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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

THE KELLERS

Keller regards David Maldonado, who has a bandage on his head but still somehow looks kind of dashing sitting up in his hospital bed. His wife stands at the perimeter. She’s fidgety and seems to be bridling panic. Keller isn’t sure if it’s because of what happened to her husband or because her daughter remains missing.

The air is filled with anxiety. Hospitals do that. So do real-time investigations. And Keller rushed here by herself rather than deal with questions of whether McCray or Santa Clara PD should venture miles from their jurisdiction since San Mateo County and Half Moon Bay law enforcement had already responded to the incident.

“I know you’ve been through this with the police, but it would help if you walked me through what happened,” Keller says.

“That’s fine,” Dr. Maldonado says. “But first, the kids, they still haven’t turned up?”

His wife Nina blurts, “We haven’t heard a word from Stella. Do you think something’s happened to them?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Keller replies. “We need you to tell us about last night.”

David tells her. About the dinner for Stella’s capstone group from Campisi Hall. The kids skipping out. The return to the hotel. David going out for a run. He doesn’t say so, but Keller suspects from the way he tells it—from the fold of his wife’s arms across her chest—that there was an argument in there somewhere. Probably what precipitated a jog so late after a night out for dinner and cocktails.

“When Stella didn’t show up at The Hut, you weren’t concerned?”

Dr. Maldonado shrugs. “Stella can be… tricky. It isn’t the first time she’s ghosted us.”

Keller stores that away for more questions later. Pacing is key in an interview. “So, you’re out on a jog and someone attacks you?”

“Not so much an attack. But he just shows up from the shadows, like in some horror movie. He had something in his hand. I thought it could’ve been a knife, but it was dark. So I wanted to get the hell out of there, and I ran.”

“And he chased you?”

“Yeah. He cut me off at the stairs to the hotel, so I found this opening where you could scale the cliffside. That’s when I fell.”

“Did you get a look at him?”

Dr. Maldonado shakes his head. “It was dark.”

“Do you have any idea who it might be?” Keller sees Maldonado and his wife tap eyes. “This isn’t the time to hold back.” Keller doesn’t add that it could relate to their missing daughter, but they get it.

Finally his wife speaks: “You tell her or I will.”

Dr. Maldonado blows out a breath. “There was an incident back in New York.”

“An incident.”

His wife chimes in again. “Call it what it is, David. An affair.”

“It wasn’t like a love affair and—” He stops himself. “It was an affair. I had an affair,” he concedes, more for his wife than Keller.

Keller is curious where this is going. The trajectory suggests the man on the beach wasn’t a random assailant, perhaps a jilted spouse, but she lets him talk.

“I was out with her late one night.”

“Her.”

“Zoe Carpenter, an anesthesiologist at the hospital.”

Keller shows no judgment on her face. Judgment can make an interviewee shut down.

Dr. Maldonado continues: “We were parked in the woods at a park near her house.”

Keller can almost feel Mrs. Maldonado’s glare burning into him.

“Zoe’s husband must’ve had a tracker on her car or something. Or maybe he followed her.” He swallows. “Next thing we know her husband is pounding on the window.”

Keller continues to show no reaction as her mind plays the movie in her head.

“I thought, ‘Oh, this is bad.’ But I had no idea…”

“What happened?” Keller asks after a long silence.

“He had a gun. I thought he was going to kill me. Kill us both. He was ranting. Crying. He’d been drinking. He’d already called Nina.” David flicks a glance at his wife, then back to nothing. “It started raining. He was growing increasingly agitated. I tried to talk him down. Tell him I’m sorry.”

This elicits a noise from his wife’s throat.

“And then he just puts the gun under his chin and…” He doesn’t need to say more.

Keller swallows, imagining the grisly scene.

“But it gets worse,” Dr. Maldonado says.

“Worse?” Keller says, failing to conceal her bewilderment. How could it possibly get worse?

“While we’re waiting for the police, I get out of the car to get some air. Zoe is in shock, nearly catatonic. Her husband is lying there in the grass, his head…”

He’s quiet for another long moment. Keller can’t take it anymore: “What was worse?”

“Across the knoll, I see a figure. A kid on a bicycle.”

Oh no. Keller feels her pulse in her neck, anticipating where this is heading.

“Apparently when her husband rushed out of the house upset, drunk, and got behind the wheel, their son followed after him on his bike.”

“He saw,” Keller says.

“Everything,” Maldonado says. “And he’s just standing there staring at me. Even in the dark from the distance I could see the hatred.”

Another stretch of silence. Then he says it: “I saw that same stare yesterday when we got to campus.”

“Wait, you’re saying the son, he was at SCU?”

“It was him. Standing there with that same glare. I thought I was imagining it. Maybe it was another kid who looked like him. But Nina saw him too.”

His wife is nodding. An exhausted nod.

“And you think that’s who went after you last night?”

“Who else would it be?”

“Is this the first time you’ve seen him since his father died?”

Nina Maldonado speaks now. “I saw him a couple times in New York. Once outside my yoga studio. Another time at Patsy’s Pizzeria. And we were getting harassing calls, hang-ups. But then it stopped.”

“What’s his name?”

“Cody Carpenter.”

“Does Stella know him? Did they go to the same high school or—”

“Stella went to private school in the city,” David Maldonado says. “Zoe lives in Englewood and her son went to school there.”

Nina adds, “I asked Stella yesterday if she knew Cody. I thought it could be a crazy coincidence that maybe he went to Santa Clara.”

“What did she say?”

“That she doesn’t know him.”

“And you believe her?”

The wife hesitates, thinks, then says: “Yes.”

“Was there anything unusual about Stella yesterday? Did she say or do anything that seemed out of the ordinary?”

Nina Maldonado ponders this. “She did leave the resort abruptly.”

“What do you mean?”

“She drove up to Half Moon Bay with us, she was annoyed we’d booked a place so far from campus. She and I walked on the beach. Like I said… she seemed slightly annoyed with us, but that’s not unusual.”

She peers at her husband for a moment and continues. “Stella was supposed to hang out for the afternoon and then we’d all go to the dinner together. Then she gets a bunch of texts, insists she has to get back to campus right away. Something about needing to turn in a paper for one of her classes or risk a bad grade.”

“Did you believe her?”

“I mean, not totally. But she clearly wanted to get back, so we got her an Uber.”

“Do you know what time that was?”

“No, but the app will have the time.” Mrs. Maldonado examines her phone. “She left here at four fifteen.”

Keller thinks about this. This was more than two hours before the kids all stormed out of the dorm, possibly summoned by someone. She makes a mental note to check whether Stella really had an assignment due. It’s more likely the texts were about whatever she and Libby Akana were fighting about. Keller imagines Stella Maldonado charging into Libby’s dorm, smashing her phone.

Nina Maldonado’s eyes are filling with tears, like she’s coming to terms that her daughter isn’t voluntarily missing. She glares at her husband: “This is your fault.”

Keller places a hand on her shoulder. A gesture of sympathy, but also one that says this isn’t the time; it isn’t going to help them find Stella.

Keller needs to move fast. Track down Cody Carpenter in case he has anything to do with the missing students. It seems unlikely. But so does the Maldonados seeing this kid three thousand miles from New York.

“Do you have his mother’s contact information?” Keller asks. “It may be the fastest way to confirm it was him, that Cody’s in California, how to find him.”

“If you get me my phone,” David says, eyeing the nightstand that’s out of reach amid the tubes and monitors.

“You still have it?” his wife says, more hurt in her tone. “You said you deleted—”

“This isn’t about us. It’s about finding Stella.”

Keller thanks them both. She wonders how they got to this point: the infidelity, the secrets, the bitterness.

In the hallway she takes a deep breath and makes a call that she knows is going to devastate another woman, another mother.