Page 34

33

T oday was the fourth time Carter Decker had to tell someone they’d never see a person they loved again. For all the complaints he’d heard from other cops about the job’s burdens, he’d carry them all at maximum weight if he never had to be the one to shatter a person’s world like that again. It would have been easier to keep Tinsley Smith in the dark when he first heard about the body found inside the car on Old Stone Highway. But after meeting her in person, he could no longer think of her as the rich lady used to getting her way with peons like him. She was a mother who loved her son. He didn’t want to leave her clinging on to a nonexistent glimmer of hope any longer than necessary.

We do have new information about your son. We located him, and I’m very sorry—

No, please—

It’s not the news I had hoped to be giving you.

Her sobs had filled the living room of the friend’s home where she was staying. Carter stood and placed one hand on her back, patting gently in a steady rhythm to help slow her breath. His father had done the same thing for him after their beagle Joey had gotten out of the yard and was struck by a speeding car right in front of Carter, and twenty years later, Carter had found himself offering the same attempt at comfort the first time he had to notify a homicide victim’s family.

He was my only son. The last remaining piece of my husband.

Carter had promised to do everything he could to find her son’s killer.

The medical examiner was at work on David Smith’s autopsy. The cause of death was obvious, two bullets fired through the open driver’s-side window, directly at his face. Carter was eager for the toxicology results, but thanks to the fentanyl crisis he could be waiting for up to two months. He still had not written off the possibility that it was a drug deal gone bad.

David’s friend Simon said that a younger David had gone on a binge during a rough period after college. Carter now knew that the rough time was over Marnie Mann’s death. It was possible that Christine’s calling things off, plus the end of the relationship Carter suspected David was having with Kelsey Ellis, had been enough to send him searching for drugs to dull the pain.

If nothing else, Carter could look himself in the mirror, knowing that he had made the right calls from the case’s outset. And one of his calls now was to circle back to Gurney’s. He had already overseen a thorough search of Smith’s hotel room after he was assigned to the case, but he now knew that the staff had failed to notice the absence of the black clay bird that Christine had admitted to throwing once she confirmed he had been seeing other women. He wanted to make sure he didn’t miss anything else before having a crime scene team do a thorough search for forensic evidence.

As he was pulling back the yellow crime scene tape from the hotel door, a woman stepped into the hallway from the next room. She did a double take.

“Are you with the police?” she asked. Her long gray hair was piled on top of her head in a bun. Her beach dress reminded him of Mrs. Roper from the Three’s Company repeats his mother used to watch while she cooked dinner.

He produced his badge from his back pocket.

“That yellow tape is all anyone’s been talking about—even more than the supposed influencer taking pictures of her butt all day by the pool. The management assured us there’s no risk to any of us, but it’s still so disconcerting.”

“I can second the assurances. Nothing to worry about, ma’am.”

“Was someone hurt?”

“It really has nothing to do with the hotel,” he reassured her in a casual tone.

“I was wondering if it was about the people who were arguing in that room on Saturday.”

“You heard an argument?”

“I certainly did. I had come back to the room to—well, I guess I can tell you the truth now that it’s legal. I came back for”—she lowered her voice to a whisper—“a little toke on a vape.” She mimed taking a drag. “How utterly delightful to say that to a cop! Never could have predicted that in 1970.”

“Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve been known to partake a little now and then.”

“Oh, that is wonderful!”

He rocked on his heels. “So … the argument?”

“Yes, I could hear their voices even as I was coming down the hall. The woman was definitely not happy. She was calling him every name in the book. My husband would have walked right out the door if I went off on him like that. I could hear the man’s voice but it was lower. I wasn’t able to make out what he was saying. I enjoyed my little toot, and back out to the beach I went. They were still at it when I left.”

“Could you tell what they were fighting about?” He was inclined to believe Christine’s account of the argument, but a third party’s corroboration would lock that piece of the picture in place.

She shook her head. “Of course, that didn’t keep me from speculating. My theory was that it had something to do with him being on the phone Friday night—or I guess it was technically Saturday morning.”

This woman in the muumuu was just full of information. “You could hear that, too?”

“Not the actual words, no. But I could tell it was a man’s voice. He was out on his terrace. I peeked through the curtains and could see he was on his cell. I wanted Hal—that’s my husband—to tell him to keep it down, but Hal said that’s how people get shot these days. Isn’t that insane?”

That was one word for it. “Did the phone call sound acrimonious? Was he yelling or any other indication of an argument?”

She squinted as if she was trying to remember. “I honestly don’t know.”

“What time was this?”

“Late. The clock said one-forty when he woke me up.”

It was the call he had seen in Smith’s phone log, the Rhode Island number that he had not been able to trace. “Anything else you remember about the couple or what you may have heard?”

“Well, when I came back to the room later on Saturday, the male half passed me in the hallway in the other direction. He was carrying a black plastic bag tied up at the top. I think it was garbage.”

“Got it.” It would line up with Christine’s account of the broken bird figurine that had disappeared from Smith’s room. “Anything else?”

“Nope. That’s it. But you’re sure we’re safe? Like, wink your right eye if you think Hal and I should get the hell out of here?”

“You and Hal are all good,” he said with a chuckle. “Don’t toke and drive though, okay?”

She smiled slyly. “It’s a deal.”

*

Carter was finishing a second search of David Smith’s suitcase when his phone rang. The city number was familiar.

“Decker,” he said.

“It’s May Hanover. I need you to listen to me.” The trepidation that had been in her voice when he called her two hours earlier was gone now. Her tone was confident and urgent.

“I’m definitely listening,” he said.

“You know that Kelsey’s husband was shot, right? In Boston? They were on the verge of divorce.”

“Luke,” he said.

“He was also shot in his car—like David Smith. He owned a restaurant and was on his way to make a bank deposit—”

“I already know the basics.”

“The glove box in his car was found open. The assumption was that either the cash for the bank drop was in there or the killer left it open after searching for valuables.”

He remembered coming to that conclusion himself but could already tell that Hanover knew far more about the details of the murder of Kelsey Ellis’s husband than he did. He had been hoping May would take the bait he had planted earlier to convince her to cooperate, but he had been expecting her to spill what she knew about whatever relationship Kelsey had with David Smith. Instead they were talking about Lucas Freedman. The car. The glove box.

Why hadn’t he seen it earlier? Before he realized it, he was speaking his thoughts aloud. “It was a traffic stop.”

“Or at least he thought it was a traffic stop,” May said. “David Smith’s killer didn’t intentionally leave the driver’s license on David’s lap.”

“David had it out for the police officer he thought had pulled him over,” Carter said. He had already run Smith’s license and rental car tag. He’d had no law enforcement contacts at all except for reporting a car accident six years earlier and the San Francisco robbery his mother had mentioned. “From the shell casings, Smith’s killer used a nine-millimeter. Luke Freedman was shot with a thirty-eight. But the MO’s still the same.”

“There’s something else,” May said.

This woman was whip-smart. By the time she was finished, he felt like he could give a tutorial about the legal and ethical complications of in vitro fertilization and the handling of genetic materials.

Carter himself really didn’t understand the appeal of parenthood, but he did know from multiple failed relationships that for some people, it felt as vital to their existence as air or water. You only get one life, as one woman had told him after breaking things off because of his disinterest in having a child. I want to spend mine as a mother.

“So just to make sure I understand,” Carter said, “under the law, Luke could have forced Kelsey to destroy the embryos once they were divorced. But with him deceased, she gets to make the call on whether to implant them or not? His parents can’t stop her?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. You should be able to subpoena the records from the fertility clinic they used. Whatever documents they signed will provide the exact terms of any legal agreement they had about the disposition of their embryos in the event of either divorce or death, but apparently the scenario I’ve laid out is pretty much the standard.”

He had no other follow-up questions, so he ended the call as he usually did. “Is there anything else you can think of that might be helpful for me to know?”

“Marnie Mann,” she said. “The girl from the Wildwood Camp who dated David Smith in college.”

“What about her?”

“Kelsey really couldn’t stand her. Frankly, I couldn’t either. But I had been making an effort to get to know her better and stop bickering with her the way we did when we were all kids.”

He didn’t understand why they were now talking about the girl who drowned at camp fifteen years ago, but kept his confusion to himself.

“The night she drowned,” May continued, “Kelsey said she saw Marnie and me off whispering to each other. She said it looked almost like we were conspiring. And that seeing the two of us together like that, she felt jealous. Left out.”

“And you think she drowned her because of it?”

“We keep calling it a drowning, but it was due to a head injury. The coroner’s theory was that she dove into the lake from an elevated spot and hit her head and that’s why she drowned. But there are other ways of getting head injuries.”

“Like from another camp counselor who doesn’t want to share her best friend.”

“Trust me, Detective. I’m having a hard time believing that I’m even entertaining the possibility, but female friendships are no joke. Losing a friend can break you far worse than losing a man. And three dead bodies in one person’s path—it’s just weird. She’s either the unluckiest woman in the world, or—”

“They’re somehow linked, and your friend’s the common connection.”

“My former friend.” He couldn’t tell if the edge in her voice was anger or sadness. “That ship has sailed.”