“You’re a lawyer now?” I asked.
“A liaison.”
The way I felt just then, I could have plowed my fist through the glass and squeezed his neck until his nasty head popped.
“What is it you want?” I asked.
“I want to look you in the eyes and know the truth.”
“About what?”
“Are you guilty as charged?”
“How do you think I’m going to answer?”
“How you answer doesn’t matter: your eyes will tell me what I need to know.”
I sucked it up, leaned forward until my nose was touching the glass, and let him have a good long look.
“No,” I said.
His smile got a little fatter.
“So far, so good,” he said. “But I’m going to need more.”
“Like what?”
“An alternative theory. More importantly, a name.”
I didn’t have to think it over—I knew what I was going to say as soon as I saw him sitting on the wrong side of the glass.
“The cook,” I said.
“The cook? That’s a bit close to home.”
“Doesn’t change the facts.”
“Acting on her own, or at your behest?”
“On her own.”
“See, now that’s interesting. I heard that she was employed as the cook at your insistence, and that cooking was only half of her job. The other half involved reporting to you.”
“That’s a story,” I said. “Nothing more than a story.”
He pushed back in his chair, crossed his legs, and rested his hands on his top knee.
“Convince me,” he said.
“My eyes aren’t convincing enough?”
“In a word, no. So what proof do you have to offer?”
“Will an eight-hour confession do the trick?”
I told him about the long drive from Podunk, Texas, back to Tampa.
Hours of Sarah sniveling and saying she hadn’t meant to kill him, that it had started as self-defense and ended in blind rage. He’d touched her one time too many. It was more than she could take. I said she kept going on and on about how sorry she was, about how a lifetime of good works would never make up for what she’d done.
I have to admit, I sounded damn convincing. Part of me hoped they were recording this conversation—it would give any jury a fat dose of reasonable doubt. The other part of me was imagining Sarah’s first and final encounter with Vincent Costello.
“She was so sorry that she ran away?” Defoe asked.
“Even the guilt-ridden have survival instincts.”
“What was she doing with your knife? The fact that she had it on her suggests premeditation. It suggests she picked her fall guy in advance.”
I started to say something vague about self-protection, then dropped it. Sarah wanted to send me away for life—what did I care if Vincent took her for a cold-blooded killer?
“Maybe she did,” I said. “Our marriage peaked with the honeymoon. Since then it’s been nonstop combat. Maybe she saw her chance to kill two birds with one knife.”
Defoe quit smiling, which did nothing to improve his looks.
“Your story rings true,” he said. “The unfortunate victim had a reputation for being handsy, to say the least. And based on the little I know of you, it isn’t hard to imagine that your wife would wish you ill.”
“So what now?”
“I’ll pass on your version of events. We’ll see what the man on the throne has to say.”
“Any predictions?”
“Depends on his mood. I’ll try to catch him during his after-dinner cigar.”
“I’d rather you didn’t wait until after dinner.”
“Sit tight, Detective Walsh. You’ll have word soon enough.”
I watched him walk away, then sat there until a guard tapped me on the shoulder. I’d like to say that I felt remorse or sadness, but that would be a lie. Back in my cell, I beat Marty at hangman for the first time. The word I guessed was doomsday.
Chapter 39
Anna Costello
I’M NOT sure what it says about me that I wasn’t hungover. Probably nothing good. At almost 10:00 a.m., Sarah was bringing herself to life with a long, luxurious bath. I’d called down for our breakfast and, more importantly, coffee.
Meanwhile, I took the morning paper out onto the balcony. In my previous life, it was always Anthony who read the paper. He called it his morning quiet time. Now I was claiming my time, sliding back into the big, bad world I’d been locked out of for so long.
The sky was bright and clear, the air just warm enough for me to sit outside in my bathrobe. The smell of horse manure mixed with the softer odors of baking bread and frying eggs. I set the paper on the table, flipped past the first page, and went straight for the fluff: fashion and film, gossip and real estate. It felt like that kind of day—the kind where you linger and meander and keep the mood light.
But then there it was, in a slim sidebar on page seven: the story that would turn our lives upside down and give them a hard shake. The headline said it all: DISGRACED DETECTIVE SET FREE ON $5 MILLION BAIL. I waited until my breathing slowed to a seminormal rate, then read through to the end. There was a lot of speculation about who had such deep pockets. I could have solved that mystery. The question was, why? Why was Uncle Vincent backing a cop who’d been caught red-handed holding the weapon that murdered his nephew?
Best-case scenario, at least for us: Vincent wanted Sean outside, where he could snatch him up and take his time. I had no trouble believing that Vincent would pay five million dollars for the privilege of avenging Anthony’s murder himself, mano a mano.
Worst-case scenario: Sean had powers of persuasion I’d never noticed.
He’d convinced Vincent that the knife was a plant. There was no way Vincent would let himself be convinced unless Sean sold him another killer, and Sean only had three options to choose from: Sarah, Serena, and me.
I was spinning back and forth, trying to figure out which scenario was most likely, when the French doors opened behind me and Sarah came strolling out with our breakfast tray balanced professionally on one palm.
“I don’t think coffee ever smelled this good,” she said. “You must not have heard the knocking.”
The bath had done wonders for her. She’d woken up looking green around the gills and pale everywhere else. Now there was color in her cheeks again, a bounce to her step. She seemed weightless, ready to burst into song.
Then she saw my face.
“Oh, honey,” she said, “I know I only just got here, but we both agreed: we can’t be seen together until after the trial. Last night was risky enough.”
“It isn’t that,” I said.
“Then what’s the matter?”
She set the tray on the table, brushed her still-damp hair back behind her ears, and rested a hand on my shoulder.
“Don’t tell me the drinking did you in,” she said. “That isn’t the Anna I know.”
I just held up the paper and pointed. She hadn’t made it past the headline before she dropped into her chair and let out a sharp whimper.
“Oh, my God,” she said.
“I know.”
“But who…?”
“I’ll give you one guess.”
“Vincent?”
I nodded.
“But why?”
“That’s the five-million-dollar question.”
“Coffee,” she said. “I need coffee.”
I filled our cups while she read on, her face going from ruddy to crimson.
“You think Vincent will kill him?” she asked.
I was impressed: she seemed genuinely concerned, and not for herself.
Life in prison was bad enough for her soon-to-be ex: she drew the line at capital punishment. The cynical side of me thought, That’s reserved for other people’s husbands. But this wasn’t the time for a catfight.
“Consider the alternative,” I said. “My erstwhile un
cle-in-law won’t be satisfied until someone stops breathing. Sean was framed. We framed him. Maybe he figured it out and made Vincent a believer.”
Sarah lifted the lid off her eggs Florentine and set it back down without so much as glancing at her plate. Then she took a little tour of the balcony, running her hand absentmindedly along the railing. She looked as though she’d lost her wits.
“It never ends,” she said. “You turn what you think is the final bend, but the road just goes on and on and on.”
“Oh, it’ll end,” I told her. “Everything does. The question is how it will end, and whether or not there’ll be anything left for us afterward.”
She sat back down, her eyes glassy, her mouth hanging open.
“What are we going to do?” she said. “What in the world are we going to do?”
Before I could answer, bells started going off somewhere in the room behind us—long, short, long, short. It was the ringtone on my burner phone. Only one person knew the number.
“That’s Serena calling,” I said, not sure yet whether I had the will to answer.
Sarah sprang up.
“I’ll get it,” she said. “I haven’t talked to Serena in ages.”
“The phone’s on my nightstand.”
I followed her inside, watched her lunge across my bed, grab at the phone, knock it to the floor, and then go scampering after it on hands and knees.
“Serena?” she said. “Serena, are you still there?”
“Put it on speaker,” I said.
She fumbled for the button. The voice that filled the room wasn’t Serena’s.
“She’s sitting right here,” a man said. “Would you like to speak with her?”
Defoe. I recognized his nasal, wispy voice, remembered telling Vincent that his right-hand man sounded more like a librarian than a killer. “Sheep’s clothing,” Vincent said. It sounded like a warning. I thought now that maybe it was.
“Sarah,” Serena said, “whatever you do, don’t—”
Defoe snatched the phone back.
“Is it Sarah I’m speaking with?” Defoe said. “I thought this was Anna’s line.”
I started to answer, but Sarah beat me to it.
“It’s Sarah,” she said. “And if you hurt her, I swear to God I’ll—”
“Feisty,” Defoe cut her off. “Just like your beloved aunt. She’s here, too. Want to say hello?”
Sarah clutched at her chest. I hoped to hell she’d remembered her insulin.
“Don’t you listen to a word this cadaver says,” Lindsey yelled. “He’s using us as bait, and I won’t—”
“As you can tell, the gang is all here,” Defoe said. “I thought I’d invite you to the party.”
Sarah looked up at me from where she sat slumped between the beds. It was clear she’d reached her limit.
“We wouldn’t miss it for the world,” I said. “You need us to bring anything?”
“Do my ears deceive me, or is that the Widow Costello?”
“Hello, Defoe. How’s life as Vincent’s trained monkey?”
“Always so brave,” he said. “At least from a distance. Last time I saw you, you were fleeing the scene of an accident. You’re lucky I didn’t call the police.”
“Thanks for that. Now about this little shindig…”
“Here’s the deal: it’s a kind of surprise party. At least, we want the location to be a surprise.”
He told us to pull up outside Lindsey’s house at 8:00 p.m. on the dot. There would be a black sedan parked at the curb. We were to follow it to what he called the “party house.”
“Needless to say, any sign of an uninvited guest—or guests—and the evening will end very badly for your friends.”
With that, he hung up. The room went as quiet as a crypt.
Part III
Chapter 40
Sarah Roberts-Walsh
“SLOW DOWN,” Anna said. “We won’t make the flight if you get pulled over.”
I took my foot off the gas until the speedometer hit seventy—a compromise she’d have to live with.
“We need to call the police, Anna. This is way, way, way above our pay grade. We’re dealing with professionals here.”
“Anthony was a professional,” she said.
“A professional accountant.”
“That’s what it said on his tax returns, but there was more to Anthony than numbers. We took him down, didn’t we?”
Her sense of calm was only inflaming my panic. I wondered what kind of chill pill she’d taken. Probably a benzo or four. I thought maybe I should ask her to share.
“We had surprise on our side then,” I argued. “Vincent’s men know we’re coming. They have Serena and Lindsey hostage. The police—”
“Will get them killed.”
“And we won’t?”
“No. Because we’ll have surprise on our side again.”
“What are you talking about?”
I wanted to scream, It’s not your aunt with a gun to her head!
“I know where they are,” she said, her voice neutral and detached, as if she was practicing to be a hypnotist.
“You’re clairvoyant now, is that it?”
“No, ma’am. I just have a good memory for sounds. You didn’t hear that chiming in the background? Defoe had to raise his voice to talk over it.”
I tried replaying the call in my mind, but I’d been too frantic to pick up on anything past Defoe’s instructions.
“Anthony hated that clock,” Anna said.
“What clock?”
“The grandfather clock in his uncle’s country getaway. It was so damn loud you could hear it two floors up, in the attic bedroom where we always slept. Kept Anthony awake all night long. There was something haunting about it, he said. I think he believed the place was literally haunted.”
“You’re saying that’s where they have Aunt Lindsey and Serena? In Vincent’s cabin?”
“I wouldn’t call a four-thousand-square-foot home a cabin, but yeah—that’s where they’re holed up.”
I thought it over while I darted in and out of traffic, one hand hovering above the horn. Maybe she was right, but I couldn’t see how it changed anything.
“All the more reason to call the cops,” I said. “They can swoop in there now. Vincent’s men won’t know what hit them. Hell, they’re probably napping, saving their energy for the big night.”
Anna sniggered.
“Hard to believe you were married to a cop for all those years,” she said.
“One bad apple doesn’t mean—”
“Oh, please. The whole damn tree is rotten. Any doubt I had was erased when Sean showed up at that seedy motel. Call 911 and Vincent will know about it before you hang up the phone.”
Her energy was picking up now. She sounded a little less sedated, a lot more determined.
“So what do we do, storm the place?” I asked. “Just the two of us? Get ourselves killed along with Aunt Lindsey and Serena?”
I took my eyes off the road long enough to see that Anna was grinning.
“We don’t need to storm the place,” she said. “For once we can use Vincent’s paranoia against him.”
I was desperate for her to cut to the chase.
“Enough with the riddles,” I said. “What do you have in mind?”
She let her head fall back against the headrest—a sure sign that she was about to take her time.
“Back in the day, Anthony wanted to impress me. He sent flowers to the shitty little bungalow where I still lived with my parents. He took me whale watching in a helicopter. He even cooked for me, if you can picture that. And he let me in on family secrets. I’m talking family with a capital F.
“We’d only been dating a month when he brought me to one of the infamous Costello retreats at Vincent’s backwoods chalet. I was peacock proud. I couldn’t believe it. Anthony Costello wanted to show me off to his family. Like I was a prize. Like he was sure this little bumpkin from Jackson would make their j
aws drop—all these career criminals at the top of their game. People who owned baseball teams and yachts and penthouses around the globe.”
I thought, Enough with the rags-to-riches melodrama. But trying to speed her up would only slow her down.
“Anthony and I got there early. He wanted to show me around ‘the grounds.’ By grounds he meant a thousand acres of Florida wilderness. Like I said, I grew up in the sticks, but I’ve never been much of a country girl. Especially not Florida country. Live oak and cypress swamps, alligators and indigo snakes—throw in a broken-down plantation house and you’ve got the set for a slasher movie.
“But now I had my man to protect me. He led me down this windy, overgrown trail for what felt like miles, though I don’t think it could have been—I’m not sure how many acres are in a mile.
“Anyway, we got to a spot where the trail was blocked by an enormous, moss-covered log. I was ready to climb over it, but Anthony held up a hand. He said he wanted to show me something, told me to stand back. I watched him crouch down like a sumo wrestler and set both hands on that log. Then he pushed and heaved and grunted until he turned red in the face and there was spit flying out of his mouth.
“The thing didn’t budge, but he kept on trying like nothing short of a hernia would stop him. I thought, What the hell are you doing? But since we weren’t married yet I only said, ‘Want some help?’ He stepped back. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘give it a try. Maybe a woman’s touch will do the trick.’
“Pushing solo wasn’t what I’d had in mind, but I could tell something was up, so I played along. I crouched down just like he had, laid my hands where he’d laid his, and shoved with all my might.
“Well, the thing rolled right away, and I nearly did a face-plant. It couldn’t have weighed more than a pound or two. Meanwhile, Mafia boy was laughing his tonsils out. I was mad as hell, but I laughed along with him, because that’s what you do when you think you might be in love with someone you barely know. Then he stood up straight, stopped laughing, and pointed.
“There was a square of blue tarp on the ground where the log had been. He pulled it back and revealed a round steel door like the kind you’d see on the top of a submarine. He grabbed the handle, twisted, and pulled.
Three Women Disappear Page 15
