Tell Her No Lies

by Kelly Irvin

  The blood wasn’t Aaron’s.

  Or hers.

  Skeet lay on the floor, facedown. Detective Cavazos squatted next to him. He touched his fingers to the man’s neck. He glanced up at King and shook his head.

  King sighed and turned back to Nina. “That’s what they call a squeaker.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Rick Zavala called the station looking for me.”

  She leaned into Aaron. Chills ran through her mixed with white heat. Sweat rolled down Aaron’s face. His hair was damp. So were his eyes. “I told you he wasn’t a bad man.”

  King sighed again. “He also admitted he murdered Melanie Martinez.” He motioned for them to follow him from the darkroom. “Careful where you step, please. What did you throw on him?” 288

  “Developer. It’s an irritant for skin and eyes.”

  “I gathered that.”

  “Is it over? Someone talk to me. What is going on?” Grace’s high-pitched demands wafted through the open door to the stairs. “Somebody, please!”

  Nina wobbled toward the stairs. King grabbed her arm. “They’re fine. I need you to stay put for a minute, okay?”

  His phone went to his ear. He asked for an ambulance. Paramedics. CSU.

  She didn’t need an ambulance. She needed to see her family. “I’m fine. Is everyone all right?”

  “I checked on everyone.” King’s partner appeared at the top of the stairs. “They’re fine. I’ll meet CSU at the door.”

  King nodded and gave Cavazos a thumbs-up. They seemed to be getting along better. “Your friend Rick gave us the lay of the land.”

  “He’s not my friend.”

  “I’m sorry about that.” He did seem sorry. “What were you thinking? Are you that naive or truly morons?”

  “Hey.” Aaron tottered as if he might make a run at King. Nina took his hand. “Name calling isn’t necessary.”

  “You couldn’t trust the professionals to do their jobs? You had to get in our way.”

  “You were busy looking at me, interrogating me and Aaron and Jan and Trevor. Instead of finding out who really killed my dad. I had no choice.”

  “Says you.” He sounded like a fifth grader. “We had the money trail. We had the electronic trail of texts and emails. We needed to cross a few more t’s, that’s all. Police work takes time. It’s not guns blazing. It’s methodical evidence collection that solves cases.”

  “Are you done?”

  “I’m done.”

  “Rick killed my dad because he tried to blackmail Peter Coggins into taking him on as a partner?”

  “The conversation was fast and furious and slightly garbled, but he says no.”

  Nina strangled the urge to scream. “Seriously? He’ll admit to killing Melanie but not my dad?”

  “I haven’t had a chance to interrogate him. This was a ninety-second phone call. We were more concerned with getting here before we had two more murders—or more—on my hands. Don’t worry, before this is over, he’ll admit it.”

  “What about Peter Coggins and the others?” Aaron’s words were slurred as if the reality of the last thirty minutes—had it only been thirty minutes?—had stunned him. “Do they know it’s over?”

  “My folks are rousting them from bed as we speak. We need to grab them before they realize what went down here.” King grinned happily. “They won’t know old Skeet here is dead for a while. It gives us a chance to milk them. They’ll think we know more than we do.”

  “He was the guy in the park.” Aaron swiped at his nose. Blood soaked his sleeve. “The guy following you and Liz.”

  Nina snatched a tissue from the box on her coffee table. “He was the guy who reached over me after the accident and grabbed the envelope from my car. I could smell the Paco Rabanne on him.”

  Aaron took her offering. “Who was driving the SUV that hit Nina?”

  “We don’t know everything. Possibly Jerome Solomon, your dad’s bailiff, or one of Skeet Miles’s thugs from his so-called security firm. It’s a work in progress—one we would’ve finished if two amateurs playing with fire hadn’t gotten in our way.” King shrugged. “We do know this guy was a bad dude who hired himself out as a hit man. His real name is Marcus Miles.”

  “Where’s Rick now?”

  “He said he was on his way downtown to turn himself in.”

  King stood back to let a paramedic pass. The woman glanced from Nina to Aaron and then back. “He looks a little worse for wear. I’ll start with him.”

  “I hate to do this to you, but I need both of you to come downtown one more time to be interviewed.” King yawned and checked his watch. “Cavazos will handle it.”

  “Not you?” Nina was too tired for sarcasm. She wanted to sleep. She wanted to think. She needed to think about Aaron’s words and what she’d said to him. They needed to talk before the light of day made them both too scared to admit they’d spoken the truth under duress. It wasn’t fear of dying. It was fear of living. “Are you headed home to catch up on your beauty sleep or something?”

  “I imagine I’ll be tied up with the officer-involved shooting team for quite a while. Again.”

  34

  Brooklyn looked so peaceful when she slept, her stuffed giraffe tucked under the sheet with her. Perpetual motion stilled by exhaustion. Nina stood in the doorway and watched in the soft glow of a nightlight while Jan pulled up the pink-and-purple comforter, patted Runner’s knobby head, and slipped away from the bed.

  A soft woof hummed in the dog’s throat as he settled down, head on paws, on the fluffy pink rug next to the bed. One of the three amigos—her gerbils—stretched and curled up again around his buddies. The wheel in their cage squeaked, then stilled.

  “She never woke up.” Rubbing red-rimmed eyes, Jan smiled. “Runner never left her side. If an intruder came in here, he’d make mincemeat out of him.”

  Runner stood guard over the most precious, innocent, defenseless person in the house. “Good dog. We need to give him extra rations.”

  Nina led the way down the hall to the kitchen. The crime-scene folks were still working upstairs. Aaron sat with Grace in the living room, alternately holding her hand and filling her coffee mug. “We need to talk.”

  “I know.” Jan selected a coffee pod and stuck it in the Keurig. “I can’t believe Rick and CG&P were behind this. Coggins always gave 292 me the creeps, but Rick? Dad did so much for him. He took a maid’s son and gave him an education and helped him get a position at a good law firm. Plus Rick’s been in love with you forever.”

  “Rick couldn’t separate his feelings for me from his desire to be somebody. I knew he was ambitious, but I never saw this coming. Who would’ve?” Nina collapsed on a stool at the island. The muscles in her legs and arms still trembled hours later. She had given her sister the high points—or in this case, the low points—after the detectives finished grilling her. She and Aaron would have to go downtown yet again for formal statements later in the day. “I want you to know I tried hard—so hard—to protect his name. Our name. Now it’s all going to come out.”

  “It’s not your fault. It’s on him.” Jan’s tone was hard, but pain and exhaustion etched lines around her mouth and eyes. “I understand wanting to protect him, but he blew it. Not you. He was so pious and sanctimonious about Liz’s addiction. Come to find out he had his own. One he let destroy him.”

  Jan had always been the clear thinker, the logical one in the family. The knots in Nina’s stomach tightened. There would be a firestorm of stories on every outlet in town and beyond for days to come. Everything she’d wanted to avoid for her family’s sake would come to pass now. She couldn’t control it. She never could. If she’d learned anything from the past few weeks, it was that fact. She was not in control.

  Eventually this story would become old news. It would be replaced by another story of a cheating politician or another celebrity who used his position to abuse a woman. Life would go on. The media would leave the Fischer family alone to
heal and to learn from the mistakes they’d made. “Addiction runs in families.”

  “It does, so we always have to be on guard.” Jan added skim milk to her coffee and stirred with more vigor than necessary. “You and me and Trevor. And we have to set the example for Brooklyn.”

  “Always.” Which brought them around to Liz and what Nina had not shared with Jan. No more secrets. Her sister needed to know everything before she deployed. “We need to talk about Liz.”

  “She abandoned us. I don’t know why she’s here now, but she can’t just hop on the bandwagon now that Dad’s gone.”

  “I need to show you something.” Nina picked up the stack of letters from the island. King hadn’t objected to her bringing them downstairs, the letters and the box where she kept her mementos. “We know Dad hid many things from us—”

  “Lied to us, you mean.” Jan plucked her mug from the Keurig and moved to the island. She cupped it in both hands. Her eyes were bloodshot and her hair a tangled mess. The purple-striped terry cloth robe hung open, revealing her favorite Mickey Mouse nightshirt. “Pretended to be a Christian. Pretended to be a law-abiding judge.”

  “It’s true. I’m still trying to absorb all this too. He was a flawed human being, but that doesn’t change the fact that he loved us. He was our father, the only one we’ll ever have.” Nina touched the yellowed envelope on top with its loopy handwriting in faded ink. Postmark Miami, Florida. “Dad loved us so much he didn’t want us to know he wasn’t perfect. He made mistakes. Big mistakes. Not showing us these letters was one.”

  Jan pushed away her cup and picked up the first envelope. “Letters from whom?”

  “From Mom.”

  “From Liz, you mean.”

  “Yes. She wrote to us. I don’t know what was going through his head. Maybe he didn’t want us to be let down by her again.” Mango strolled into the room and made a beeline for Nina. He wound himself around the wooden stool leg. Nina hopped down and scooped him up. She needed pet therapy like never before. His warm body and throbbing purr eased the tension in her shoulders and arms. “He knew he was giving us a better life, one she could never give us. I don’t know, but he did what he thought was best.”

  “She wrote us?” Jan ran her fingers over the envelope and looked up at Nina. “Where were they? You’ve read these?”

  “I have.” Running her hands across Mango’s soft orange fur over and over, Nina explained how the letters came into her possession. “She wanted us back. Dad didn’t want us to know. I was waiting for the right time to tell you. So much has happened, I didn’t want to heap more coals on the fire.”

  “Are they going to make me even sadder?”

  “Probably.”

  “I can’t take that right now.” Jan dropped the envelope. “I’m getting ready to deploy to a country where you can expect to be served an IED with breakfast. I’m spending three days with a husband I haven’t seen in six months before I go. I’m leaving my seven-year-old daughter, who just lost her grandpa, again. I don’t need this.”

  “I understand. But I couldn’t let you go without you knowing that our mother cared enough to write us. Sixteen times. She sent us photos. She remembered good times.” Nina settled Mango on her lap so she could pull the photos from her rose-covered memento box. She held them out. “She wanted us back. That’s something to hang on to when you think about her. Grace will always be our mother, but we can have two moms.”

  Jan examined the two photos, one at the motel, the other on Christmas Day. Her face crumpled. “I loved that doll.”

  “Me too.”

  “There were good times, now and then, weren’t there?” Sweet resignation colored Jan’s face. Gone was the military sniper, the platoon commander. For a second she looked like that little girl who wanted McDonald’s chicken nuggets, french fries, and ice cream for her sixth birthday but settled for hot dogs and beans drenched in barbecue sauce at the soup kitchen. “Or do I just pretend that to make myself feel better?”

  “Good times are relative when you’re homeless.” A fresh orange. Soap. Clean underwear. Socks. An air-conditioned library with free books and a clean bathroom fully stocked with toilet paper. Nina held up her single seashell. “Only Liz could make it sound normal not to be able to keep all the seashells we collected because there wasn’t room for them in the car where we lived.”

  “I loved going to the beach.”

  “She remembers that. She remembers how fearless you were. How she had to drag you from the waves.”

  “She does?” Tears trickled down Jan’s face. She didn’t seem to notice. “Remember those new sneakers we got that Christmas? They had lights on the soles that lit up when we walked. I loved those shoes.”

  “We have to hang on to the good memories.” Nina slid from her chair, gave Mango one last pat, and settled him on the floor. He stretched and strolled to his water bowl. Nina slipped closer to her sister and opened her arms for a hug. Jan returned the favor with a ferocity that could only come from having walked through those years together and survived. Because they had each other. “Aaron always says that forgiving lifts a huge burden. It lets you move on with your life. It frees you from the past. That’s what I want now. To let it go and be free. If I can forgive Dad for everything he did, I guess I can forgive Mom for not caring enough. Or being unable to care. Do you think you can?”

  “I’ll try. I just know I never want Brooklyn to feel like I feel right now.” Jan’s voice broke. “If I don’t come back, she’ll need all the family she can get.”

  “You’re coming back. You’re good at what you do. Brooklyn knows you love her. She’s proud of you.” Nina grabbed a tissue, handed it to Jan, and then snatched one for herself. “She has a great mom and a great dad, a grandma, and an aunt and an uncle who love her like crazy.”

  “Because they are crazy.” Jan hiccupped the laugh of exhaustion and near hysteria. “They’ll find us in the dictionary next to the word dysfunctional.”

  Nina sucked in a breath. If only this conversation could end here. One more revelation had to be made. “That’s not all.”

  Jan groaned. “You’re kidding, right? Why not lower the boom all at once? Rip the bandage off. It hurts less.”

  “We have a sister and a brother. Half sister and half brother.”

  “She had more kids?” Jan closed her eyes and opened them. “How old? Living with her all this time? Where have they been? On the street?”

  “Thirteen and ten. It’s a horrifying thought, isn’t it?”

  “What they’ve been through.” Shaking her head, Jan wadded up the tissue in a ball. “I don’t have to imagine. Neither of us do. We know. She wanted us back, she didn’t get us, so she replaced us.”

  “I’m trying not to look at it like that. I sincerely doubt it was a conscious decision, any more than having us was.” Nina rubbed Jan’s back the way she used to do at night when they first moved into this house. Jan would slip from her bunk bed and climb into bed with Nina “just this once.” Every night. “They’re the reason I want to make peace with her. They need our help. Dad isn’t around anymore to save them.”

  “She’s not handing them over.”

  “No, but she came back for a reason. I’m hoping it’s because she knows they need family. They need us. She needs us.”

  Jan ducked away from Nina. She took her coffee cup to the sink, rinsed it, and placed it in the dishwasher. She stood for several seconds, her back to Nina. Finally, she turned. She looked far too sad and old for a woman her age. The expression would be the one Nina saw in the mirror in the morning. “I agree. I’m sorry I won’t be here to help you with this. Send me pictures. I’ll skype when I can.”

  “I will. I promise.”

  “I want to know everything. I need to take a shower. I feel dirty.” Jan started for the door, then reversed directions and headed to the island where she scooped up the letters. “May I take these for a few days?”

  “They’re as much yours as they are mine.”
/>   Jan held them against her chest. She sighed. “Does she say who your dad is? Or mine?”

  Nina shook her head. Some things were better off left unsaid. She would not send her sister off to war with the knowledge that her mother didn’t know who her father was. It wasn’t a lie. Nowhere in the letters did Liz talk about their fathers. Let the Superman theory go with Jan. She would need it. “No, but she makes it very clear that she wanted us back. And she’s here now. She wants to be a part of our lives now.”

  “I can live with that. Like I have a choice.” Her smile was grim. The career Army woman was back. “Of course, I’ll take the easy way out and go to Afghanistan and let you deal with this entire mess. Liz. Mom. The siblings. Trevor.”

  “You’ll be busy serving your country. We’re even.”

  She saluted Nina and strode from the room with the same determined stride that had taken her to the recruiting office not long after Brooklyn’s birth.

  Making peace with the past took time, but they were both headed in the right direction. Nina went to find Aaron.

  35

  The doorbell rang. Nina jumped and shrieked. “Get a grip.”

  Talking to herself wasn’t a good sign, even though every day the anxiety and the sense of walking on the razor’s edge lessened a little. Day by day, she thought a little less about those moments in the darkroom with the man she loved and the man who planned to kill them both. The night when she had been certain she would never have the chance to live. Yet she still jumped at every noise, flinched at every backfire. Her therapist said it would take time. Give it time.

  Strangely, the panic attacks had stopped. Simply stopped. As if given a true reason to panic, she’d learned not to do it for smaller, less earth-shattering crises. Time would heal the other wounds.

  That was one thing she would never take for granted again. Time. No one had as much as they thought they did. People walked around like they were immortal. She’d said those words, her voice filled with despair, at her last session.

  “It’ll get easier. One day at a time.” Dr. Wallace said so and Nina believed it. With Aaron in her life, anything was possible.