by Cate Holahan
She withdrew her notebook and pen from a jacket pocket with an apologetic smile, as though she were a census worker forced to complete a survey. He stepped back, allowing her into the house. Behind him, a mouthwash-colored pool sparkled in its toothpaste setting.
Gabby tapped her pen against the pad. “So, your name is …”
The man headed into the kitchen. “Andrew Baird.” He crossed the gray hardwood floors to a white island that Gabby realized held all the necessary appliances, including a Keurig machine. He pointed to a wooden table surrounded by four white chairs. “You want a cup a coffee? I was about to make myself one. Up early surfing.”
Gabby hovered by the kitchen island, refusing to sit in the spot Andy had designated—a subtle way of establishing her control in his space. “So, this sixteen-year-old. Did you get her name?”
Andy pulled the basin from the coffeemaker and placed it beneath the faucet. “No. I didn’t even see her, really.” He raised his voice over the running water. “I’m guessing she and her friends were out by the pool helping themselves to wine.” Andy shut off the faucet and jostled the full reservoir back into the machine. “Chris talked to the dad, though. You can ask him.”
Gabby glanced at the white staircase behind her, also encased in glass. She’d see anyone descending, but this Chris could still get the jump on her, given her position. “Is he here? Your roommate?”
Andy pointed to the glass wall facing the beach. “He’s the dot on the water out there praying for a swell. He’ll probably come in soon. Nothing’s really breaking anymore.”
Gabby couldn’t see the human speck to whom Andy referred, though she asked for the full name and scribbled it down. As the guy who had gone out to talk to the infuriated father, Chris was the one who would have seen Ben—provided Ben had actually gone to the party. Andy would have been too busy trying to slip something into Mariel’s drink.
Gabby followed up with a question about whether they were renting the home, even though she already knew the answer. When she asked about Mariel, Andy would invariably invent some things. She needed to gauge his reactions by forcing him to tell known truths and lies.
“We’re subletting from a friend,” Andy said. “It costs a fortune but, if you surf, what choice do you have? It’s either rent a place here for the summer or fly halfway around the globe, praying you’ll catch some waves before vacation’s up. We’re hoping our buddy will let us pop in on the weekends, too, since we sent a bit of extra cash his way.”
Gabby wrote down surfers, even though the information wasn’t relevant to what had happened to Mariel. If she only noted the details that actually pertained to the rape or the murder, Andy would realize what she was here about and clam up. “What do you do besides surf?”
Andy shrugged, as though everything else wasn’t interesting. “Banking.” He gave a slight smile that Gabby guessed someone had told him was endearing, given the extra few seconds it remained on his face. “That’s another reason we would never have brought underage girls here to drink. Too much liability.”
Gabby wrote down the occupation as the Keurig machine began to hiss. “I’m not only here about the teenage drinking,” Gabby said. “There was a young woman, Mariel Cruz, that came to the party last night. She has long black hair, tan skin. Filipina. Pretty. Do you remember her?”
Andy looked at the Keurig machine as if he suddenly needed to read the directions. He picked up the filled cup and stared at the liquid. Though pupil movements rarely revealed lying, avoiding eye contact entirely was often a tell.
“Do you remember her?” Gabby repeated.
He turned around, walking back to the wall of cabinetry. Again, he pulled open the door of the paneled fridge. This time he removed a carton of milk off a lower shelf, which he opened, poured into his mug, and returned to the fridge door. His movements were slow, the incidental activities of someone weighing the risks of denying having slept with the subject of a police investigation versus confessing to some sort of “voluntary” relationship. Gabby guessed he was replaying the prior night in his head, trying to establish the odds that his DNA had already put him with the girl.
“I do remember.” The fridge shut with his final answer, cutting off the welcome blast of cold from the room. Though a breeze wafted from an opening in the east-facing wall, it wasn’t strong enough to cool a glass oven. “She’s beautiful,” Andy continued. “We got to know one another last night.”
Gabby jotted that down while maintaining eye contact. “Had you met her before?”
Andy leaned against the back cabinets, apparently forgetting that he’d promised to make a second cup of coffee. “No, but we really hit it off. I like her very much.”
Gabby nodded. “I know what it’s like to hit it off immediately with someone. My husband and I met in high school, and I knew from the first that he was the one. We had so much to talk and laugh about. I could have chatted with him for hours.” Gabby continued smiling, tapping into her real feelings about Derrick to provide Andy with a false sense of ease. “What did you and Mariel talk about last night?”
Andy smacked his lips together. “You know, I’m not totally sure. To be honest, I’d had a bit too much to drink. Everything’s a bit hazy. But I know we had fun.” The lids drew down over the green eyes. “Why all the questions about Mariel?” His jaw dropped. “Wait, don’t tell me she’s in high school! She said she was an au pair. She said she was an adult.”
Classic move, Gabby thought. Start discrediting the victim by making it seem that she might have lied about something not even in dispute. “Nope. She’s an au pair. Eighteen, but not in high school.”
Andy grimaced. “I assumed she was at least twenty-one, like the other au pairs.”
Gabby noted his tense facial expression. If Mariel was remembering the prior night’s conversation about her age correctly, then Andy had just told his first lie. “I’m sorry if she had some alcohol here,” he continued. “The bottles were lying around. Did she come home hungover and her house mom called you?”
Gabby ignored the question. “Did you sleep with her?”
Andy lowered his head over his cup, examining the liquid as though something floated in it. A smile stretched across his face. He extended his mug toward her in a kind of cheers. “A gentleman isn’t supposed to tell.” He punctuated the statement with another coy sip.
Then you should be blabbing, Gabby thought. She sighed, pretending to be particularly put upon by her duties. “Unfortunately, I have that report …”
The mention of a written document erased Andy’s smirk. He lowered his cup and swirled the liquid. The Columbo act wouldn’t work anymore, Gabby realized. The guy finally understood that she wasn’t here to make him answer for some underage party crashers.
“Is she all right?” The concern on Andy’s face was believable, though probably only because he actually felt the emotion for himself. If Mariel wasn’t okay, then he was the obvious cause. “I invited her to have breakfast with me this morning, but she said she had to go. I sent her home in a car.”
Gabby scratched at the sweat-curled hairs on the nape of her neck. Andy would use his ten-dollar car service receipt as evidence that everything had been consensual, and there’d be somebody on a twelve-person jury who would likely accept that argument.
Gabby looked to the water, centering herself before the most confrontational part of the interview. A figure moved up the beach, toward the lawn. The black wetsuit that he wore, despite the heat, reminded her of Batman. She hoped he wasn’t action hero sized. Andy, though no more than five foot nine, was still significantly bigger than she was. Sometimes people forgot they were dealing with an armed law officer when reeling from an accusation that could land them in prison.
Gabby directed her attention back to Andy. He held his coffee cup between both hands, rotating it. Fidgeting. “Mariel came home with no memory of what happened before waking up next to you,” she said. “Naked.”
Andy raised his eyebrows, transforming them into accent
s that emphasized his surprise. The reaction was rather subdued for a rape accusation, Gabby thought.
“Well, maybe she didn’t want anyone to know she’d slept with someone she’d just met.” Andy walked over to the kitchen island and placed his cup in the sink. He turned on the faucet and reached for a bottle of blue dish soap, which he immediately squeezed into the mug. “It must be easier to say she doesn’t remember.”
He rubbed his thumb around the cup’s lip, wiping away the DNA from his mouth. Gabby watched the nonchalant way he eliminated evidence, certain that he had nothing to worry about from Mariel’s allegations. He’d spent time figuring out what to do if she went to the cops, Gabby figured. He’d say one thing. She’d say another. The case would go nowhere.
“Mariel went to the hospital for a rape kit.” Gabby tried to keep her face slack, her voice light.
“Well, that’s outrageous.” Andy shut off the faucet. “Ask anyone at the party—she was all over me last night. We were having a good time. I’m sorry if she woke up and had buyer’s remorse. God knows I’m having some now.”
The far wall of the house suddenly retracted. Chris stood in the opening. He was significantly taller than his roommate, and he also looked significantly older, though Gabby guessed that might be due to the thinning blond hair set far back from his broad forehead and the silvery hairs between his pectorals.
“Chris, this detective here—Gabriella, was it?—she’s looking into sexual-assault allegations against me.” He gestured to his friend, becoming more animated given the presence of backup. “That girl from last night. The one that was making out with me in the kitchen. You saw her. She’s now saying she didn’t want to have—”
“She’s claimed that she was too incapacitated to give consent,” Gabby corrected.
“She wasn’t too incapacitated to tell me all the crazy ways she wanted it,” Andy said. “Isn’t that consent?”
Chris looked stricken, though only for a moment. He held an open palm toward his friend. “She must have seen the house and smelled money. Andy doesn’t have to drug women to get laid.”
Gabby nodded, scrawling five words in her book. Chris brought up the drugs. She hadn’t suggested to either man that Mariel was claiming she’d been slipped anything, only that she’d been incapacitated. The natural implication was that Mariel had been blackout drunk during intercourse, which wouldn’t have actually made Andy guilty of anything aside from contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Rape in the second degree required that Mariel’s incapacitation stem from being given a debilitating substance without her consent.
“Were there drugs at the party?”
Andy looked insulted. “No. Wine. Some beer. That’s it. There weren’t even shots.” He shook his head. “If she was on anything, she must have brought it for personal use. We didn’t see it.”
With Chris and Andy backing each other up about Mariel’s consent and Fiona claiming she’d believed her friend had feigned tipsiness, Mariel didn’t have much chance of winning any case. A rape kit would only prove she’d had sex, and if drugs showed in Mariel’s system, both Andy and Chris would say she’d willingly taken her own pills. Gabby had to hope that whatever substance had been stirred into Mariel’s drink was something only two health-insured men could obtain with a prescription. Otherwise, the girl wouldn’t have much of a chance at justice. She’d probably end up wishing she’d never told Dina what had happened and involved police in the first place.
Gabby closed her eyes for a moment longer than a blink, forcing her brain to switch gears from the rape investigation that was quickly going nowhere to her murder case. There were too many similarities between the party and the one Ben was claiming to have attended to doubt that he’d been at the house. However, his presence didn’t mean he had an airtight alibi. He could have visited just long enough to create a semblance of having been somewhere else while his wife was being murdered. To rule out Ben, she needed to know when he’d been at the party.
Gabby approached the larger roommate. Chris had greenish eyes too, she realized, though a different color than Andy’s. His were clearer and mixed with more blue, like sea glass rather than a graying river. “Andy said that a man came here to collect his underage daughter and that you went out to talk to him. Did you—”
“Yeah. We kicked those girls out as soon as—”
Gabby held up a hand. she’d already listened to Andy’s defense for serving high schoolers. “This dad, I understand he got into an altercation with some guy that had been flirting with his kid.”
Chris wiped sweat off his brow with the back of his hand. “I heard that, but the guy had taken off by the time I went outside.”
“When was that?” Gabby pressed her pen to her notepad.
“I’m not sure.” Chris wicked away the seawater clinging to his jawline with the heel of his hand. “Before two AM, probably. I went to bed around three, and it took a bit for everyone to leave—even after that crazed guy threatened to call the cops.”
Gabby stared at the number two that she’d just scrawled onto the paper. Ben being gone from the party by that hour didn’t make or break his defense. She needed to talk to someone who would have a more exact timeline. “Did you get the name of the dad and daughter?”
Chris scratched the scant hair above his ear. “Not really. I think the guy’s name started with a D or E or something. I remember what they looked like, though.”
Gabby nodded for him to continue, holding her pen at the ready.
“The girl was Black, very pretty. She had her hair slicked back in a ponytail and a lot of shimmery makeup on. Red lipstick.”
As Gabby scrawled down the details, she couldn’t help but think they all could have been used to describe Kayla. Teenagers, though, tended toward the same trends. A slick ponytail and shimmery makeup must have been whatever the magazines were plastering on their summer covers.
“The dad was also Black. He was bald and he had a goatee. I thought he might have been a body builder. He had huge guns and a big number two tattooed on his arm.”
Gabby stopped writing. The chances of there being two bald, goateed Black men with number twos on their biceps in the area were next to nil. The man was Derrick—her husband. He’d grabbed Kayla from this party. An invisible hand squeezed her heart. Her prime murder suspect had been chatting up her daughter.
The notebook vibrated in Gabby’s hand. She took down each man’s contact information for her report and robotically warned them not to leave the area, her mind already on the phone call she needed to make.
“Do I need a lawyer?” Andy asked.
Gabby mumbled something about there not being any charges—yet—as she headed to the door. The glass walls seemed to aim the sun straight at her. She was sweating. Dripping. She needed to get out of this house. She had to see her daughter.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE DAY OF
Jenny woke, surrounded by a dark, heavy damp. She thrashed against it, unsure of what it was or where she was. Oxygen streamed into her airways, bonded with the memory of her husband squeezing her neck until she’d passed out. She pushed herself upright under the sweat-drenched duvet and checked the moon’s position through the balcony doors. It hung just above the horizon, a broken spotlight dangling far too low from the scaffolding. She hadn’t been out long. Louis, however, was no longer in the room.
She lay there, forcing saliva down her raw throat, listening to the crashing waves still audible through the shut balcony door. A memory seeped into her swimming brain. She saw Louis, bent over scented candles in the small apartment they’d shared in med school. He lit them with short matches they’d confiscated weeks earlier from a corner bar. Each strike against the carbon strip illuminated, for a moment, the man she’d fallen for. The boyish face topped with ginger hair. The piercing blue-gray eyes beneath a preternaturally concerned brow.
Jenny remembered how Louis had cupped his hand around each flame, shielding it from the howling outside that had seemed
to penetrate the thin walls of their high-rise apartment. Growing up in landlocked West Virginia, she’d never seen a hurricane or a superstorm or whatever the meteorologists had named the vortex of clouds closing in on them. She’d watched the news, awed and horrified by footage of wind ripping willows from the ground and wielding them like battering rams against cars and streetlamps. When the power had gone out, she’d screamed, sure nature’s strike force had finally arrived at their doorstep.
Louis’s chivalry had gone into overdrive that weekend. He’d made certain she would want for nothing, loading the pantry days beforehand and clearing out the local liquor store of her favorite cabernet. He’d duct-taped the windows and filled the defunct fireplace with scented candles. He’d charged the electronics and rented her favorite films on DVD.
She remembered snuggling with him beneath musty extra blankets and munching on almond-butter sandwiches washed down with wine while the floodwaters blocked their building’s egress. If she closed her eyes, she could almost feel the warmth of his skin, the way his body had radiated care and concern for her. The way it often still did.
She’d loved him then. Maybe she still loved him. But Louis had violated the unspoken rule that allowed their marriage to survive his “outbursts.” If he hit her, he had to be flagrantly sorry for a very, very long time. Months, at least. Contrition and promises of reform had to follow his combustion, enabling Jenny to regain her power and remember the good times.
Their better days far outnumbered the bad. Louis had become abusive only in the past five years, since she’d taken the high-profile sports anchor position. A couple’s therapist they’d seen briefly had suggested that Louis’s anger stemmed from unresolved parental issues about money that made him feel threatened whenever it seemed like he was losing the traditional “male” provider role to Jenny. But she wouldn’t relinquish her job and lose even more power to her unpredictable spouse. They’d reached an impasse. The only way through was for Jenny to run away.
