Closer Than Blood

by Gregg Olsen

  Tori smiled slightly, the kind of smirk that promised some kind of conspiratorial disclosure. “Of course you do.”

  Parker kissed her. “You really love me, don’t you?”

  “I love you more than you will ever know,” she said, embracing him with a forceful hug. “We are like those swans. We are forever.”

  Down the hall in the master bedroom, Alex Connelly woke up and turned to the empty place in his bed. He felt around, but nothing.

  Where is Tori? he thought.

  It took him a moment to compute that it was a sound, not spicy Thai food, that had awakened him in the first place. A thumping and voices. It was coming down the hall from the room where Parker was staying.

  The dark wood of the hallway floor made it difficult to navigate in the night, so he flipped on the lights. The noise stopped instantly.

  He turned the knob on his son’s door.

  Tori was sitting on the edge of the bed. Parker was under the covers, his face turned away.

  “What’s going on?”

  Tori turned around and faced her husband. “Oh, you startled me.”

  “What’s happening here?” he said a second time.

  “Did you know Parker has night terrors?” Tori patted the teen on the shoulder.

  Alex took a couple of steps closer. He noticed a candle was lit on the nightstand. A damp washcloth was folded next to it. Did the boy have a fever? The bed was so completely thrashed that it was clear that Parker had been in some kind of sleepless torment.

  “Son, are you all right?”

  Parker seemed out of breath, but he answered. “I’m okay.”

  Tori looked at her husband and then over at her stepson.

  “I’m so glad I could be here for you, Parker. Let me know if you need anything more.”

  Parker lifted his head slightly from the pillow. “Thanks, Tori. You really helped me a lot.”

  Tori and Alex backed out of the bedroom and returned to their own.

  “I don’t think you should dress that way around Parker,” Alex said, indicating the short, thin nightgown. Underneath she wore no panties.

  “Honestly,” Tori said, “how I dressed when I went to help him was the last thing on my mind. The boy needed me. Needed someone, for God’s sake. You wouldn’t know much about that, would you? You seem too wrapped up in work. Too wrapped up with that bitch Lissa in the office.”

  “Let’s not go there. I was just saying . . .”

  “Good night, Alex. You don’t have a clue how to be a decent person. Not to me. Not to your son.”

  Parker lifted the top sheet and comforter that he and Tori hastily pulled over his naked torso when the hallway light went on. It was a close call. Somehow the fact that he and his stepmother-lover had almost been caught red-handed excited him. He reached for the washcloth and wiped up the semen.

  Tori had been there for him that night.

  Oh yes, she had.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Tacoma

  The interrogation room at the Tacoma Police Department was windowless. The only break in the pale gray drywall was the grate for the heating duct that filled the room with stifling warmth on a cold winter’s day and so much cold air during the summer that a pair of gangbangers actually asked for—and got—a couple of blankets.

  “Trying to do something about the AC,” Eddie Kaminski said as he led Maddie Crane and client Darius Fulton to a pair of plastic molded chairs that would be more appropriate for a campus dining hall.

  Maddie dropped her coat onto the table to demonstrate that she was bored and irritated. It was a couture label, but so convoluted in its design that one had to know it by sight and not read it.

  To be sure, Kaminski didn’t care about those things. There was a good bet that the man sitting across from him was exactly who he was looking for.

  Maddie was as high priced as she was shrewd. She wasn’t about to show up with her client if she didn’t think she could persuade the police to back off and look somewhere else.

  “What you have so far is annoyingly circumstantial,” she said, her flinty eyes bearing down on Kaminski.

  “The gun was his,” he said, glancing at Darius before returning his gaze to the lawyer with the great coat and imperious demeanor.

  “So? It was stolen.”

  “Wasn’t reported.”

  “He didn’t know that.”

  “Are you kidding me?” He glanced at Darius, who looked passively in the direction of the vent as it funneled hot air right at his face. “Look, everything about your client suggests that he runs a tight ship. He knows where everything is.”

  The lawyer had quick answer. “He’s had some personal problems as of late. He’s recently divorced. His wife took things from the house and he wasn’t exactly sure what she pilfered. She absconded with his stamp collection, for crying out loud.”

  “And my dad’s antique decoys,” Darius said.

  Maddie shot him a look. “You’ll talk when I say so.”

  Kaminski almost felt a blush of embarrassment for the guy just then. His wife took his stamp collection and his lawyer had snipped him of his manhood.

  “All right. That’s your explanation for the whereabouts of the gun—that, by the way, conveniently turned up in a murder across the street.”

  “Yes, Detective,” she said. “That really is an interesting coincidence.”

  “All right, then,” Kaminski said, reaching for a file folder that both the person of interest and the lawyer had been keeping an eye on like it was some scorpion sitting on the table in front of them. “What can you tell me about the e-mails?”

  Darius seemed confused. “What e-mails?”

  Maddie leaned across the table. “I’m talking here. What e-mails?”

  Kaminski pulled out a sheet of paper, making sure that it was obvious that there were many, many others inside.

  I want you. I need you.You are everything to me.

  Darius shook his head. “I didn’t write that. I didn’t even know her e-mail address.”

  Maddie touched his shoulder with the tip of her index finger. It was not a gesture meant to calm and show support, but to pointedly get him to zip it.

  “Please, I’ll handle this,” she said.

  Darius wasn’t having any of that. He was flustered. “Handle this? This thing is beginning to spin out of control. This damn handling you’ve been doing is going to send me to Walla Walla with a needle in my arm. I didn’t write to her. I had sex with her once—and I admitted that. I didn’t even fantasize that there would be any other encounters. Not seriously, anyway.”

  He slumped back down in his chair and put his hands on his forehead. He started to rub the beading sweat from his eyes. He looked puffy and red.

  A heart attack waiting to happen.

  “Can we turn down that goddamn heater?” he said, loud enough for the investigator on the other side of the mirror to hear without the benefit of a microphone.

  “Sorry. We’ll get you out of here in a minute.”

  “We’re going now,” Maddie said. She snatched up her coat and moved toward the door, motioning for her client to follow.

  Kaminski went in for the kill just then. He didn’t want Darius Fulton to drop dead, but he was all but certain this was the last chance they’d be able to speak unencumbered by a legal process that would send up walls to keep them apart.

  “Your hair was in a ski mask hidden between the cushions on your sofa. Tori Connelly confirms that it was the mask that the intruder wore the night she and her husband were shot. Will you stop lying just for a second?”

  Darius looked like he was going to have a heart attack. His eyes popped like a hermit crab.

  “I’m not lying,” he said.

  Maddie shook her head at Kaminski. “This interview is over. Mr. Fulton wanted to be helpful—against my advice.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Just one more.”

  Darius looked at the bottled water but didn’t touch it. He’d crawl on h
is hands and knees through Death Valley before he’d fall for that ruse a second time.

  “Drink it. We don’t need your prints again,” Kaminski said.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t look fine,” Maddie said, still hovering with her coat.

  He took the bottle and guzzled.

  “You really want me to believe that you’ve been set up by Tori Connelly? That she screwed you one time to spin a web around you and make you the fall guy? Why in the world should I believe that? You haven’t given me any reason to make that seem one bit plausible.”

  Darius blinked hard. “I wish I had some answer that would satisfy you, Detective. I wish that I hadn’t been a big, dumb, old fool.”

  “Did you think that the plan to kill Alex would allow you to step right in?”

  The lawyer glanced at her client, telegraphing with a finger to her glossed lips for him to remain mute.

  “We’ve already told you, Detective,” she said. “Mr. Fulton had absolutely nothing to do with the murder—the planning, the execution of it. None of it. If I were you, I’d focus on the merry widow. We’re done here.”

  When she opened the door, the air felt like a blast from a freezer as it met the Panama heat of the interrogation room.

  Darius lingered. “I didn’t hurt anyone. I would never shoot anyone.”

  “Shut up, Darius. We’re leaving.”

  His eyes were pleading.

  “Now!” she said, snapping him to attention the way his wife had done throughout their whole marriage. Darius jumped to his feet.

  Their father had always said that one had to “break some eggs to make an omelet,” but Tori Connelly highly doubted that he was referring to murdering people in order to get one’s heart’s desire. Yet the thought circled through her brain. She would not always be beautiful. She might not always be rich, but she was willing to do what she had to do to try to get that way.

  She owed it to herself.

  Tori looked at the date on her phone. In just a few days, Parker would turn eighteen. Her sister would be dead. She’d be rich.

  Life would be so, so good.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Tacoma

  Instead of meeting a stone wall, Eddie Kaminski was greeted with the offer of coffee or a drink when he knocked on Tori Connelly’s front door to relay the latest updates to the case, though some details had already been on the news.

  “Chilly out there, maybe you’d like something that would really warm you up,” Tori said as she led the detective into the living room where her sister was sitting with an open laptop.

  “A break in the case,” she said. “I’ve offered him a drink, but he’s on duty.”

  “Just like on TV,” Lainie said. She’d grown weary of her sister’s antics with men. She could see how Tori used her body to call attention to herself. That day she wore a fuchsia-colored scoop-neck sweater that left very little to the imagination.

  “If you’ve got it, flaunt it” was one of Tori’s catchphrases from high school.

  “Been a lot of activity across the street,” Lainie said. “Nothing on the news, though.” She looked at her laptop and shut the lid with a snap.

  He took a seat on the end of the sofa. Tori brushed against him as she bent close to take his coat from his lap.

  “Let me hang that up for you,” she said.

  “Oh, thanks,” he said.

  Lainie watched as the detective’s eyes followed Tori. If her sister had hooked a worm and dropped it into Puget Sound, Eddie Kaminski had his mouth open, ready to take the bait. The moment was uncomfortable and familiar.

  “What’s been going on?” she asked again.

  Tori slithered back into the space next to the detective.

  Kaminski breathed her in, deeply. Maybe too deeply. She smelled of wild honey and flowers. He glanced at the wall, the vacant spot where the tacky painting had hung before the forensic team came and confiscated it.

  “My husband loved that painting,” she had said as they carried it away. “It makes me sick that it was used in such an evil way. Used against me by that awful man next door.”

  “Mrs. Connelly—” he started to say.

  “Tori,” she said.

  “All right then, Tori. I have a few questions. I’m hoping you can help.”

  Lainie watched as her sister inched a little closer to the detective.

  “I have nothing to hide.”

  “What can you tell me about your affair?”

  She shifted a little and crossed her feet at the ankles. “Oh, that. It all comes back to that.”

  “I’m sorry. I know it is painful to recall all of that.”

  “He practically raped me.”

  Kaminski was surprised, but he didn’t show it. “Mr. Fulton?”

  Tori looked right at him, with those drilling-deep-as-possible blue eyes. “Who else?”

  “But you’ve never indicated it was a rape. I thought it was consensual, an affair.”

  Her eyes started to flicker.

  The tears are coming, Lainie thought.

  And they did.

  “I didn’t put up a fight; there wasn’t a struggle. But I told him I didn’t want to do it. He just kept pushing and we drank too much. It was not an affair.”

  The remark was curious. Kaminski looked at the e-mails recovered from Fulton’s computer. He could quote them almost verbatim, though he didn’t just then. Instead, they ran through his mind like the juvenile prose from a lovesick middle-aged man.

  You’re the most beautiful woman in the world.

  You make me feel so good. Too good. I can’t take it.

  I saw you today in the yard. I love the way the sunlight spins your hair into gold.

  When can I see you? When will he be gone?

  Maybe I’ll just have to make him gone.

  “I feel completely violated,” Tori said.

  “I’m sure you do. You have every reason to feel that way.”

  Lainie said nothing. Her sister was fascinating as always, and this man, this detective in their midst, seemed to play her in a way that she hadn’t seen before. It was unclear if he was buying all that she had to sell.

  “One thing the team wonders about,” he finally said, “is how it was that you didn’t recognize him when he was in your house the night your husband was gunned down. It was in this room, right?”

  All three of them knew full well that it had been.

  “Yes,” Tori said. “Right here.” She reached for her glass.

  Ice water? Vodka?

  “So how was it that you didn’t know it was him?”

  “I told you. He wore a mask.”

  “Yes, you did say that. But didn’t he seem at all familiar? His voice?”

  “Not really. I was too upset. I was in shock.”

  “Of course you were.”

  Lainie thought of jumping in to defend her sister, but she thought better of it. Tori was a big girl and if she’d gotten herself into trouble, she alone was the one to extract herself from the mess. No one could wriggle out of a conflict better than she.

  Tori set down her glass, aiming for the ring of condensation on the coaster. She liked things to be just so.

  When she stayed mute, Kaminski asked once more. “I mean, you knew him pretty well.”

  “He had his pants on, if that’s what you’re getting at.” She looked at him, then at her sister. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. I know you are doing your job.”

  “Yes, I am. So, please, how was it that you couldn’t place the intruder as someone whom you’d slept with?”

  She tilted her head and looked at him, once more, dead-eyed. “It’s hard to keep track of my lovers, detective.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting anything like that,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “I’m sorry if I offended you.”

  “I’ll add it to the list of things I’m trying to get over. It’ll be somewhere at the bottom on a list topped by the fact
that the Tacoma Police treat crime victims like criminals.”

  She stood. “I’m glad that you’ve got that creep, detective. I am happy to help with the investigation in any way that I can, but I will not have you come in here and treat me like trash for an error that I made.”

  Kaminski got up and thanked the women for their time. His eyes lingered on Lainie, who said nothing more.

  A good night’s sleep was so needed. The endless drama with Tori had tied her stomach in knots. Lainie O’Neal looked up at the gauzy canopy and stared. There were no tiles to count and her eyes were too tired to try to discern something in the weave of the fabric to hold her interest and work her brain into slumber. She slipped out of bed and put on a robe that Tori had hung on an antique hook by the doorway. She wasn’t really thirsty, but a glass of milk seemed like a good idea.

  As she walked down the hallway, she noticed a sliver of light coming from under her sister’s doorway.

  Maybe she can’t sleep, either.

  She was about to knock when she heard Tori’s voice.

  “All right,” she said. “That sounds good. But be careful.”

  Silence.

  “Look, for this to work you have to use the phone I gave you.”

  The phrase was odd. Lainie pushed closer to the door frame and turned the knob, cracking it open a bit more so she could hear exactly what her sister was saying.

  “. . . soon. I love you. I need you.”

  Lainie felt the muscles in her legs weaken some. Who was her sister talking to at that hour? Who in the world did she love? Her husband was dead.

  She let go of the knob and took a step backward, turned around, and started toward her room.

  “Lainie!”

  The voice was loud, jarringly so for the stillness of the night.

  She turned around. Tori stood right behind her.

  “What are you doing up?”

  Lainie stood still before slowly folding her arms. She was unsure of how that hallway meeting would go. Argue? Confront?

  “Just can’t sleep,” she finally said.