by Dale Mayer
“Like you just said, her sexuality was open,” Vince interrupted her musings. “Maybe she was trying that one before she got married, or that was a secret part of her life she didn’t want anybody to know about.”
“She definitely needed to try anything and everything before it was too late,” Raina said.
“This wasn’t the first time for them,” Reyes said. “The other woman was crying and telling Reana how she needed to confess, to tell the truth about her feelings. We had quite the blowup. Then I just walked. It’s taken me a long time to realize, as I look back on the relationship, the little signs I hadn’t seen. Once I realized what was going on, it made sense to me. But, for whatever reason, your sister wasn’t prepared to acknowledge where her sexuality lay. And potentially she was happy with either sex. But she loved that woman. She didn’t love me.”
Raina swallowed hard. “I guess the next answer I need to know is …” She searched his handsome face. “Who was that other woman?”
*
He should have realized that would be the question uppermost in everyone’s minds. The trouble was, he didn’t know. “I’d never seen her before,” Reyes said. “And her name wasn’t mentioned in the short discussion we all had.”
“Of course not,” Vince said. “That would be way too easy. Because anybody else in this lovely sordid love triangle will look good for murder. We need to find the other woman.”
Reyes nodded. “I guess I never contemplated that she might be involved in the murder. I don’t know if your sister was still together with her or not.”
“I can’t say,” Raina said, “because I didn’t know about her in the first place.”
“What did she look like?” Vince asked.
“She was in bed, mostly nude, that’s what I saw.” Reyes’s tone was short. “Her hair was long, brunette, wavy. She was a classic beauty, long aquiline nose, high cheekbones.” He paused, thinking about it. “Honestly, outside of trying to figure out what the hell was going on, she wasn’t the focus of my attention. It was my fiancée in bed with her. That’s where my attention was,” he said.
“Understandable,” Raina said. “But that description doesn’t ring a bell. I can’t place a woman like that.”
“Have you seen her since?” Vince asked.
“No,” Reyes said. “I hadn’t seen her before. I didn’t recognize her, and I haven’t seen her since. But it’s not like I stuck around.”
Silence fell on the three of them as they waited for the cops to come. When they did, all three of them were taken to separate interview rooms.
Reyes walked into the small room to find his lawyer right behind him. He smiled and said, “I know it’s a job to you, but I really didn’t have anything to do with this.”
The lawyer nodded. “I believe you. I’ve also known Ice for a long time, and she believes you. It’s good enough for me. Now let’s get this over with.”
They took their seats, and the two detectives who had accosted them at the restaurant came in. Reyes answered all their questions, but they didn’t ask anything more than what he’d already answered at the restaurant.
“I understand you had an ugly breakup with the deceased?” This officer’s name was Jacob Laudner.
Answering Detective Laudner’s question, Reyes said, “Depends on what you mean by ugly. I found her in bed with another woman, yes.”
At that, the two officers lifted their heads from writing their notes.
He nodded. “Yes, you heard me. She was in bed with another woman.”
“According to two of her coworkers and your own mother, you had an affair, and she found you out.”
“That’s the story Reana told everyone. She had to save face as to why we broke up, and I had left town, so she was free to say whatever the hell she wanted.”
“We’ve already spoken to your mother, and your mother backs up Reana’s story.”
“That’s nice,” Reyes said steadily. “My mother and Reana are good friends My mother would probably believe anything Reana said to her. The truth of the matter is, it was all lies. But then that’s what Reana did well.”
Detective Laudner settled back in his chair. “So you’re saying something completely different than what everyone else is saying about Reana?”
Reyes knew he was on difficult ground. “I don’t know about that. Reana was one of those people who only let a certain number of people see who she really was. She was all about appearances.”
The other detective, Detective Burgess, asked, “Can anybody collaborate?”
“Collaborate what? That she was having an affair? Well, that would be the other woman in bed, but, no, I don’t know who she is. I’d never seen her before that night, and I haven’t seen her since.”
Detective Burgess studied Reyes’s face for a long moment. “So you’re creating a fictional character to confuse the issue.”
Suddenly tired of the whole thing, realizing this was just the tip of the iceberg, Reyes said, “Hardly. I’m sure, if you contact the security company for Reana’s apartment building, you’d see this woman coming and going. For all I know, she lived there with her.”
“That must have made you angry, to have found her in bed with another woman.”
“So you’re saying that, two years ago, I was really angry. I left for all that time, and, in the meantime, I plotted her death?” Reyes asked in astonishment. “I come back to town with my boss to my family’s company, and I kill her the first night I arrive?”
“Did you?”
Reyes rubbed his temple, trying to marshal his thoughts. “I did not kill Reana. I saw her for five minutes at the store yesterday, and that’s it. You’ve already asked me about a time line for my whereabouts last night, and I gave it to you.”
“For all I know, you slipped out of the house, killed her and sneaked back in with both your host and your boss as your witnesses.”
He stared at them in surprise. “Wow, that’s an awful lot of effort for somebody in bed with another woman two years ago.”
“She was your fiancée. She duped you. Not only having an affair but with a woman. How does a man compete with that?”
“He doesn’t.” Reyes shook his head. “The thing is, I went there to break up with her. So finding her in bed was just an easy way out. It was a great save on my part. What could have been an ugly scene was an ugly scene but for a whole different reason.” His tone had turned hard. “I walked out with a sense of relief that I had a clear conscience, and I hadn’t had to hurt her.”
“So now you’re saying you went there to break up with her.”
“I would have said it earlier, but I didn’t get a chance. All you wanted to know about was why we broke up. The reason was, I found her in bed, but it would have happened anyway,” he said. “I went there to break up with her.”
“And why were you breaking up with her?”
“Because it was like living in a soapbox. It didn’t matter what the issue was, there was drama, there were fights, there was turmoil nonstop.”
The officers asked him several more questions, but he had no other information. He hadn’t had any contact with her, hadn’t had any phone calls with her, hadn’t seen her in the ensuing years. “And, no, I haven’t seen her sister or her mother in all that time either. Hell, I haven’t seen my own brother and my parents in the past two years either.”
“And what about the woman you say you saw in bed with her? Can you give us a description?”
He nodded and gave the same description he’d given Raina. “Somebody has to know about her,” he said heavily. “And, for all we know, she’s the one who may have killed Reana.”
“Bloody convenient,” Detective Burgess said.
“Not very,” Reyes said. “I came here for a couple days to see my family and to help my boss. Other than that, I wouldn’t have come at all.”
Detective Laudner stood up. “The interview is over for the moment. But don’t leave town.”
Reyes stared at him. “A
re you serious? I have to go back to Texas, back to work.”
“You don’t get to leave town until we say so,” Detective Burgess said. “And I don’t care how much pull your boss has. Or your lawyer, for that matter.”
Reyes turned to look at his lawyer, who was busy writing down notes.
The lawyer stood and said, “We’ll see about that. As far as hassling my client goes, you’re done with that too.”
“We didn’t hassle him,” Detective Burgess said. “All we did was interview him.”
“The interview has ended,” the lawyer said with a hard smile. “We’ll discuss the rest as you try to do an investigation.”
Reyes stood. “Do I get to know anything about what happened to Reana?”
“You probably already know,” Detective Burgess said. “Why don’t you tell us?”
Reyes opened his mouth to argue, but the detectives walked out. He turned to look at his lawyer and asked, “Can they do that? I don’t even know how she died. For all I know it was a suicide.”
“She was beaten up and shot,” the lawyer said. “The autopsy is underway right now. And that’s unusual in itself. Normally it takes a couple days. It’s a busy morgue. The coroners are beyond busy with multiple fatalities in this city. But someone pulled strings to give Reana priority. We have to wait for the results.”
Reyes nodded thinking he likely had Ice to thank for the speediness of the autopsy. “I’d like to know as soon as anybody else does,” he said. “Because I’m pretty sure Ice and her team will want to investigate this.”
“They may want to,” the lawyer said, “but the best thing for you is to keep your hands out of it.”
Reyes gave him a hard look. “And, if you were in my position, would you?”
The lawyer gave a bark of a laugh. “Hell no. I’d be making damn sure I sorted this out because I couldn’t trust the police. Sometimes they’re good, and sometimes they’re just damn sloppy. If they can find a way to nail this on your head, they wouldn’t bother searching for another one. To them, you’re looking like a very nice suspect, and they aren’t putting in too much effort to find anybody else.”
Reyes nodded. “That’s what I mean. I need to know everything they know and investigate this myself.”
“What you need to do,” the lawyer said, “is find the woman’s lover. Doesn’t mean they still have to be involved the last two years, but, as soon as you can confirm what you saw, it’ll shake things up a bit. It doesn’t take your neck out of the noose, but it does throw in other likely suspects.”
“The woman was bawling her eyes out back then,” Reyes said as they walked through the hallway. “And she was devastated at Reana’s anger at seeing me. I think, more than that, Reana wouldn’t publicly acknowledge what they had between them. It was a secret, and that meant it was under the table, something she was ashamed of. The other woman wanted Reana to be honest and to confess her love, but she wouldn’t do it.”
“It sounds like Reana might not have loved her any more than she loved you. Did you consider that?”
Reyes stopped and thought about it, then said, “You’re right. I can’t know for sure that she did. The bottom line is, I don’t think Reana loved anybody but Reana.”
Chapter 7
Raina may have thought being at the police station was hard, but standing over her dead sister’s body had to be one of the worst moments of her life. She’d waited until she could see her sister, not wanting there to be any mistake before she spoke to her mother. Yet standing outside her mother’s front door, she knew the worst was yet to come.
She had refused to let the guys come with her. They’d wanted to give her silent support, but she knew nobody could help her through this next hour.
She knocked on the door, but there was no answer. She knocked again, then pulled out her phone and called her mother. When there was still no answer, she stood, wondering what to do. She had a key to the house, but her mother was one of those who didn’t take kindly to anyone accessing her private space. Like her sister.
Raina sat down on the front steps. A brick wall enclosed the house all the way around, except for the four porch steps that went down to the sidewalk. There she tried again to call. And got no answer. She couldn’t help but panic at the thought of what was going on. Had her mother already learned about Reana’s fate? That would explain why Mom was completely unavailable. But it also didn’t say much about what her mother might be doing.
Raina pulled out her keys, unlocked the front door and stepped in. “Mom? Are you home?”
No answer.
She called out again and again as she raced through the lower floor. No sign of her. Hitting the stairs to go up two at a time, she ran to the master bedroom. The door was shut. Hating to know what was on the other side, but knowing she had no choice, she knocked on the door hard. Still no answer. She opened the door and stepped in.
Her mother lay across the bed, her body lifeless. Raina moved to her mother’s side, checking for a pulse on her neck. There was one, but it was incredibly faint. She grabbed her phone and called 9-1-1 as she tried to rouse her mother.
“Mom! Mom, wake up. Wake up.”
But there was no response. Her mother’s body flopped limply on the bed. The 9-1-1 call went through immediately, but Raina had to answer so many damn questions.
The dispatcher said, “We’ve already dispatched somebody to that address. I do need to get more information from you.”
Raina sagged on the bed beside her mother. “Just hurry, please.”
The woman continued to ask her questions: who she was, what her relationship was with the other woman, and what her home address was. By the time she was done, she could hear sirens coming up the street. “They’re here. They’re here,” she said and hung up the phone.
She raced down the stairs and opened the door as the ambulance came to a stop. She called out before the first paramedic reached her. “She’s upstairs in the main bedroom. She’s unconscious. I don’t know what’s wrong.”
The two men rushed past her, heading to her mother’s side. She stood at the front door, hating the thought that her mother might have tried to commit suicide. She’d never been suicidal, as far as Raina knew, but it was the first thought that had crossed her mind. Somebody might have told her about Reana. And, if that was the case, Raina could definitely see her mother taking steps to stay close to her favorite daughter.
Raina didn’t begrudge them their relationship—or rather she tried not to. She’d been happy for the two of them, but that hadn’t minimized the hurt Raina felt.
Her mother had understood her sister more than Raina ever could. And that had just been so wrong. She and Reana were twins. They should have understood each other. She thought twins were supposed to finish each other’s sentences, to understood everything about how the other one operated. But somewhere along early childhood, they’d taken divergent paths and had ended up so vastly different that they might as well have been strangers, speaking different languages.
Raina slowly walked upstairs and into the bedroom, watching the men work on her mother. Her hand went across her mouth instinctively, wrapping her arm around her stomach as she leaned against the wall out of the way.
One of the men asked her, “Do you know what happened?”
“No. I just got here a few minutes ago,” she said. “I came by the house and found her like this.”
“Is there a reason why she would have tried to commit suicide?”
Her voice broke as she said, “We just found out that my twin sister was murdered sometime in the last twelve hours.”
Both of the men stopped.
She shrugged, tears coming to the corner of her eyes. “I only found out at about eight this morning. I came here to break the news to her. I just came back from the police station, confirming it was my sister’s body.” She swallowed hard, wiping at her eyes. “And this is how I found Mom.”
“So I presume somebody else told her?”
“
I don’t know,” she said in a broken whisper.
Her mother was quickly strapped onto a gurney and wheeled out. They carried her down the stairs and put her in the ambulance.
“Do you know for certain that she tried to commit suicide?” she asked one of the men but only got a shrug.
Two police officers walked in at that moment. They did a quick search of her mother’s bedroom and the adjoining bathroom. They came out with several pill bottles; all were empty.
She clapped a hand over her mouth as she stared at the empty bottles. She shook her head. “I don’t even know where those are from,” she said. “As far as I know, she wasn’t on any medications.”
And yet, the bottles had her mother’s name on them. A sob broke free, and Raina didn’t know what to do anymore. She sank down on a chair beside the bed as the police continued to search.
“There wasn’t a letter though?” one of the officers asked. “What’s going on?”
“Maybe you should check with the two detectives I spent an hour with today. My sister was murdered sometime during the night,” she said, sobbing. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I just can’t answer any more questions right now.”
And suddenly she wasn’t alone anymore. Reyes sat beside her, his arms wrapped around her waist as he picked her up and sat her on his lap. He just held her close.
He told the police officers, “You’ll have to talk to Detectives Laudner and Burgess. We just came from the station, answering their questions. Apparently her sister was beaten and shot sometime during the night. Raina’s already traumatized from that. Finding her mother like this, she needs more time.”
The officers nodded in compassion. “There isn’t a suicide note, so we have to treat this as suspicious. Can you tell me if she had any suicidal tendencies? Was she dealing with any depression or any major trauma, financial ruin, a breakup, anything?”