by Mira Gibson
“Sounds fair,” she said, surprised Mary hadn’t gouged her.
“But if you flake and don’t get home when you said, then it’s another two an hour.”
“Okay.”
“And if you cancel then...”
Holly waited impatiently while the girl cooked up another fee.
“Hang on,” she grumbled. Somewhere in the background another girl told her to Hurry the fuck up, but Mary didn’t respond. “Okay, you have to cancel three hours in advance and if you don’t then you pay me half of whatever it would’ve been to watch... What’s his name?”
“Tucker,” she said dryly, envisioning no scenario where she would cancel.
“Cool. Just text me whenever. I don’t drive, but Cody or my sister can bring me over.”
Holly heard the other girl chime in—Or me.
Concluding the conversation, Mary added, “I know the Heimlich maneuver.”
But Holly cut in with, “How much lead time will you need?”
“Huh? No, just text me whenever and I’ll come over,” she told her, making the cancelation clause of their negotiation entirely moot.
“Sounds good, talk soon.” As Holly set her cell on the nightstand, it dawned on her that Mary’s wide-open schedule—text me whenever—implied she might not work for any other families, but Holly decided that would be to her benefit and made her way through the hallway and down the stairs, joining Tucker in the living room.
A commercial for Toys ‘R Us was playing softly so she muted the TV and scooped Tucker up, giving him a few bounces before settling him on her hip, as she stepped towards the couch.
The idea of explaining to him that his parents had died was daunting. She studied his face, his round eyes blue as a summer sky and shifting over the TV screen, the particular brand of intrigue in his expression endearing her. Were there terms simple enough for him to understand that his parents were gone and never coming back?
Finally, she sat with him on the couch, helping his spindly leg to straddle her lap. She laced her fingers through his.
“Tucker,” she said softly, stealing his attention from the next cartoon that had begun, “about your parents...” Her mouth went dry, her throat raw and scratchy so she swallowed, but when she tried to come out with the terrible truth—that she wasn’t his mother, that his mother had passed away, that she was his aunt—she couldn’t get the words out no matter how plainly they formed in her thoughts. “How can we entertain you while I get some work done?”
In response to the question or perhaps avoiding it, Tucker freed his hands from hers and clutched the silver chain around her neck, eyeing the heart-shaped pendant.
She unfastened the clasp. The chain spilled loosely from her neck then dangled from his hands as he examined the pendant. She maneuvered him off her lap, setting him on the couch and when she reached the TV set, she unmuted the sound so he could watch the next animated show about a gap-toothed dish sponge living under the sea.
As she rounded into Benjamin’s home office, angling to dig up the Joint Will that Benjamin had told her about, Lucas’s bizarre pretense leapt to the forefront of her mind. I think you need help, he had told her in the police station, justifying how he had acted on her behalf, hiding the stray bullet, never mentioning it to his partner, entirely assuming she had contributed in some way to Benjamin’s murder. And in the wake of remembering came a flash of their long-ago night a decade prior.
I can help you, he had said, lying on his side between the sheets, searching her eyes as if hoping to find a part of himself in her. She hadn’t needed help, not other than what his body could provide—taking the sting out of life, giving her an escape if only for a few hours in a dingy motel room.
Lucas had been the one in need of help, but he couldn’t see it, didn’t recognize that his urge to rescue was a misdirected instinct to save himself. Holly had easily pegged him. It had been the look in his eye, his hunger thrusting into her, the delicacy and desperation to implant his very essence in her so he could find himself in another human being, so he wouldn’t be alone, so he would no longer be the only one of his kind.
Lying there beside him, as he had elaborated, detailing her qualities, which both rang true and revealed his own, Holly had sensed his tremendous sorrow.
What happened to you? He had asked, tucking her hair behind her ear and making her wonder about the degree to which his past had destroyed him.
Growing up? She had whispered, at a loss for mirroring the sad story of his life.
While he had curled her against his body—her head resting on his shoulder, her leg draped over his nude waist, her hand grazing his chest—he began opening up, using vague terms and at times dropping in mind-splitting admissions. Holly had puzzled over why she was messed up in the distinct way that she was. Nothing truly awful had ever happened to her, nothing that even remotely compared to the beatings, the starvation, and cruelty that Lucas was describing.
I shouldn’t be telling you this, he had said grimly. I’ve never told anyone. It’s not something women want to hear.
It’s okay, she had breathed, strangely content to be the keeper of his secret.
The recollection washed away and Holly muscled open the filing drawer of Benjamin’s desk and began thumbing through the hanging-folders, scanning each tab for the word Will, as she tried not to analyze how Lucas’s dark past might have informed his decision to bend the law in her favor.
She couldn’t find the Will.
Annoyed, she glanced around the office, her gaze darting from Benjamin’s framed Dartmouth diploma on the wall to Benjamin’s books on business and finance lining the shelves to Benjamin’s mini-bar in the corner of the room, stocked only with his favorite liquors and not her sister’s. It certainly was his office, alright. There wasn’t a hint of Rose anywhere or their son.
Holly pushed away from the desk, as it occurred to her that Rose might have stashed the document upstairs.
Tucker yelled, “I’m hungry!” when she passed through the living room.
Without slowing her step, she suggested, “How about grilled cheese?” and he beamed a big grin at her. “Two minutes.”
After padding up the stairs, diverting her gaze from the mirror as she rounded the landing, and making her way into her sister’s walk-in closet set back just shy of the master bedroom, she spied a trunk poking out from the veil of her sister’s hanging dresses.
It looked officey enough so she yanked it clear of the garments and popped the latches.
As soon as she pitched the lid vertical, she saw an envelope resting on top of a folded blanket. The envelope looked thick and when she peeked inside, discovering a stack of cash, each bill one hundred dollars, she was suddenly bogged in woolly confusion.
There had to be at least six thousand dollars here, she estimated, sorting the bills, which she soon placed on the blanket in favor of turning the envelope over in her hands.
A stationary card dropped out.
Printed in a masculine hand, the card read—You’re dead to me. Don’t come back.
Chapter Nine
“Meet you out front?”
Without looking at his partner, Lucas said, “Ah, you want to head over together,” while engaging the safety on his GLOCK before fitting it into his holster, a classic shoulder system he hadn’t broken in. The leather dug through his shirt where it spanned his ribs, chafing his side.
Cody shot Gibbs a nod as the rookie crossed through the locker room where cops were changing out of their street clothes and into uniforms, checking weapons and spraying deodorant in their pits. “Makes sense to carpool until the roads clear up.”
It wasn’t the roads or Lucas’s unreliable Ford that Cody was worried about, but Lucas in general. Ever since Cody had returned to the interview room where Lucas and Holly had spoken privately, he’d been keeping tighter tabs on him, shadowing Lucas’s every move, calling his cell whenever he was out of sight regardless if Lucas had only stepped into the John. It had been less than
twenty-four hours of this and he wasn’t sure how much more he could take.
Keeping things light, he teased, “You just like showing off that Dodge of yours,” and slammed his locker shut, which reminded him of the high school football team he’d never made. He was fairly certain the precinct had the exact same lockers.
Cody grinned with an air of modesty, folding his arms and glancing at Lucas’s winter coat where it rested on the bench beside them. “That goes without saying,” he granted. “It’ll also give us some time to talk.”
Lucas didn’t like the sound of that.
Pulling his coat on after his partner had handed it to him, he snuck a glimpse at Cody whose waning smile looked brittle enough to crack.
As they left the locker room, Lucas felt slightly unnerved that he had consistently forgotten to buy a combination lock—the notion that anyone could pop his locker open and spy the dregs of his disheveled life, an unsettling thought.
The bullpen was filling up, detectives walking briskly to their desks and phones blaring from every corner of the room. Cody sidestepped for Tammy to cut in-between them. The receptionist slowed, making a point to shift her flirtatious eyes between them before she swayed on through.
Angling to get inside his partner’s head, Lucas asked, “What was your take on Danes?”
“What do you mean?” he said, brushing over the subtext.
“Grilling her for her whereabouts?”
Cody paused once they reached the entryway and zipped up his ski jacket, but the hesitation gave Lucas the impression he was buying time to formulate a response.
“I wouldn’t call it grilling her.”
He was evading and it made Lucas’s stomach lurch as he followed Cody outside into a flurry of wind-driven snow that marked the onset of another storm.
Using short steps to cross a sheet of black-ice, his partner added, “We’ve got zilch on the surveillance footage, it’ll be weeks before ballistics gets us names on the .48 calibers and we can expect it’ll be a long list. Christ, half this county owns a forty-eight. Holly Danes is all we’ve got to go on.”
“But you don’t think she did it,” he said, his tone towing the line between a question and statement, as he waited, shoulders hunching against the wind, for Cody to unlock his truck.
“I think we have a double homicide and no viable leads,” he pointed out, implying Holly was of interest to him if for no other reason than pouring over her whereabouts would give him something to do. He pressed the key-fob and his truck bleated, but before he rounded the hood for the driver’s side, his eyes flared, catching the light. “I’ve been waiting for a case like this. I’m going to nail this guy to the wall and the only way to do that is to look into every single detail, confirm every last word I hear.”
Though Cody was his partner, he hadn’t exactly built Lucas into his vision of success.
Climbing into the passenger’s seat and shutting the door, he weighed his options in terms of drawing Cody’s interest away from Holly. Lucas couldn’t be certain of her involvement in the murders, only that she was undoubtedly there, both in the hotel room and at the Wythe’s house, and eventually his partner would find out.
If and when he did, Cody wouldn’t just be fired up. He would be tenacious and could frame her motivation any number of ways—the estrangement from Rose could’ve driven Holly to kill, perhaps her revolver had jammed and thinking fast she drew a .48 on Benjamin, maybe this was about securing custody or some need to move into the estate, or perhaps she had gone on a murdering rampage after Rose had caught her stealing drugs.
Lucas felt in his gut that no matter how circumstantial or outlandish the reason, his partner would eventually present a case against Holly Danes to the Sergeant that would be a bitch to dismantle.
The most damning piece of evidence, second only to the .32 caliber bullet he had pocketed, was the Joint Will he had come across in the Wythe’s home office. It had been amended a week prior, leaving all assets to Holly. When he had glanced at it, his back to the officers, his thumb and forefinger widening the hanging folder enough to scan the document as he mentally scrambled for a way to clear the room, Benjamin’s signature had jumped out at him. It hadn’t looked right, didn’t resemble the one Lucas had seen in the checkbook register. After instructing the officers out of the room by spinning a thin excuse around the importance of searching the master bedroom, Lucas had hidden the document in his inner coat pocket, fighting the surge of adrenaline rushing through his veins.
He hadn’t fought the impulse to cover for the woman who at the time had just driven off—evidently towards the Wythe resort—but he had questioned it.
An identical brand of compulsion had come over him in the hotel room when his gaze had landed on the bullet.
He felt responsible for her, yet didn’t know why.
As they drove—Cody leaning into the steering wheel, straining to see through the flurries that slipped over the windshield, its wipers thwacking back and forth, short sips of visibility; Lucas watching the shops along Kelsea Avenue, the foggy storefront windows and shopkeepers shaking salt from tin cans onto the sidewalk—Cody glimpsed him from the corner of his eye, asking, “You ever work a case this big up in Plymouth?”
He frowned, pretending to give it some thought since his partner obviously wanted to hear that he hadn’t. “We had crimes of passion, a wife killing her husband because he smacked her one too many times. Accidental shootings, kids and guns where you file reckless endangerment, put a parent in jail to appease the town. Nothing major,” he lied.
“You’ll get a feel for it.”
The encouragement didn’t land except condescendingly, which Lucas hardly appreciated, and because of it he couldn’t keep from demonstrating his aptitude for this kind of crime.
“He doesn’t have access to a full range of emotions.”
“Our guy?” Cody stiffened behind the wheel as he turned up Main Street.
“Sadness, joy, nervousness,” he began listing, “most importantly empathy, aren’t in his repertoire of emotions. He’s numb, but easily insulted.”
“You think he killed two people because they insulted him?” he challenged, staring at Lucas for a beat before returning his eyes to the road.
“I think he’s provoked by insult. I think the emotion is one of the few gravitational forces he responds to. I don’t think this is about your usual motives—money, betrayal, insurance. I think it goes much deeper than that. Our killer has been festering for a very long time, plotting and refining his attack and plotting more carefully, perhaps months in the making.”
“Where is this coming from?” Cody rolled to a stop for a red light and shifted in his seat, giving Lucas his full attention. “I’m not disagreeing, just interested in getting inside your head.”
The woman who had been on the other end of Benjamin’s cell phone came to mind—I thought you were dead—but Lucas wasn’t ready to lay that card on the table. “It’s a hunch.” The look on Cody’s face told him that he wouldn’t get away with as little. “The light’s green.”
Cody eased on the gas, tires crunching over icy snow, as they drove through the intersection. “Sounds like you’re describing a serial killer.”
“I don’t think he’s killed before,” he clarified, feeling suddenly warm. He angled his vent towards the window. “But I don’t think we’ve seen the worst of what he’s planning on doing.”
“Who’s left to kill? Holly?”
Suppressing a smile, Lucas said Bingo but only in his mind. Luring Cody away from suspecting Holly would be a delicate procedure, one he would have to craft off the cuff and hope like hell it panned out.
“You think she’s scared?” he pressed when Lucas hadn’t responded. “Intimidated or just paranoid and that’s why she was tight-lipped at the station?”
His partner seemed to consider the possibility that Lucas had introduced, falling silent, his brow knitting together, evaluating as if the contradictions would dance into alignment on th
eir own, as he pulled the truck along the curb in front of McCoy’s and killed the engine.
Interrupting his partner’s reverie, Lucas commented, “Looks like a real drinkers’ bar,” and stepped out of the truck.
McCoy’s was a one-story slab of weathered bricks. Its aluminum awning was bowed under a heap of snow and the sign above it—painted letters, fading yet boasting liquors, beer, karaoke—gave Lucas the impression this was where alcoholics came to die. And the boarded up windows weren’t helping, neither was the fact that its doors were open in the afternoon, though he reasoned that with darkness closing in at half past four all winter, welcoming customers at three wasn’t entirely uncalled for.
If it looked dismal from the outside, McCoy’s was damned miserable within.
The odor hit him first, as he edged over creaking floorboards that were damp with melted snow. It smelled like bleach and stale urine, which drew his eye to a bearded man shuffling drunkenly out of the bathroom that was in unfortunate proximity to a pool table. The bathroom door slammed against the edge of the table and the man stumbled.
Cody was barreling ahead for the bar, but Lucas took his time, passing booths made of cracked vinyl where drinkers were hunched over their pints, their elbows planted on sticky tables, the profound lack of conversation thickening the air, as Jimmy Buffett twanged quietly from the jukebox.
Lucas couldn’t picture Holly stopping in this dump for a nightcap under any circumstance and the revelation gave him a terrible feeling.
Joining Cody at the counter where the bartender—a burly man in his forties whose greasy hair was tied in a low rattail—was running a stained rag over one of the stools, Lucas debated telling his partner about the woman who had called Benjamin’s cell phone. He decided if things went south in terms of Holly not having been at McCoy’s, he would.
Their phone exchange had been brief if not intriguing. After hearing her comment how she’d thought he was dead, Lucas had to force himself to breathe, a flush of urgency rocketing his heart rate through the roof. Who is this? He had demanded, pressing the cell to his ear in a white-knuckle grip. Her counter had come swiftly, Your fucking wife stopped by? It wasn’t until she had hung up and Lucas discovered the bullet gleaming from the carpet just shy of the dust ruffle lining the bed that he knew unequivocally Holly Danes had been in that room. But it meant that the caller had as well.