When the numbers on the houses finally started getting closer to the address she’d long since memorized, she slowed. The one she was looking for was three in from the end of the block, its facade more subdued than its colorful neighbors. If the owners had wanted to blend in, they should have gone with obnoxious colors instead of bland neutrals.
Trudy glanced around for the best place to conceal herself so that she could watch without drawing any attention. There was a small park a little down the way, nothing big, just a triangle of grass for dogs. But there was a bench, and a few palm trees she could duck behind if needed.
Once she sat down, she positioned herself so that she could keep the front door of the house in her periphery without actually staring at it. Then she dug out a cigarette—not to light but to give her nervous energy an outlet. She turned it over in her hand, running her nail along the seam where the smooth paper disappeared into itself.
And she waited.
Two hours later her legs were restless and her back was stiff, but she’d watched three ladies go into the house and not come back out. They’d all been middle-aged and matched the staidness of the place, with their conservative trousers and mom-cut hairstyles.
If this was a den for serial killers, they certainly had good covers.
Still, she wasn’t stupid. She stretched, enjoying the slight pull on the muscles in her shoulders and back, then resumed her spot, slouched against the bench.
One more woman approached the house in the next hour. This one was different, though. She was wearing jeans and a coat despite the weather; she was younger, too, and had long brown hair that she’d pulled up into a ponytail.
But it was the way she walked that rang familiar with Trudy. Her shoulders were sloped forward, her arm wrapped around her waist like she was holding herself up. She kept glancing back, tucking her chin to her shoulder so she could see behind her.
The woman didn’t even slow at the foot of the stairs to the house. As she passed a narrow driveway a little ways down the block, she twisted and ducked into the shadows the opening provided. The movement was fast, practiced, and unexpected.
Long minutes passed, and the street remained empty. Trudy tried not to watch the spot where the woman had disappeared, in case eyes were watching her from a distance. It was an instinct honed from years of experience.
Just when she was about to give up on the woman, write her off as someone unimportant, someone taking a shortcut to work while Trudy had projected onto her, she came back to the sidewalk.
She was still glancing around, still a bit caved in on herself, but this time her stride was purposeful. She paused at the house, checked something in her hand, then jogged up the steps to the front door. Trudy couldn’t see the person who welcomed the woman inside, but the little details she’d been gathering since she’d arrived started to click into place.
Trust me.
It was a safe house.
Trudy needed money. She always needed money, an irony of her life that she did not find amusing. But now she needed a lot of it, fast.
The women at the safe house had been exactly what she’d expected once she realized what it was. They were nice, boring ladies who probably all had ridiculous savior and superiority complexes that would annoy the living shit out of Trudy in any other circumstance. But that didn’t matter now. What mattered was that they told her they could get her fake IDs, new names, backgrounds that would hold up at least to a little scrutiny.
What they couldn’t give her was money. Not much, anyway. Not nearly what she would need. And if she wanted to leave soon, Trudy would have to figure out a way to get her hands on some.
She didn’t dare linger in front of the house after she skipped down the stairs. Nor did she go back to the park. Instead, she just started walking, not really knowing where she was headed. She slid her phone out of her purse and opened up the maps app. Her grandmother had access to her password and often checked what she’d been looking at, so Trudy didn’t risk googling anything. It took a while, but she finally found what she was looking for.
There was one easy way for a girl who looked like her to get fast cash.
She zoomed in on the name of the little gray building situated in the middle of a long line of fast-food restaurants, tanning salons, and dry cleaners.
Mac’s Strip Club.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ALICE
August 3, 2018
Five days after the kidnapping
“If it wasn’t Charlotte who killed Ruby, then who was it?” Nakamura asked.
That was the question, the one they were missing. Juries didn’t want to know who hadn’t committed the crime. What they wanted was to be told a story. A good one at that. Facts didn’t really matter to them, but narrative did. There needed to be an engaging plot, a hero if possible, and, the most important part, a villain. Someone to blame.
Alice just had to find hers.
It was three in the morning. She’d been left talking to walls in her own apartment, and once they started talking back, she’d realized she needed a change of scenery. Halfway to the station, she’d made a detour to drag Nakamura out of bed, too. A healthy sleep pattern was a foreign concept to her, so she didn’t even blink at the hour. But now her partner was slumped in the lone chair in their little makeshift basement office.
His eyelids drooped as he watched her tape pictures to the empty cinder-block walls. “This is getting out of control, Garner.”
She pushed her hair back into a low ponytail that was mostly just a stub and wrapped a rubber band around the strands. “You didn’t have to come.”
Nakamura rolled his head once to each shoulder, stretching his neck. “You realize when I get three calls from you in quick succession I’m not just going to sleep through that.”
Alice shrugged. “You didn’t have to come.”
“So,” Nakamura said, switching the subject, “if it’s not Charlotte Burke, who killed Ruby?”
Zeke Durand. He was a new player, and she added him to her mental list. The jogger. The owner. The Burkes. Zeke Durand. How long would the list become? How many more did they not know about?
She told Nakamura what she’d heard from Ben, but at three in the morning there was little to do about the new information.
“What if it was a classic kidnapping gone wrong?” she asked. Her hand twitched by her side, and she brought her thumb to her mouth to gnaw at the nail that was already bitten down to the quick. It kept the shaking to a minimum, though. “It wasn’t supposed to go down like this.”
“I think we’d still have gotten a ransom note,” Nakamura said, and when she looked over at him, he was looking at the wall instead of at her. She dropped her palm back to the outside of her thigh. “Even if they’d grabbed her and then she’d died in the process, they would have pretended she was still alive.”
“But they would have had no proof of life.”
“Do you think the Burkes wouldn’t have paid anyway?” Nakamura tipped onto the back legs of the chair. “They wouldn’t have taken the chance, even without a guarantee that she was alive.”
Alice stepped back away from the wall of suspects, hands on her hips, her gaze bouncing from each picture to the next.
“What if it’s not about money?” Alice asked. “What if it’s about . . .”
“About . . . ,” Nakamura prodded when she paused.
Alice tapped her fingers against the seam of her jeans, considering whether she wanted to put the thought out there, into the world. She took a deep breath, making the decision because she was tired, and it was exhausting holding all her thoughts in check.
“What if it’s about revenge?”
Nakamura was silent at that. She turned when it dragged on.
“Could be,” he finally said, his eyes shifting away. “Doesn’t rule out the family, though.”
“No.” She returned her attention to the photos, then grabbed a thick black marker from where it rested on top of a stack of evidence boxes.
“But if it was revenge from an outsider, it would start with Sterling.”
She circled the patriarch’s face with her Sharpie.
“Why?”
Alice clicked the cap back on the marker, her gaze locked on the judge’s face. “The rest of them”—she waved a hand toward the wall—“they’re so controlled they have almost no contact with the outside world.”
The iron fist with which Hollis ruled her family was apparent in each interaction Alice and Nakamura had with them. Alice wasn’t sure quite how cut off the women were, but when she’d asked for the names of friends and acquaintances, the lists had been almost embarrassingly short.
Neither Charlotte nor Mellie had a job, outside of a few select charitable boards, which had probably been approved by Hollis. Trudy had school but didn’t seem to do much beyond what was required. No sports, no extracurriculars.
“Okay, so not the younger women,” Nakamura said. “What about Hollis, though? She seems the type to inspire rage.”
Alice pressed her lips together, considering. She remembered the governor’s wife at that party, flustered and mortified because of Hollis. Humiliation was a powerful force. It was more often than not the primary emotion that spurred on mass violence. Kidnapping and killing a little girl wouldn’t be an unbelievable leap.
“I think,” Alice started, slow and careful, “Hollis tends to inspire rage in women. She doesn’t tend to direct that venom toward men.”
Nakamura made a little surprised sound. “You’re saying you think our perp isn’t a woman, then?”
“I’m saying this doesn’t feel like a reaction to some society lady feeling bitter that Hollis stole her venue location for a party,” Alice said.
“Your gut instinct is out in force on this case, isn’t it?” It sounded like Nakamura was teasing, but there was something underneath the words that set her on edge. Before she could bristle, he moved on and the moment was broken. “So, Sterling.”
Sterling. Despite the fact that he hovered over the case like a threatening, dark cloud, they had barely seen him at all.
“The snake himself,” she murmured. They’d had to question him, of course, the day Ruby had gone missing, and he’d played the part of concerned grandfather convincingly. That didn’t mean anything, though. They were all playing parts.
Nakamura thumbed at his chin. “You have a real problem with him.”
Alice shook out her shoulders, the tension there pulling at the delicate tendons of her neck. “I don’t trust him.”
“That’s probably a good call.” Nakamura laughed, and the remaining tightness dropped from her back. “But we’ve scoured his cases and got zip.”
That was true. The junior officers they’d assigned to that duty had found little in the search. Despite the well-known fact that his sentencing practices weren’t quite fair, anyone who was likely to hold a grudge was still in jail.
There was one man whom the officers had gotten excited about. But it turned out he’d moved to Michigan and had a solid alibi.
“They could have missed something,” Alice said, not sure why she was pushing. “A connection that was overlooked because it wasn’t obvious.”
“Schaffer and Lowe are still searching,” Nakamura said. “If they find anything, then we can chase it. But if it’s not a blatant link, then we’re kind of screwed trying to come in from that angle.”
Nakamura slid a hand into his dark hair, then lifted the, by now, lukewarm cup of coffee he was clutching to his lips. He swiveled his jaw after he swallowed.
“Alice.” It was coming. The tone, the way her name was weighted, the way it slipped off his tongue like an apology. “What does that gut of yours say?”
“It says, going into an investigation with a preconceived assumption of guilt blinds you to any other options,” she said.
Everyone wanted it to be Charlotte.
The facts didn’t matter, the narrative did. Alice said it enough to know it to be true. There were gaping holes in the evidence that everyone was just going to ignore because of course the mother did it.
Nakamura scratched at his scruff. “But we’re cops, yeah?”
“Thank you for reminding me. I would have forgotten otherwise,” Alice shot back.
He squeezed one eye shut. “You seem to have, though.”
“Because I refuse to give in to the laziest option possible without considering others?”
It annoyed her that Nakamura was hopping on the bandwagon. It annoyed her that it brought up the ghosts of those whispers that had haunted her before they’d found Lila’s killer. It annoyed her that she still let it affect her. Fragile emotions had no place here.
She had to remember that.
“No,” he said slowly, not rising to her tone. If they were going to fight, she wanted a brawl. But he kept his same measured, easy voice even as he accused her of being shit at her job. “We’re all considering other options.”
“Are you?”
“You think we’re all steering this investigation to go down a certain road,” Nakamura said. “But what you’re not seeing is that we’re not directing it. We’re following the path already there. You just don’t like where it’s taking us.”
“Why are you so sure I don’t like where it’s taking us?” Alice pressed, wanting him to say the words. Needing him to.
Nakamura tipped his head, studying her face. “Because now you’re running the investigation that you couldn’t when your daughter was killed.”
There was a beat of silence.
“Then why haven’t you asked for me to be taken off the case?” Alice asked.
This wasn’t the time to be having this argument. They were both exhausted, and it showed in the way they’d lost the carefulness with their words, with each other. Her own had become sloppy, spilling out into the hushed, darkened space in a way they wouldn’t have in the bright light of day.
“Who do you think did it, Alice?” Nakamura asked instead of answering the question. She released a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
“I don’t know,” she said, repeating her assertion from earlier in the day, turning to the wall again.
Nakamura paused, and she could feel his eyes on her back.
“Who do you think did it, Alice?”
“What do you want me to say?” she asked.
“I want you to say what’s in your gut.”
Everything in her was coiled tight, ready to shatter.
She walked up to the picture she’d circled and tapped the capped marker against it.
“Sterling Burke,” she said, throwing it down like the challenge it was.
Nakamura smiled, and the tension that had been holding them both in its ugly claws dissolved into nothingness. “And that’s why you’re on the case.”
There was a twenty-four-hour convenience store four blocks away, and by 4:00 a.m. neither Alice nor Nakamura had been able to continue resisting its neon lure. The sludge at the station that passed as coffee wasn’t cutting it.
Alice leaned back against the counter, cringing as a spill she hadn’t noticed seeped into the fabric of her jeans. Nakamura was busy carefully peeling the tops off his fancy creamers, lining them up next to his cup. She didn’t have the patience for all that.
As the caffeine started to clear the fog from her brain, she studied her partner.
“You don’t think it’s Sterling,” she said, keeping her voice low. There were three other people in the store, one of whom was the bored teenage cashier twirling his phone on the counter. The other two were some college kids with bloodshot eyes, giggling over potato chips. None of them were paying any attention to the detectives.
Nakamura shrugged. “No.”
“Then why does it matter that I do?” Alice asked.
In a practiced move, he dumped the sweet cream into his black coffee, the pure dark color of it turning milky. She winced at the sacrilege of it all.
“Why do you think it’s him?” Nakamura asked instead of ans
wering her question.
Alice knew the kind of man Sterling Burke was—evil, manipulative, power hungry. None of those things made him a killer, though. If Alice based her suspicions on the quality of his character alone, she’d be just as bad as the rest of them desperately snatching at the low-hanging fruit that was Charlotte Burke.
“Process of elimination,” she said, following Nakamura as he walked toward the front. They paused as he made a slight detour to the doughnut case, where he plucked out three with pink sprinkles.
“So you think it’s someone in the family?” Nakamura asked as he arranged his bounty in the little brown paper bag that he’d grabbed. “Weren’t we just talking about revenge?”
“Either way, we should be looking at him more than we are.” Alice shrugged off the semantics as they headed toward the front counter. Did it matter if he’d been the one to actually strike the blow? There were other ways he could be responsible for Ruby’s death.
“Maybe you’re right.” Nakamura held up the doughnuts and the coffee to the kid behind the register and then gestured to hers as well.
The boy didn’t even look up from his phone as he tapped their orders in. “Five sixty-three.”
Nakamura slipped him a ten. They were silent as the kid counted out the change. Nakamura only started talking again once he’d pocketed the bills and they stepped away. “But you know there’s a big difference between Sterling killing her and someone doing it because of him.”
“Is there?” she asked, sipping at the coffee. Stupid. It was a stupid thing to say. Nakamura had already called her a shitty cop at least once tonight.
Emotional. Erratic.
The words were all but branded into her skin. They also came with the implication that she couldn’t be rational or logical or be trusted to do her job. There was a thin line between the way Nakamura was watching her now and those memories.
Alice didn’t really want to ask the question that was nagging at her. The coffee hadn’t hit her system yet, and the case was rubbing her raw in all her most vulnerable spots. But she was never one to hide or cower. “Why is my thinking it’s Sterling the thing that’s keeping me on the case?”
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