Lizzie stood still, staring at a person who should not be there. Music, faint but insistent, came from upstairs, and an entryway side table held a haphazard pile of textbooks. Students? Students in the empty house. The not-empty house. Paying rent.
“Ma’am?” the girl was saying.
Maybe the records weren’t up to date. Maybe the place was sold and rented, but the bank’s internal paperwork had failed catch up. Certainly its record-keeping systems weren’t foolproof. She herself was evidence of that. Lizzie almost nodded, mentally agreeing with this logical explanation.
“Sorry, Miss. Yes, it’s about the-” Lizzie paused, considering what it was about. It was about her own curiosity. Her compulsion to make things add up. Which now, faced with reality, might not be prudent.
Because reality could create problems.
What if Aaron got wind of her visit? Would he have something on her? Or would she have something on him? The girl, Maddie, was waiting for an answer. Lizzie needed answers, too.
“It’s about the rent,” Lizzie said. The words tumbled out almost before she realized. “I’m checking, routine, to see if we have the correct address where you’re sending the rent check. Can you confirm it?”
Lizzie hoped the girl’s definition of “confirm” didn’t include Lizzie having to provide something for her to confirm.
Maddie nodded her head. Like she was eager to help. Good.
“Oh, no prob. We send it to, like, a post office box in Boston. I don’t have the exact-exact place, you know, because Frank, he lives here, too, always pays it, after we pay him. So, um…” She brightened. “I could have him call you?”
“Who at the post office box? I mean, can you confirm the name on the P.O. box?” Lizzie was Miss Helpful. Miss Unthreatening.
“I can look,” Maddie said. “Want to come in?”
She did, and she didn’t. Decide.
She did. Lizzie took a step across the threshold as the girl scurried away. Two laptop computers were open on a coffee table, a big-screen TV on mute, showing some music video with singing dogs and what must be hookers on motorcycles. Music continued from upstairs, louder now, thumping through the ceiling. Certainly several people were living here. Why? How? And if the house was sold, why did Aaron still have the keys?
Maybe they hadn’t changed the locks. But still, even if the sales and transfer paperwork was delayed, it shouldn’t be this delayed. Certainly Aaron would be interested in hearing about that. It wouldn’t be Aaron’s fault, of course, he didn’t handle the sales end of it.
Problem was.
Would those questions domino onto her own… “activities”? The housing market was coming back, all the analysts agreed. Not a full recovery, but the outlook was positive. What if they started auditing the foreclosed properties and the transactions connected to them? Would the audit fingers reach into her files? They might. They would. They definitely would.
Best to leave it alone.
If the numbers were taken out of her control, it would ruin her plans. Ruin her families’ lives. Because they were her families now, and no way near recovered. They needed her, relied on her.
“Might be upstairs.” Maddie came back into the foyer, empty-handed. “Two more seconds.”
Lizzie blew out a breath as the girl trotted up the stairs. An array of running shoes, laces dangling, lined each step. Maddie kicked a pair out of the way as she came back down.
Lizzie’s mind computed risk and reward, curiosity versus consequences. She’d simply imagined the place would be empty. She’d overanalyzed, like she always did, and now, bottom line, it put her where she had no business being.
“Sorry, I’m no help at all,” Maddie was saying. “But seriously, I can have them call-”
“Never mind,” Lizzie said.
23
“So where is he, Sherrey? Yeah, I’ll hold.” Waiting for Bing to finish whatever he was doing, Jake eyed the array of documents and files he’d spread across Nate Frasca’s desk and office, wondered how fast he could put everything back in place, wondered how fast he could change his plane reservation, wondered how life managed to throw a monkey wrench into his plans at every damn turn.
He almost laughed, though humor was the last emotion he felt. A monkey wrench? What his grandfather used to say. Grandpa was on his mind a lot these days, as Lilac Sunday loomed.
Sherrey had told him there was another dead body near the Arboretum. Five days before Lilac Sunday. Boston would go ballistic.
Jake was on the verge of ballistic himself.
There had been not one thing in Frasca’s elaborate files that pointed to any established reason Gordon Thorley should be suspected of making a false confession. The more Jake turned pages, the more he’d warily allowed himself to believe that this guy might be the solution to the crime that’d haunted his city-and his family-for twenty years.
Jake had listened to the rumble of D.C. spring thunder as, page by page, he delved into the documented world of fakers, phonies, liars, and losers. Even the clinical cop-and-doctor speak was unable to disguise the torment-or manipulation-that would drive an innocent person to confess. But there was nothing in all the science, nothing in all the precedent or patterns, that explained Thorley.
He’d come here looking for answers, looking for some magic piece of paper that would slam Thorley into an understandable category, make him another sad but predictable loser.
“Be careful what you wish for,” Jake said out loud.
Be careful what you wish for. His grandfather had said that, so many times. He’d explained to teenage Jake, in those mosquito-swatting summer evenings at the Cape cottage, what happened when cops wanted a solution too much.
Grandpa, who wore his badge even with his khaki shorts and boat shoes, also confessed the sorrow, the disappointment, when the cops failed. Telling a family their loved one had been murdered, that was the first hell of it. The only redemption, Grandpa had said, blasting more lighter fluid on the sizzling charcoal or turning the bluefish the two of them had just caught, the only redemption was when they could tell a family-we got him.
He’d never gotten to give Carley Marie’s family that news. Even at age fourteen, Jake knew his grandfather blamed himself for that. Died blaming himself for that.
A splat of rain hit Frasca’s picture window, and then another. This time Jake could see the lightning before he heard the thunder, Sherrey’s speaker-amplified voice barely louder.
“Thorley is in the wind.” Sherrey sounded full of triumph. “Means that bottom-feeding lawyer used a technicality to make us let the bad guy go. I oughta make fricking Hardesty tell the victim’s parents.”
“I’m headed to the airport,” Jake said. “We’re gonna get him.”
It had to be connected, another dead girl in the Arboretum, right before Lilac Sunday. Was Thorley crazy? Or determined? Either way, a suspect. The suspect. “His sister, his family, his parole officer. Someone knows where he is. We’ll find him.”
He stopped, remembered another of his grandfather’s warnings. Don’t jump to conclusions. “This is Boston, though. Someone gets killed every week. Even Lilac Sunday week,” Jake said. “But yeah. We need to talk with Thorley.”
“Count on it,” Sherrey said. “Soon as we find the jerk.”
The dial tone buzzed over the speaker.
Jake stashed his phone, zipped his briefcase closed, stepped into the reception area.
“Miss Cardenas? Will you tell Dr. Frasca I had to go? A case heated up and-I’ll be in touch. Maybe from the airport.”
Frasca’s secretary took off her headset, raised one eyebrow at the window. Jake could hardly see the park now, the rain now gushing in rivers down the slick glass, muddling the spring day into incomprehensible green and brown. “Good luck with that,” she said. “I’ll call a cab.”