Page 44 of The Lost Heiress
“Ah, that makes a lot of sense, actually,” Saoirse said. “I thought you were just really bad at this. Now I see it’s all an act.” She took a swig from her bottle and let the liquid burn down her throat, warm her stomach.
“Yeah,” Teddy said, scratching his chin. “But, I was thinking, it might be a bit too obvious at this point. So maybe in the second half, you let me get a run in, just to throw people off our trail.”
“Mm,” Saoirse said.
Teddy glanced at her water bottle. “Can I have some of that?” he asked, and Saoirse reflexively handed it to him, forgetting for a moment that it was filled with vodka, not water.
Teddy took a sip before she could warn him. His eyes got big for a second, and then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and screwed the cap back on.
“All right, then,” he said as he handed the bottle back to her. He had a look in his eye like he was reappraising her.
“Stop fraternizing with the enemy, Mountbatten,” one of his teammates called.
Teddy stood up. “I’m just buttering her up so she’ll go easy on us, is all,” he said. He winked at her so only she could see. “Don’t worry—I’ve got her right where I want her.”
When Saoirse’s team won, Teddy bought her an ice cream, and they walked along the pier together, feeding pieces of her sugary cone to the seagulls and talking.
“Has anyone ever told you you have the most amazing eyes?” Teddy asked. “Like, they’re really quite large. Like saucers. They’re stunning.”
Saoirse laughed. “You make me sound like the wolf in ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’” Saoirse said. “Why, Granny, what large eyes you have.”
“No, not like a wolf,” Teddy said. “Cuter than a wolf. Like a meerkat. A mongoose.”
“Oh my God,” Saoirse said, but she couldn’t help but laugh. “You sure know how to make a girl feel good about herself, calling her a mongoose.”
Teddy shrugged. “It’s a compliment. It’s all in how you say it. My little meerkat. My little mongoose.”
Saoirse laughed and threw a piece of her cone at him. “Please stop talking now,” she said.
There was rarely a day that summer that they didn’t spend together, always in a group, but somehow, they always sought each other out. At an outdoor concert, Teddy lifted Saoirse onto his shoulders so she could see the stage, and the bare skin of her thighs burned where he held on to her. She could barely focus on the song the band was singing, even though it was one of her favorites. Another time, in the air-conditioned room of the town’s dark theater, Teddy sat next to her, his arm laid out next to hers on the armrest, just barely touching.
Part of her wished she could go back in time and warn that skinny, knobby-kneed fourteen-year-old version of herself. She’d take her by the shoulders and shake her.Get out while you still can,she’d say.This isn’t the sweet young puppy love you think it is. You don’t know what’s coming.
The thing was, no one knew the real truth about her and Teddy, the full extent of it. She’d never even confided it to Hugh. It was a secret both too shameful and painful to look at. So she kept it wedged beneath her rib cage, next to other dangerous things.
Chapter Fifteen
Present
At noon, Detective Church sat down for lunch with Teddy Mountbatten at the Beverly Wilshire. The meeting place had been Teddy’s idea; it was not Church’s scene at all. They were seated on the outdoor patio, and at the table next to them, a middle-aged woman had a Pomeranian in a baby stroller. She rocked and cooed at it as she picked at her salad, her designer shades perched high on her forehead. Church had had to look twice to make sure he’d really seen what he had thought he’d seen.
“If I were a client, I’d tell myself not to talk to you,” Teddy said, taking a sip from his iced tea. He was sharply dressed in a designer suit and leather loafers, still handsome despite his age.
“And why’s that?” Church asked.
Teddy smiled good-naturedly. “It’s always people wanting to help that gets them into trouble,” he said. “‘Silence is the true friend that never betrays,’ I always tell them. But people can’t help themselves. The guilty ones are overconfident and think they can’t be caught, and the innocent ones think they have nothing to hide and share guilelessly. I’m not sure which is worse, honestly. They both do as much harm to themselves.”
Teddy Mountbatten was a criminal defense lawyer now, and not just any criminal defense lawyer—a very famous one. Teddy was knownfor taking on headline-making cases. His first claim to fame had been serving on the defense team for Dr. Mark Morrison, a neurosurgeon who had been accused of murdering his pregnant wife. It had seemed, at first, to be an open-and-shut case: Dr. Morrison was the only one home at the time of his wife’s murder, and he was covered in her blood. Later, it was discovered he’d been having an affair with a young lab technician from the town over. But Teddy was an expert at introducing seeds of reasonable doubt and nurturing those seeds until they took root and grew, cracking the perfect facade of the prosecution’s case. He knew how to tease out an admission, how to poke holes in a testimony, how to make a person seem untrustworthy, unreliable, inaccurate. How to implicate and insinuate with subtle inflections or the nuanced way he worded a question.
Teddy had brought in a blood-spatter expert to argue that the perpetrator must have been left-handed, while Dr. Morrison was right-handed. He sidled up to the jury booth when giving his arguments; he knew how to make each juror feel like he was speaking directly to them. And they warmed to him; they couldn’t help themselves. Teddy was handsome and charming and good at getting people on his side. When the jury returned a verdict of “not guilty,” the public was shocked, and the world took note of Teddy Mountbatten. “Teddy the Tenacious,” they called him. In his long tenure as a criminal defense lawyer, Teddy had never lost a case that had gone to trial.
“I assure you I’m not here to get you into any trouble, Mr. Mountbatten,” Detective Church said. “I’m just trying to establish a baseline of events from the people that were there that night. What they saw, what they remember.”
Teddy leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Detective Church, let’s be honest with one another—no bullshit,” Teddy said. “You have a job to do, and that is to find the person responsible for all this. And sure, I bet you’d like to find the right person. But we live in an imperfect world. Witnesses lie or obfuscate or misremember. Physical evidence is incomplete or contradictory or nonexistent. You do the best you canwith what you have, but in order to do your job, you must find theseeminglymost right person—aviableperson—nothing more. And I am a seemingly viable person, I think we can both agree. So let’s cut the pretense, shall we, and get straight to what you came here to ask me.”
Detective Church shifted in his chair. He hated talking to lawyers. They had such a skewed sense of the justice system. To them, it had nothing to do with justice or truth at all; it was about winning, no matter what side they were on.
“Okay, Mr. Mountbatten,” Church said. “I’ll get right to it, then. You and Saoirse used to date?”
