I felt an urgency to get there, but I realized my route would take me to within a block of where Marla’d told me Derek Cutter, the young man who’d gotten her pregnant, lived. He was someone I wanted to talk to, and this might be my best chance at catching him.
So I hung a left and pulled up in front of a brick duplex, a simple box of a building, constructed without a single nod to any kind of architectural style. One apartment on the first floor, another on the second. Marla had said Derek shared the upper apartment with some other students. I parked at the curb, then went up and rang the bell for the top unit.
I heard someone running downstairs, and then the door opened. It was a young woman, maybe twenty, in a tracksuit, her hair pulled back into a ponytail.
“Yeah?” she said.
“Hi,” I said. “I was looking for Derek.”
Her mouth made a big “O.” “Oh, yeah, right, he said he called you late last night, after all the shit that went down. He’ll be glad to see you.”
“Wait, I think—”
But she was already heading back up, taking the steps two at a time, shouting, “Derek! Your dad’s here!” She must have turned right around when she got to the top, because a second later she was flying past me. “Just go on up. I gotta do my run.”
I climbed the stairs, and as I reached the door to the second-floor apartment it opened, and a man I guessed was Derek looked startled to see me.
“You’re not my dad,” he said. He looked thin in his T-shirt and boxers, his legs coming out of them like two white sticks. He had a patchy beard, and black hair hanging over his eyes.
“No, I’m sorry, your girlfriend, she just assumed. I didn’t have a chance to set her straight.”
“She’s not my girlfriend; she’s a roommate, and, like, who are you?”
“Marla’s cousin,” I said. “I’m David Harwood.”
“Marla?” he said. “You’re Marla Pickens’s cousin?”
“You got a minute?”
“Uh, sure, yeah, come on in.”
He created a space on the couch by clearing away several books and a laptop. I sat down and he perched himself on the end of a coffee table that was littered with half a dozen empty beer cans.
“Why are you here about Marla?” he asked.
When his roommate mentioned something about “all the shit that went down,” I’d assumed it had to do with the Gaynor murder, and Marla’s possible involvement. It had made the news.
“You haven’t heard?”
“I’ve heard about what went down on campus last night, but that hasn’t got anything to do with Marla, does it?”
Now it appeared neither of us was up to speed, but on totally different events. “What happened at Thackeray?” I asked.
“Fucking security killed one of my friends, that’s what happened,” Derek said. “Shot him in the goddamn head.”
“I don’t know anything about this,” I admitted. “Who was your friend?”
“Mason. They’re saying he was the guy.”
“What guy?”
“Who was attacking girls at the college. There’s no fucking way. He wasn’t like that.”
“What’s his last name?”
“Helt. Mason Helt. He was a really good guy. He was in the drama program with me. He was really good. They say he was attacking one of the security guards, who was, like, bait or something, and then he got shot. It’s nuts.”
“I’m sorry about your friend,” I said. “That’s why you called your dad?”
Derek nodded. “Yeah, just because, you know, I kind of freaked out and I just needed to talk. I was surprised when Patsy said it was my dad at the door, because I didn’t tell him to come out or anything.” He fixed his eyes on me more closely. “You look familiar to me.”
I had a feeling why that might be, but I didn’t want to lead the witness. No sense in Derek’s taking a dislike to me if it didn’t have to happen.
“I don’t think we’ve ever met,” I said honestly.
“You were one of the pack,” he said. “One of the ones who made my life hell. I recognize you.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’d have been one of them.”
It was a long time ago. Seven, eight years? The Langley murders. Father, mother, son, all killed in their home one night. Derek and his parents lived next door, and for a period of a day or two, Derek was a prime suspect. The real killer was found and Derek completely exonerated, but it had to be a scarring experience.
“Every once in a while,” he said, “people still look at me funny. Like they think, Maybe it wasn’t that other guy. Maybe it really was him. Thanks for being a part of that. For putting my picture in the paper. For writing stuff that wasn’t true.”
I could have told him I’d been doing my job. That it wasn’t the press that arrested him, but the police. That the media didn’t just decide one day to pick on him, but that we were following the story where it led. That the Standard wouldn’t have been doing its duty if it had decided not to be part of the media frenzy, no matter how short-lived it was. That sometimes innocent people get caught up in current events, and they get hurt, and that’s just the way it is.
I didn’t think he’d be interested in hearing any of that.
“It’s why my parents split up,” Derek said.
“I didn’t know about that,” I said, although Marla had mentioned something about it.
“Yeah, like, for a while, it looked like maybe they could ride it out. But that didn’t happen. My parents, they couldn’t patch it all together. So my mom moved away, and they had to sell the house, and everything pretty much went to complete shit, thanks very much. If I could have gone to college someplace other than Promise Falls, I would have, but I couldn’t afford it.”
For what it was worth, I said, “I’m not here as a reporter. I don’t even work as one anymore. And the Standard doesn’t even exist.”
“So, what then? Why are you here? What’s going on with Marla?”
I told him.
“Jesus,” he said. “That’s totally fucked-up. So they think she killed this woman and ran off with her kid?”
“That’s not what Marla says happened, but I’d bet it’s what the police think.”
“So what are you doing?”
“Trying to help. Asking around. Hoping I’ll find out something that makes it clear she didn’t have anything to do with it.”
Derek shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you. We’ve talked maybe half a dozen times since she lost the baby, ran into her a couple of times, but that’s it.”
“Did you know about the earlier incident, when she tried to smuggle a baby out of the hospital?”
He nodded. “She told me about it. She said she just kind of lost her mind for a second. But that was pretty crazy of her.”
“How’d you meet?”
His story matched Marla’s. They’d struck up a conversation in a Promise Falls bar, hooked up. Saw each other pretty seriously for a while.
“She was one of the weirdest girls I ever went out with,” he said.
“How so?”
“Well, first of all, she has this thing? Where she doesn’t exactly recognize you?”
“Face blindness,” I said.
“Yeah. I thought she was making it up at first, but then I Googled it and found out it was a real thing. And then I saw an episode of 60 Minutes where they talked all about it. More people have it than you might think. Brad Pitt even says he thinks he’s got it. Every time I’d meet Marla, I’d walk up to her, and she’d be looking at me, like she thought it was me but she wasn’t quite sure, and then I’d say, ‘Hey, it’s me,’ and she’d hear my voice, and then she’d be sure. It was really strange. She told me to always wear my hair the same way. Like, hanging like this, you know? That if I combed it back or something, which I would never do, because I don’t really do anything at all with my hair, she’d have a harder time recognizing me. Or, like, wear a plaid shirt. I wear a lot of plaid shirts. She said those kin
ds of visual cues really worked for her.”
“I know,” I said. “The family started noticing it when she was a teenager. Tell me about when you found out she was pregnant.”
“She told me she’d missed her period. It was like a bombshell, you know?”
“How’d you take the news?”
“Honestly? I got off the phone—she didn’t tell me in person—and I barfed my guts out. I used, you know, protection and everything, almost every time.”
“Almost,” I said.
He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I know.”
“How’d your parents take it?”
“I didn’t tell my mom. Just my dad. He’s kind of a traditional guy. He said I had to accept responsibility, and do whatever I had to do, and he’d be there to support me. And once we kind of knew where this was all going, he’d bring my mom into the loop. So, you know, I told Marla I would stand by her, help her any way I could. That it was her decision to make, whatever she did.”
“And she decided to have the baby.”
“Yeah, which, if I’m telling the truth, was not exactly what I was hoping she would do. But like my dad said, it was her call. She said she wanted to have the kid; she really wanted to have a baby, said it would give her a focus, that it would really help her get her life together, right? And she said it was up to me how involved I wanted to be, but I was never sure whether she meant that, or if she was trying to guilt-trip me into stepping up and asking her to marry me or something like that, which I did not want to do. Marry her. I just wasn’t ready for anything like that.”
“Sure,” I said. “You’re still in school and all.”
“This is my last year. I graduate later this month. I didn’t even realize for a long time how much older than me she was. I thought she was maybe a year or two, but she was, like, seven or something. It’s like I’ve got this thing for older women.”
“What?” I said.
“Mrs. Langley?”
Right. The neighbor who’d been murdered years ago. Derek had been rumored to have had a sexual relationship with her. It was one of the things that had made him, briefly, a suspect.
He shook his head. “We don’t have to get into that, do we?”
“No.”
“Anyway, I started thinking maybe it wasn’t a guilt trip, that Marla really didn’t want me that involved, and part of that may be that her mom didn’t like me.”
“You met Agnes?”
“I never actually did, but Marla told me she wasn’t pleased. She runs the hospital, right? I mean, you’d know, if Marla’s your cousin. Her mom would be your aunt, right? She’s a bigwig around town. And I’m the son of a guy who runs a landscaping company. You could just guess how much she loved that.”
I felt as though I’d been dipped into a bucket of shame. Derek had my aunt pretty much nailed.
“And then,” I said, “Marla had the baby.”
The young man nodded, and then began to tear up. “It was so weird. I was really sorry I got her pregnant, and didn’t want her to have the kid, and didn’t want to have the responsibility, right? But when I found out the baby—it was a little girl, but you probably know that—died when it was, like, coming out, it kind of hit me. I never expected that to happen. But it hit me real hard.”
He sniffed, used the back of his hand to wipe away a tear. “All of a sudden I was thinking about what she might have grown up to be, what she’d have been like, whether she’d have looked like me and all that kind of shit, and I was so shook up about it that I kind of, you know, went to pieces.”
“What happened?”
“I moved back in with my dad. We’re pretty close. It was a good thing we hadn’t told Mom anything. I mean, it would have killed her to think she had a granddaughter, and that she died right away.” He swallowed. “Marla told me about holding her. Holding the baby when she was dead. She said she was in kind of a daze, but she looked at all her little fingers and her nose and all and said she was really beautiful, even though she wasn’t breathing. She even had a name chosen for her. Agatha Beatrice Pickens. Agatha sounded sort of like her mother’s name, but was different, she said.”
He wiped his eyes again.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “These things can affect you in ways you never expect.”
Derek Cutter nodded. “I guess.”
We both heard the sound of a car door closing. Derek got off the table and looked out the window.
“Oh, shit,” he said. “I know that guy.”
I joined him at the window. I knew that guy, too.
“Detective Duckworth,” I said.
“Yeah. He was the one who thought I’d done it when our neighbors got killed. What’s he doing here?”
I could think of two possible reasons: Duckworth wanted to talk to him about Marla Pickens for the same reasons I had. Or maybe he wanted to ask him about his dead friend Mason Helt.
“I hate that guy,” Derek said. “Can you tell him I’m not here?”
“I can’t do that, Derek.”
“Great.”
“I want to ask you one last quick question.”
“Fine, whatever.”
“I want your gut feeling about Marla.”
“Gut feeling?”
“Can you imagine her killing Rosemary Gaynor?”
He thought a moment. “My gut?”
“Yeah.”
“One night we were at this thing at the college—this was before she got pregnant, I think. And there’s a whole bunch of kids around, and this guy was really giving shit to this girl about her talking to some other guy or some shit like that, and you could see she was really intimidated, looking real scared, and he went to raise his hand to her—I don’t know if he’d have actually hit her, but you never know—and Marla, who’s been watching all of this, grabs this beer bottle and throws it right at this asshole’s head. We were only like six feet away, so even if her aim hadn’t been great, she had a good chance of hitting him. And she does, right on his fucking nose. Lucky thing the bottle didn’t break or the guy might have lost an eye, but his nose started bleeding like crazy. And the guy looks at Marla, like maybe he’s going to come at her, and she shouts, ‘Yeah, I’m right here!’ Like she was just daring him to try something. Swear to God, you had to see it to believe it.”
“Jesus,” I said.
Downstairs, the doorbell rang.
“So when you ask me what my gut thinks about Marla, I don’t know if there’s anything she could do that would surprise me,” he said.
FORTY-THREE
DUCKWORTH thought, I’m an idiot.
He’d just pulled up in front of the house where he’d been told by the Thackeray College registration office that he could find Derek Cutter, when he realized what he should have asked Sarita Gomez’s landlord, Mrs. Selfridge, she of the magnificent banana bread.
When Duckworth had left the station that morning he’d dragooned a female officer and put her on the phones to call nursing homes in and around Promise Falls to try to find where Sarita worked. It had occurred to him that, even if they were to call the right place, someone might deny employing a person here illegally.
It was on the way to interview Derek that it hit him.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he said to himself.
He pulled right over to the curb, a couple of blocks away from Derek’s address, and got out his notebook and phone. He found Mrs. Selfridge’s number and dialed.
She answered on the third ring. He identified himself.
“Oh, hello, Detective,” she said. “If you’re wondering if Sarita’s come back, she hasn’t. She’s paid up to the end of the month, but I’m thinking I should start looking for a new tenant. I got a feeling she’s flown the coop for good.”
“You might be right,” Duckworth said. “I wanted to thank you again for that banana bread. I was wondering, would you be willing to part with the recipe? And if you say no, I’m pretty sure I can get a subpoena.”
That made her laugh. �
�I don’t even have it written down. I just do it out of my head. But I guess I could come up with something.”
“And there’s another thing,” he said. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this yesterday. Your phone, that Sarita used?”
“Yes?”
“I’d like you to go through the call history. Calls in and out.”
“I could do that,” she said. “You want me to do that before or after I get you the recipe?”
“Before,” Duckworth said, with some regret. “Sarita probably made, and received, calls from the nursing home where she worked. Once we have that number, we’ll know her employer. And there may be other numbers, too, that might help me find her.” He paused. “And when I do, I can ask her whether she’s going to keep the room.”
“Oh, I’d really appreciate that.”
“You have the card I left with you?” he asked. She said yes. “Okay, if you’d take down those numbers and e-mail them to me, I sure would appreciate it.”
Mrs. Selfridge said she would get right on it, and Duckworth said good-bye.
Idiot, he thought again. He wanted to plead overwork. Juggling too many cases at once. A murder, a fatal shooting at Thackeray, strange goings-on in the night at Five Mountains. Dead squirrels, for God’s sake.
And then there was the home front. How the hell did his son end up working for that asshole Randall Finley? That son of a bitch couldn’t be trusted. There had to be a reason he’d hired his son. Sure, Trevor would be a good hire for any company, but you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to drive a truck. Finley could have hired anyone for a job like that. Why Trevor?
While he waited for Sarita’s landlady to get those numbers, he’d continue on to Derek Cutter’s residence. The young man’s name had surfaced twice in the last day, in two separate investigations. Not only had he been identified as the man who’d gotten Marla Pickens pregnant, he was also reported to be a friend of Mason Helt, the student Clive Duncomb had shot in the head.
Duckworth had much to discuss with Derek.
He was about to put the car in drive when his cell rang.
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