They pushed through the door, leaving behind the harsh fluorescent buzzing for the cool morning air, and Nakamura smiled back at her. “That’s not all there is,” he said gently.
Alice fell in step next to him. “But?”
“No one else would dare consider it,” Nakamura said as their shoulders bumped.
“That’s scary.”
“It’s reality,” he said.
He was wrong, though. People would consider it; they just wouldn’t say any of those accusations out loud.
“Oh, come on.” Nakamura gulped at his coffee, a desperate man. “It’s not like you’re exactly fresh off the bus, Garner. You know what it’s like.”
Alice shook her head. “DC is bad, but not like this,” she said. “Everyone there is a power player. You don’t go there to live in DC. You go there to own DC.”
“See, not so strange.”
“But it’s an even playing field because everyone there has power,” Alice corrected, wanting him to understand how messed up this situation was. “Here, though, it’s just Sterling Burke. He holds the keys and has no reason to negotiate anything.”
He dug in his bag for a doughnut, but she could tell his attention was focused on what she was saying. “He’s not the only player in town.”
“Oh yeah?” Alice raised her brows. “Because the police chief bows and scrapes to him. The governor is up his ass. From what I hear, he gets lunch with the state speaker every other week. He’s the godfather of one of the Supreme Court justices’ kids, and literally no one will get us a fucking warrant to search his house even though his granddaughter was murdered. You wanna tell me that’s not what’s happening here?”
Nakamura sighed, a small sound that disappeared into the lingering darkness. “Well, thank God we have you.”
There was a sarcastic bent to the words that she saw reflected in the tilt of Nakamura’s lips.
“Oh, screw you,” Alice said.
He shook his head. “Honestly, though, I’m glad you’re on this case. There are a lot of people in this town who would work very hard to make sure not even a suggestion of suspicion falls on Sterling Burke. If you start yelling about all of this too loudly, you’re slapping the target on your own back. Not a lot of people are willing to do that.”
“As we’ve seen,” Alice said, frustrated. “I can’t tell if you’re warning me or encouraging me.”
Nakamura grinned at that. “A little of both?”
“Can I ask you a question?” Will you be honest? was the subtext underneath.
He seemed to understand. “Yeah.”
“Do you not think it was Sterling because you don’t think it was Sterling? Or do you not think it was because you don’t want to be the one to have to arrest him?”
There was a moment when she thought she might have pissed him off to the point of silent treatment. But then he slid her a look. “You’re still on the case, aren’t you?”
She could press, but she wouldn’t. “What do you think about this Zeke Durand thing?”
Wrinkling his nose, he stared off in the distance as his hand rummaged in his bag for a doughnut. “We should be talking to him.”
“Yes,” she agreed, quick and easy.
“And it means Trudy Burke withheld information.”
Tilting her head up to the sky, she sighed. “Yes.”
“Makes you wonder . . .”
She let her chin fall to her shoulder, her eyes on his. “What else aren’t they telling us?”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHARLOTTE
July 26, 2018
Three days before the kidnapping
“Can you get me a gun?” Charlotte asked, her voice small in the darkness. Once upon a time, the question would have been ludicrous.
Enrique pushed himself up onto his forearms, his face red-tinged from where it had been pressed into the pillow. “Are you okay?”
If she could answer that, she wouldn’t be in this mess.
“Can you?” She’d already shifted her eyes back to the popcorn ceiling of the cheap motel room.
There was some rustling that she didn’t pay attention to, and then Enrique coughed. She looked at him. He’d slid from the bed and pulled on his black boxer briefs. He scratched at his six-pack and then dragged his nails down farther, an idle, distracted movement, until they slipped under the elastic waistband. A part of her recognized that he was gorgeous. All smooth skin and tattoos and muscles, dark eyes that promised nights of depravity. His jaw was sharp, his lips lush to the point of feminine. The contrast was appealing.
It wasn’t his looks that drew her, though. It was the way he didn’t care about the bruise marks he left on her hips in the shapes of his fingers, and the way he dragged his thumbs over her windpipe sometimes. It was the way he didn’t treat her like she was a girl made of glass.
“Yeah,” he said, slapping his stomach as if he’d just decided on something. “You have to tell me why.”
It was a pointless ultimatum, one he wouldn’t follow through on if she pushed. But, God, it was tempting. The lure of letting it all spill out.
Enrique had no connection to the Burkes, no connection to her real life. If he knew who she was, he’d never let on. Perhaps it was safe to tell him—not all of it, never all of it. But some.
They’d met six months ago on the waterfront. There was a bench there she liked to call hers. She pretended no one else knew about it, and whenever she went shopping, she’d get a cup of ice cream and take it to her spot.
On that day Enrique had been sitting there, legs spread so that they took up half the bench, arms stretched along the back so that his very presence took up the rest.
An hour later she’d been splurging on a nice hotel room for them. She’d later had to explain the charges by saying she’d been struck with a sudden migraine midday and hadn’t been able to do more than crawl into the closest Hilton and book herself a room for a few hours.
Enrique Lopez, it turned out, was a doctor at an underserved clinic on the south side of St. Petersburg. He’d moved to town only a few weeks earlier and had no idea the Burkes were to be treated differently. That hadn’t changed in the six months they’d known each other.
He was watching her now, though she knew he didn’t expect anything. That was another draw: his pure acceptance of what she had to offer without a demand lurking behind every easy word.
“I think I’m going crazy,” she said, the confession lifting the weight that had taken up a permanent residence on her rib cage. The freedom of it made her giddy, became a rush and pop in her blood, which tickled a giggle from her throat.
She arched up, her spine coming off the bed, until she was clutching her knees to her chest. Laughter, uncontainable and light and edging on manic, filled the room until tears ran unchecked down her cheeks.
“Hey, hey.” Enrique’s voice was tinged with panic as he knelt on the bed. Arms came around her, strong and warm, and she flinched.
“Don’t touch me,” she gasped out with the little breath that was still in her lungs. He knew the rules. He wasn’t supposed to touch her after. The chemicals that flooded her brain during it all helped her forget her terror. But the crash afterward always yanked her back to a reality where the weight of a body was too familiar, too horrifying. The memories that came with it would send her to her knees, swallowing against bile.
“Sorry. I’m sorry. Char.” He sat back on his heels.
“Don’t . . . touch me,” she said again on a gasp, forcing the words out because it was important. So important.
“I know, I’m sorry.” Enrique moved so he was no longer in her space, so that he was across the room, leaning his weight against the wall. He sank down to the floor so that he was still watching her but was no longer such a threat. “Talk to me, Char.”
She’d always liked the way he said her name, the way he caressed it with his tongue before letting it slip out. Char. No one else called her that; it was just him. Her father called her Charlie, a
habit Trudy had picked up once she realized how much Charlotte hated it. Her mother never called her anything but her full name, leaning heavy on the last syllable, without a trace of her Southern accent. Mellie sometimes called her Lottie, because she was silly. But to Enrique she was Char.
Sometimes she wished she was always Char. She imagined that woman was wild and uninhibited. She ate street food with her fingers and went skinny-dipping in the ocean underneath full moons. She slept with hot Latin men and danced in clubs where sweaty bodies rubbed against each other to a relentless, pounding beat.
Char said things like “I think I’m going crazy,” but in a way that could be remedied over bottomless mimosas at brunch.
Charlotte, on the other hand, had breakdowns that caused said hot Latin men to stare at her with eyes that understood too much.
“Char, talk to me,” he said again, but it was a plea more than an order.
She swiped at the wetness beneath her eyes and laughed again, this time at herself for being ridiculous. All of a sudden, she remembered she was naked. She pulled the sheet from beneath her so that she could wrap it around her shoulders. It wasn’t much, but it provided the illusion that she wasn’t completely vulnerable.
“I, um. I have a daughter,” she said, refusing to think about the amount of trust she was putting into this man. Into any man, really. He only nodded for her to continue, as if the moment wasn’t fraught, as if it hadn’t taken walking to the edge of some sort of cliff to get her to talk to him about Ruby. “She’s . . . she’s the wind. You know?”
“Yeah,” he said softly, though he couldn’t actually know. She wanted him to. She wanted him to know how Ruby made ships sail and windmills turn and carried the smell of lilacs to far-off places. She wanted him to know that Ruby could bring down buildings as easily as she could let birds dance and dive through the sky. She wanted him to know that Ruby was the wind, but she was also the sun and the rain and the moonlight on a crystal-clear night. She was everything.
“They want to take her away from me,” she said, licking her lips. It hurt, even saying the words.
“What? Why?”
She laid her head on the tops of her knees. “My mother hates me.”
“They can’t just do that, though.” Enrique sounded sure, so sure. If only she could believe him.
“You don’t know my parents,” she countered.
“Maybe so,” he said. “What started this?”
You, she wanted to say, to see how he would react. Would he feel those sharp barbs of guilt bite into his skin? Would it sink in, settle in, find a place in his soul, a dark malignant thing that ate at the purity of not knowing?
But it wasn’t the truth, not really. “I lost her.”
“Your daughter?”
She nodded. “Last Saturday. We were in a store, and she disappeared. I couldn’t find her. I kept trying to and I . . . I couldn’t find her.” The sob was wrenched from her. It was broken and painful.
“It happens, Char,” Enrique said. “You’re not the first person to lose track of her kid in a busy mall.”
She shook her head. He wouldn’t understand. “It doesn’t matter. It’s an excuse. She’s been waiting for one.” He was another. Or, the fact that she was sleeping with him was another. They were all just excuses.
It was a final punishment, the ultimate one. Complete and total control over her life hadn’t been enough. Hollis wanted to burn her to the ground and salt the earth.
“What’s with the gun, then, Char?”
“Have you ever felt powerless?” she asked, sure that he hadn’t. He carried himself with an easy confidence that bespoke a life of getting what he wanted. Not through the privilege of being born into the right family, but through being the kind of man he was. She didn’t wait for his answer. “I’ve spent my whole life feeling powerless. I don’t want to feel that way anymore.”
“A gun is the easy answer,” he said, slow and deliberate. “But don’t think that makes it the right one.”
“I don’t think I asked for your opinion,” Charlotte snapped.
“No, you just asked me to get you a gun. So I kind of think I get to have an opinion on it,” he said, his voice going sharper than she’d heard it before.
They both backed off then and sat in silence. A fight broke out just on the other side of the door, and they listened to the mix of Spanish and English cuss words as the languages warred for dominance.
“Why do you think you’re going crazy?” he asked once the chatter moved off to interrupt someone else’s conversation. Perhaps it would be well timed for them, too.
“I’m not a strong person,” she said, not sure how to actually put into words what was happening. But this thing she knew. This one fact.
A protest scraped against the back of Enrique’s throat. “You’re the strongest person I know, Char.”
“Don’t say that,” she said. “Don’t say something that’s not true because it sounds nice. Because it fits what you want it to be. Say I’m not crazy. Say I’m normal. Fine. Don’t say I’m strong when I’m not.”
The demand pushed into the empty spaces of the motel room, filling it with something other than the residue of smoke.
“Okay,” he said, and she relaxed without realizing she’d gone rigid.
How to explain it anyway? It wasn’t possible. Why had she thought he would get it? Why had she thought she could tell him?
“I’m not a strong person,” she tried to start again. This time he let her talk. “And when things get hard, I break. You know some people, they’re like diamonds, right?”
“Pressure makes them beautiful,” Enrique said, and for the first time all night she remembered why she’d picked him. Why she hadn’t let this thing between them die after that one afternoon at the hotel.
“You’re like that, aren’t you?” Somehow she knew it to be true, even though he didn’t answer. “I wish I was. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like. Do you ever do that? Have arguments in your head long after the fact? The words you wanted to say, wished you were brave enough to say, rattling around there as if they meant something? As if they weren’t just empty thoughts that will never see the light of day?”
“No.”
It was harsh and easy all at once. “Of course you don’t,” she said. “Because you’re like a diamond. But me? I shatter like glass.”
“What are you going to do with a gun, Char?” he asked.
There was nothing to say that would make sense to him.
She didn’t want to be glass any longer. She didn’t want to be powerless. She didn’t want to bow her head and say the right words to soothe a hatred she had never asked for in the first place. Was that so hard to understand? She thought it must be.
Why would someone who had never known what it was like to fall apart understand the need to feel like it could all be put back together?
She bit her lip, sinking her teeth into the flesh. “Do you really want to know?”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ALICE
August 3, 2018
Five days after the kidnapping
“We want to bring in Trudy Burke,” Nakamura said as soon as the chief walked into his office. They’d been squatting in it since getting back from coffee an hour and a half ago, going over their game plan for day two of the murder investigation.
Deakin’s eyes flicked up briefly before returning to the file he was holding as he rounded his desk. “What? Who?”
“Charlotte Burke’s niece,” Alice said.
“Well, I want a million dollars and a nice little place on Key West.” Deakin looked between the two of them. “It ain’t happening. What’s going on? You think she had something to do with it?”
“No, not necessarily.” Alice leaned forward, her arms braced on her thighs, and filled him in on Zeke Durand.
“So a teenage girl lied about the boy she was seeing to cops who would have told her mother and grandparents?” Deakin asked. “Just trying to understand the sus
picious part here.”
Alice plucked at a loose thread on the inseam of her jeans. She hadn’t had enough sleep to deal with people being obtuse on purpose. “She lied.”
“Everyone lies,” the chief shot back.
“I have heard that a time or two,” she said, and Nakamura coughed. It was a warning, and it was reflected on Deakin’s face. She pulled an apology from the depths of her belly and hoped he wouldn’t care that it wasn’t sincere. “Sorry, sir.”
“I think the point we’re making, perhaps poorly, is that from every indication we’ve gotten from the girl, she cared about Ruby deeply,” Nakamura said. “If there was a relationship she was withholding that could have informed the investigation, it’s suspicious that she didn’t disclose it.”
“I don’t have any intention of interrogating her,” Alice said. There would be no dramatic scene of the young woman handcuffed to the table in a cold room. “I just want her away from Hollis Burke.”
“She’s a minor. You’d be working around lawyers and her mother anyway,” the chief said. “Go try to talk to her at the house first. Then we’ll see.”
“I also want a search warrant on the residence,” Alice pushed.
“Working on it,” Deakin muttered, his attention back on the file. “Apparently, all of the city’s judges have conveniently misplaced their phones.”
“This family, man,” Alice muttered as they pushed to their feet. It would be pointless to try to talk to Trudy at the house, but that seemed to be the option they’d been left with.
“And you wonder why it’s so weird that you think it’s Sterling who killed her,” Nakamura said, keeping his voice pitched lower than hers so the chief wouldn’t hear as they walked from the office. “You haven’t really explained your reasoning for that yet.”
“Process of elimination,” she said again, though she knew that wasn’t what he wanted.
He growled in annoyance but didn’t say anything more in the crowded bull pen. Everyone was watching them.
Girls of Glass Page 11