Page 23 of Death in the Family
Tim sighed and dropped into an armchair. There was a second chair nearby, so wide and plush I wanted to curl up in it and reset my brain, but I knew neither of us should get too comfortable. I could see Abella nervously watching us from across the hall, and I was itching to talk to Bebe and Ned.
“Both parents in one shot. Can’t have been easy on the kids,” Tim said. Then, “Where’s the money?”
“Excellent question. It went to the three of them, most likely—Jasper, Bebe, and Flynn. We need to confirm that. I’ll ask Camilla.”
“This girl, Abella,” Tim said. “You believe her?”
I’d asked myself the same question multiple times since sitting down with her. My gut told me she was innocent. But could I trust it? “Right now, at this moment? Yeah, I do.”
“Because the girlfriend has every reason to lie. She was in a bed stained with blood. There’s blood on her clothes. She could be making the whole thing up: the affair, Flynn’s bullying, all of it.”
“She could be,” I agreed, “but I still can’t imagine her rolling over to stab her boyfriend and going back to sleep.” Someone else had done that, and I was increasingly sure that someone was still in the house.
“Know what I think? I think Abella knows exactly what happened.” Tim interlaced his fingers and clasped the back of his neck in a stretch. “The fight Flynn overheard last night was probablythem breaking up, and Jasper didn’t feel like sticking around to deal with the fallout in the morning. I know lots of guys who don’t have the balls to face an ex. Abella’s pissed and embarrassed by the fact that he left, and as for the blood, couldn’t it be... you know... female trouble?”
I gaped at him. “What?”
“Bleeding all over the sheets at an ex-boyfriend’s house is even worse than the boyfriend taking off in the middle of the night. The family called it murder, and she didn’t want to fess up, so she let it snowball. From where I’m standing—sitting,” he amended with a grin, “this seems like a simple misunderstanding that got way out of hand.”
I contemplated Tim’s straight eyebrows and the evenhanded character I’d come to know. Between the two of us, I was the only one who seemed certain Jasper Sinclair was dead. Tim was considerably more optimistic about the man’s fate, even when faced with evidence to the contrary. As he rolled his neck and relaxed his shoulders, it was clear he thought he had it figured out.
It occurred to me I might be the victim of self-sabotage. Could it be that my subconscious was trying to trick me? I have too much history with gruesome homicides to assume everything’s flowers and rainbows when I find blood all over the walls, but what I was feeling wasn’t just healthy skepticism: it was a bone-deep belief this missing person was dead. There were parallels to the horrors I’d left back in New York. Memories circled me like hungry dogs. The sooner I solved this case, the sooner I could get off the island. I wanted to be there, but I didn’t. Thought I could do what needed doing, and doubted myself at every turn. It was a push and pull between my head and my heart. Either way, I lost.
I was willing to consider Tim’s theory. Of course I was. Butwhen he winked at me and said, “It’s not as complicated as you think, Shane,” all I heard was “Listen, sweetie, get a grip. This isn’tLaw & Order.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.
His eyes got marginally larger. “Just... I know you’re used to crazy cases in the city. Around here, the explanation’s usually pretty simple.”
“A missing person and a ton of blood. You think that’s simple?”
“Notsimple,” he said, flushing. “Simple’s not the right word. But thisisa missing persons case.”
“That was called in as a murder. Everything I’ve seen so far leads me to believe that’s what we’ve got. So I’m thinking we should take them back to the station.” I said it quick, knowing my resolve wouldn’t last. I didn’t know if I could trust it, but if my intuition about these people was right, I didn’t want to be alone with them on the island for one more minute. “We’ve got the two boats. You drive one, Norton will take the other.”
“Take them all in? In this weather? Shane, come on. It’s rough on the water, getting worse all the time. We have to question them here. On the off chance we need to make an arrest,thenwe can—”
“A man is missing without a trace! We’ve got critical evidence up there that’s deteriorating with every passing second!”
“We’ve got no body,” Tim said. “He could still show up—what then? Do you want to be the one to explain why we’re clogging up headquarters with eight witnesses to a nonexistent crime?”
“You know as well as I do that murder and a corpse aren’t mutually exclusive. We don’t need a body. We don’t even need the murder weapon, not if we’ve got a confession or enough circumstantial evidence. It’ll take hours to question everyone, and it’salready nearly noon. We’ll be here all day. If we stay, we could get stuck.”
“Yeah, but not, like,forever.” Tim showed me the side of his face and looked at me from the corner of his eye. “You’re acting weird. What’s this all about?”
Shit.Pull yourself together, Shay. “It seems like a bad idea, us against them.”
To my absolute horror, Tim laughed. “There are two of us, and we’re both armed. I think we can handle them for a few hours, don’t you?”
He looked tickled, like this wasn’t a homicide investigation but some sort of weekend team-building retreat. I wondered why he didn’t share his theory with me sooner. Was he humoring me all morning? Did my efforts to probe our witnesses amuse him? So much for the two of us being on the same wavelength. “You’re a BCI investigator,” I said, suddenly furious. “You were trained to solve murders. Why does it feel like you aren’t doing your fucking job?”
The smile melted from Tim’s face. After a beat he said, “No, that’s fair. I should have prepped you better. That’s on me. Look, I’ve been working for the New York State Police in this region for seven years. You want to know how many homicides I’ve seen during that time?”
I already knew the answer. When I applied for the job, McIntyre dangled the data in front of me like a fishing lure, and I’d bitten greedily. I didn’t see the point in playing his game. “I’d rather know how many times you’ve found a bed soaked with blood and it turned out a woman ran out of pads. Don’t you get it?” I said. “We don’t have the team we need to do this right. Wehave to be on the same page, and that page has murder written all over it. This is entirely about protocol,” I told him. “I’m not okay with straying from procedure, and you shouldn’t be either. It’s sloppy, Tim, and sloppy is dangerous. You understand that, right? Please tell me you get that.”
Over the few weeks that I’d known him, I’d challenged myself to learn Tim’s tells. I was getting pretty good at extracting information from the most neutral of expressions. If Tim doubted what he was hearing, whether from a witness or suspect, his mouth shifted a hairsbreadth to the right. When he was nervous, he swallowed twice in quick succession. If I was ever in doubt, I could always rely on his eyebrows. But as he sat there in that comfy chair, staring up at me, his face was as indecipherable as a book written in a foreign language I was trying to read upside down.
“Sure, Shana. I get that,” he said.
