I reached for the card-sized notepad in my back pocket and a pen.
“What did he look like?” I said.
“That’s what I thought was strange. Here this guy was gushing about how warm it was at the festival and he was wearing a charcoal hoodie with the hood over his head. It didn’t make sense to me. I mean, it must have been 80 degrees at the time of day, and he was jogging no less.”
Her eyes shifted from me to a bird that flew by in front of us. I needed to speed things up.
“How tall would you say he was?” I said.
“Well,” she said, “he was taller than me for sure. Not by much though. He only had about three inches on me.”
“So around 5‘10?”
“That’d be about right.”
“What about hair color, eye color?” I said.
“He wore dark glasses that made him look like a beetle, and I don’t mean the car. And his hair was perfect.”
“How so?” I said.
“Well, he had that hood on so it was hard to tell for sure, but at one point while he was talking to me he lifted it a bit and stuck his hand inside and smoothed it out, like a piece had strayed and it bugged him. From what I could see, it was a brownish color, and he had it parted to one side—I’d say twenty-five percent to the left and the rest to the right.”
“Was it thick, thin, receding?” I said.
“Thick.”
“Long or short?”
“Short.”
“Eyes?” I said.
“He never took the glasses off.”
“Oops, that’s right,” I said. “Bad habit. Do you know where he went after you talked to him?”
She shook her head.
“I didn’t pay him any attention after he gave me the brush off. I left.”
Taye Diggs took out his cell phone and dialed.
“I’m going to need you to do something for me,” I said to the woman.
“Alright.”
“Head down to the police station. They’ll take your official statement,” I said. “And I’m sure they’ll want to get a sketch of the guy while it’s still fresh in your mind.”
I took her name, address and phone number down and then sent her on her way. What a day it had been already, and it was just getting started.
CHAPTER 18
When I arrived back to my car, a silver Aston Martin idled behind it, which blocked me from backing out. The window tint was so dark on the driver’s side, I couldn’t have seen in even if I had a flashlight. Taye Diggs opened my car door and took his hand and shoved me inside and drew his gun with the other.
“Get down,” he said, “until I find out who this is.”
I squatted low enough in the seat that I was well below the window but still high enough that I could watch all the action through the side mirror. The window of the Aston Martin came down and unveiled a face I hadn’t seen in months, and I gasped loud enough for everyone on the street to hear.
I opened the door of the car.
“I told you to stay inside,” Taye said through clenched teeth.
I looked toward the other car.
“Giovanni?” I said. “What are you doing here? How did you find—”
“It’s nice to see you again Sloane,” Giovanni said.
Taye looked over at me and then at Giovanni.
“Are you gonna tell me who this dude is or what?” Taye said.
Giovanni stuck out his hand to Taye. “The name is Giovanni Luciana,” he said, “can I speak with you for a moment?”
Taye looked at me.
“It’s alright,” I said. “We know each other. You can put your gun down.”
The truth was I didn’t know him. Not well, anyway.
Taye made the most of his muscular frame and held his arms at his side the way an ape does while he walked over to Giovanni’s car. Once there they engaged in small talk that wasn’t audible enough for me to hear. From the look on his face, Taye wasn’t happy. He made a phone call and frowned and then looked at Giovanni like he wanted to inflict blunt force trauma to various parts of his body.
“She’s all yours,” Taye said to Giovanni.
What was that supposed to mean?
Giovanni stepped out of the car and walked over to the passenger side door and opened it and gestured inside with his hand.
“Come with me please,” he said to me.
“What—why?”
“You’ll see,” he said.
“It’s fine,” Taye said. “He’ll explain everything, just go with him.”
I was both reluctant and exhilarated, which up until then, I didn’t know could be experienced at the same time. I walked over to the car and got in and looked at Taye who nodded at Giovanni and then turned and went.
What was happening?
“Do you want to tell me what’s going on?” I said to Giovanni.
“We’re going for a drive,” he said.
“May I ask where?”
“You’ll see.”
Why was it that everything surrounding him was always shrouded in secrecy? I was unnerved, but not enough that I didn’t absorb everything about him—the way he was dressed in an expensive charcoal suit with light grey pinstripes, the Montblanc watch on his wrist; even his mannerisms and the way he flicked his wrist when he shifted gears with his long, bony fingers had an element of fascination to it.
“Why did you hang up on me yesterday?” he said.
“How did you know I’d be here today?”
“You first,” he said.
“Alright. Someone came in after I dialed your number, and I decided I didn’t know why I called in the first place, so I hung up.”
He held his pointer finger up in the air.
“Ah, but you do know, don’t you? Something compelled you to call me,” he said. “I can hear it in your voice now as you talk to me. What was it?”
From the sound of it, I wasn’t going to get away with evading his questions for long, but there wasn’t a level of comfort required for me to open up and spill it all out either. The shield to my circle of trust was up, and he was on the outside.
“I was thinking about the first time we met several months ago,” I said.
“I remember it well,” he said. “That was the day you accused me of murdering that poor excuse for a man who used my sister’s body as part of his daily workout routine.”
“And I still think so.”
That did it. In a moment of haste I’d spoken about the suspicions I had about him over the past several months. The words gushed out of my mouth too fast for me to do anything, like they often did, and now they clung in the air between us like a leaf desperate to stay welded to the branch of a tree.
His eyebrow lifted.
“I shouldn’t have—”
“You say what’s on your mind, and I respect that,” he said. “It’s an admirable quality in a woman such as yourself.”
“When I asked about your involvement, you didn’t deny it.”
“I never admitted it either,” he said. “Don’t you agree that the women of the world are better off without him? Who knows how many more women he would have abused?”
We both sat for a minute, and neither of us said a word. We just drove. Destination: unknown.
After a few minutes of silence he said, “Where does that leave us?”
I shook my head.
“I don’t even know you.”
“Don’t you?” he said.
What was that supposed to mean?
“You checked into my background right after we first met,” he said. “I would say you know quite a bit.”
The man didn’t miss a beat. I thought about asking him how he knew, but then we’d be back to going in circles again. It was unusual. For some reason our exchange made me feel like I was the one being interrogated, instead of the other way around, and in that moment, the tables had been turned—on me.