“Jenna Coeur?” Bruce echoes, frowning. “The actress? The one who—”
“Right.”
“What was she doing there?”
“Nobody seems to know.” She takes a deep breath. “I was hoping you might be able to find out.”
Chin in hand, he simply waits for her to continue.
She tells him the rest—about the possible connection to Jaycee, about Elena having invited her to the reunion next weekend.
“I’m afraid that I might have inadvertently put my family at risk.”
“You can always just cancel this reunion until some other time.”
“But they’ve got plane tickets, and . . . look, I love the two women I met this weekend. There are very few people in this world I can talk to face-to-face about . . . what I’ve been through, with cancer. And now, about Meredith. We’re all facing the same loss. We’re all in the same boat. I really want to see them again. But . . .” She takes a deep breath. “I want to hire you. I’d just feel better if you could check out Elena and Kay and confirm that there are no surprises in their backgrounds. They’re going to be staying under my roof, with my children in the house. And if you could tell me more about Jaycee, and maybe track down Jenna Coeur in the process—that would be even better.”
“Is that it? Find Jenna Coeur? You don’t want me to, I don’t know, maybe find some long lost relatives while I’m at it? Or, I don’t know, find Jimmy Hoffa and Amelia Earhart and maybe Elvis?”
She can’t help but smile. “No, that’ll do. For now.”
He pulls out a notebook and a pen. “I’ll do what I can. Tell me everything you know.”
She nods, feeling relieved. “It might be better if you took out your laptop. I can show you.”
Meredith was supposed to be the first, the last, the only.
Then came that stranger—Roger Lorton, his name turned out to be. The man who popped up in the wrong place at the wrong time, asking for a light.
They wrote about his murder in the newspaper. Said he was mugged, apparently, while out walking his dog.
No one will ever connect that to Meredith’s death . . . or to me.
And this next one . . .
No one is going to connect it, either, because they’re not going to be looking for a murderer at all.
No one will ever suspect it didn’t just happen.
It’s how it should have been, with Meredith.
If only she hadn’t been so afraid of needles.
But I respected that; I had to spare her that final ordeal. I tried to make her death as painless—and as quick—as I possibly could.
Maybe it was the wrong choice. There’s no way of knowing.
You can’t second-guess the past; you can only keep moving ahead.
The same thing will happen with this next target.
It’s a simple process of elimination; a step that might be unpleasant to anticipate and carry out, but is absolutely necessary for the greater good.
The thing that really infuriates Tony Kerwin is that all along he was just trying to do Elena a favor—make that favors—and how did she turn around and treat him?
Yeah. Like crap.
As he scrubs himself in the shower after his early morning gym workout, he runs through the mental list of everything he’s done for her.
She owes him, man. Owes him big-time.
Driving her home on Friday night when she was skunk-drunk—favor number one.
Seeing her safely inside—favor number two.
Granted, maybe he shouldn’t have moved in for a kiss, but he just couldn’t help himself. The chick is hot. He’s been thinking about her ever since he took her out last fall, trying to figure out a way to get her interested in him again. Playing hard to get didn’t do the trick, but he was hoping a good hard kiss might.
It did, which led to her bedroom—and favor number three, he thinks with a smirk.
And then favor number four—not commenting after he found the prosthesis in her bra and the angry scar where her breasts should have been. Who knew she was hiding such a deep, dark secret?
“Cancer?” he’d asked when he found it.
Either she pretended not to hear him or she really didn’t. She was pretty wasted.
He dropped the subject—for the moment, anyway—and got back down to business—favor number five.
That was followed, the next morning, by favor number six—driving her to the airport up in Boston, and by offering favor number seven—picking her up from the airport last night.
First she flatly—and rudely—refused him, then she avoided his calls all day Saturday. To top things off, by Sunday she had apparently blocked his number on her phone, because every time he tried to call her, he got a recording: “The number you are trying to reach has calling restrictions that have prevented the completion of this call.”
It took him a few calls to realize what she’d done, and every time he heard the message—which gave way to an immediate dial tone—he was increasingly infuriated. Not just with her, but with himself. He’d gone out of his way, and for what?
Ungrateful bitch.
Although—he does feel a little better now that he at least knows why she made up that story about having a boyfriend last fall, after he took her out on their one and only date—unless you count Friday night’s hookup.
He doesn’t.
He’s an old-fashioned romantic. He can’t help it. He wants to wine and dine her—well, he wanted to. Not anymore. Not after the way she treated him.
And here he’d been willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, even after she lied to him back in the beginning.
He’d known all along that she wasn’t really seeing someone else. He’d followed her around long enough to know that she was home alone most nights, or out with her friend Sidney.
He’d actually thought she made up having a boyfriend because she was trying to get him to stop asking her out. Now he knows it was obviously because she’d been ill with breast cancer. She probably thought he’d be turned off by that; by her scars.
I wouldn’t have been. I would have made her feel beautiful. She didn’t give me a chance.
Damn her, anyway.
Now it’s Monday morning. He has to go to work and see her there.
Is he looking forward to that?
Hell, no. Good thing this is the last week of school.
He steps out of the shower, rigorously towel dries himself, throws on a pair of shorts, and heads for the kitchen. He’ll get dressed for work later. Plenty of time for breakfast in front of the TV, where he’ll catch up on the latest Red Sox trade.
Standing at the counter, he peels a couple of bananas and tosses them into the blender for his daily smoothie. Then he adds four raw eggs. Plenty of protein—that’s what you need to start the day.
Too bad Elena chose to keep her breast cancer a secret from him. If he had known, he could have been giving her healthy tips like that. He could have had her on a solid fitness regimen and—
Feeling a rush of movement behind him, he starts to turn around, only to feel a piercing jab, like a bee sting, in his neck.
What the hell?
By the time the gloved hand pulls the syringe out of his body and tucks a tortoiseshell comb into the back pocket of his shorts, Tony Kerwin is lying on the floor dying an agonizing death.
Part III
Saturday, June 15
The Day That Changed My Life Forever
I was thirty years old when I got my diagnosis. I had to go see my doctor for test results while I was on my lunch hour at school—his office was right around the corner. I remember wishing it were a hell of a lot farther than that, because I had about a minute to transition from “You have the big C” to “the letter of the day is C.”
It was. Can you freaking believe it? The letter of the day was a C.
That’s just the way it worked out.