Page 45

CHAPTER 45

I DIDN’T ASK HIM anything about the body I was going to see. I needed time to think, to work up to handling it.

Though I’d never met her, I’d seen enough to imagine that I would have liked Daisy Hansen. Sure, she was flawed. She was a cheater. She was unreliable and secretive, and her optimism was probably relentless. But I’d seen her mother’s barely contained, minute-by-minute terror that her daughter was never coming home. I’d seen fear and sadness in the candlelit eyes of Daisy’s friends and neighbors outside her house. For hours, I’d scrolled Daisy’s social media pages and learned her little quirks and eccentricities. How she squealed at random dogs on leashes in the park. How she hated Fridays because she liked to work. I knew the sound of her long-suffering sigh when she didn’t get enough sleep. I knew the wheeze she made when she laughed hard.

Good and bad, Daisy had been a real and genuine person.

I sat in the car beside Brogan and watched Manhattan Beach become Sepulveda and then the 105 East. The sight of an In-N-Out Burger made me simultaneously nauseated and desperate to go inside and order everything they had.

“Look, Rhonda,” Brogan said eventually. “I know Troy Hansen killed his wife.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because I know what kind of man he is and what kind of wife he had.”

I waited, feeling tired. Brogan seemed to age as he thought, as if the memories he was turning over were draining something from him. He was probably only in his mid-to late thirties, but they’d been hard decades.

Brogan ran a hand through his hair, seemed to weigh his words even when they were out of his mouth. “I know him because I’ve been him. I’ve been the guy with the star wife. Daisy Hansen was a bubbly, vivacious woman. If she wasn’t chitchatting with the yoga gals, she was changing the lives of her diet-program followers. She was emailing, calling, texting, studying, hunting for opportunities, doing good deeds, paying it forward, being a good friend, a good colleague, a fierce competitor.” He shook his head. “It exhausts me just thinking about what it was like to be Daisy Hansen.”

“You said you’d been him,” I pressed.

“I was the turkey vulture married to the swan for ten years.” He glanced at me. “She ran marathons to raise money to cure cancer. She installed community gardens in run-down neighborhoods. And here I was, the bozo cop who hadn’t had the grades for law school.”

“Oh, wow.”

“Yeah. She was a fucking saint.” Brogan took a pack of cigarettes from the center console and lit up. “She ran a charity that cared for orphaned baby elephants. She started it when she was in college. In the beginning, you hate yourself for being such a piece of garbage. Then you hate the other person for insisting on being so amazing all the time.”

I said nothing.

“Troy Hansen is an awkward loser from a family of duck hunters up north,” Brogan continued. “I don’t know if it was sheer luck or a twist of fate or a glitch in the universe, but somehow, Troy Hansen landed Daisy Rayburn, and she was the best and worst thing that ever happened to him.”

“You think he envied her,” I said.

“Wouldn’t you?”

I thought about Daisy and Troy’s beautiful home. The meals in the Tupperware. The magazines on the coffee table. The artfully filtered Instagram shots.

I thought about my high-school years. I’d been nearing two hundred pounds at age fourteen and on the fringe of a goth group of drama and literature nerds. Girls like Daisy hadn’t deliberately set out to make my life a nightmare, but they didn’t need to. I’d loathed the ease with which they navigated the world.

But I hadn’t wanted to see them dead.

“It’s okay to discover that, actually, you hate your wife.” Brogan shrugged and exhaled through his open window. “But you don’t kill her. You do what everybody does: You get a divorce.”

“There’s no evidence that Troy Hansen hated his wife,” I said.

Brogan snorted humorlessly and kept driving. “We’re not there yet.”