made together, Sarah. Look at our son,” he whispers. “Sometimes we forget to really pay attention to how lucky we are . . .”
I reach for his hand and hold it. “Quite a masterpiece tree you guys made.” I’m aware of how close we’re sitting, how our thighs touch, and how natural and exciting that feels.
“I don’t know if you noticed, but I mastered the physics on the tree base this year. Thor himself couldn’t pull that tree over.”
I smile through the beginning of tears. Then when I look at him, he’s leaning over the laptop, a puzzled expression on his face. “This doesn’t seem right,” he says quietly, then plays the clip. It’s a twenty-second clip taken in the foyer. Shane comes in the front door and disarms the alarm. The time stamp reads Tuesday at 9:15 p.m.
“I gave Shane the alarm code a couple of weeks ago so he could drop off a bunch of file boxes related to the Paragon purchase during the day, when neither of us were home. But the time code says this happened Tuesday, the night Antonio and I were shot. That can’t be right.”
“He’s not carrying any boxes, so maybe he actually came back again Tuesday night?”
He runs his hands through his hair. “Why would Shane come into our house four days after Rebecca called the deal off? Is it possible the time code is wrong?”
The time discrepancy on the clip is troubling both of us. Does this mean the data is unreliable, or was Shane actually in our home the night Ben was shot? If he was, why was he there and why hadn’t he mentioned it to me?
Ben’s face has turned white with distress, and it’s clear his mind is whirling, trying to process it all as his body is fighting to recover. I can see fatigue in his red-rimmed eyes, but he’s trying to power through it.
“Let’s call him and ask why he was there Tuesday night.” I pull out my phone to make the call, but before I can dial, Ben stops me.
“Who do police think shot at me and Antonio? Do they have any suspects?”
“They’re investigating Rebecca’s father, Gary Stanton.”
His face falls. “God, I hope that’s not true, Sarah. He was at a meeting I had with Rebecca once, and he’s got a way about him . . . well, he’s the scariest man I ever met. If he’s the one after me . . . I’m a dead man.”
His dark tone takes me by surprise. Ben has never been one for hyperbole or melodrama. He’s surprisingly calm in tense situations, but Gary Stanton definitely has him rattled.
“The FBI says he’s left the country, so maybe we’re . . . safe?”
He shakes his head. “Gary doesn’t do the dirty work himself. Shane says he has people who carry out whatever he wants done.”
“How would Shane know?”
“Shane grew up down the street from the Stanton family on Long Island. That’s how I met Rebecca—Shane introduced me to his childhood friend. He told me to keep a distance from the rest of the family—and whoever Gary’s ‘helper’ guys were—but he swore Rebecca was above all that.”
“Maybe a ‘helper guy’ shot at you and Antonio.” It’s not lost on me that we’re talking about “helper guys” and killers as if it’s an everyday thing. “If we can find out his name, we could get the FBI to look into it.”
Ben looks skeptical. It seems impossible that we’ll ever figure out who’s behind all this. Whoever it is has been too fast and nimble. And far too determined. “I’m betting the FBI already knows who Gary’s guys are.”
I take out my phone and search for Shane’s number in my contacts. “You’re probably right, but let’s see if we can get the name from Shane so we can pass it along. And let’s find out why he was in our house that night.”
I’m grasping at straws and I know it. But I also know that we have to keep moving or the fear that’s growing inside is going to paralyze me.
I click on Shane’s number in my phone. Moments later I get a recorded message: The number you’ve reached is no longer in service. Please check the number and dial again.
“Strange. He called me from this number a few days ago.”
“Maybe try him at work?”
“What’s the name of his company again?”
“Ingenious Capital Management in Pasadena.”
I look up Ingenious on my phone and find it easily. They’re apparently one of the leading investment companies specializing in real estate, hospitality, and media investment.
<
br /> The receptionist answers with a posh British accent.
“Shane Russo, please,” I say.
There’s a long pause on the line, then he asks me to spell the last name, then the first name.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “We don’t have anyone by that name here.”
“Would he be in the London office, then? He said he was just promoted to partner and is transferring there.”
I hear a flurry of keystrokes. Then resignation in his voice. “I’ve checked the database and there’s no one by the name of Shane Russo in any of our operations. And no new partners have been named in the last five years.”
I thank him and hang up. “Are you sure the company was named Ingenious?” I ask Ben.
He looks puzzled. “Positive. There’s a lot I don’t remember about the last week or so, but I’m sure about Ingenious. That’s the company he said was going to back my offer to buy Paragon. It’s not something I’d forget.”
“I recovered a clip where Shane tells you he ‘took care of it’ and ‘no one has to know.’ What did he take care of for you?”
“It’s complicated.” Ben closes his eyes and rests his head on the back of the couch. “And you’re not going to like hearing it.”
“What is it?”
He blows out a breath. “The morning I went to Rebecca’s apartment to return her purse, I noticed a Montblanc chronograph watch alongside the wine bottle and wineglasses on the counter. It’s got a very distinctive look to it and I thought I’d seen it somewhere before. So when I was on my way to the airport the next morning, I called Shane and told him that I dropped off Rebecca’s purse, but I didn’t find her anywhere in the apartment. That’s when I realized the watch belonged to him. I remembered him wearing it the night before. And that meant he and Rebecca were . . . back together.”
“Back together? But he and Diane . . .”
He sucks in a harsh breath. “He’d been having an on-again, off-again affair with Rebecca for years. When we started the deal for Paragon, he’d promised me it was over between them. But when I realized it was his watch at her apartment early in the morning, I called him out on it. I told him he had to knock it off with Rebecca because his affair was going to blow up the deal I was trying to resurrect.”
“Was the watch his?”
“He denied it. Told me there are lots of guys with watches like that. But I remembered his had a big scratch on the crystal, just like this one did. I told him not to bullshit me anymore, I knew the watch was his. And if he didn’t stop screwing around with Rebecca, I was going to tell Diane and cut him out of the deal, if there ever was one.”
“What did he say?”
“At first he was really calm. He begged me to keep his secret. Said I owed it to him after all the years we’d been friends. When I told him I wasn’t going to keep his secret, he told me to eff off and hung up on me.”
“So when he told you on Saturday he ‘took care of it,’ he meant . . .”
“He meant that he broke it off with Rebecca.” He thinks about that for a moment. “But that’s kind of impossible, right? Because by then Rebecca was already dead.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
How well did we know Shane Russo? He’d come back into our lives nine months ago, but it’d been nearly two decades since we’d all been in college together. He’d told us that he was an executive in finance earning millions. And we’d believed him.
“Did he even live on Acacia like he said he did?” I ask. “I mean, we never went there because they were always in the midst of renovation.”
“Or he said they were.”
There’s no Wi-Fi, so I use my phone to search up one of those sites that allows you to type in a homeowner’s name and see what properties they own. When I type in “Shane Russo,” it returns “0 properties.”
I look up the address where they supposedly live on Acacia in Brentwood, and the current homeowners since its purchase ten years ago are listed as Andrew and Kelly Moore.
Was anything Shane Russo told us about himself true?
When I finally ask the question we’re both thinking, my voice sounds distant, hollow. “Could Shane have killed Rebecca?”
Ben sucks in a deep breath before he speaks. “We know he was in her apartment that night. And he was the last person to see her alive.” His tone is raw, uneven. “And earlier that night when she came in wearing that engagement ring, he wasn’t just jealous. He was furious. And stoned out of his mind . . .”
Everything starts to come into focus. It feels like looking through a telescope and adjusting the lens until an indistinguishable blob in the sky sharpens so you see what it actually is. “So for the moment, let’s go with the theory that Shane killed Rebecca. In a fit of anger or rage, maybe. Or it could’ve been an accident. We don’t know. And when you confronted him about the watch the next day—”
“That was the only evidence connecting him to her murder. And I was the only one that knew it was his. All I had to do was tell police and he’d become the prime suspect.” His voice is a raspy whisper. “So that’s why he poisoned me. Because if I told anyone about his watch being at the crime scene, he’d lose—”
“Everything,” I say, finishing his sentence. “But how could he poison you? Travis says there’s no way the poison could’ve gotten into your lunch at the Parkway Bistro that afternoon.”
He lifts a water bottle off the floor and stares at it as he turns it in his hands, as if the answers might be written there. “If Shane is behind it, then it didn’t happen at the Parkway Bistro. Maybe it happened when Shane came over Saturday afternoon. He brought me a drink—a hangover cure from some nearby juice place. It’s the kind of stuff he was always bringing me, so I didn’t think anything of it. Only this one had charcoal and some other crap in it so it tasted horrible.”
“Which covered up the bitter taste of the belladonna.”
His voice is weary, exhausted. “And when the poisoning didn’t work, he sent someone to . . . make sure I could never tell police what I knew about the night Rebecca was murdered. If we’re right, then Rebecca’s father, Gary Stanton, might not be behind any of this. All of this is Shane’s doing. He’s the one who poisoned me, who hired people to kill me, who planted the murder weapon . . .”
Dazed by Shane’s betrayal, I feel a sudden rush of nausea. It’s hard to grasp that someone who murdered Rebecca and then tried to kill Ben was ever our friend.
But what sickens me most is all his visits after Ben went missing. Under the guise of our friendship, he came with food and comforting words, but in truth he’d only been there to get information about Ben’s whereabouts and the security-system recordings. And to tell me lies about Ben.
Ben looks crushed. “What are we saying? This is Shane we’re talking about. In college, he was almost like a brother to me. All those hours we spent together, figuring out which restaurants to buy, hammering out business plans, crossing the country checking them out, hanging out over a few beers. I had no idea . . .”
I pull up Shane’s profile photo on Facebook. He’s standing by the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, dressed in a bright-white polo and tan slacks, with his hands in the air. His broad smile says he has the whole world in his hands. Yet when I look at his brown eyes, I think I can sense that he’s hiding a secret. Is it simply because I know that he is?
And there’s something else. A distinctive watch on his wrist. I zoom in on the photo and point it out to Ben.
He nods and closes his eyes, as if willing all of this to go away. When he finally speaks, there’s a quality to his voice that I can’t pinpoint. Sadness. Betrayal. “All we really know about him was what he told us. Remember how he went on and on about how much money he was spending to redo his five-million-dollar house? Over a million, right?”
“And he was always talking about all the places he was going. Prague last month. And the month before, Dubai.”
“And what about that African safari he went on last spring where he said he hung out wit
h that James Bond actor, what’s his name?”
“Daniel Craig. He was pretending to be someone he wanted to be. A rich, successful businessman . . . a partner in a major international investment firm. But none of that was true.”
We sit there for a long moment, the weight of our discovery stifling us both. My head is swimming, trying to come up with a plan. What to do next. Then I’m suddenly aware that Ben is looking at me.
“You know what I’m thinking?” he asks, meeting my gaze.
“That we’re really bad at choosing our friends?” I say, trying to lighten the mood.
“That too,” he says, smiling. “I was thinking that while you and I have been figuring all this out, I realize how smart and practical and beautiful you are. How lucky I am to create a life with you.”
His eyes search my face. I’m not used to compliments, especially from Ben, so I’m taken by surprise. And momentarily speechless.
“After everything I’ve been through, I can’t take anything for granted,” he continues. “So if it’s okay with you, I’m not going to keep quiet when I notice things I love about you.”
Notice things I love about you.
My heart leaps at what he says. I can’t seem to catch my breath. Then my eyes meet his, but I don’t know how to respond. Everything around us—even my fear—fades away, and suddenly it feels like we’re the only two people in the world, discovering each other for the first time. He drops his gaze to my lips, and I’m sure this time he’s going to kiss me.
He leans in, but his lips linger on mine for only a moment.
“I’m happy you’re here,” he says, his voice caressing me. I inhale a short breath, surprised at the effect that the brief kiss has on me.
I close my eyes for a few fluttery heartbeats, then lean in to kiss him again, allowing myself to dissolve into the feelings this kiss awakens in me until reality inevitably comes roaring back.
A few minutes later, Ben is back at the window, scanning the area around the cabin.