I would give the Andres their answer, even if I had to burst their perfect-kid bubble to get there. In the long run, they’d find more peace knowing the truth. That was some tiny measure of comfort.
A bigger dose: if my gut was right, that little Davenport prick would rot in a cell for half his life. There wasn’t a rug big enough for daddy’s friends to sweep a double-murder rap under. And if he had a red hoodie, assaulting an officer doesn’t get you much sympathy from your average Texas judge.
So I’d almost gotten myself killed, and maybe handed our big bad whatever got Ray killed as a bonus. But Graham had proof that Tenley was in possession of a whole lot of cash Monday night. Cash that wasn’t on her or in her bag when she was found.
I closed my eyes, the fingers of my free hand tightening around the sheet.
I didn’t have a few days to recuperate. The case was getting more urgent—and more personal—by the hour. Some stitches and a few Band-Aids were in order, because we had a killer to catch.
34
Staring smack into the sun when a freshly sewn head wound that’s less than twelve hours old isn’t any fun at all. I’d sooner be shot again, and that’s saying something, because that bullshit hurts.
I pulled a ragged Astros cap from the glove box in my truck and tucked it low over my eyes, still wishing my sunglasses were darker. Thud. Thud. Thud. My stitches throbbed in time to the truck’s engine, the Tylenol I’d swallowed on my way out of the DoubleTree not even slowing it down. The doctor had given me a small bottle of Vicodin on my way out of the ER, but I disliked pills as a general rule, and narcotics scared me. Besides, I needed everything firing on as many cylinders as I could muster if I was going to talk to Nicky Richardson.
He was the reason for the glaring brightness currently producing multicolored spots in my left peripheral. Sitting in his Mercedes convertible in the school parking lot, drumming two fingers on the steering wheel and looking for all the world like he’d never smile again.
Which made me smile more than I had in days.
Serials don’t feel remorse for their crimes. They get a kick out of the chase, the defeat, the kill. They don’t mourn their victims. So Nicky’s soulful, sad gaze was the best evidence I could’ve hoped for that he hadn’t done anything wrong.
But he did know both dead girls. Which meant I had to ask a few hard questions. The way to do that without causing myself a lot of grief was to catch him between home and school. Since I was all stocked up on grief and difficult situations this week, there I sat, staring into the sun.
He moved one hand toward his door, and mine followed. Finally. The bell rang twenty minutes ago.
He paused. Let his head drop to the top of the steering wheel. He was still for three blinks before his shoulders started heaving. Big, hollow breaths that don’t feel like they’re doing their job. The kind where you know your lungs are full, but you still can’t breathe.
Poor kid. But . . . thank God.
I opened my door and crossed the lot, the sun mercifully disappearing behind a cloud. It took a few beats for him to notice me, his eyes popping wide when he looked up. The door opened and he scrambled to his feet. “Officer.” He swallowed hard. “What can I do for you today?”
I nodded. “Can we just talk for a moment before you go to your first class?”
“Of course.” He put out his hand, gesturing for me to lead the way to a shaded concrete bench. I obliged, patting the cool surface so he’d join me. No easy way around it, so I just asked.
“How did you know Jessa DuGray, Nicky?” I asked.
I watched his face for cues.
Not a twitch, not a flinch. He looked me dead in the eyes as the corners of his lips ghosted up before they fell again. “Tenley. She was the one who knew Jessa. Or I guess really, Tenley’s mom did. But that’s how I met her. She was sweet. Cute. A little quiet.” His brow furrowed. “It’s weird that T is gone less than a year later, isn’t it?” His hands flew to his curls, palms obscuring his forehead. “My God. You don’t think she knew something about what happened to Jessa, do you? I mean, they said she jumped, right?”
I tried to force words out over the throbbing above my left ear, but my mind was having trouble processing his sentence and forming a reply. “Ten . . . Tenley? Knew Jessa?” It even sounded half-addled to me.
He didn’t seem to notice, his head shaking. “She had to have jumped,” he repeated.
I blinked. Knew better than to shake my head. “Nicky, exactly how did Tenley come to know Jessa?”
He dropped his hands back to his lap. “She was an artist. Won some kind of contest Erica’s firm sponsored for Texas high school seniors. So when she came here to go to school, Erica offered her a sort of internship where she helped out with stuff. T hung out at her mom’s office sometimes, and they talked. They weren’t best friends or anything, but Tenley liked her well enough. Said Jessa was into older guys and it worried her. She was too trusting, T said, and maybe she was right. She followed me on every site like the first time she ever met me, and I followed back because it’s a dick move to not follow a sweet girl just because you don’t want to screw her, you know? But then she disappeared.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose between two fingers. “Jessa was a business major.”
Nicky nodded. “She wasn’t allowed to study art. Told us her dad said she couldn’t waste her free ride on a useless degree. So she figured she’d learn business and be a designer, like Erica. Her dad sounded like a real douche. Maybe that’s why we hit it off, me and her.” That brought a twisted smile to his stubbly face.
Intern. Artist. Decorator. Learn the business.
I stood. “Nicky, do you know if Jessa ever spent any time with Zayne Davenport’s mother?”
He nodded. “She liked helping out with the refinished furniture. Especially when people wanted funky stuff with bright colors.”
Holy shit.
I patted his shoulder. “I’m so sorry for your loss. Again.”
I cursed the morning traffic every inch of the way back to the hotel and flipped my computer open what seemed like a lifetime later. How could I have missed this? I pulled out my notes and ran back through every interview.
Erica didn’t say they knew Jessa.
But I didn’t ask her, either. She was mourning her daughter, and the chances they would know Archie’s cold-case victim were too slim to even register. Days of looking for a way these girls were connected. “And they were friends,” I muttered, plugging my phone into the laptop and pulling up Tenley’s passwords. Instagram. Snapchat. Twitter. They were on each other’s friends list everywhere. Even last night, I’d focused on looking for guys they both knew and just big fat not noticed.
Hiding in plain sight. Dammit.
The magic rock was at least in this field. I could feel it, a tiny electrical surge skating through my gut. I was finally close.
I grabbed a piece of paper and started a chart. Jessa knew Erica because of her career. She knew Tenley through Erica. She knew Nicky through Tenley.
Back to Erica. Then Bethany Davenport. Then Zayne. The paint thinner on her back. “Because she was in his mother’s studio when he attacked her.” I said it right out loud.
My gut said yes.
I just needed proof, and that was the tricky part. Bethany Davenport would lie through her caps till she went to her grave to keep her kid out of trouble, and her husband would make sure it worked.
Erica. She was the common denominator here, and if I’ve ever met a mother who loved a child, it was her. I clicked the pad to wake up my screen. How far back did she and Bethany go? Was there anything in a shared past we could leverage to make her tell the truth?
I googled Erica first.
More than a thousand hits. I scrolled.
Paused.
It was nothing. She was a decorator. Letting the work speak for itself.
Right?
There were no photos of her. Not one, on the whole internet. Rooms she’d done by the d
ozens, from every angle. I stopped, hovering the arrow over one of a peach-and-silver bedroom.
Charity’s bedroom, one I remembered as gold and white.
Erica redecorated my sister’s room at the mansion for Governor Holdswaithe and his ditzy little trophy wife. That shouldn’t make me angry. I had no love for that endless tomb of a house—hell, I didn’t like living there when I had to. But sacred spaces aren’t supposed to be reimagined. I kept scrolling.
Not so much as a snapshot of Erica. My mother would have definitely told her that with her looks, that was bad business. Erica clearly took pride in her appearance. And my mother didn’t take kindly to having advice ignored. Another place where two and two was some sideways exponential, theoretical version of four. An alternate-universe four.
An alternate-universe Erica Andre?
The guy. The one in the shabby clothes with the grease-laden hair who looked like he’d walked up on a ghost outside Lola’s. What had he called her?
Sammy Jo.
What if he wasn’t high or half-crazy?
I needed a maiden name. Tax records—I clicked to the Travis County property database and punched in the Andres’ address.
The house was in Brent’s name. Just his.
I tapped a finger on the edge of the keyboard. Maybe that’s why she stayed even when she knew about his girlfriend—but why had a woman like Erica Andre agreed to that in the first place?
Because mortgage companies have a way of dragging skeletons out of the deepest closets, maybe?
I went to the marriage records next. Travis County had nothing. Bexar County had nothing. I searched half the state before I found them in the Harris County database. October wedding, twenty years ago this coming fall. Brent Ryan Andre and Erica Louise Tenley.
I clicked the search bar again. Erica Tenley & Texas.
Twenty-three hits.
All of them news articles from this week.
Not a single link more than five days old. Every one with Erica’s name highlighted as Texas track phenom Tenley Andre’s mother. No trace of Erica before she was Tenley’s mother: no high school sports articles, one-off mentions in the small-town paper’s list of honor roll students . . . nothing.
Damn. If I had a good old-fashioned print to run, it would be faster, but processing grieving parents is usually frowned upon. And unnecessary. So I’d have to do this the sneaky, time-consuming modern way.
I cleared the search field and typed Sammy Jo & Texas. Two hundred links came up. Nothing to do but start sifting.
I scrolled, reading, until my eyes were about ready to fall out of my face, then clicked to the images.
Nothing. Nothing for pages.
And all of a sudden, I found her.
Long hair. Frizzy, darker. Hollow cheeks. But the guy was right: those eyes. Erica’s bright baby blues were hard to miss, and looking closely, the nose and the smile finished the picture. This girl was unmistakably Erica Andre. I’d stake my badge on that. I clicked the link to the article that accompanied the picture.
February, thirty years ago. Sammy Jo Felton died in a car accident when the SUV she was driving flipped over on a narrow road and exploded. I magnified the photo on the screen.
It was Erica. It had to be. I’d never seen relatives with a resemblance like this.
But Erica did say her mother died “a long time ago.” In a car crash, maybe?
I double-checked the date. The math didn’t work for the girl in this photo to be Erica’s mother. The article said Sammy Jo was fifteen, and thirty years ago that would’ve been right about Erica’s same age. I scanned the rest of the article. No other passengers mentioned.
It had to be her.
“She reinvented herself,” I murmured to the desk lamp. “Just like she remade Charity’s room, she remade her life.”
But what had she run from? The news story in front of me didn’t tell me anything about Sammy Jo other than that she was supposed to be dead.
I pulled out my phone and snapped a photo of the screen. Time for some of these skeletons to come out into the light.
35
I didn’t call anyone on my way to the Andre house, mostly because I wanted time to think up the most inoffensive way I could muster to ask Erica if her entire life had been built around one massive lie.
Stopped under a tree on the Davenports’ side of the road, I stared at the end of Erica’s driveway. I couldn’t seriously go up there and accuse this woman of knowing or even hiding something about her child’s death, could I?
Three long blinks gave my eyes solace from the unrelenting sunshine, and I kicked the door of the truck open, adrenaline making quick work of masking my headache. Hard questions, and often being the person who asks them, are part of this job. I got over worrying about what people think of me years ago. I just needed her to tell me the truth.
The only question left concerned the best route to that: kindness or shock value?
I could be sweet and soft-spoken and ask her if there was anything she’d like to share with me to help Tenley—that sort of emotional plea is big with grieving relatives. Or I could go for shock. Wait for Erica to open the door, call her “Sammy Jo” or “Miss Felton” and watch her reaction.
I still hadn’t decided when I rounded the pillar at the end of the driveway and spotted Erica. But she didn’t see me.
She was too busy trying to cram a .22 into her tiny little eggplant Prada bag.
I scooted behind the pillar and stared, even pulling my sunglasses down the bridge of my nose to get a better view.
She wriggled the gun around, zipped the bag, and climbed into her Jag.
I made myself dizzy sprinting back to my truck, let her have half a block, and followed.
Granted, folks around here are about as likely to have a handgun as folks in Seattle are to have an umbrella. But Erica Andre had a place for everything. And that bag didn’t have room for a handgun.
Where she was headed with it—and who she intended the bullets in it for—might just be Archie’s elusive magic rock.
36
Two hours and about a hundred speeding violations later, Erica Andre got out of her car at a run-down beer joint at least ten exits past the ass end of nowhere.
I watched from the far side of the motel across the dusty two-lane road as she disappeared through a screen door holding on by a single hinge. Checking the clock, I shook my head. A Westover Hills decorator to the rich and powerful didn’t belong in a wood-and-metal shack with a flashing neon sign out front that advertised old eer, thanks to a short circuit feeding the C and the B.
But the young woman from the news article—Sammy Jo, with her frizzy, unkempt hair and faded, ill-fitting clothing—she might.
Classy. Poised. Elegant. Erica Andre was everything Sammy Jo Felton never could’ve dreamed of being.
I’m not what I appear to be, she’d written in that email to Stella Connolly.
She wasn’t there to drink, because she could drink on the quiet in a hundred places closer to home. Places she wouldn’t need a handgun.
Which left two options I could see: She wanted to hire someone to avenge her daughter’s death and knew this was where to find such people but wasn’t stupid enough to go unarmed. Or she thought her past had caught up to Tenley and was looking to take a pound of someone’s flesh in return.
I had to get in there. Preferably without Erica seeing me.
I stepped out of the truck and circled wide around the motel, crossing the road a good football field away from the bar. Skirting scattered yucca, I found the back door, and recoiled when my tug on the handle moved the entire wall. The whole damned building seemed in serious danger of crashing into a heap of rotted lumber any moment.
I twisted the knob harder. Locked.
Dammit.
I paced a short stretch of the dirt off the stoop.
The front door was open, of course, but my gut said it was more important to let this play out, for the moment, than to have Erica Andre in my
line of sight.
I just needed to make sure she didn’t leave.
I ambled halfway back to the front of the building, stopping when Erica’s car came into view. Nothing to do but wait. If anybody’d tried to tell me yesterday I’d spend this afternoon staking out Tenley Andre’s mother at a decrepit beer joint spitting distance from the Mexican border, I would’ve choked on one of Archie’s peppermints laughing. There’s no such thing as a typical homicide investigation, but this one was pulling levels of weird I’d scoff at TV writers over.
Shading my eyes against the glaring South Texas sunshine, I dug a handful of Tylenol from my pocket and swallowed it dry. My head throbbed harder in response, the stench of booze and cigarettes seeping from the wall next to me strong enough to make me step sideways.
If Erica was indeed an alcoholic, she had to be dying a little every minute she spent in there. Not much would make a person face those sorts of demons.
I’d seen the anxiety in her every jerky move when she climbed into her perfectly polished luxury car back in Austin. Erica thought she knew something.
I stared at the car. A little dusty, but otherwise spotless, not a hint of a scratch or dent. Like all those magazine spreads—room after gorgeous, flawless room—that had filled my screen this morning. Erica Andre had dedicated decades of meticulous care to building her daughter the kind of world where dreams don’t get cut short by violence—they come true.
Tenley’s world wasn’t supposed to include the sort of people who murdered teenage girls.
But the longer I stood there, the surer I’d bet Sammy Jo’s had.
So who or what was important enough to bring Sammy Jo home after all these years?
The screen around front slammed twice in quick succession, and Erica’s SUV engine roared to life, tires spinning in the dirt lot as she slammed the gas in reverse.
The second she turned left out of the lot, I hurried to the front corner of the building. Spotted a skinny girl with bright-purple hair and a waitress’s apron jiggling a key in the driver’s door of an ancient Honda Civic.
Fear No Truth Page 22
