“I think it’s fair to say he didn’t think it all the way through,” I said. “But his little charade ended up backfiring pretty spectacularly. It got someone killed.” I told her that Candace was dead, but left out, for now, who’d been arrested for the crime.
“And there’s more. The person — the people — responsible for Brie’s death also became somewhat unnerved by the possibility that she might still be alive.”
I let that sink in for a minute.
“I see,” she said.
“Because Brie isn’t alive. That was confirmed for me today. Someone was hired to kill her.”
“Dear God,” Isabel said.
“That way, Brie could be killed while the person who hired this hit man was out of town.”
I watched Isabel closely for her reaction.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she said. “What are you implying? Norman and I were in Boston. Andrew, what are you suggesting?”
“I’m not suggesting anything,” I said. “I’m going to tell you what I know. Because you deserve to know before anyone else.”
Fifty-Seven
Tyler had been brought back to the interrogation room where he’d been interviewed earlier by Detective Hardy. He sat at the table alone. A small bag of potato chips and a bottled water had been left for him. He devoured the chips. He hadn’t had a proper meal since breakfast and his stomach had been growling.
Tyler had no idea what might happen next. He was scared.
The door opened.
A woman carrying a small briefcase entered. She looked to be about the same age as Tyler’s sister. Dark hair and glasses. She was wearing black slacks and a white blouse with a black jacket over it, and when she looked at Tyler she smiled.
“Hello, Tyler,” she said. “My name is Nan Sokolow. I’m going to be your lawyer.”
“Hi,” Tyler said nervously.
“Your sister, Jayne, has engaged my services on your behalf,” Nan said, sitting across the table from Tyler. She took in his puzzled expression and said, “I’m here to help you. The first thing I want to know is, have they been treating you well?”
Tyler shrugged. “They got me these chips.”
“I just want to be sure you haven’t been mistreated in any way.”
“They’ve got me here when I didn’t do anything. Isn’t that being mistreated?”
“That’s what I’m here to talk about with you. From now on, I don’t want you to say anything to the police or answer any of their questions unless I’m right beside you.”
“I already answered a ton, but I didn’t tell them anything bad.”
“You admitted you were there. That you went into the house.”
“Yeah, well, that.”
She managed a wry smile. “We’ll do what we can about that, but just so you understand, not another word.”
“Okay.”
“I want you to tell me everything you told them. And anything that you might have left out.”
Tyler told his story.
“So when you left Ms. DiCarlo’s house the first time, she was still alive.”
“Yeah.”
“And when you came back, she was dead.”
“Yeah.”
“And during this period you talked to your friend Cam.” Tyler nodded. “How much time elapsed between your first and second visits to Ms. DiCarlo’s house?”
“I don’t know exactly.”
“Half an hour?”
“Maybe a little more than that.”
“Forty minutes?”
Tyler thought. “Probably. They took my phone, but my texts with Cam are probably there. They’d show when I was talking to him.”
“Okay.” Nan made a note on her yellow legal pad. “When you were at the scene the second time, when you found Ms. DiCarlo, did you get the sense that there might be anyone else in the house at that time?”
“Like, hiding?” Tyler asked.
“Yeah, like hiding,” she said.
“I didn’t hear anyone. But, I mean, I didn’t exactly go looking around. After I found her, I wanted to get out of there as fast as possible.”
“You were in shock.”
“Well, I don’t know if I was in—”
“You were in shock,” Nan said again.
“Yeah, okay, I guess I might have been.”
Nan smiled. “Good, you’re catching on. What I’m trying to work out here, Tyler, is a defense strategy, and one part of that defense is being able to prove that you weren’t the only one with an opportunity to do Ms. DiCarlo harm. It looks to me that there’s as long as three-quarters of an hour that someone else could have entered that home and killed that woman.”
“You think?”
“Well, Tyler, if you didn’t do it—”
“I didn’t.”
She smiled. “Of course. What I’m going to be arguing is that there was plenty of time for someone else to get into that house and kill Ms. DiCarlo. And anything you can think of, anything you might have noticed, that might suggest someone else had been in the house will be very helpful to us.”
Tyler nodded slowly.
“Maybe... the sound of someone breathing, hiding in a closet. Or a squeak on the stairs. Someone clearing their throat really quietly. You get where I’m going here?”
Tyler nodded again. “I might... I might have heard something.”
“And when you heard this noise, you realized, instinctively, that the killer might still be in the house, which is why you didn’t call the police, and instead ran for your life.”
“I guess... I guess that’s what might have been what I was thinking.”
Nan smiled. “There you go. Let me make some more notes.”
Fifty-Eight
Andrew
I told Isabel I wanted to take her for a ride.
“I don’t want to see my sister’s grave,” she said. I had filled her in on most of what had happened to me in the afternoon. “I’m not ready for that. I’m not sure I can handle it.”
“Not there,” I said. “Someplace else.”
She shot me one wary look before we left. “What if this is a trick? What if I end up disappearing just like Brie?”
“Call or text anyone you want,” I said, “and tell them you’re with me. That should offer you some level of protection.”
She agreed to go. Once we were in my car, she had questions.
“If you know who hired this hit man,” Isabel said, “then why haven’t you gone straight to Detective Hardy?”
Both hands on the wheel, I glanced her way and smiled. “She and I have something of a strained relationship, which you should understand better than anyone. Anyway, before she slaps the cuffs on this person, I want a little face-to-face time. And when you’ve heard the truth, maybe you’ll finally be satisfied I didn’t have anything to do with Brie’s disappearance.”
Isabel looked increasingly uncomfortable. She was quiet for a moment, then said, “I’m going to kill Albert.” Her brother had tried to phone her twice in the last twenty minutes, and both times Isabel had declined the call. “What an idiot.”
“I suppose,” I said, trying to give her brother the benefit of the doubt, “that he thought he was doing the right thing.”
“You know what the road to hell is paved with,” she said.
“I do.”
“Even though I did everything I could to get Hardy to go after you,” she said, “I always held out some slim hope, you know? So when I saw that woman from the hospital window, pretending to be Brie, I wanted to believe. Didn’t you?”
I had to think about that. “If there had been a way for Brie to get in touch, to let me know she was okay, she would have done it directly. So I was skeptical. But Albert’s stunt accomplished more than he could have imagined. It might have given some false hope, but it also started off a panic.”