Page 109 of Sharp Force

“The parents are gone,” he replies. “And Georgine and Claire have never gotten along, truth be told. The sister is in Chicago, and I gave her the news right away. She’s already lining up a funeral home and all the rest. And of course, I’ll help in any way needed.”

“It sounds like you must have kept up with Georgine ever since college?” Benton queries.

“We’ve always stayed friends. After her husband died, we got closer.”

“Maybe more than friends?” Benton suggests.

“Be careful starting rumors,” Calvin Willard threatens.

“Why was your nephew staying in her house on Mercy Island?” Benton is unrelenting in his calm, quiet way. “Why were you giving her money?”

“Because she was helping Zain,” the senator answers. “And had been for the past six or seven years.”

“Helping with what?”

“He’s never had a good relationship with his mother. My damn sister. I blame her for why he’s never had a girlfriend of any consequence. If you get my drift.”

“I’m not sure I do.” Benton plays obtuse.

“It’s not that I care if he’s gay, nonbinary or whatever the hell people call themselves these days,” Calvin Willard goes on to say. “But he’s had trouble with depression, with feeling like he’s never fit in. And I’m sure you’ll find out soon enough that Georgine’s been seeing him since he graduated from high school. That’s when his mother bailed, and Zain went into a serious decline.”

“Georgine began giving him therapy?” Benton assumes.

“Her job was to keep him alive,” Calvin says, and for an instant I see the love he feels for Zain. “His moods got much worse when he started William & Mary. He became increasingly uncomfortable in his own skin. He started exploring alternatives, if you know what I mean.”

“I’m not sure I do,” Benton says.

“Self-hatred, doing self-destructive stuff, wanting to die.”

“I noticed his scars,” I reply, and he nods gravely.

“A cutter. Someone who self-harms.” He tells me what I’d already decided.

“Has he ever made an attempt at taking his own life?” I ask.

“Nothing that anyone knows about.” Calvin Willard stares off.

“Meaning, he’s made attempts that weren’t reported to the police or anyone else,” Benton infers, and what the senator is saying won’t be helpful to his nephew.

I can anticipate a prosecutor making the case that it’s not surprising a cutter would slice his own throat. It will be suggested that Zaindeliberately caught the knife blade on his necklace, minimizing the injury. Or maybe he tried to kill himself after murdering his psychiatrist. I can feel a net closing around him as we talk outside his hospital room.

“What’s important is his preoccupation with killing himself,” Calvin Willard says. “I’ve made sure Georgine looked after him since my sister can’t be fucking bothered with her own son. It was Georgine’s idea for him to have the robot. As weird as it sounds, Robbie is a therapy dog for Zain. His best friend. Zain fucking loves the thing.”

“Then you were paying Georgine to be his live-in psychiatrist,” I summarize.

“Not twenty-four-seven,” he says. “They didn’t live together in Yorktown. But he’d stay in her house there when needed, depending on what was going on with him.”

“You mean, if it wasn’t safe for him to be alone,” Benton says, and the senator nods.

“Zain has his own place in Williamsburg,” he goes on. “But he’d talk to Georgine daily, and you’ll find that out too soon enough from their phone records.”

“Why were you paying her in tax-free gifts?” Benton gets back to that.

“Because I didn’t want a paper trail showing Zain has problems.” It’s hard for the senator to say. “I didn’t want people finding out that he has significant enough ones requiring him to have a minder. If that got out it would wreck his future. All doors would slam shut.”

“Including his internship at the White House,” Benton says.

“Well, let’s be honest.” Calvin Willard’s ego shines through. “He wouldn’t have gotten that were it not for me.”