Page 29

CHAPTER 29

IN THE VIDEO, Troy Hansen stands in a drugstore. He’s wearing the same hoodie, pulled up, but it’s easy to know it’s him from his stooped posture. He’s in the beauty-products section, a basket on his arm, staring at bottles. From somewhere else, I hear the soft clatter of cardboard on the linoleum. The camera dips, comes back up. Troy is suddenly holding a box of condoms. He hands it to the person behind the camera.

“Whoops. Thanks.” A woman’s voice.

“No problem.” Troy gives an awkward smile. He tries to go back to his shopping. She doesn’t let him.

“Gotta stock up.” She shakes the box. He looks. “You never know when there’s gonna be another pandemic.”

Troy laughs his weird, tittering laugh. “Essential items only.”

“Right. Right.” She shows the camera the box of condoms. “You, uh, you go through a lot of these?”

“Me?” Troy’s smile twitches. “No. I don’t tend to.”

“Oh. So you don’t use ’em at all?”

Troy grins down at his basket, eyes mischievous. “Well. Not that size, anyway.”

I fished around on the internet on my phone at the café table while Troy squirmed in his seat. It didn’t take me long to find out that the condom video was in the process of going viral. The original poster’s follower list on TikTok was spinning like the reels on a slot machine. Stills of Troy standing in the grocery-store aisle smiling and holding a box of condoms were trending on every news chart in the country. The video had been uploaded barely thirty minutes ago.

“When was this video taken?”

“About an hour ago.”

“Jesus, Troy,” I said.

“I was just buying shampoo!” He gave a dark growl. It was the first genuine, complex emotion I’d seen him exhibit. “It was morning. I thought the stores would be empty.”

“So you thought you’d go out and get some scalp cleanser and flirt with some random woman?” I asked. “Are you nuts?”

“I wasn’t flirting!”

“It looks like you were flirting,” I said. “She made it look like you were flirting. How did you not see it?” I slapped the table. “A woman recording a video saunters up to you in public and accidentally drops a box of rubbers at your feet, and you don’t clock that as a setup?”

“I wasn’t thinking!” Troy pleaded. “She wasn’t holding the phone like a camera. She had it tucked in her front pocket. And it wasn’t flirting, it was ... it was question and response . She said, ‘Do you use these?’ I said, ‘No,’ and then it was like — ”

“The punch line was right there,” I said. “You couldn’t help yourself.”

“Yes! Exactly!”

“You’re either an idiot or a sociopath, Troy,” I said. “I’m trying to figure out which. Your wife has been missing for a week.”

“Maybe I’m both.” Troy clawed his scalp. “But I’m not a killer.”

We sat in silence.

“Rhonda, I said something stupid. Really stupid. But this video ... this isn’t me. I don’t go around bragging about my ... my penis size to random women. Something came over me.”

“It doesn’t matter, Troy,” I said. “It doesn’t matter if you really were flirting or if you went on autopilot or you panicked or you were tired or ... whatever, Troy. It doesn’t matter what you were actually doing. I’ll repeat what I just said: It. Looks. Like. You. Were. Flirting.”

“Oh, Jesus. Jesus.” Troy hung his head.

“Let’s get on to the other thing.” I stared at the top of Troy’s head. “A quarter of a million dollars was deposited in your and Daisy’s bank account two months ago. Where did it come from, and why didn’t you tell me about it?”

The waitress came over, asked if I wanted coffee, returned with a mug. Once she left, Troy lifted his head and looked at me. “We won the lottery,” he said. “Daisy buys a lottery ticket every week. She’s done it since college. You know what Daisy’s like, right? You’ve been looking into her life. You know Daisy’s an eternal optimist.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about it?” I repeated.

“Because it’s motive. Like you said.” He squirmed in his seat. “I wanted you to help me.”

“When people find out about this,” I said, “they’re going to see a sociopath who won the lottery and began dreaming of a new life. A life without his spouse.”

“They’re going to find out about the box too.” He wrung his hands, looking at the windows at the front of the café. I followed his gaze and saw Dave Summerly and two plainclothes cops out there. “The police are gonna have to arrest me soon or people will riot.”

“Troy.” I took a deep breath, then put my lawyer voice on, prepared for a hard sell. “Maybe you getting put away just for a little while is not a completely bad thing.”

He turned to me, his pupils huge.

“Out here, you’re damaging your reputation minute by minute, day by day,” I said. “Even when you’re not bragging about your dick size on camera — ”

“I didn’t — ”

“ — any and all footage of you looks terrible. You stand awkwardly. You walk awkwardly. It’s not fair, but people interpret that stuff and see what they want to see. They see guilt. None of this is going to help you if you end up going to trial. At least if you’re in the county jail, you’ll be away from the public eye.”

“I can’t go to prison,” Troy said. “I won’t.”

“Listen, county is not — ”

He shot up from his seat, knocking the table with his thighs and making my coffee slosh over the rim of my cup.

“I feel sick,” he said. He certainly looked it. His lips were white as paper and his left eye was twitching. “I’ll be right back.”

Troy headed to the café’s restroom. I watched Summerly’s wide back leaning against the front of the café and thought about county jail, about how someone as weird as Troy Hansen would fare there. A weird vibe could be useful in prison. If Troy kept his mouth shut, he might be avoided, an unknown quantity in the midst of more obvious prey. Because there would always be prey. The prison system was jammed full of the vulnerable, the young, and the naive. I mopped up my spilled coffee, mentally rehearsing what I would tell Troy to prepare him for his first-ever incarceration, when his words suddenly echoed in my ears as clearly as if they were bouncing off a canyon wall.

I can’t go to prison.

I won’t.

I hurried to the restroom at the rear of the café and found what I’d thought I’d find — a locked door and a horrific silence in response to my frantic knocking.

I turned and saw the back door of the café just past the restroom. I went out the door, glanced back up at the bathroom window, saw it pushed all the way up on its rusty hinges.

I eased back into the café as calmly as I could and called Baby.

“We have a problem,” I said. “Troy just did the worst possible thing an innocent man can do.”

“What? What did he do?”

“He ran.”