Girls of Glass

by Brianna Labuskes

  But day to day, she shut him out. That wasn’t as hard. They lived in a big house, and he was almost never home. When he was, she could hide using the excuse of youth and rebellion.

  She thought of him now, though. His empty laugh and his calculating eyes. No one ever seemed to see it; they saw the charmer and thought it was genuine. She thought of the cruelty in which he decided the fates of people he feared, and the leniency he gave to those who could help him. She thought of the way he shook the governor’s hand after spending the evening planning to bring him down.

  Could he kill someone? She had not a single doubt.

  Did he kill Ruby? That was less certain.

  “I think my grandfather grew up in Jacksonville,” she finally said.

  He nodded. “Well, it looks like we’re going to Jacksonville.”

  They left that night. She’d hidden her backpack in a copse of trees right by the park, so all they had to do was swing by his place to grab clothes and supplies. Then they were on the road, chasing answers that might not even exist.

  It felt good to do something, though. If she was wrong, if nothing came of it, and they crawled back to St. Petersburg with only receipts from gas stations, it would still feel better than staring out windows and wondering what she should have done differently.

  Zeke left her alone for most of the drive. It was a little more than three hours between the cities, and even during the day there wasn’t much to look at. Maybe it would have been the perfect time to think, to formulate a theory, but she couldn’t. Instead, she took each thought as it came, unraveled it, and let it dissolve into the darkness of the night. Her head was blissfully empty by the time they crossed the bridge into the city.

  “I’m guessing you didn’t book a hotel,” Zeke whispered as if he were scared of startling her out of wherever she’d sunk into. It was the first thing he’d said to her since they’d left St. Pete’s city limits.

  “No,” she said. “Let’s just look for a vacancy sign, yeah?”

  It didn’t take long. The c in the sign was out, but for the most part, the place seemed decent enough. In their price range, at least. Or in his, because she didn’t have much money to spare for the room, and she couldn’t use a credit card without being found.

  Charlotte knew where she was but had been sworn to secrecy. And Trudy had no interest in letting Hollis know what she was up to.

  He didn’t even ask, though. Just told her to wait in the car as he took care of checking in, and she knew she owed him. In that moment, she remembered his mom was dying. She knew almost nothing about him other than that, and the fact that he was willing to do things for her simply because she asked.

  Maybe that was why he was helping her. Maybe he’d rather be in a silent car driving to Jacksonville in the middle of the night than counting the cracks in his ceiling, waiting for the day to come when he would be left by himself. Maybe she wasn’t the one who should be asked if she was running away.

  He knocked on her window, and she gasped, thankful no one had been around to hear the noise fly out of her mouth.

  “Come on,” he said when she opened the door. “We’re right here.”

  The room was nothing special, as the outside of the building advertised.

  There was the faint smell of cat pee that lingered in the air, and the paint was chipping off the wall in large flakes in some places. But it had two beds that looked relatively stable, and a TV that was from the current century.

  She dropped her bag and starfished onto the closest mattress. Something heavy landed in the space beside her. Her fingers touched metal, and she realized it was a flask. “Bless you, Zeke Durand,” she said, sitting up and opening it to take a swig. Peach schnapps. Too sweet for her taste, but like the rest of this trip, beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  After tossing it back to him, she scooched up the bed until she was leaning against the headboard. It was nearly two in the morning, and she couldn’t even imagine going to sleep.

  “Why are you helping me, Z?” she asked, watching him grimace at the sweetness. He threw the flask over to her, and she took another sip, holding on to it for a bit. “You know that favor I promised you is about worth the paper it was written on now.”

  “Not everyone is out to get something from you, you know,” he said.

  That would be nice if life were a Disney movie, but it wasn’t, so she just waited.

  He sighed. “When you first talked to me. Well, there’s this drug trial. My mom was rejected from it, but it’s her only shot.”

  “You wanted my family to pull some strings?”

  “Your grandfather golfs with the governor.” He shrugged. “It was worth a try.”

  It probably would have worked. Especially if she’d played up the tutoring-an-underprivileged-kid thing. Good for the image.

  “And now?”

  He paused and then shifted so that he was looking at the ceiling instead of her. “You have sad eyes.”

  She tipped her head so the syrupy alcohol sat at the back of her tongue for a second before she swallowed. “You’re helping me because I have sad eyes?”

  A smile was in his voice when he responded. “I kind of like you a little, too.”

  “Just a little,” she teased, feeling light and buzzed, though that was more from the stress and lack of sleep than from the schnapps.

  “Not everyone’s trying to get something from you,” he said again. “Sometimes people want to help just to help.”

  And maybe life wasn’t a Disney movie, and maybe he was just using her problems to forget about his own, and maybe that was all there was to it. But she’d take it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  ALICE

  August 4, 2018

  Six days after the kidnapping

  “Who’s coming in?” Alice asked, dumb with the surprise of it.

  “Sterling Burke,” Chief Deakin repeated, drawing out the name. “The man you’ve been salivating to drag into your interrogation room for the past two days.”

  She blinked, trying to get the words to make sense as she followed Deakin across the bull pen. “How?”

  Deakin shrugged one shoulder. “Volunteered himself, actually.”

  “What? Why now?” The thoughts that had been encased in molasses moments earlier broke free. “He just called you? Out of nowhere?”

  Nakamura bumped into her when she stopped just outside the chief’s office. Deakin turned when he realized they weren’t still trailing him.

  “Are you really complaining, Garner?”

  She shook her head, though her palms were slick with sweat. “No. It’s strange, though, isn’t it?”

  “Does it matter why he’s coming in? He’s coming in,” Nakamura said so that only she could hear.

  “Understanding why a person does something is more important than what they actually do,” she snapped, striding to her desk.

  What nerve had they struck? The search warrant? Or maybe it was that they knew Trudy was missing. Alice had already set uniforms on the task of tracking her down; if it took longer than a couple of hours, she’d take over herself.

  Whatever it was, Hollis wanted to throw a distraction at the detectives, as something shiny to look at, while she fixed the problem. That something shiny just happened to be her husband.

  Nakamura tipped his chin toward the door. “Well, I guess we shall see shortly, won’t we?”

  She nodded once, her eyes on Sterling Burke as he walked in, watching him like she would a snake apt to bite.

  Sterling was of surprisingly average build—only an inch or two taller than her own five feet eight inches—and had a delicate bone structure that should have made him appear petite. On a less confident man, it might have. Instead, the judge carried himself with a presence that took up space.

  He was also fit in a way that spoke of daily workouts in an air-conditioned gym, and his hair was thick silver, which gleamed beneath fluorescent lights that turned others’ greasy and limp.

  Some mi
ght call him handsome, or dignified, at the very least. But it wasn’t his classic good looks that drew the eye—it was the power, pure and captivating, that was draped over him like a cloak he wore with decades of familiarity.

  The entire energy of the room shifted—tightened—when he came in. Young officers tucked in loose shirts and touched nervous fingers to scruff that had grown out of control. Older detectives played at being disinterested but gravitated toward where the chief stood waiting to greet the judge, their bodies pulled like magnets unable to resist.

  She watched it all. She watched the way his palm slipped easily into the chief’s as if they were old friends. She watched the judge’s gaze traverse the room, landing on each face before dismissing it. She watched the way his smile came and went without disrupting the laugh lines near his eyes.

  “We’ll set you up in one of our rooms, Judge,” Deakin was saying as he walked the man over. Or, really, the man walked him over, a hand firmly on the chief’s shoulder. He dominated this interaction far more than Deakin ever would. “But if you’re not comfortable in there, just say the word.”

  “I’m sure it will be fine,” the judge said, turning toward Alice and Nakamura. Though the reassurance was benign, there was something dark in his tone.

  “Our best are on the case, Your Honor,” Deakin said, nodding at them. “Detective Nakamura.”

  Nakamura reached out a hand.

  “And Detective Garner.”

  She nodded instead of holding out her palm, and the judge accepted it easily, his eyes on her face. “Ah. The new recruit,” he said, his voice smooth Southern molasses.

  The new recruit. Welcome to St. Pete. It’s like a family that way, isn’t it? He remembered her from that party months ago when they’d first met. It was a good skill to have. Recognizing faces. It spoke of the way he cataloged memories, slotting them into different files in his brain. Useful. Not useful.

  “Judge Burke,” she said, forcing the honorary out of her mouth. “Thank you for coming in. We just have a few questions.”

  “Of course.” His face turned serious. “Whatever I can do to help move this investigation forward.”

  There was a threat behind the words, a right hook followed by an implicit jab that they weren’t doing their jobs so he had to step in to help. The tone may have been couched in congeniality, but there was no mistaking the intention.

  Nakamura led the way to the nicest interrogation room, the one they saved for innocent witnesses and well-meaning tattletales. The vent was kept clean of dust, and the walls were painted eggshell instead of stark white. She wished they were using a different one. This one was designed to put people at ease, and she wanted him on edge.

  Sterling settled into the uncomfortable metal chair, thumbing open the button of his thousand-dollar suit as he did so. “I’m sorry it’s so late, Detectives. I hope I’m not keeping you. My calendar was, unfortunately, impossible to clear.”

  Impossible to clear until it wasn’t. Trudy. It had to be Trudy. Where was she? Why did they not want the detectives to look into her whereabouts? Why had the teenager disappeared in the middle of a murder investigation?

  Was she running away, hiding? What did she know?

  It itched at Alice’s brain.

  She tapped her fingers on the table while Nakamura took up his usual position against the wall.

  Interrogations were battlefields. With the dumb, the lazy, the boring, it was easy to lay traps, to know how to play it. With the cunning, it was harder. There were personas to adopt, ones they kept as weapons in their arsenals. There were strategies to take, forged in countless wars.

  The most basic was good cop, bad cop; it was a cliché for a reason. But it never seemed to work with her and Nakamura. The good cop fit him. But the bad-cop role felt too familiar, too welcome, for her to really embrace it. They’d learned early on it wasn’t for them.

  Instead, Nakamura would take the observer role, distancing himself from the action. He could read a room easily, but only when he wasn’t engaging. She, on the other hand, thrived when she was parrying. Body language laid bare so many secrets, but it was best to read them when she was up close, where she could see the pearls of sweat form, where she could watch each muscle tick, where she could feel the way fingers tangled together to soothe themselves.

  Sterling Burke was confident and at ease, with just a hint of sadness wrinkling his brows. He wanted to help; he was being honest. It was the story he told through his open palms, through his relaxed shoulders, through his wide, sincere eyes.

  Trust me, I’m telling the truth.

  He looked between them. “What can I help with, Detectives?”

  Alice felt the chief’s eyes from behind the mirror. If she screwed this up, she had only the amount of time it would take for Deakin to walk the short distance between the observation room and this one.

  “You can start by telling us where you were the evening of July thirty-first and the morning of August first,” she started. It’s what she would have asked anyone.

  The judge didn’t react, beyond a quick glance up as if trying to remember something. “I had dinner at the club,” he started slowly in that drawl of his that rubbed her nerves raw. “And then came home at about eleven. I went to bed around midnight and woke at five thirty the next morning, as always.”

  It was almost the exact window Birdie had given them for time of death. If they pressed for an alibi, Sterling would just direct them to Hollis.

  The question had been a softball anyway. A man in Sterling’s position would have an airtight alibi for when his granddaughter went missing, no matter if he was involved or not.

  She needed to throw him.

  “What about family members?” She watched him, watched the creases next to his eyes deepen.

  “Excuse me?”

  It was a warning: Don’t tread into that water.

  Then his eyes shifted to the mirrored window in case his message wasn’t clear. He could end this at any time.

  “Extended, of course,” Alice said, as if that’s what she meant all along, as if she hadn’t been talking about the vipers that called the Burke mansion home. “Any long-lost, disgruntled cousins? An uncle who’s bitter over your success?”

  The question seemed to genuinely surprise him. His chin tipped up and his eyelids slid lower while his gaze tracked to the side.

  “No,” he finally said, but slowly. “My wife had a sister, but she passed years ago. No children.”

  A basic family tree had told them that days ago, but it gave her an interesting read on him. This was what he looked like telling the truth.

  “Is there anyone you can think of who would want to hurt Ruby? Perhaps a business acquaintance? One who got too close, too often?” She let the suggestion coat her voice.

  He shut down again, the mask slipping firmly back into place. His eyes were still sharp and focused on her face, though. It was a reminder that he was reading her, too. “If I suspected anyone, I surely would have let you know sooner than this, Detective.”

  “Would you have?” She tipped her head to the side, doubtful. She moved on before he could add anything. “Do you know where your granddaughter is?”

  There was anger in his eyes, but he was too controlled to really let it slip out. This was the nerve they had struck. Here it was.

  “She’s staying with a family friend,” Sterling said, as smooth and unruffled as he’d been earlier. He was still directing this conversation. Or at least he thought he was. “The media has become unbearable. We didn’t want to put her through any more distress than she’s already had to endure.”

  It made sense, but that didn’t mean it was true. If it was as simple as that, Sterling wouldn’t be here, wouldn’t be forced to answer their questions so that they wouldn’t look too hard in any other direction.

  “We’ll need the name of that friend,” Alice said. Trudy wouldn’t be there. All that giving them an address would do was buy the Burkes time, but she had to ask anyw
ay.

  “My secretary will send it to you.”

  They were parrying, but without any heat. The need to strike out, to draw blood, was burning in her veins, and Alice knew she needed to control the fire so she could use it, so that it wouldn’t make her sloppy.

  “And what exactly was their relationship like? Ruby and Trudy’s.”

  It wasn’t blood that she drew with the question, but it put him off-balance anyway; it forced him back a step to reassess the field.

  His mind worked; she could actually see it. His lashes drifted down against his cheeks a beat too long as if he wanted to shield the confusion he knew his eyes would reveal. Why was she asking about Trudy? Surely the girl wasn’t an active target in the investigation.

  “I don’t know what you’re implying, Detective” was what he finally said. It was a stalling tactic.

  “I’m not implying anything, Sterling,” she said, opening her palms up to him. Look. I can be sincere, too. “Would you say the girls were close?”

  There was a hesitancy in his manner that hadn’t been there before, not even when she’d asked about the family as a whole. He didn’t have a prepared answer for this. “You could say that.”

  “Would you say it?” she pressed.

  “You would have to ask their mothers or my wife,” he said. “They would have a better idea.”

  It was the perfect opening. “So you weren’t close with the girls?”

  “We’re a close family, Detective,” he said. His body language was the opposite of what it should be. He tensed when telling the truth, relaxed when he lied. It was a sign of someone more comfortable with deceit. She knew it well.

  “But you don’t know if the girls liked each other?”

  Sterling shifted. “The softer things they shared with their grandmother.”