Catching Ruth’s smug grin in the rearview mirror, Andrea dreaded her daughter reaching puberty. The only thing that made Andrea’s present-day misery tolerable was knowing how much more miserable she would be in a few years. She stopped the car in the junk-cluttered garage. Any weekend now, Jeff would be sure to clean it.
Ruth and Elijah rushed between the middle-row seats past their younger sisters and opened the sliding doors. “Dibs on the swings! Dibs on the swings!” they said simultaneously and repeatedly. Sarah undid her seat belt and erupted from her booster seat, already athletic enough to quickly catch up to her older siblings.
Whining loudly, Sadie struggled against the restraints of her safety seat. Give me five minutes, Andrea thought. Just five minutes without one of them screaming. Andrea released her youngest, lifting her aloft as her little legs cycled in the air.
“Taking Daddy to the train station naked from the waist down might have been an exciting adventure for you, but if you’re going on the swing set, you’ll need to put on a pull-up and shorts, okay?”
Sadie struggled with the choice. Her two-and-a-half-year-old mind calculated, knowing that her mother was probably right but also knowing that a playtime delay of a minute was like a lifetime lost in toddler years. “Okay,” she said softly. And the second Andrea set her down, Sadie ran away as fast as the two chicken wings she called legs could carry her.
Andrea smiled. She hated her life, but she loved her children.
Mostly.
It was five minutes after seven in the morning on a Monday and the kids were already playing in the backyard. The neighbors were going to kill her. Having moved to the neighborhood a year ago, the Sterns had the youngest kids on the block.
Andrea shouted, “Ruth and Elijah! Watch your sisters! I’ll be inside!”
She held the car keys in her hand and, as always, heard Jeff’s voice hammer in her head: Why can’t you ever put them on the hook when you come through the door?
She tossed the keys on the kitchen island.
She put some more water in the teakettle and made her way into the powder room, struggling to turn her body in the small bathroom so she could sit and pee. After finishing, she pulled her maternity panties over her hips, lamenting the loss of her body. She wondered if it would bounce back after her fifth child. She was only thirty-three. Scientifically, it should be possible. Science fictionally, at least.
The teakettle whistled. She grabbed a white “I ♥ NY” mug, which had been her favorite since college. The decal was badly worn. She used a metal tea ball to scoop a healthy spoonful of a Teavana blueberry-pineapple blend from a canister on the counter. When she was pregnant, she always switched from coffee to tea, the fruitier the better. She really missed coffee, but right now the smell of it nauseated her.
She took a deep breath to catch the initial waft of the tea. She was so tired. It had only been six weeks since Jeff had started his new job, requiring a ride to and from the train station every morning. He would likely be on the waiting list for a parking permit for a year. That meant ten more months of chauffeur service on top of the baby’s due date in October, which was over two months away.
Andrea ran her hand across the kitchen table. She felt the pockmark indentations the kids had left on it from banging their utensils. She looked past the wood railing that divided the open family room from the kitchen. They had brought their furniture over from the old house even though Jeff had wanted to buy all-new stuff. He continued to act like the money would last forever even when so much of it had been lost.
Not lost, since that implied an accidental misplacement. Squandered. Stolen. Litigated. Adjudicated. Reimbursed to the clients he had cheated. Paid to the IRS to avoid going to prison. Any and all of those better defined where their money had gone as a result of Jeff’s transgressions.
She opened the French doors that led to the sunroom. It was her favorite spot in the house. She could sit in the wicker chair by the corner and look out the large windows across their deck into the backyard. She liked to watch the sun set in the afternoon sky as it scraped the edges of the trees and glistened on the small pond off their backyard.
Sunroom. Massive deck. Full play set. Pond in the backyard. Thirty-two hundred square feet and this was the house they had been “reduced” to after the trial. Four bedrooms, three and a half baths, partially finished basement, and purchased for $770,000. That was downsizing by their standards. The house they’d been forced to leave after the settlement had sold for $1.5 million. All but two hundred thousand of that had sifted through their fingers like sand. They had put 20 percent down on this purchase. After all was said and done, they had fourteen thousand dollars left in their checking account. It was the smallest amount of money they’d had since she was twenty-five years old. Most people would kill her for the incredibly small violin she played.
She sat down and sipped the tea. As usual, Sarah was precariously climbing along the top of the play set as Ruth and Elijah pushed Sadie on the swing. When Eli started squawking like a goose, Sadie asked for help down. Ruth lowered her. Sarah swung down like Tarzan and they started running around the backyard flapping their arms.
Andrea watched them a few minutes longer, which was just enough time for her to get angry again. She struggled to lift herself out of the chair. She opened the sliding door that led to the deck and shouted, “Eli, stop picking up the goose doody and throwing it at your sisters!”
They giggled and chanted, “Goose doody!”
Andrea sat back down. She sipped her tea.
She closed her eyes.
She was back at the crime scene.
Everything was locked in place, including an image of her holding Sadie, but a second image of her was able to walk in and around the frozen figures. She pictured the blood spatter on the front of the pump and the position of the body and the gas nozzle. She pictured the wet stain on the ground and on the victim’s pants. She had gotten a clean-enough look at his face to recognize him as the youngest worker at the station. In his early twenties, and painfully shy. He didn’t speak English well. She thought the obvious: robbery. Her second thought was just as obvious: hate crime.
In her mind, the blood spatter that had hit the top of the gas pump freeze-framed. Some of it sprayed behind to the other side of the island. Close range and at a sharp upward angle. She looked at the strikes on the building behind the island. Elevated, not as steeply angled.
She walked past the small cashier stand, noting its unremarkable details. Register: closed. Can of Pepsi: opened. A battered iPhone: facedown. A ratty cushion on the stool that looked about as comfortable as simply using the stool as an enema. The bullet strikes were wildly scattered, but every bullet had hit above the height of the doors.
She took a step back and surveyed the scene.
Then she opened her eyes and sipped her tea. She thought about Morana. It had been months since she’d done that. There was nothing about this situation that should have linked the two together, except for the fact that this was the first time Andrea had felt alive since Morana.
Annoyed with herself, she got up and rinsed her mug out. She opened the JennAir stainless steel refrigerator and took out a box of Thick & Fluffy Eggos. She put four of them in the toaster oven. Anticipating the inevitable whining over who wanted what, she took out butter, peanut butter, cream cheese, jelly, and syrup. She grabbed from the fridge a Tupperware container filled with green grapes. Not the purple ones because Sadie hated those. And no seeds either, because Ruth hated those. And forget about Eli and Sarah, because they hated fruit no matter what form it came in, unless it was a maraschino cherry nestled on a bed of whipped cream.
She wondered if she should offer to help the police. What would Jeff say? He wouldn’t want her getting involved. Morana had almost ended their relationship. It was a torrid affair that, for fourteen months, had ruined his life and ignited hers.
Andrea missed that
excitement, that insanity. She craved that kind of relationship again, as twisted as it had been. Intellectual, thought-provoking, alluring, and dangerous. Where would she be now if she hadn’t gotten pregnant with Ruth? How many other Moranas might be in prison if she hadn’t chosen to keep the baby over her career?
It was unlikely anyone in the West Windsor Police Department had ever investigated a homicide. She’d had more experience by the time she’d turned twenty-three than all of them combined had now.
Her cell phone rang. Not even seven thirty in the morning.
“Hi, Brianne,” she said.
Brianne Singer was one of the friends Andrea had made the same way most moms in West Windsor–Plainsboro seemed to: their kids went to school together or played sports together. In Brianne’s case, her triplets—Morgan, Mary, and Madison—had been in Ruth’s class since second grade.
Andrea got along better with Bri than she did with the other “friends” of their limited social circle, which she had privately dubbed “the Cellulitists.”
“What’re you doing, Andie?”
“Fucking three men at the same time,” Andrea replied.
“Only three?” Brianne said.
They laughed. Bri was one of the few people Andrea felt comfortable enough with to let her “original Queens” out. She’d spent the first twelve years of her life in New York City, and adjusting to suburban New Jersey when she’d moved to West Windsor in middle school had been rough. On rare occasions, she liked to give her original accent and attitude some freedom to fly.
The toaster oven pinged. She prepped the kids’ breakfasts as she continued her conversation.
“Morgan woke up vomiting,” Brianne said, as if Andrea cared to hear about it.
“Sorry. Is she okay?”
“She hid a bag of Swedish fish under her pillow last night and ate them all after her sisters fell asleep.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“Her vomit was, like, totally red. I freaked out. I thought it was blood. You’ve never seen anything so gross in your life,” Bri said.
Andrea thought of Marcus Tolliver, who had been Morana’s fourth victim. His skin had been expertly flayed from his body, head to toe. The coroner said that hadn’t even been the cause of death. He had been alive through the entire process, which they estimated had taken several days. The bleeding had been remarkably contained, but Marcus eventually suffered a lethal heart attack from the pain.
The NYPD’s MCS unit was certain the killer was a man with experience handling carving knives or in taxidermy until Andie Abelman, a Columbia University criminal justice junior on a fast-track graduate school internship in the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, determined Morana was a surgeon. And a female.
“I gotta go,” said Andrea. “The kids are too close to the pond again.”
“You should put a fence up,” said Bri.
“That would force the geese to work too hard to shit in the backyard,” said Andrea, hanging up.
She looked out the window. The kids were on the play set, nowhere near the small pond that backed onto their property. Seven forty-two and she still had an entire day with absolutely nothing to do but prevent four shrieking anxiety attacks from causing her water to break early.
Her phone vibrated on the counter. A text from Brianne: Forgot, going to pool with Crystal at 10 join us!
Andrea would probably go to the West Windsor Waterworks pool in the community park, because why not? In the seventh month of her pregnancy, she reveled in just floating in the water. It eased the dull throbbing in her knees and ankles and allowed her to stretch her back muscles. She would break out the only maternity bathing suit she had, a bright marigold tankini Jeff said made her look like the Beatles’ yellow submarine.
She opened the casement window and shouted, “Come inside and get some juice!”
The kids scrambled up the deck. Sadie, as usual, lagged behind the others and complained about it. They sucked through the straws hard enough that Andrea thought their heads would implode.
She smiled.
They were good kids. They didn’t whine any more or less than other children. Having an almost-absent father and a crushingly unhappy mother hadn’t appeared to affect their lives. So far. Truth be told, they had been given everything they could possibly need. Still, Andrea thought they deserved more. They deserved to know their parents could be whole. She wondered how long it would be before her kids realized they weren’t.
Andrea decided she would offer to help the police.
3
IT was seven forty-five by the time Kenneth Lee arrived at the crime scene. Fifteen minutes earlier, he’d been startled awake by a call from his editor, Janelle Simpson. He’d been scheduled to cover a Girl Scout troop planting trees at an assisted living facility in Plainsboro at ten and he’d planned to sleep until at least nine forty-five. It said quite a bit about Kenny’s abject indifference to his job as a reporter for the Princeton Post weekly that West Windsor’s first murder in decades failed to excite him.
He parked in the McCaffrey’s shopping center lot and walked across Southfield Road to the Valero gas station. The cordon at the intersection of Southfield and Route 571 now included three patrol cars, a detective’s unmarked vehicle, a suit-and-tie guy Kenny assumed was the prosecutor, and a Mercer County medical examiner’s van. Two patrol officers guarded the cordon, keeping a few scattered bystanders and the press at bay.
Patrol Officer Wu was handling traffic on Southfield; the new kid—Patel?—was performing a similar function at the 571 egress. Detectives Garmin and Rossi hovered as the coroner placed the victim into a body bag. Each held a large coffee cup. Garmin noshed on his bagel. The deputy chief of police, Lt. Margaret Wilson, supervised the activity.
Chief Bennett Dobeck stood away from the others, his back ramrod straight. His hard, cold eyes surveyed everything. Kenny Lee had little respect for people in positions of authority, but Dobeck was a terrifying son of a bitch.
The chief’s son, fourth-generation military turned cop, Patrol Officer Benjamin Dobeck, manned the cordon tape in front of Kenny, keeping Victor Gonzalez, a reporter from the Trenton Times, at bay. Benjamin was Kenny’s childhood frenemy, and Kenny watched now as the Aryan wet dream of an officer casually but purposefully shifted to his left and right to prevent Gonzalez from taking any clean pictures with his cell phone.
“C’mon, Officer, let me get something,” pleaded Gonzalez. “My photographer is stuck in traffic on I-95.”
Though he continued moving, Benjamin was unmoved. Benny had been a dick in high school and he was still a dick today.
Kenny turned on the Voice Memos app on his phone as he sidled to the cordon tape. He stepped in front of the annoyed Gonzalez and whispered into Benjamin’s ear, “Tell me something no one else knows, Benjy.”
“That you were secretly born in Slantsylvania?” Benjamin whispered without turning his head.
“An Asian joke,” said Kenny. “I never heard one until today.”
“What do you have for me?” replied Benjamin.
“A six-pack from that craft brewery in New Hope that’s getting super raves.”
“Getting warmer.”
“My brother’s phone number.”
“Bite me.”
“I said his phone number, not mine.”
“Shut up.”
“Eventually, you’re going to have to come out,” said Kenny. “I’m sure your dad and especially your grandfather will be okay with it.”
“Bite me with your brother’s mouth,” said Benjamin.
Kenny didn’t care one way or the other if he really was closeted, but the joke went back to their high school days. In retaliation for Benjamin’s constant bullying, Kenny had made a mock version of the Pirate’s Eye school newspaper with a 120-point headline, jock likes cock, and a photo of Benjy taken at a wrestlin
g competition with his face buried in an opponent’s crotch. Kenny had five hundred copies made and individually replaced the front page of each real edition with his own.
The stunt led to a week of detention and an ass-kicking, but it had won him serious cred across a spectrum of students who hated Dobeck’s guts. It also earned some amount of begrudging respect from Benjamin himself.
Benjamin looked around to make sure his fellow officers weren’t paying attention. Out of the side of his mouth, he said, “We’ve had our eyes on the vic for a while now.”
“How come?”
“Drugs,” said Benjamin.
“Using or selling?”
“Both.”
“Oh, Benny, that’s great,” said Kenny.
“Off the record,” hissed Dobeck.
Gonzalez craned his neck. “What did he tell you?”
“He thanked me for letting him cheat off me on our algebra final in eighth grade,” said Kenny. “You have to start developing your sources early, Victor.”
Since they’d get no further information until the department made a statement later that day or tomorrow, Kenny left. Reaching his battered gray 2012 Prius, he made a call.
“What do you have?” his editor asked in her usual exasperated tone. Janelle Simpson liked to pretend that being the editor of a weekly local paper was a lot of work. She didn’t have a clue what being a reporter at a real paper was like. Kenny felt the dark cloud roll through him, a reminder that he’d never know what that was like again, either. Then again, a small part of him still had hope. It was that part that whispered in his ear now: You’re only one story away from a comeback.
A comeback, he thought, at twenty-nine years old. Pathetic.
“They were bagging the victim when I got there,” he said.
“Robbery?”
“No details yet,” replied Kenny, his usual impatience elevated by that nagging whisper in his ear. “Janelle, I was hoping you could help me get the jump on a tip.”
“I got a million things to do,” she said.
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