The Beautiful and the Wicked

by Liv Spector

  “Wild Turkey for you,” Conrad said to Lila, setting a crystal whiskey glass in front of her filled with one perfectly round ice cube submerged in her regular booze of choice.

  “You’re an angel, Conrad,” Lila said, keeping her eyes on Teddy, who looked momentarily relieved by this brief interruption.

  “And a gin martini for you, sir.”

  “Cheers, Conrad.” Teddy immediately wrapped his fingers around the glass’s elongated stem and threw half the drink back. He breathed a deep sigh, then nodded at Conrad, who wordlessly returned to the main house. Teddy leaned over and took Lila’s hand in his, looking her squarely in the face. “I’ve got something to tell you, but I want you to promise me that you’ll stay calm.”

  A nervous laugh burst from Lila’s lips. How could she ever hope to stay calm when he was acting like this? “Just spit it out,” she said, feeling her pulse begin to increase.

  Teddy nodded. Then he downed the rest of his drink, still clearly stalling. “Enrique Herrera was found dead yesterday morning,” he said slowly.

  Lila suddenly grew cold, despite the fact that she was baking in the hot Miami sunshine. “What from?” Her voice was flat. Serious.

  “Gunshot to the head.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” She scrambled to her feet. She didn’t know where she was headed, but she had an overwhelming need to go . . . she’d figure out where in a second.

  “When was I supposed to tell you? While you were passed out? Lila, a ­couple hours ago you didn’t even know where you were. Who you were! I thought it would be better for you to catch your breath before you shot off again.” He sighed. “I knew you’d react this way. Ready to leap before knowing where you’ll land.”

  She shook her head. Teddy should know better than to try to control her. Avoiding his gaze, she focused on the ice under the untouched caviar, watching it as it slowly turned to water.

  “What are the police saying?” she asked.

  “That it’s suicide. The maid found him in his bedroom with the back of his skull blown off and a smoking gun in his hand.”

  “Suicide! That’s bullshit,” she spat. She was growing angrier by the second. Her nerves were electric. “You and I both know he didn’t kill himself.”

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions, Lila. You don’t know what happened.” Teddy gave her a nervous look.

  “I know exactly what happened. His wife killed him,” she said defiantly.

  “Elise Warren? You don’t know that, Lila.” He regarded her warily.

  “Like hell I don’t!”

  Teddy and Lila had known each other for a little over a year, and in that time he’d seen how her obsessions could get the better of her. And there was nothing Lila was more obsessed with than Elise Warren.

  Lila’s mind was racing. She said, “She’s done it before, Teddy. Twice. And she got away with it . . . twice. Two husbands dead. Are you trying to tell me she didn’t off the third?” Lila had spent whatever spare time she had over the last ten years trying to prove that Elise Warren was guilty of murder in the first degree, and now, finally with Elise’s latest husband dead on the ground missing half his skull, she had a shot at making a murder rap stick.

  Teddy gave her a skeptical look. “This is exactly what I was worried out. I knew you’d think it was Elise. But sit down. Let’s talk things through . . . together.”

  “Not a chance in hell. If Elise is guilty, and I can guarantee she is, she’s already using her money and connections to dig her way out of this mess. And I’ve got to catch her before it’s too late.”

  Before Teddy could say anything, Lila was already halfway across the lawn. She knew this was her chance for justice, and she had to take it. Finally.

  Lila knew for certain Elise was guilty—­because ten years ago, she’d offed her first husband, Jack Warren.

  And Lila’s sister had taken the blame.

  CHAPTER 2

  “I CAN’T TELL you much about the Herrera case, but I’ll say it doesn’t look good for Elise.”

  That was music to Lila’s ears. She was on the phone with Mitch Kessler, an old buddy of hers from back when she worked homicide for the Miami PD.

  “But officially they’re still sticking to the suicide story?” Lila asked.

  “Sure are. But from what I heard, it looks like there might’ve been some tampering with the crime scene. And all fingers point to Elise. Plus, the forensics report came in and there was zero gunpowder residue found on Herrera’s hand. The whole thing stinks to high heaven.”

  Lila had to stop herself from laughing out loud. “Sounds pretty unlikely, right? That a guy can shoot himself without getting any gunpowder on his hand?” It couldn’t get any better than this. It looked, finally, like Elise was going to get what was coming to her.

  “Exactly. Anyway, she’s here getting questioned now.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  Lila drove her silver Karmann Ghia toward the police headquarters as fast as she could. She turned west on a causeway that sliced low across the turquoise shimmering of Biscayne Bay, the warm winds swirling around her, making thick swaths of her long, black hair dance like marionettes held aloft by invisible strings.

  “Listen,” Kessler was saying, “just be sure to keep my name out of this. If anyone found out I was giving you information about the case, they’d have my ass.”

  “You’ve got my word,” Lila said.

  “Maybe you’ll finally get her this time, Lila. I sure as hell hope you do.”

  Around the Miami Police Department, it was a well-­known fact that Lila Day had it in for Elise Warren—­and no one could really blame her.

  ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2008, at 2:20 A.M., the captain of The Rising Tide radioed the U.S. Coast Guard from the middle of the Caribbean Sea, 154 nautical miles northeast of Cuba. He was calling for help. “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. This is Captain Robert Nash on The Rising Tide. We are 23 degrees 10 minutes north. 79 degrees 21 minutes west. A passenger has been shot. Possibly fatally. And is now overboard. I repeat, Jack Warren has been shot and is overboard. Armed suspect still at large. This is The Rising Tide. We are requesting immediate assistance. Over.”

  Lila knew the recording by heart, as did most of the world thanks to the intense media coverage following Jack Warren’s death. TV stations and radio programs would play the Mayday call in a seemingly never-­ending loop. Over and over again, they’d play the captain’s slow and shaky voice stuttering out those now infamous words. His every gasping breath serving as proof that he knew just how bad it was to have one of the world’s most powerful men die on his watch.

  An hour after the distress call was made, when the coast guard boarded the yacht, all that was left of Jack was a thick, viscous pool of his blood. Four bullet casings and a snub-­nosed .38 were also recovered from the scene of the crime. The ship’s captain confirmed that there were ten guests and fifteen crew on board when the yacht left Miami on the seventh of September, four days prior to the murder. When The Rising Tide was searched, everyone was accounted for. Except for Jack, of course—­and Ava Day, a twenty-­six-­year-­old landscape painter from Miami who just happened to be Jack’s latest in a long series of mistresses.

  The bloody event occurred during Jack’s fiftieth birthday party. According to the police report, first responders noted that every person interviewed, be they passengers or crew, was either in a heavy state of intoxication or just sobering up from a heavy state of intoxication. Images from the crime scene showed a wild post-­bacchanalian spectacle: booze bottles were littered all over the main deck, furniture was splintered, upended, or overturned, dirty mirrors with traces of cocaine were found in several guest cabins. And there were unsubstantiated rumors that several members of the crew had ingested LSD on the night of the murder. But despite the impaired states of everyone on board, their stories matched in several key areas: fi
ve ­people heard a man and woman arguing, followed by several gunshots. One passenger saw Jack’s lifeless body fall overboard, hit the water, and sink down into the choppy seas on that moonless September night. And everyone verified that Ava Day, Jack’s mistress, had been on board. The fact that Jack had invited his girlfriend on a cruise along with his wife and their only child was something police investigators chalked up to an eccentricity of the upper class.

  “Rich ­people,” they muttered, between interviews of the hungover or soon-­to-­be-­hungover passengers. “They’re not just like us.”

  Jack’s wife, Elise, who the police report noted went from being cooperative to agitated during her interview, stated that she’d seen Ava flee the scene in a dinghy. “That whore murdered my husband!” she yelled. “With any luck she’ll drown at sea!”

  The police searched the waters for both Ava and Jack for days, but came up empty-­handed. All that was found was the fifteen-­foot inflatable boat, which Elise identified as Ava’s escape vehicle. It was discovered capsized and drifting a ­couple miles offshore of a small Cuban fishing village. Ava was nowhere to be found, but forensics confirmed that her fingerprints were all over the interior of the boat.

  After the prints found on the boat were linked to those found on the murder weapon, the commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard held a press conference naming Ava Day as the primary suspect in the murder of Jack Warren. “The suspect remains at large, but we will use every air and sea craft available to search for Ms. Ava Day. And our search for the remains of the victim, Jack Warren, is ongoing.”

  When Warren’s body was never recovered, he was officially declared lost at sea.

  The gory and sensational murder of the fifty-­year-­old tech titan by his lover shocked the world. Every news site and gossip rag was scrambling for details, desperate to know everything about this gun-­wielding mistress who had murdered one of the world’s Great Men. And as Ava was publicly vilified, picked apart, and condemned by public opinion, Jack was being canonized.

  His good friend and golf buddy President George W. Bush released a statement: “The world lost one of its greatest visionaries today. A heartbreaking tragedy.” The Beach Boys announced they were going to write an album-­length opera-­bio about Jack. And Sean P. Diddy Combs, who was a frequent guest on The Rising Tide, tweeted, “RIP to my homie Jack.”

  Jack’s face graced the cover of every newspaper and magazine around the world. On cable news shows, talking heads pontificated somberly about how the loss of such a genius would negatively impact the development of global culture. Mourners left tokens of remembrance and flowers at the gates of the Silicone Valley campus of Jack’s multitrillion-­dollar company, Warren Software. It might seem strange that all this outpouring of sentiment was for a man uniformly believed to be an egomaniacal narcissist whose relentlessness and deep political conservatism often put him on the opposite side of the good guy. But nothing, it seemed, rehabilitated a toxic public image better than being murdered.

  Lila and her mom found out about Jack’s death when police came banging on her mom’s door in the middle of night, looking for Ava. Lila was twenty then, and still living at home. The news that Ava was romantically involved with the world-­famous Jack Warren came as a complete shock to both Lila and her mother. But no surprise touched the out-­of-­body bewilderment they felt when the police told them Ava was wanted for his murder. Slack-­jawed and blindsided, the two women stood holding each other, pajama-­clad and barefoot in their kitchen, weeping for Ava, as the police barged in, tossed things around, treated them roughly, accused them of lying, and threatened them with jail time for aiding a fugitive.

  Lila never doubted her sister’s innocence for one second. How could the kindhearted, sensitive sister she knew be the violent and volatile temptress the police and newspapers were talking about? But the world had made up its mind. And leading the charge was Elise Warren, the former-­model-­turned-­failed-­TV-­actress who took to the role of sad and vengeful widow like she’d been waiting to play it her whole life. The woman whom the tabloids had previously painted as an ambitious gold digger was transformed overnight into a beautiful victim of lust and betrayal. There was a sympathetic Vanity Fair profile, and continual TV appearances with Elise demanding the capture of Ava Day for the murder of her beloved soul mate. She even put up a $25 million reward for anyone who provided information leading to the capture of Ava. In Elise’s hands, Jack’s death became a three-­ring circus, with her as the ringmaster. And with every maudlin and self-­serving interview Elise gave calling for Ava’s arrest, Lila hated the woman even more.

  Amid the storm, Lila felt utterly helpless. And she hated that feeling. So a few months after her sister’s disappearance, she enrolled in the Miami Police Academy, hoping that becoming a cop would be the best way to fight for her sister—­to fight for every person unjustly accused of a crime.

  As Lila worked her way up from a lowly beat cop to one of the most respected homicide detectives in all of Miami, she always kept tabs on Elise. She watched as Elise remarried the Austrian financier Helmut Stadtlander while police were still hunting for Ava. When Stadtlander tumbled down an alpine cliff to his death, on their honeymoon, Lila was sure that Elise would be charged with his murder. But nothing happened.

  Now, with Elise’s third husband, Enrique Herrera, suspiciously dead, things would surely be different. In a little over a decade, Elise had buried three husbands—­and in the process, become one of the richest women in the world. But Lila was set on making sure that luck had finally run out for Elise.

  BY THE TIME Lila got to the Miami police station, she was so anxious to see Elise in handcuffs that she practically bounded up the station stairs. The first to greet her was Sergeant Corey Kreps, as always. Forty years of police work under his belt and a weakness for Irish whiskey had left Kreps unfit for almost all law enforcement work, so the higher-­ups stuck him behind the bulletproof glass of the station’s front desk, where he could do little harm to himself or others.

  “Hey, sweetheart,” he called out to her. “Looking as gorgeous as ever.”

  “Same to you, Kreps.”

  “Oh, you know. I try to stay pretty for my suitors,” he said as his rheumy eyes twinkled and his yellow-­toothed smile shined brightly. “And what brings you down to this shit hole?”

  “Got word that Elise Warren was going to make an appearance downtown.” She grinned. “I couldn’t resist seeing it in person.”

  “That’s my Lila,” Kreps said with a loud slap of his hand on his meaty thigh. “Still after the Warren broad, huh? Like a dog with a goddamn bone. But I’ve got bad news for you, hon. You just missed her.”

  “She’s gone? Already?” Lila looked around the building’s dingy lobby, but saw only the usual collection of small-­time crooks and junkies, the hard-­done-­by folks getting squeezed between their shitty lives and the criminal justice system.

  “Swear to God,” Kreps said.

  “Who did the questioning?”

  Kreps flipped through the papers in front of him. “Looks like Detective Rafael Marana is the guy to talk to.”

  “Marana? Oh, Christ.”

  It was a well-­known fact that Rafa Marana was one of the laziest, paint-­by-­numbers homicide detectives that the city of Miami had ever known. Having him as lead detective was nothing but bad news.

  “Easy there, kid. Ever heard that you can’t shoot the messenger?”

  “Is Marana still here?” She needed to talk to him immediately. Too impatient to wait for Kreps’s response, Lila rushed down the hall to the homicide department.

  When she got to his office, she found Marana on the phone. The moment he laid eyes on her, he slowly shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe a shitty day just got shittier. He put his hand over the receiver and whispered, “Not now.”

  His worn-­out shoes were propped up on a corner of his old, steel desk
, which was piled high with tiny mountains of files and yellowing papers, untouched for ages. By his feet, a bottle of Pepto-­Bismol sat right next to his oversize “#1 Dad” coffee mug. Marana, Lila remembered, had no children. She walked over to him, ripped the phone away from his ear, and slammed it down.

  “Goddamnit, Day!” Marana yelled. “That was an important call.”

  “Why’d you let her go?”

  “It’s none of your goddamn business, or did you forget you’re not a cop anymore?”

  “You forget you are one?” She slapped his feet off his desk. They fell to the floor with a heavy thud. “Where’s Elise?”

  Marana let out a titanic exhale. There was a lifetime of disappointments contained in that one gust of breath. “I knew it was only a matter of time before you came sniffing around here. As if getting a high-­profile case isn’t enough of a goddamn hassle. When I saw Elise was involved, I knew you’d be up my ass.”

  Marana leaned back in his chair and picked at a scab on his skull. He flicked the dried crust of skin to the ground and then sniffed at his fingers, deeply inhaling his scalpy scent. Lila felt a wave of revulsion crawl up her esophagus. “We ran into some problems,” he said simply.

  “Problems?”

  Marana looked exhausted. Like everyone else on the force, he knew that Lila had some kind of vengeance thing for Elise because of what happened with her sister. But he clearly wasn’t up for dealing with her wrath today.

  “Tell me what happened,” Lila asked, trying hard to swallow her anger.

  “Some evidence has gone missing.” He said it in a matter-­of-­fact way, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to misplace key evidence in a possible homicide case.

  “What evidence?”

  “The gun. It’s gone. Okay? Gone. We’ve searched the evidence locker. We’ve searched the entire police station. Nothing. Nada. Zip.” His words were coming at Lila rapid-­fire, and his wide eyes were locked on hers. She noticed a little spittle had collected at the corners of his mouth. “Now I’ve got some fresh-­out-­of-­law school A.D.A. chewing my ass out. And Elise’s attorney is saying that she’s going to bring a lawsuit against the city of Miami for fifty million bucks because we called her down to the station for questioning and lost key evidence. This case is only thirty-­six hours old and it’s already a colossal boil on my ass. So, the last thing that I need in this entire cocksucking day is to get any shit from you.”