Page 50

CHAPTER 50

ALEX brINDLE’S LEGS WERE so wobbly, she barely made it to a big beige armchair in the room at the front of the house. I had to help her there. Baby stayed outside to tell the actual eleven o’clock couple who had just arrived that the doctor was unexpectedly indisposed.

I watched the psychologist crying in her armchair and tried to keep a neutral-to-sympathetic expression on my own face while I determined if her behavior was genuine. I decided that the tears were real. But the words I’ve killed her rang in my ears, and I was impatient to find out what she’d meant.

“Do her parents know?” she asked.

“If they don’t, they will soon,” I said, sitting down on the couch across from the therapist. “The police are doing their best to inform them before the internet breaks the news.”

Brindle sucked in a deep breath, looking like she wanted to gag.

“How did she ... I mean, did they ... did they find ... ”

“They found her body this morning. They’ll be doing an autopsy soon.”

“Oh Jesus.” Brindle put her face in her hands.

“You said you killed her,” I pressed. Baby came into the room and sat beside me. “What did you mean by that?”

“I told her to leave him.” Brindle swiped at her eyes, leaving a streak of mascara across her right temple. “It was him, wasn’t it? Troy?”

I glanced at Baby. Her eyes were narrowed, suspicious. “We’re not sure yet.”

“This is all my fault. I told her to — ”

“You told Daisy quite a few things that you shouldn’t have told her over the course of your relationship,” Baby interrupted, taking out her phone.

“Like what?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Baby smirked. “Like her ass reminded you of polished stone? Like the smell of her shampoo on your pillow turned you on? Like that you held whole sessions with clients here while your mind was completely tangled up with her?”

“My messages.” Brindle put her hand over her mouth. “You ... you’ve read those? Did you ... oh God.”

Baby powered on. My heart was in my throat. Brindle seemed to be assuming Baby and I were cops. She was probably too upset to notice how young my sister was. Well, we needed to keep her not thinking about it too much for as long as possible.

“Let’s see what else we have here,” Baby said, scrolling on her phone.

Alex Brindle looked like she was about to be sick.

“Two weeks ago,” Baby said, “you texted, ‘We need to talk.’ It was in response to Daisy telling you in a text message that she loved you. You called her. The two of you spoke for an hour and forty-seven minutes.”

Brindle sat back in her chair. The color had drained from her cheeks, and sweat was beading at her hairline.

“In fact, Daisy said she loved you several times across your message history.” Baby flicked the phone screen with her thumb. “You never said it back.”

“I feel sick,” Brindle said. “Just ... just give me a second.”

“This is all very — ” Baby started, but I hushed her. My sister had gone in hard, and she’d done a good job. But she was still learning when to ease off the accelerator. I’d had enough practice with clients to know that a physically incapacitated suspect couldn’t provide a solid story, whether that story was fact or fiction.

Brindle put her head in her hands.

“I loved her too,” she said. “But I had so much more to lose than Daisy did.”

“Like what?”

“Like my license and my practice.” Brindle wiped sweat from her brow. “I was Daisy’s psychologist. She started coming to me about a year ago, wanting to talk about her marriage to Troy. She’d tried getting Troy into couples counseling but was having a hard time convincing him that there was a problem. And apparently he’s not much of a talker. So Daisy and I would meet alone. We grew close during the sessions. She was bright and funny, and that’s a bit of a rarity around here. Most of the people who walk in that door are struggling to find some peace in their lives. I counsel trauma victims. Rape victims. I specialize in broken marriages.”

“You’re a hero.” Baby rolled her eyes. “We get it.”

“There’s a phenomenon that occurs sometimes between patients and therapists.” Brindle tore a tissue from an ornate silver box on the coffee table. “It’s called transference. You come in here, you open up, you form an emotional connection. Sometimes a patient confuses that connection with romantic feelings. When Daisy told me she was thinking about me outside the sessions ... ” Alex Brindle shook her head. “I should have stopped things then.”

“Yes, you should have,” Baby said. “You’re looking at the loss of your psychologist’s license and up to six months of jail time. California Business and Professions Code, division two, chapter one.” My sister leaned toward me and whispered, “I looked it up in the car.”

“Less vinegar, more honey,” I murmured, then turned back to Brindle.

“I should have told the police as soon as I heard that Daisy was missing.” Brindle rubbed her eyes. For a moment, she gripped her head as though trying to squeeze out the fear. “I just couldn’t. I didn’t want to put myself in the public eye like that. I’ve been sitting here for days now, just hoping that Daisy kept our relationship secret, that she’d be found safe and everything would blow over.”

“Well, it didn’t,” Baby said.

“When did you and Daisy become intimate, Alex?” I gave Baby a warning look.

“It’s been about five or six months.” Brindle twisted the corners of her tissue into little points. “Troy blew up at a neighbor kid when he and Daisy were at her parents’ house at Christmas. Daisy didn’t like that. She came in wanting to discuss it. She wasn’t talking about leaving him then. She was just ... questioning her choices with Troy. The truth was that she didn’t know him that well. That there were things from his past, his childhood, that worried her. There were a lot of closed doors.”

“What do you mean, closed doors?” I asked.

“Things he wouldn’t talk about,” Brindle said. “Whenever Daisy tried to deepen the connection, you know, be vulnerable, he’d shut down. Say the past was the past. Daisy was worried about what kind of past that was.”

Silence in the room. Baby was chewing her nails.

“But look.” Alex Brindle sighed. “Daisy was also just questioning her life path in general. I thought she was bored, to be honest. That can happen. He worked. She worked. They had a nice home. She tried to go digging around in his past for drama and couldn’t get anything. She needed conflict. There was no jeopardy in her life. No risk. No thrill.”

A shimmer of energy seemed to pass through the room. Baby felt it too. She nudged my Vans with the side of her designer boot.

“What do you mean by thrill ?” she asked. “Like, Daisy wanted to do something dangerous?”

“She just wanted something to give her life a spark,” Brindle said miserably. “I think our affair was, you know ... the risk she was chasing. That’s what I was trying to work out with her, all those times we said we needed to talk.” She nodded at the phone in Baby’s hand. “Did she love me? Or did she love the taboo?”

“Then the money came into the equation,” I said.

“That just made her question things more.” Brindle shook her head. “And it made me question things more.”

“Were you thinking of running away with Daisy?” I asked.

“No,” Brindle said. “Not at all.”

“So what were you questioning?”

“What Daisy wanted to do with the money,” Brindle said. “It turned me off. It was too intense for me. Here she is, telling me that she loves me, right? That she’s thinking about leaving her husband for me. Then she tells me she wants to go to graduate school, get a degree in psychology. She runs her thesis idea past me. And guess what?” Brindle gave a sad laugh. “Her thesis topic was my area of expertise. My exact area.”

“Sounds like she was becoming obsessed with you,” I said.

“She was.” Brindle nodded. “And I was in too deep. I was trying to back off.”

“What’s your area of expertise?” Baby asked.

Dr. Brindle laughed, a small, embarrassed sound.

“When I started out, I didn’t do this kind of domestic stuff, couples therapy.” She gestured to the coffee table, the fluffy throw on the couch, the whole pretty but sterile setting. “But I learned after ten years of trying to change the world one monster at a time that you make a lot more money and you sleep better at night when you counsel normal people about normal problems.”

Baby and I looked at each other.

“I used to work in prisons,” Brindle said. “My doctoral dissertation was on serial killers.”