Past Deeds

by Carolyn Arnold

  She took a half-step back when a man came up behind her, wearing a T-shirt and a pair of boxers, and put an arm around her waist. He eyed me with instant dislike.

  “Who are these people?” he asked Alvarez.

  “The FBI,” she said, turning to face him and putting them cheek to cheek. “They’re here about Robert.”

  The man took a dominating position behind Alvarez and put his hands on her shoulders. “This isn’t a good time right now.”

  “Actually, this is the perfect time,” I countered. “We have a plane to catch and need to ask Josefina a few questions before we leave.”

  “Maybe when you get back, then.” The man was smug.

  “We won’t be back,” I said firmly.

  Alvarez put a hand over the man’s. “It’s okay, Garrett.” She moved back, and Garrett moved with her. “Come in,” she told us.

  Paige and I entered the apartment, and Alvarez and her boy toy just stood there and made no offer of a place to sit.

  “We shouldn’t be long, but it still might be more comfortable for you if we were seated,” Paige said as if reading my mind.

  Alvarez and Garrett moved as a unit toward a sofa, where they sat snugly beside each other. Paige and I dropped into chairs across from the sofa.

  “We understand that you and Robert were lovers,” Paige said.

  “We were.”

  “We’re sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you.” Alvarez blinked slowly.

  “You and Robert were close?” Paige put it as a question as her gaze drifted over Boy Toy. I hated that I even felt a twinge of jealousy. I was in great shape, too, and worked out every chance I got—which hadn’t been often lately. Ate healthy. I sucked in my flat gut even more and sat up straighter, squaring my shoulders.

  “Guess you could say that,” Alvarez admitted. “I cared about him, but Rob and I were rather casual. He was married and just having fun. So was I…having fun, anyway.” She gave a smoldering look at Boy Toy, who put his finger to her lips and eyed her like he was going to take her right then and there.

  Okay!

  I glanced at Paige, but she wasn’t looking at me.

  “So you never developed any real feelings for him, despite it being ‘for fun’?” Paige’s gaze danced briefly to me, and I flushed with a rush of new guilt, feeling like I’d used her. That’s what my sleeping with Paige had been to me: fun. But I had been married. The affair had been exciting and risqué, off-limits, like forbidden fruit.

  “No, I did,” Alvarez admitted.

  Spikes of self-flagellation exploded in my chest.

  “But I knew we weren’t going anywhere,” Alvarez said. “He wasn’t going to leave his wife, and they were in counseling.”

  “Have you ever returned to the Lucky Pub since he was shot?” Paige asked.

  “No interest.” A shiver visibly tore through her, and Garrett wrapped an arm around her.

  “We understand that you had dinner with Robert at the Lucky Pub the night before he was murdered,” Paige said.

  “That’s right. We were there most nights, actually. He was obsessed with the patio and insisted we sit out there whenever the weather was nice enough.”

  “Did you notice anything or anyone unusual the night before the shooting?” I asked, not wanting to come out and show her Michelle Evans’s picture.

  “There was a woman who kept staring at Robert. She was driving me nuts the way she was looking at him.”

  “And how was that?” Paige asked. “Like she was interested in him?”

  “I wouldn’t say so. More like she had something against him. I asked him about her.”

  My curiosity piqued. “What did he say?”

  “He didn’t want to talk about her. And I let it go at the restaurant because I didn’t want to make a scene.”

  “But after you left,” Paige pressed, “did you pick up the conversation?”

  “Oh, yeah. I was furious, but he still refused to talk about her. He wouldn’t even tell me her name, but he knew it. I knew he did. I told him I wasn’t having sex with him until he told me about her. He bid me a ‘good night.’ Can you believe it?” Alvarez consulted her companion, who shook his head and swept a strand of her black hair behind an ear and kissed her cheek.

  Whatever had transpired between Evans and Wise was still volatile—and raw after many years. What the heck had happened? “Did you mention this woman to investigating officers?”

  “I never did. Do you really think some chick killed Robert? ’Cause I don’t. I think he messed with that girl somehow for sure, but I don’t think she killed him. That’s why I never brought her up to the police.”

  I leaned forward, clasped my hands between my knees. “Messed with her how?”

  Alvarez bit on a bottom lip and shrugged, and the robe slid down the curve of her shoulder a few inches. “It would only be a guess, but I’d say he slept with her.”

  “Broke her heart?” Paige inquired.

  “I wouldn’t know, but she was pissed about something.”

  I thought back to Evans’s emotionless expressions on the video. Something didn’t jibe here. I was pretty certain Alvarez was talking about Evans like we were, but we should make sure before we continued. “What did this woman look like?”

  “She had blond hair, pretty,” Alvarez spoke slowly, like she wasn’t sure why all this mattered.

  There was one more way of verifying we were all talking about Michelle. “At the pub, the night before Robert’s murder, where was she seated?”

  “At a table, facing us.”

  It was clear we were talking about the same person, except for the face I remembered from the video, the one that had been devoid of emotion. “What made you think she was mad?”

  “Well, I could tell Robert was mad. It was just oozing from him. He was normally cool under pressure, slow to anger, but this woman had him livid. His face was all scrunched up, and he said something to her.”

  “When was this?” I glanced at a clock on the wall, only to realize things were getting interesting and we had a plane to catch—soon.

  “I’d stepped out to use the restroom. Really it was because I needed a break from this woman’s constant staring. I came back and saw Robert sitting at her table. He didn’t know I saw him. I hung back.”

  I’d have to look at the video again, but I don’t remember seeing Alvarez standing back and watching Wise and Evans. It was possible that she was just out of the camera’s range.

  “Did you know she had the audacity to follow us back here?”

  “She came to your apartment and spoke with you or Robert?” Paige asked.

  Alvarez shook her head. “No, but I found a note under my door the next morning. I know she put it there.”

  “How do you know she left the note?” I was interested in proof, not suspicion.

  A flicker of irritation crossed her eyes. “The note told me that Rob was a dangerous man. The handwriting was certainly a woman’s. We’re typically neater.”

  What a generalization! She’s never seen my mother’s handwriting. “Can we see the note?”

  “I threw it out. It scared me at the time. Some wacko stares at us all through dinner and then gives me a note like that. It had to be her, who else?”

  “Okay, thank you for your time,” Paige said and led the way out of the apartment.

  In the SUV, Paige turned it on and commented, “So Josefina calls Michelle a wacko, admits she was scared of her but doesn’t report her after Rob was murdered? Some people are crazy.”

  “Uh-huh.” My thoughts kept steamrolling me with guilt. It was for fun.

  “Three widows receive compromising photos of their husbands,” Paige began. “Now Wise’s mistress says she received a note, essentially warning her away from Robert. It’s almost as if part of Michelle�
��s mission is to expose these men to all the women in their lives.”

  “All right, so we have the Marines, a diner, the Mavises, four male victims, two mistresses—”

  “And a partridge in a pear tree.” Paige chuckled.

  “Yeah, I have no idea how it all fits together yet.”

  “Good, because neither do I, and as the senior agent among us, I should figure it out before you do.”

  I fell silent, thinking that was her way of apologizing for pulling the seniority card the other day. But if anyone owed anyone an apology… “Paige—”

  “Brandon—”

  “You go first,” I told her.

  Her face went serious. “I did feel guilty. Still do sometimes. Not for falling in love with you, not for sleeping with you, but for hurting Deb—that’s if she ever found out. But only a little. You weren’t happy, Brandon, not with her. If you were, you never would have…” She didn’t need to finish, and I nodded.

  “We’d been drifting apart,” I admitted, grabbing the morsel of justification she’d extended.

  “And like it had been for Josefina and Robert, what we had when you were in the academy was casual.”

  “It didn’t feel that way sometimes.”

  “No, it didn’t.” She locked her gaze with mine. “But all that’s behind us now. You and Deb, well, you’re divorced, and you’re happy with Becky. I’m happy for both of you.” She smiled one of those sorrowful smiles you gave people when your heart was breaking.

  “I’m sorry, Paige.”

  “For—”

  “Please, let me get this out.” Before I find an excuse not to. “I’m sorry for hurting you, for putting you through everything I have.” I loved Becky, but in another life, if things were entirely different, I could see myself with Paige; I loved her, too.

  She sniffled and batted a hand of dismissal. “We were adults. We both knew what we were doing.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Besides, the past is harmless if we just leave it there. It’s not like we can go back and do things differently anyway.” She attempted a smile, but her eyes darkened. I sensed she was revisiting the lesson she’d learned her last time in California. She’d gone to hunt down one of the men responsible for raping her friend when she was on spring break in college—but it had snowballed into a legal nightmare when he’d turned up dead and Paige looked good for his murder. But even that trip to the past had a silver lining: we’d uncovered a serial killer and brought him to justice.

  No more was said as Paige put the SUV into drive and took us to the airport. My heart hurt for the women in my life—past and present. But the past wasn’t something I could change, just as Paige had cleverly pointed out. My only hope was that over time I might forgive myself. I also had the lesson to make smarter choices moving forward and utilize a little thing called self-control. I just hoped I had some.

  -

  Forty-Four

  Baltimore, Maryland

  Friday, October 25th, 7:30 PM Eastern Standard Time

  Kelly looked out the windshield at the colored lights whizzing by as Jack sped down the interstate toward Baltimore, her mind miles away and years in the past. Her six-year-old self had watched her mother shoot her father as if from a distance, through someone else’s eyes. Even all this time later, the image never crystalized beyond a flat, cardboard-like representation of the event. Shrinks told her she needed to allow herself to the feel the moment and immerse herself in it, but she’d never been successful. That didn’t mean the horror she’d witnessed hadn’t affected her. Really, how could it not when six was such a tender age, a time when impressions were made and memories formed. Kelly couldn’t help but empathize with Michelle. She’d experienced trauma of her own; her father had left her as a young girl. Feelings of abandonment were left to churn in his absence and to curdle like spilt milk over time.

  “She didn’t show any emotion. Cool, calm, devoid of emotion…” Kelly ruminated out loud what Paige and Brandon had told them about the Michelle Evans they’d seen on the pub’s surveillance video.

  Jack took an exit for Baltimore and didn’t say anything.

  Kelly started thinking about Paige’s call that updated them on her and Brandon’s visit to Josefina Alverez. “If our sniper is the one who left the note for Wise’s mistress—which it would seem she had—she viewed Wise as a dangerous man. But she didn’t show any signs of being afraid of him. It’s not lining up.”

  “She views herself in a position of control and power—and she is the one holding the gun.” He glanced over at her, a smirk playing on his lips, and Kelly smiled.

  “Suppose you’re right about that.” She hoped that Frank Evans, Michelle’s father, would be able to shed some light on her past, but he also hadn’t seen his daughter since she was six—that they knew of. It was even more of a stretch to think he’d have any clues to offer as to her current whereabouts. But he might be able to tell them more about the Mavises and the Sunset Diner than they already knew, which was very little.

  It was about thirty minutes of city driving, after getting off the highway, to reach Frank Evans’s address. Jack pulled into the lot of a rundown apartment building. The sight of the crumbling brick and broken asphalt hurt Kelly’s heart.

  “This is where a Marine vet with an honorable discharge ends up? Something’s wrong with the system. Some ‘thanks for your service.’”

  “The men and women who sign up to serve this country don’t do it for the money.” Jack got out of the SUV, and she felt like a child who’d had her hand slapped. Her cheeks flushed warm, and she unbuckled her seatbelt and joined him outside.

  “Sorry, Jack, that’s not what I was saying.” She walked around the front of the vehicle.

  “No harm done.”

  “I was just saying that vets should be compensated for their trouble.” Her defensive words spilled out, and she instantly felt like a fool. How could compensation even begin to smooth over what active service men and women had seen and done?

  “I’m not going to argue with you.” Jack led the way into the apartment building.

  There was an overhang above the front door, and Kelly looked up to study it, almost fearing it would fall on top of them. She shuffled into the main lobby as quickly as possible.

  Jack pressed the button for Frank Evans’s apartment, and they waited.

  “I realize that many of them go in without a trade and come out with one, but I still feel there could be more our country could do for them.” For some reason, Kelly couldn’t let the matter go. Maybe it was because the man she loved the most in this world had served his country and should have received far more acknowledgment for his efforts.

  Jack rang Frank’s apartment a second time.

  “Who’s it?” A man’s slurred voice came over the intercom.

  “Mr. Frank Evans?” Jack asked.

  “Who’s is it?”

  Who’s is it? The guy sounded shit-faced drunk.

  “It’s the FBI. We need to talk to you.”

  There was thundering silence for a span of time, and just when Kelly wondered if he’d passed out or was making a run for it for some reason, there was the buzzing of the door unlocking. They made their way to Frank’s apartment, but the door was closed, and there was no response to Jack’s first knock. He knocked again.

  There was a thump against on the back of the door, and Kelly imagined Frank was looking at them through the peephole. “Go away.”

  Oh, this is going to be fun.

  “Mr. Evans, open the door,” Jack said in a no-nonsense manner.

  The door cracked open the amount the chain would allow, and Frank squeezed his face through the opening.

  Jack put his badge a few inches from his nose.

  “Geez.” Frank crossed his eyes and pulled back. The door was shut, the chain slid, and the door opened wide
. He stood there cradling a beer bottle in his right hand. “I don’t know why the Feds wanna talk to—” He burped and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  Kelly wanted to fan the air. If smell had color, they’d all have been shrouded in a green haze.

  “Can we come in?” Jack didn’t wait for an answer and started inside the place.

  “Surrreee, come on in.” Frank bobbed his eyebrows at Kelly, and she gave him a cordial smile, taking shallows breaths but still getting inundated by the odor of whiskey. Beer, whiskey…what else has he been drinking?

  A Cat 4 hurricane would have left less of a mess than what was before them. The living area of the apartment were all visible from the entry and littered with trash. Take-out boxes tossed here and there. Every sitting surface but where Frank must have had his butt parked was covered. The tabletops were packed with empty bottles, with barely enough room to set down a fresh drink. Maybe that’s why Frank traveled with one.

  As she continued to scan the room, she found a rocks glass—the whiskey and source of the reeky belch—nestled between remote controls and a pizza box. The apartment smelled like a man’s gym locker—nauseating body odor.

  “Takes a seat where you’d like.” Frank gestured around and rocked on his feet.

  “Steady there,” she said.

  “Nah, I’m fine.” Frank batted a hand in the air but made his way to a pocket of space on the couch.

  How did a former Marine end up in this hovel, with such a horrible addiction? Her mind raised the question, though the answer could be textbook: it was to drown out the memories of what couldn’t be unseen. Her grandfather had taken to drink for a brief time, but thankfully, he had her, and he was willing to help himself. That was the key. You can only help those who want to help themselves.

  Jack laced his hands in front of himself. “We’re hoping you can answer some questions we have about your daughter Michelle.”