Watch her, p.19
Watch Her, page 19
When Hester had left her mother’s house, she’d thought she’d cut all ties, but that’s not the way the world worked. Not these days. Her life was subject to the same scrutiny as anyone else’s. “When your mother died,” she said, “did you go to the funeral?”
Morgan stood. He crossed to the kitchen, where he rinsed the beer bottles and put them in the recycling. “You asked your question this morning,” he said.
“It’s tomorrow somewhere. I’m jumping ahead.”
“Would you go to your own mother’s funeral?”
“Not in a million years,” Hester said, but as the words spilled from her lips, she thought about Elaine Hardenne, sitting in that Illinois farmhouse, worrying.
In Hester’s own narrative, she was brave. She’d left her mother’s home and headed to Wellesley. She’d taken charge of her life and her future in the way she’d known how. But she thought of herself now, today, and what she’d do if Kate disappeared, how she’d manage to make it through the hours and days. In the twenty-one years since she’d climbed onto that bus to leave for Boston, she hadn’t questioned her actions or her selfishness. Not once. “Maybe I would go,” she said.
“There’s your answer,” Morgan said.
“What was it like? The funeral?”
“Strange,” Morgan said. “And full of regret. You can’t make up for things after the end. You can’t make it better.”
He leaned across the sofa and kissed her on the cheek. “That’s enough for tonight,” he said.
She nodded. It was enough for her too.
ANGELA
Triple-deckers in various states of repair lined the narrow street. Squad cars, their lights flashing, had blocked access. Angela pulled onto the curb and showed her badge as she ducked under the yellow crime scene tape running around the perimeter of one of the houses. “Where?” she asked Roy when she saw him.
“Second floor,” he said, nodding toward a house covered in weathered shingles. “In the kitchen.”
Across the street, the first of what Angela assumed would be many news trucks had pulled onto the sidewalk, and a bevy of neighbors had gathered. Heading up the walkway, she noted that the front light was out, and the shrubs surrounding the entrance were overgrown. Upstairs, she found Stan talking to the medical examiner, while Zane hovered. The apartment was a typical railroad design, a long hallway with rooms off it at intervals, and a kitchen in the caboose.
“Blunt force trauma to the head,” the medical examiner said. “But no defensive wounds that I can see. My guess is she hit her head on the marble counter, but I’ll confirm when I get the body on the table.”
“Yowzers!” Zane said.
“Shut. Up,” Angela said, grabbing his arm and dragging him to the front room, where she pointed outside. “Do you want something like that to wind up on TV? If it did, you’d be done. Finished. In uniform for the rest of your career. Understood?”
“Sorry.”
Paramedics carried the body down the narrow stairs.
“Don’t move,” Angela said to Zane, and then pulled Stan aside. “Is he a moron?” she asked, jerking her head toward Zane, who offered a high five to one of the uniforms.
“He’s batting a thousand right now,” Stan said. “Besides, he’s part of the team whether you like it or not.”
“Is this punishment?”
“It could be,” Stan said. “But it’s not. I need you on this.”
Angela often took the high-profile cases, especially ones involving women. She knew how to handle herself on camera, and she knew how to answer tough questions without giving away too much. She understood the role, even if she didn’t always like it. “Resident black lesbian reporting for duty. What can you tell me?” When Stan began to answer, she nodded toward Zane. “Not you, him.”
“Hot dog!” Zane said.
“Perez!” Stan said. “Don’t make me regret this. Give the report.”
That wiped the grin from Zane’s face, and it pissed Angela off that it had taken a rebuke from Stan for this kid to start listening.
“Vic is female, late teens or early twenties. Her roommate found the body on the kitchen floor. She tried to administer CPR and called nine-one-one.”
“She touched the body?”
“She’s covered with blood,” Zane said. “Head to toe.”
“What’s the vic’s name?”
“Thomas,” Zane said. “Mary-Elizabeth Thomas. Goes by Libby.”
“And where’s the roommate?”
“Neighbor’s house.”
“Great,” Angela said. “You stay here. Work with the techs and let us know if they find anything important. We’ll be talking to . . .”
“Sasha,” Zane said. “Sasha Howell.”
Stan led them across the street to a house from a different socioeconomic class. This one had been painted recently and had a well-maintained garden and ample lighting. The door to the third-floor apartment was propped open, and a woman sat at a dining room table with a uniformed cop, who nodded and left when Angela walked in. Two men hovered in the kitchen. Stan went to speak with the owners, leaving Angela to take the lead on the interview. “Mind if I sit?” she asked.
Sasha Howell had mousy hair held in a barrette. Her eyes were bloodshot, and Angela suspected that whatever Sasha had taken that night—alcohol or something else—still coursed through her bloodstream. Angela hoped it softened what she’d seen, because, as Zane had indicated, her jeans and blouse were covered in drying blood. So were her face and hands. It took a moment for her to nod, and even then, Angela waited to ask her first question.
“Is she dead?” Sasha asked.
“I’m afraid so,” Angela said, softly. Witnesses often grasped at hope, even when there was none. “Tell me about tonight,” she added.
“When I got home?”
“Even before that,” Angela said, trying to ease Sasha into the story.
“Emma and I went out. We went to Tres Gatos. It’s a tapas bar.”
“Good food there. Great drinks. Who’s Emma?”
“My roommate.” She paused. “My other roommate.”
“Emma lives with you and Libby.”
Sasha nodded. “We’re best friends, Emma and me, but if I’d stayed much longer, I’d have been sitting by myself anyway. She was flirting with a guy at the bar. I got bored and left.”
“Have you texted Emma?”
“She hasn’t answered.”
One roommate dead, the other unaccounted for.
“Send me a photo, would you,” Angela said, jotting down her number.
Sasha sat up. “Oh, God. You don’t think . . .”
“I don’t think anything. Not yet.”
When the photo beeped into Angela’s phone, she forwarded it to Roy and told him to canvas the restaurant and the surrounding area. Take as much help as you need. This is a priority.
“You walked home by yourself,” Angela said to Sasha. “Did you see anything? Anyone leaving the house.”
Sasha stared at the table. “I found her. Sprawled on the kitchen floor. There was blood everywhere.” Sasha touched the dried blood on her own face. “Can I take a shower?” she asked.
“Not yet,” Angela said, as Stan stepped into the room behind her.
“Your friends are making up a bed for you,” he said. “One of the police officers can get some things for you to wear from your apartment, and you can shower after we process what we can. But tell us what happened, and don’t hold back on details. You don’t know what’ll wind up being important. Start with walking into the house. Was anything out of the ordinary?”
Now that Angela had established a level of trust, Stan could play bad cop when necessary. The two of them had played this game countless times over the years.
“The front light was out,” Sasha said. “But it’s been out for months. I called the landlord. He didn’t do anything. We tried changing the bulb ourselves, but it didn’t work.”
“What about the front door?” Angela asked. “Was it locked?”
“The door to the apartment too,” Sasha said. “If they’d been open or unlocked, I’d have noticed.”
“Once you were in the apartment,” Angela said, “was anything out of place? Did you see or hear or smell anything unusual?”
“You mean besides blood?” Sasha asked, softly. She paused, and her head snapped up. “She knew him, didn’t she?” she said. “How else would he have gotten into the apartment? Does he have keys? A murderer has keys to my house!”
Angela leaned forward. “You’ll stay here tonight, and hopefully by morning this will all be sorted out. Most murderers are idiots and easy to catch. Tell me about Libby. How did you meet her?”
Sasha slumped in her chair, the momentary burst replaced by exhaustion.
“We put an ad on Craigslist. Maybe six months ago. Emma and I already lived here. We went to Simmons together, and another friend lived here too, but she moved in with her boyfriend.”
“Does that friend have keys?” Stan asked.
“They moved to Seattle,” Sasha said.
“What was Libby like to live with?” Angela asked.
“She kept to herself, mostly, which was strange because we did everything together, and we even said that in the interview, and she said she was excited to move into a place with friends, but when she did move in, it was like she didn’t want to do anything. I even asked her to come with us tonight, and she said no.”
Again, Sasha caught her own words. “Oh, God. Do you think . . . I mean, would she be okay if she’d come with us?”
“Hypotheticals don’t help,” Stan said.
“He means that you can’t plan for these things,” Angela said. “Ever.”
“Sounds like you didn’t like Libby that much,” Stan said.
That woke something in the woman. Her eyes darted from Stan to Angela. “I liked her fine. I didn’t know her. I probably said ten words to her last week.”
“What did you know?” Angela said. “That can be a good place to start.”
“She was from California,” Sasha said, quickly, eager to show her cooperation. “And she was always working. She told me she was an architect when she moved in, and I sort of wondered why she even needed roommates because don’t architects make a lot of money? But then I found out she had an internship. And she was still a student.”
“That bothered you,” Stan said. “That she lied.”
“She didn’t lie,” Sasha said. “It was me. I assumed.”
“But she let you assume,” he said. “I bet you said something like Libby is an architect, and she didn’t correct you.”
“What else did she lie about?” Angela asked.
“I didn’t know anything about her,” Sasha said. “She was so intense. If you asked her how her day was, you could get caught listening for an hour to every single detail. We used to imagine what she’d do on a date.”
“You and Emma?” Stan asked.
Sasha shrugged.
“And what did you imagine?” Angela asked.
“A lot of direction.”
“Not very nice,” Stan said.
Angela swiveled toward him, a fraction of an inch to tell him to lay off. He nodded, barely.
“It happens,” Angela said. “But it sounds as though you knew more about her than you thought. You imagined her having sex. That’s intimate. Was she planning to have sex last night?”
“Was she raped?” Sasha asked.
“I don’t know. The ME will tell us.”
“What if I’d been the one here alone?”
The horror of what had happened had begun to hit Sasha. Any useful time with her would be short now. “Did she have a boyfriend? Or a girlfriend?” Angela asked.
“Sort of. His name’s Barret. But I think they broke up.”
“Last name?” Stan asked.
“I barely knew him.”
“Describe him, then,” Angela said.
“Black hair, those plug things in his ears. He goes to school with her.”
Stan took notes and went into the other room, where Angela could hear him relaying the description. Angela flipped through her notes, and when Stan returned, she said, “Tell me about your conversation from earlier. You said that you asked Libby to come out, and she said no. What else did you talk about?”
Sasha sighed. “A lot.”
Angela waited.
“Her day,” Sasha said. “That it was long. That someone followed her during lunch.”
“Stop,” Stan said. “Someone followed her. You might have mentioned that ten minutes ago. Did she say who?”
“Some woman,” Sasha said. “Libby kept rambling on about a list and the school. This was Libby’s last semester at Prescott. She said the school wanted information on her.”
“Prescott University?” Stan asked. When Sasha nodded, he added, “Just what we need.”
Angela waved Stan into the kitchen. Something about Sasha’s story was sounding too familiar.
“Tell Zane I need him to run an errand,” she said, taking out her phone and hitting speed dial number 7.
“Cary told me you were on a case,” Hester said when she answered.
“I’m sending a car over,” Angela said. “I need you in JP.”
“I was there a few hours ago.”
“I’m not surprised,” Angela said. “You can tell me about your day when you get here.”
BARRET
Barret huddled in the corner of the bandstand, shielding himself as best he could from the wind and rain. Libby hadn’t texted again, even after over an hour of waiting. He read her last message. Meet me. By the boathouse.
He was here. Waiting. And he didn’t know why she’d written or had a change of heart, but no matter what, he didn’t want anything to jeopardize it. He couldn’t appear needy. He stood and walked down the stairs, into the rain. A man with a dog hurried by. Barret squinted after him as he turned the corner of the jogging path. He approached the wrought-iron gate that led to the docks. The boats had been pulled up for the winter and were covered with tarps. He tested the locked gate, before heaving himself up and over it. He maneuvered around the boat hulls till he reached the end of the dock and sat, his feet dangling over the rough surface of the pond.
He imagined Libby, in her room, working. The drawing of Rusty still hung on her wall—at least it had till last night—and he wondered whether she’d stared ahead, pondering a design, and had found herself focusing in on Rusty’s wagging tail, and remembering the night Barret had given her the drawing, the night on this pond. He wondered if she’d found herself smiling without knowing why, and if she’d rolled onto her side and glanced at a photo of him before tapping in the text. Did she regret the text the moment she hit Send, or had she found room for him in her heart again? He could go home, to the dorm, and wait. Or he could go to Libby’s house, like he had last night. He could shimmy up that trellis and sit in her window and hope she wanted him there.
Across the pond, Pinebank hovered over the foggy darkness.
Barret’s feet moved, almost on their own. He found himself skirting the pond, and then on that staircase, creeping through the dark. In the Matsons’ yard, he pressed his back to one of the cottonwood trunks and surveyed the house. Inside, the lights on the first floor were ablaze. He slunk across the lawn, his shoes sinking into the mud, and turned the light on his phone toward the wall. The mural was gone. Erased. Had the paint washed away in the storm? Or had Gavin found the mural this morning and scrubbed most of it away?
Barret kicked at the foundation and rested his head against the brick. He tried to tamp down the growing sense of hopelessness that he’d kept at bay since Libby had thrown him out. When he’d come to Boston in January, he’d seen the future. He’d dreamed of becoming someone new, and he’d accomplished that, but now he created art to see it destroyed. He loved women—first Alice, then Libby—who couldn’t love him for who he was, and he wondered if any of this had been worth it. He thought about the farm, about Rusty lying in the driveway, about the relentless wind in the winter and sun in the summer. He remembered his mother, her arm around his waist, holding him up as they stumbled across the finish line in that stupid three-legged race that he’d sulked about till he’d loved every minute of it.
He could talk to his mother. He knew her number by heart.
He punched it into his phone, his thumb hovering over Send. He wondered what he’d tell her, what he’d say when she called him Brittany.
Inside the house, the dogs barked.
Barret hit Cancel. Across the veranda, Jennifer Matson came to the French doors and peered into the darkness, clutching a fireplace poker in one hand while the dogs flanked her on each side. She took a step back, and then launched forward, as though willing herself to cross that threshold into the night.
“Who’s there?” she said, her voice barely a whisper.
Barret could leave. He should leave.
But he stepped away from the house and into the light. “Is Gavin home?” he asked.
“No one’s home,” Jennifer said. “Only me. Me and the dogs. It’s lonely.”
“It’s cold,” Barret said.
“Would you come inside?” Jennifer asked. “You can help me.”
Barret looked at the poker in her hand. Jennifer leaned it against the wall. “There’s nothing to worry about,” she said.
Behind her, a kettle whistled.
HESTER
The unmarked cruiser sped along Storrow Drive. “Can’t you tell me what this is about?” Hester asked, one more time.
The detective driving made a zipping motion over his lips. “Sarge would kill me,” he said.
“I can feign innocence,” Hester said.
“But I couldn’t. That’s part of the job.”
Hester rested her forehead on the passenger’s side window as the lights of MIT shone across the Charles River. A few moments later, the detective pulled onto a residential street, where Angela met the car. “She give you any trouble?” she asked.
