The Couple Next Door

by Shari Lapena

  How could he have been so stupid? Why had he trusted Bruce Neeland? He can’t remember now why he had trusted him—his mind has shut down in his grief and fear. There’s nothing to do now but confess. Anne will hate him. He is so sorry. For Cora, for Anne, what he’s done to them. The two people he most loves in the world.

  He had been greedy. He’d persuaded himself that it wasn’t stealing if it was Anne’s parents’ money—Anne would inherit it all eventually anyway, but they needed some of it now. No one was supposed to get hurt. When he and Bruce had planned it, it had never occurred to Marco that Cora would be in any actual danger. It was supposed to be a victimless crime.

  But now Cora is gone. He doesn’t know what Bruce has done with her. And he doesn’t know how to find her.

  Two uniformed officers get slowly out of the police car. They walk over to where Marco is slumped against the Audi.

  “Marco Conti?” one of the officers asks.

  Marco doesn’t respond.

  “Are you alone?”

  Marco ignores him. The officer pulls his radio to his mouth as his partner squats beside Marco. He asks, “Are you hurt?”

  But Marco has gone into shock. He says nothing. He has obviously been weeping. The officer standing beside him puts his radio away, draws his weapon, and goes into the garage, fearing the worst. He sees the infant car seat, the white blanket thrown on the dirt floor in front of it, but no baby. He comes back out quickly.

  But Marco still isn’t speaking.

  Soon other police cars converge, lights flashing. An ambulance arrives on the scene, and the medics treat Marco for shock.

  A short time later, Detective Rasbach’s car pulls up the long drive. He gets out in a rush and speaks to the officer in charge. “What happened?”

  “We don’t know for sure. He isn’t talking. But there’s an infant car seat in the garage and no sign of a baby. The trunk is open, empty.”

  Rasbach takes in the scene and mutters, “Jesus Christ.” He follows the other officer into the garage and sees the car seat, the little blanket on the floor. His immediate reaction is to feel terribly sorry for the man sitting on the ground outside, guilty or not. He clearly expected to get his child back. If the man is a criminal, he’s an amateur. Rasbach goes outside into the sunlight, squats down, and tries to look Marco in the face. But Marco won’t raise his eyes.

  “Marco,” Rasbach says urgently. “What happened?”

  But Marco won’t even look at him.

  Rasbach has a pretty good idea what happened anyway. It looks like Marco got out of his car, went into the garage expecting to get the baby, and the kidnapper, who never had any intention of returning the child, knocked him out and took the money, leaving Marco alone with his grief.

  The baby was probably dead.

  Rasbach stands up, gets out his cell, and reluctantly calls Anne on her cell. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Your husband is fine, but the baby is not here.”

  He hears her gasp turn into hysterical sobs on the other end of the line. “Meet us at the station,” he tells her.

  Sometimes he hates his job.

  NINETEEN

  Marco is at the police station, in the same interview room as before, in the same chair. Rasbach is sitting across from him, just as he was when Marco gave his statement a few days ago, with Jennings beside him. The video camera is recording him, just like last time.

  The press had somehow already gotten the news of the failed exchange. There had been a mob of reporters waiting outside the station when they brought Marco in. Cameras flashed and microphones were pushed in front of his face.

  They hadn’t handcuffed him. Marco was surprised that they hadn’t, because in his head he had already confessed. He felt so guilty he didn’t know how they couldn’t see it. He thought it was a mere courtesy that they hadn’t restrained him, or it was simply deemed unnecessary. After all, there was obviously no fight left in him. He was a beaten man. He was not going to run. Where could he go? Wherever he went, his guilt and grief would go with him.

  They let him see Anne before they brought him into the interview room. She and her parents were already at the station. Marco was badly shaken when he saw her. Her face showed that she had lost all hope. When she saw him, she threw her arms around him and sobbed into his neck as if he were the last thing in the world she could cling to, as if he were all she had left. They held on to each other, weeping. Two shattered people, one of them a liar.

  Then they had taken him into the interview room to get his statement.

  “I’m sorry,” Rasbach begins. And he genuinely is.

  Marco lifts his head in spite of himself.

  “The car seat and blanket have gone in for forensic testing. Maybe we’ll get something useful.”

  Marco remains silent, slumped in his chair.

  Rasbach leans forward. “Marco, why don’t you tell us what’s going on?”

  Marco regards the detective, who has always annoyed him. Looking at Rasbach, he feels his desire to confess dissolve. He sits up straighter in his chair. “I brought the money. Cora wasn’t there. Someone attacked me when I was in the garage and took the money from the trunk.”

  Being questioned by Rasbach in this room, the feeling of playing cat and mouse, has sharpened Marco’s mind. He is thinking more clearly now than he was after things went so terribly wrong an hour or so ago. Adrenaline is coursing through his system. Suddenly he’s thinking about survival. He realizes that if he tells the truth, it will utterly destroy not just him but Anne as well. She could never withstand the betrayal. He must maintain the fiction of his innocence. They have nothing on him, no proof. Rasbach obviously has his suspicions, but that’s all they are.

  “Did you get a look at the man who hit you?” Rasbach asks. He is tapping his pen lightly against his hand, a sign of impatience that Marco has not seen before.

  “No. He hit me from behind. I didn’t see anything.”

  “Just one person?”

  “I think so.” Marco pauses. “I don’t know.”

  “Can you tell me anything else? Did he say anything?” Rasbach is clearly frustrated with him.

  Marco shakes his head. “No, nothing.”

  Rasbach pushes his chair away from the table and stands up. He walks around the room, rubbing the back of his neck, as if it’s stiff. He turns and faces Marco from across the room.

  “It looks like another car was parked in the weeds behind the garage, out of sight. Did you see it or hear it?”

  Marco shakes his head.

  Rasbach walks back to the table, puts his hands on it, leans forward, and looks Marco in the eye. “I have to tell you, Marco,” Rasbach says, “I think the baby is dead.”

  Marco hangs his head. The tears start to come.

  “And I think you’re responsible.”

  Marco snaps his head back up. “I had nothing to do with it!”

  Rasbach says nothing. He waits.

  “What makes you think I had anything to do with it?” Marco asks. “My baby is gone.” He starts to sob. He doesn’t have to fake it. His grief is all too real.

  “It’s the timing, Marco,” Rasbach says. “You checked on the baby at twelve thirty. Everyone agrees that you did.”

  “So?” Marco says.

  “So I have tire-track evidence that a strange car was recently in your garage. And I have a witness who saw a car going down your back lane, away from your garage, at twelve thirty-five a.m.”

  “But why do you think that’s got anything to do with me?” Marco says. “You don’t know that that car had anything to do with whoever took Cora. She could just as easily have been taken out the front door, at one o’clock.” But Marco knows it hasn’t done him any good, leaving the front door ajar; it hadn’t fooled the detective. If only he hadn’t forgotten to screw the motion-detector light back in.

&nb
sp; Rasbach pushes himself away from the table and stands looking down at Marco. “The motion detector in the back was disabled. You were in the house at twelve thirty. A car drove away from the direction of your garage at twelve thirty-five. With its headlights off.”

  “So what? Is that all you’ve got?”

  “There’s no physical evidence whatsoever of an intruder in the house or the backyard. If a stranger had come into your backyard to get her, we would have some tracks, something. But we don’t. The only footprints in the backyard, Marco, are yours.” He leans on the table again for emphasis. “I think you carried the baby out of the house to the car in the garage.”

  Marco says nothing.

  “We know that your business is in trouble.”

  “I admit that! You think that’s reason enough to kidnap my own baby?” Marco says desperately.

  “People have kidnapped for less,” the detective says.

  “Well, let me tell you something,” Marco says, leaning forward, looking up into Rasbach’s eyes. “I love my daughter more than anything in this world. I love my wife, and I am extremely concerned for the well-being of both of them.” He sits back in his chair. He thinks carefully for a moment before he adds, “And I have very wealthy in-laws who’ve been very generous. They would probably give us whatever money we needed if Anne asked them for it. So why the hell would I kidnap my own baby?”

  Rasbach watches him, his eyes narrowing. “I will be questioning your in-laws. And your wife. And anyone who ever knew you.”

  “Knock yourself out,” Marco says. He knows that he’s not handling this well, but he can’t help it. “Am I free to go?”

  “Yes, you are free to go,” the detective says. “For now.”

  “Should I get a lawyer?” Marco asks.

  “That’s entirely up to you,” the detective says.

  • • •

  Detective Rasbach heads back to his own office to think. If this was a fake kidnapping, staged by Marco, he has clearly fallen in with some real criminals who’ve taken advantage of him. Rasbach can almost feel sorry for him. He certainly feels sorry for his distraught wife. If Marco did set this up, and has been duped, his baby is probably now dead, the money is gone, and the police suspect him of kidnapping. How he’s holding it together at all is a mystery.

  But the detective is troubled. There’s the babysitter, a problem that’s been niggling at him. And there’s this commonsense question: Why would someone who could probably get money easily enough just by asking risk it all with something as stupid, as fraught with risk, as a kidnapping?

  And there’s that disturbing information about Anne, about her propensity for violence, that has recently come to light. The more he gets involved in this case, the more complicated it seems. Rasbach has to know the truth.

  It’s time to question Anne’s parents.

  And he will talk to Anne herself again in the morning.

  Rasbach will figure it out. The truth is there. It’s always there. It simply needs to be uncovered.

  • • •

  Anne and Marco are at home, alone. The house is empty but for the two of them and their horror and grief and dark imaginings. It would be hard to say who of the two is more damaged. Both are haunted by not knowing what has happened to their baby. They each hope desperately that she’s still alive, but there is so little to sustain that hope. Each tries to pretend for the other. And Marco has additional reasons to pretend.

  Anne doesn’t know why she doesn’t blame Marco more than she does. When it first happened, when their baby was taken, she blamed him in her heart, because he was the one who persuaded her to leave Cora at home alone. If they had taken the baby next door with them, none of this ever would have happened. She’s told herself that if Cora didn’t come home unharmed, she would never forgive him.

  Yet here they are. She doesn’t know why she clings to him, but she does. Perhaps because she has nothing else to cling to. She can’t even tell if she loves him anymore. She will never forgive him for Cynthia either.

  Perhaps she clings to him because no one else can share or understand her pain. Or perhaps because he, at least, believes her. He knows she didn’t kill their baby. Even her mother suspected her until the onesie arrived in the mail. She’s sure of it.

  They go to bed and lie awake for a long time. Finally Marco gives in to a troubled sleep. But Anne is too agitated for sleep to come. Eventually she gets out of bed, goes downstairs, and roams the house, growing increasingly restless.

  She begins combing the house, but she doesn’t know what she’s looking for and gets more and more upset. She is moving and thinking faster and faster. She’s looking for something that incriminates her unfaithful husband, but she is also looking for her baby. She feels lines blurring.

  Her thoughts speed up and become less rational; her mind makes fantastic leaps. It’s not that things don’t make sense to her when she’s like this—sometimes they make more sense. They make sense the way dreams do. It’s only when the dream is over that you see how odd it all was, how it actually didn’t make sense at all.

  She hasn’t found any letters, or any e-mails from Cynthia on Marco’s laptop, or strange women’s underwear in the house. She hasn’t found any receipts for hotel rooms or hidden matchbooks from bars. She’s found some worrying financial information, but that doesn’t interest her right now. She wants to know what’s going on between Marco and Cynthia and what that has to do with Cora’s disappearance. Did Cynthia take Cora?

  The more Anne turns this over in her mind in her frenzied state, the more it seems to make sense to her. Cynthia dislikes children. Cynthia is the kind of person who would harm a child. She is cold. And she doesn’t like Anne anymore. She wants to hurt her. Cynthia wants to take Anne’s husband and her child away and see what that does to her, because she can.

  Eventually Anne works herself into an exhausted stupor and falls asleep on the sofa in the living room.

  • • •

  The next morning, early, she wakes and showers before Marco realizes she’s spent the night on the sofa. She pulls on black leggings and a tunic as if in a trance, filled with dread.

  She feels paralyzed when she thinks of the police, of being interrogated by Rasbach again. He has no idea where their baby is, but he seems to think that they do. He asked her yesterday, after taking Marco’s statement, to come in this morning. She doesn’t want to go. She doesn’t know why he wants to talk to her again. What’s to be gained from going through the same things over and over?

  From his place in the bed, propped up against the pillows, Marco watches her getting dressed, his face expressionless.

  “Do I have to go?” she asks him. She would avoid it if she could. She doesn’t know what her rights are. Should she refuse?

  “I don’t think you have to,” Marco says. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s time we spoke to a lawyer.”

  “But that will look bad,” Anne says worriedly. “Won’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” Marco says tonelessly. “We look bad already.”

  She approaches the bed, looks down at him. Seeing him like this, so plainly wretched, would break her heart if it weren’t broken already. “Maybe I should speak to my parents. They could get us a good lawyer. Although it seems ridiculous to think we even need one.”

  “It might be a good idea,” Marco says uneasily. “Like I told you last night, Rasbach still seems to suspect us. He seems to believe we staged the whole thing.”

  “How can he think that now—after yesterday?” Anne asks, her voice becoming agitated. “Why would he? Just because there was a car going down the lane at the same time you checked on Cora?”

  “That seems to be the gist of it.”

  “I’ll go in,” Anne says finally. “He wants me there for ten o’clock.”

  Marco nods tiredly. “I’ll come with you.”

  “You don�
�t have to,” Anne says, without conviction. “I could call my mother.”

  “Of course I’ll come. You can’t face that mob out there alone. Let me put some clothes on, and I’ll take you,” Marco says, getting out of bed.

  Anne watches him walk to his dresser in his boxers. How much thinner he looks—she can see the outline of his ribs. She is grateful that he’s coming to the station with her. She doesn’t want to call her mother, and she doesn’t think she can do this on her own. Also, she thinks it’s important that she and Marco be seen together, to appear united.

  There are more reporters outside their house again now after yesterday’s fiasco. Anne and Marco have to fight them off to get to their cab—the police have the Audi for the time being—and there are no police officers here to help them. Finally they make it to the taxi on the street. Once inside the car, Anne quickly locks the doors. She feels trapped—all those jabbering faces crowding in on them through the windows. She recoils but stares back at them. Marco swears under his breath.

  Anne looks silently out the window as the mob falls away. She can’t understand how the reporters can be so cruel. Are none of them parents? Can they not imagine, for one moment, what it’s like not knowing where your baby is? To lie awake at night missing your child, seeing her little body, still, dead, behind your closed eyelids?

  They head downtown along the river until they reach the police station. As soon as Anne sees the building, she feels herself tensing up inside. She wants to run away. But Marco is beside her. He helps her out of the cab and into the station, his hand on her elbow.

  As they wait at the front desk, Marco speaks quietly into her ear. “It’s all right. They may try to rattle you, but you know we haven’t done anything wrong. I’ll be out here waiting for you.” He gives her a small, encouraging smile. She nods at him. He rests his hands gently on her shoulders, looks into her eyes. “They might try to turn us against each other, Anne. They may say things about me, bad things.”

  “What bad things?”