Lauren nodded.
“In addition, you told her you were informed that the rug was what Laughlin’s body was wrapped in and that it had been traced back to you as a result of the cleaning tag that we found attached to it.” He paused, looking at Lauren from under his brows. At her nod, he continued. “About then, she would have told you what happened on Saturday, a little after sunset, how Bo Laughlin came to be shot and wrapped in that rug.”
“You’re assuming again.”
“Yeah. She would have told you what her role was and also what roles your husband and Greg Honey played in Laughlin’s death. Am I right? You know the whole story?”
“It was an accident. They were shooting at targets. They didn’t know Bo was there.”
“So I’ve heard.”
Lauren kept his gaze.
“That’s what your husband, Jeff Wilder, told us, too—that it was an accident.”
“When did you talk to him?”
“We picked him up after we left your house. He’s here.”
“Oh.” The syllable came on a small puff of air, as if she’d been punched, which was how she felt. “You arrested him? For what happened to Bo? Can I see him?”
“He’s not here solely on that matter, Mrs.—Lauren. There are other—well, let’s just say we’ve been discussing a variety of subjects with Mr. Wilder, and your name keeps coming up. Maybe you should hear about that first.”
“What subjects?”
Cosgrove opened his manila folder and took out pages she recognized were the asbestos-notification form. “You remember this,” he said.
“Yes, but what does it have to do with Bo’s death? I don’t understand.” Lauren’s heartbeat was erratic.
Cosgrove flipped to the last page. “Earlier when we showed it to you, you seemed to think this wasn’t your signature.” He pointed it out.
“It’s not,” she said.
“You’re sure? Take your time. We’re in no hurry.”
She looked at her name again. It was Jeff’s handwriting. She’d known it before. But she hadn’t wanted to know. She still didn’t.
“Who do you think signed it, if you didn’t?”
Sidestepping his question, she said, “You told me there wasn’t any asbestos in the Waller-Land building, and that’s accurate to a point. The truth is that it’s there but not at a toxic level.” A more complete recollection of the business dealings surrounding the Waller-Land contract had begun to stir in her mind. “The inspector who did the survey came by the office, and I remember him saying it was unusual in such an old building not to find more of a presence.” Lauren felt confident of this memory. Jeff knew it, too; he’d heard the man, and she told Cosgrove he had. “It’s possible that another survey was done—”
“You’re talking about this inspector, here. He’s the one you spoke with?”
Cosgrove indicated the section on the form that requested the inspector’s name, licensing number, and employer. But the name that appeared there, Cameron Lewis, wasn’t the name of the man Lauren remembered, and she said so.
“You’re sure this wasn’t the guy?” Cosgrove asked for the second time.
Lauren looked at him, and her annoyance must have shown on her face, because he apologized.
“It’s like you said, sometimes you have trouble with your memory. Your husband told me since you took that bad fall and injured your brain so severely, you often do things and can’t recall doing them. It doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to imagine you would forget a name, right? Or that you might forget signing a document or a check? Or even meeting with certain people? I mean, for a while, you thought you might have had something to do with Bo Laughlin’s death, am I right? At least that’s a relief, huh? That notepad, for instance. Clearly, your husband brought that into the house.”
“I’m not sure I know what to think or how to feel about any of this.”
“Yeah, I can imagine. All of it, coming down like it has, it’s got to be a shock.”
Lauren could have laughed. She could have thanked him for his empathy.
He took out what looked like a folded brochure from his manila folder and handed it to her. “What do you know about this?”
She had immediate impressions of colors—aqua, brilliant turquoise, pink-tinged taupe, and foamy white—that suggested water and sand. Brighter colors depicted beach umbrellas and palm trees. The Nautilus at Padre Island was scrolled across the front panel above an elegant, low-slung building, and below that, in smaller print, the line read: An exclusive golf club and resort. She looked at the detective, mystified. “I don’t know anything about it.” Was that right? “I’ve only been to Padre once, and that was years ago.”
“You don’t have an interest in the Nautilus?”
“An interest?”
“You haven’t purchased shares of ownership in the resort?”
Lauren searched her mind, scrambling for an answer, the right answer. She had the sense that Jim Cosgrove knew the right answer. There was nothing wrong with his brain or memory.
“Mrs. Wilder? Lauren?”
“Why am I here, Detective? Why can’t I see my husband?”
“If you could just bear with me—”
“Is he under arrest? Am I? You can at least tell me that! Is Tara? Do we need a lawyer?”
“Well, of course as far as your sister and your husband are concerned, it would be up to them to ask for a lawyer in the event they were placed under arrest. But so far, you and I are just talking, trying to sort out some things we both find confusing.”
“Am I free to go, then?” Lauren held Cosgrove’s gaze.
“Yes, of course, if you want to, but you want the truth, right? It’s important to you?”
She couldn’t deny that it was.
“It’s important to me, too,” Cosgrove said. “I think it’s a big part of why I became a cop. I like to get to the bottom of things. I like to see justice done. I don’t like seeing innocent people hurt. Especially kids. Man, that gets to me.”
“My kids are fine.”
“Yeah, you’re a good mom. Jeff made a real special point of letting me know that.”
Was it sarcasm she heard in his voice? Had Jeff complained to him about her care of their children? Was this about taking them from her? She wanted to ask but couldn’t find the breath or the courage.
The detective picked up his pen. “Tell me about Wick Matson. At our earlier interview, you said he was a heavy-equipment contractor. How do you know that?”
“Because I’ve seen his name on invoices; I’ve written him checks.”
“Have you met him?”
She took a moment, then said no. “But I don’t have a lot to do with the big commercial jobs. Anyway, I think even Jeff hasn’t worked with him that long. A year, two at most.” She paused again, thinking about it. It was when she’d come back to work after the accident that she learned Jeff had changed heavy-equipment suppliers. She remembered him saying something about the former contractor, that he wasn’t maintaining his machinery and Wilder and Tate couldn’t handle the liability if there was an accident. Insurance was a huge part of the cost of running a salvage yard. She explained this to Detective Cosgrove.
“So you don’t know Matson in the capacity of real estate developer. You don’t know that the Nautilus is his project? You haven’t bought shares in the resort yourself or solicited others to invest in the property?”
Her heart tripped. “No.”
“Your husband said you might know where Matson is.”
“What? No. I have no idea why he would say such a thing.” Maybe he hadn’t. “Please let me talk to him.”
Detective Cosgrove lifted another page from the folder. When he pushed it across the table toward her, Lauren saw it was from Cornerstone Bank. She recognized the logo at the top.
Cosgro
ve asked her to look at it.
She averted her gaze, and it was willful, a child’s tactic. Even she knew it was useless.
“Paul Thibideaux—you know the VP over at Cornerstone, the one who’s an old friend of your husband’s—he was kind enough to have this printed out for me. It’s a record of the deposits and withdrawals made to and from your account there in the last six weeks, basically from the time you opened it until today, this morning, in fact.” He paused. “I’m going to need you to look at the list, Mrs. Wilder.”
She did, scanning it quickly, her eye catching on what to her were enormous figures. There were deposits for anywhere from $115,000 to $136,000. The withdrawal amounts were smaller but more numerous. There was one for $22,000, another for $8,000, and three more for $12,000. “I’ve never used this account.” She put the list down. “I only found out about it a few days ago.”
“Really? Because, like I said before, according to your husband, you opened this account yourself.”
“No. I—we were together when we opened it.” Lauren tried again to think, to conjure any image from that experience, the one Jeff claimed they’d shared, but nothing came. Her head was so full of the white noise of her confusion, a higher dissonance of panic. What was going on? She bent forward. “If you’ll let me talk to Jeff, I’m sure we can straighten all of this out.” She wasn’t sure of that or anything.
“Okay, I guess now’s as good a time as any, but before we go, there’s just one more thing I want you to see.”
Lauren watched as Cosgrove reopened the folder, his manila envelope of horrors.
The photo he pushed across the table toward her, a grainy black and white, showed part of a street, the hoods of cars nosed into parking spaces. It was a moment before Lauren recognized the scene, and when the sense of it gelled, a frisson of unease tapped up her spine. “Where did you get this?”
“Do you recognize the location?”
“It’s Prescott Street, outside Kim’s Needle and Book Nook.”
“Yeah. Do you recognize anything else? You see the SUV with the hood up? Could that be your Navigator?”
“Where did you get this?” Lauren repeated.
“There’s a surveillance camera nearby. We took the still from the film footage. But we also have a couple of witnesses who saw you pull into the space.”
“On Wednesday when I came into town to help with the search for Bo, they saw me driving my Navigator?”
“Yeah.” His gaze was penetrating, watchful.
“There was an Altima in that space when I went back. Jeff said I drove it into town.”
“But the picture, the film footage, and the witnesses say otherwise.”
“But that means . . .” She trailed off. She couldn’t begin to wrap her mind around the meaning.
Cosgrove slid a second photo toward her, its quality as poor as the first one. “Do you recognize the guy with his head under the hood?”
The image of the man was too blurry to distinguish more than the fact that he was doing something to the engine, tinkering with it, the way Jeff had tinkered with her Navigator on Tuesday evening when it wouldn’t start. But Lauren didn’t want to think about that, either. She said, “I don’t know who that is.”
“Well, it’s your husband, Jeff Wilder. On Wednesday, while you were at the community center, he tampered with your car, pulled a few wires, then contacted the dealership, had them bring the loaner and switch it out with the Navigator.”
“How do you know?”
“The evidence, film footage, witnesses.” Cosgrove ticked through his list.
Lauren barely heard him. “It could be Danny, the kid who brought me the Navigator. When I went back to Kim’s and didn’t find it, my first thought was that he’d stolen it. Maybe I was right after all.” In her excitement, she bent forward. “He took it for a joyride. Isn’t that what they call it?”
Cosgrove only looked at her, and she got the sense he was waiting for her to run out of words, enthusiasm. She was loath to do either. “There’s no way you can tell who that is from this picture. You can’t even see—why would Jeff do that? We’d already paid for repairs once.” Lauren’s voice rose, as if its very tenor would make her denial true.
Cosgrove shuffled his “evidence” back into the folder and stood up. “If you’re ready, I’ll take you to see him now. You can ask him. He’s just down the hall.”
Lauren stood, too, and fought a wave of dizziness. “Is Tara with Jeff?” It made sense that they would be together if this was about taking the children. But somehow that seemed unlikely now.
Cosgrove said it was possible Tara might be detained.
“You mean arrested?”
“It depends.”
Depends. Dr. Bettinger’s word, Lauren thought, following the detective down the corridor, the one he used when he couldn’t say for sure.
Cosgrove paused outside the door of another interview room only steps away from the one he and Lauren had left, and when he looked at her, she saw caution in his glance, as if he might be warning her to enter at her own risk.
“Ready?” he asked, and before she could say no, he turned the knob.
Jeff said, “Thank God,” when he caught sight of her, and he came immediately around the table to hug her, but it wasn’t a relief, having him close. It wasn’t a comfort, and she stepped from his arms quickly, feeling as leery of him as she might a stranger. She couldn’t help it, and yet her reaction was disconcerting to her.
“I’ll get y’all some coffee,” Cosgrove said, and he left before Lauren could say she didn’t want any coffee, before she could say, Don’t close the door. Don’t leave me alone in here. She kept her back to Jeff.
He said her name, and she turned on him. “What is going on? The police picked Tara and me up at her house. They brought us here in separate cars. I thought it was about Bo, because you shot him. My God, Jeff—” She broke off, feeling the shock again as if it were new, fighting to withstand it. “How could you? And then you tried to hide—you left him, left him on the road. You would treat a dog better, or at least until now, I always believed you would.”
He came toward her as if he might embrace her again, but she held her hand up, palm out, stopping him. “No,” she said. She could not tolerate his touch now. “You’re playing some kind of game with me, and I want to know what it is.”
“Let’s sit—”
“You brought his notepad into the house. It fell out of your pocket, or maybe you put it there deliberately, because you wanted me to think I was the one. You wanted me to believe I was involved, that I’d done something to Bo. Why would you do that? The police already knew it was you and Greg. What were you trying to accomplish?”
“Calm down, okay?”
“Calm down? Are you kidding? I’ve spent hours today scared to death, getting grilled by detectives about everything from Wick Matson and some resort property to a bank account I’ve never used. There’s so much—so many things that have happened lately. I’ve been so scared I was losing my mind, what little I have, but it was you, wasn’t it? You were trying to make me doubt my own sanity.”
“If you’ll just let me—”
“Don’t say I’ve forgotten or it’s my brain injury or I’m on drugs. Don’t say any of that. Don’t talk to me about my issues, Jeff—that you discussed with Detective Cosgrove,” she added, insult riding in her voice. It seemed a small thing by comparison, but it hurt her that he would talk to a virtual stranger about her.
She put her hands to her head. “This can’t be real.”
“Look, can we at least sit down?”
But she wouldn’t, although he did, perhaps thinking she would follow suit.
“I know you’re pissed, but I can explain,” he said, and for one wild moment, her heart soared with a vain hope that an explanation was possible. “Will you sit down? Please?”
<
br /> She pulled out the chair opposite him and sat, stiffly, jaw clenched in a mutinous knot. The room was a duplicate of the one where she had sat with Cosgrove, and she was sitting where he had, with her back to the door. The mirrored wall was on her left now, but she was only subliminally aware of her surroundings.
“Tara must have told you the shooting was an accident,” Jeff said. “It was probably Honey’s bullet. He couldn’t get enough of shooting that goddamn gun.”
“Oh, my God! Please tell me you aren’t trying to lay blame—”
“It happened so quick.” Jeff snapped his thumb against his middle finger. “Like that. Why the hell was the kid there, anyway? That’s what I don’t get.”
“His name was Bo, and it doesn’t matter why he was there, Jeff. It doesn’t even matter that he was shot, as tragic as that is. That was an accident. Even the police know it, or they will. The terrible thing, what is so despicable, so beyond comprehension, is that you covered it up. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? They arrested you. I can’t even imagine what it took, what was going on in your mind to do such a thing.”
Jeff’s face hardened. “I’ll tell you what was going on. Our fucking lives were over, that’s what was going on.”
“I don’t know what you mean. If you’d only reported it—”
“That wasn’t going to change the fact that the kid was dead, and with the cops involved, one thing was going to lead to another, and the shit would hit the fan, just like it is now. That’s what I was thinking.”
“What shit, Jeff?”
“There’s a lot you don’t know.” He kept her gaze, and there was something relentless in his eyes, some kind of awful anguish and desperation.
Lauren couldn’t look away, although she wanted to. The blood in her veins felt like sludge, like ice.
He said, “You won’t like it, but you’ve got to understand I had no choice.”
Crooked Little Lies Page 31
