A Cold Dark Place (31 page)

Not like mine back home, Emily thought.

The furnishings were all antiques, of the most simple and
elegant style. None of that ridiculous rococo French crap
that most Americans clamored for once they had a few million to rub together. Emily noticed a landscape behind a settee, but suppressed the urge to get close enough to study it.
She was sure it was a Constable, but she wasn't about to tip
her art history class hand by saying so. Few residences in
Seattle could make the pages of Architectural Digest, Emily
mused to herself, but this one could.

The Espositos might be new money, but their taste-or
their hired interior designer's was decidedly old school.

Ensconced in her grand living room, Tina put up her host ess facade. It was merely a mask. Beneath her fine silk blouse,
it was clear that her heart was beating at an accelerated rate.
She was scared.

"Can I offer you some coffee?" She pointed to a mohair
sofa. "Please take a seat"

"No coffee, thank you," Emily said. "We're not here on a
social call, Tina. We're here to talk about the murder of a
close friend of yours"

The remark brought a hard stare from Tina, then a curt response. "Bonnie and I weren't friends." She poured some coffee into a dainty china cup and proceeded to sprinkle a blue
packet of sweetener into the dark brew. Then she stirred.

The wheels were turning. She was buying time.

"But you were," Emily said. "You called her five times
this week."

Tina continued to stir like she was paddling a river. Christopher glanced at Emily. They both knew what was going on.

Buying more time. Time to think.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Tina said stiffly.
She picked up the tinkling china cup and saucer and drank.

"Why are you making us treat you like this?" Emily said.

"How so?"

"Like you're a liar. We have the phone records. We know
you called her."

An overweight longhaired mini dachshund waddled in
and jumped up on Tina's lap. "Millicent," she said. Tina
seemed grateful for the intrusion. She started stroking the
dog's fat belly.

Emily leaned forward. "What did you talk to Bonnie
about?"

Tina said nothing.

"If you'll look at the duration of the calls," Chris interjected, "you'll see they were very short."

Tina stammered, pretending to be unhappy with her cot fee, her dog, her maid taking the day off. She was beginning
to unravel. Her face was red now and she was petting the dog
with such pressure, both detectives were sure the poor animal would yelp in pain if she didn't stop.

Chris pressed harder. "What was the nature of the calls?
We have to know."

Tina just sat there. It was almost as if she wasn't listening.

"Do you get this?" It was Emily taking charge. "The
woman's been murdered"

"Right. I know," she finally answered. Millicent the dog
jumped to the floor and Tina stood up. "But if I tell you what
I know you'll think I killed her."

Emily glanced at Christopher. This was the money shot.
"Try us," she said. Her words were a command, soft, but not
without some very real force.

Tina bent over and set her coffee on the table tray. "I didn't
kill her. I couldn't kill anyone"

"All right." Christopher was standing now, too. "Talk to
us"'

With her arms wrapped around her like she was fighting
off the chill of the air conditioner, Tina started across the
room. She wasn't having any of it just then. "I think I might
need a lawyer."

Emily indicated to Christopher that he stay put. She took
Tina by the arm and they moved to the breakfast room off
the kitchen. "Look, Bonnie was a big girl. I doubt you killed
her and moved her body around that house. But you do know
something. If you get a lawyer involved it'll just make things
messier and more public. You don't want that, do you?"

Tina's hands were trembling then. She tried to steady
them by clasping them together.

"I just don't want my husband to know."

Emily nodded. It was a false assurance, but she needed to
nudge the woman into saying what she knew. "I can't guar antee anything. But trust me. I will do what I can to keep
your name out of this. Tina, what do you know?"

Tears were streaming down Tina's face and she looked for
a tissue. Finding none, and not wanting to go back out to the
living room and be seen by Christopher Collier, she took a
linen napkin from a sideboard drawer and dabbed at her
eyes.

"I had a baby." She stopped talking as she fought to form
the words that would reveal her darkest secret. "I gave it up
for adoption."

Pieces were falling into place.

"Through Bonnie at Angel's Nest?"

"Right. Bonnie helped me"

"A lot of young women have given up babies when they
couldn't care for them"

Tina set her napkin down and flattened and folded it.
"That's not what happened. I had a job. I wasn't some dumb
girl."

`But you did what you thought was right."

Tina was crying so hard now, she could no longer speak
with any clarity. A few words tumbled from her lips, but they
were nearly unintelligible. Whatever she was about to say
had been buried for a long time. It wasn't going to come out
without a fight. Right then, Tina Winston Esposito was fighting a losing battle. She could not hide it any longer. She was
in quicksand.

"Take your time. It'll be all right."

Tina steadied herself. "Please," she said, "don't tell Rod.
Promise. Promise me. Don't tell anyone" Her pretty eyes
were pleading. Her hands were now held like she was praying.

In fact, she was.

"I'll do my best. What is it?"

"My baby's father was Dylan Walker."

It took almost half an hour to calm her down. By then,
Tina Esposito had been ravaged by her emotions. Her blond
hair was entirely limp, her carefully applied makeup had left
her face for the folds of a linen napkin. She no longer looked
like the woman who lived in that fabulous penthouse, but a
stranger at odds with all of her surroundings. She was frightened and ashamed. She seemed short of breath in the way
that an asthmatic might while confronting the last flight of a
staircase.

"Relax. We'll get through this."

"I can't"

"You can. You will."

Emily went to the refrigerator and retrieved some bottled
water. Tina's getting ready to talk Just have to keep at her.
Give her the space she needs.

"My Xanax is in the cabinet to the left of the sink, behind
the Earl Grey," she said.

By then, Christopher had joined them, but with the shock
of the revelation, he abdicated the role of lead interviewer to
Emily, who was doing all she could to reassure Tina.

"There's no need for this to come out," she said. "But we
do have to know everything."

"How can I be sure?" Tina suddenly looked like a middleaged woman with a past that finally caught up with her. "My
husband will leave me"

"He wouldn't do that," Emily said.

"You don't know Rod. He's all about appearances. This is
his home. His money. It all comes from his carefully manufactured image. It matters"

"Tell us everything and then we'll go," Christopher said.
"If we need to talk with you later, we'll arrange a discreet location. We're not here to ruin your life for something stupid
you did a long time ago. Okay?"

Tina shook her head. "I can't say that I thought I'd be able
to live my whole life having swept this under the carpet. The
truth is, I've never gone a day without wondering if someone
would come knocking on my door and asking, `Are you my
mother?"'

Christopher sat next to Emily, facing Tina. "Tell us what
happened" His calm, understanding tone seemed to say,
don't be embarrassed. Don't hold back. You can trust us.

Tina stayed silent, collecting her thoughts. She closed her
eyes. Emily could see how hard this was, that Tina was fighting the compulsion to stay closed up. To lie.

"All right. But I want you to know that whatever I did,
whatever stupid mistake I did, I've regretted it for a lifetime.
It isn't me. My therapist has taught me not to let it define me.
So I won't. I just won't."

Tina told them how it started, how the whole love affair
with Dylan Walker had blossomed into something sexual.

"God, I know, you think I fell for him because he was so
handsome. But it wasn't like that. It was through his words.
It was like he could see into my soul. I know that sounds
completely ridiculous, but the man had a gift. He was one of
those rare people who could look right at you and know
everything about you. Everything that mattered to you"

"I know the type," Emily said. "The world is full of charmers"

The disclosure seemed to calm Tina. She brightened
slightly. "Maybe you do understand? I have beat myself up
for almost twenty years. You'd probably be surprised to know
that it wasn't until very recently that I've been able to put the
blame on him, rather than myself."

Chris shot Emily a look, but she ignored it. Chris was the
kind of man who never once considered that any actions
were the result of another's control. He was all about personal responsibility.

Tina told them that when she first wrote to Dylan Walker,
it was on a whim. But within a few months, she was in so
deep that when he asked her to have his baby, she said yes.

Emily prodded, though she did so as gently as possible.
"That's a huge leap, Tina. How did it happen?"

Tina stared at her smudged napkin. "I said yes, because I
knew it wasn't possible. We weren't married before his conviction and therefore there'd never be any conjugal visit. Not
in Washington, anyway. It was all a fantasy love affair. I believed in him-I never thought he'd killed anyone, let alone
those girls from Meridian. I mean, I knew that to my bones.
My love and support for him just masked the reality of what
I was about to do"

Emily drew her in with a knowing smile, a look of acceptance. "Sometimes we do things that when we look back, we
can't imagine that it was us at all." It was the kind of comment
that made her such a good interviewer. Reveal a little something of yourself-or at least let the subject think you are. It
builds trust and trust leads to further disclosure. In this case,
Emily's thoughts were on Reynard Tuttle and Kristi Cooper.

"It was me," Tina said. "And I've thought about it every
day. For years I tried to set it aside. When the Angel's Nest
scandal broke I was just sure that it would come out. I
started going to church. I prayed every night. I got on meds.
Each moment closer to trial I just knew my life was going to
implode. But it didn't. I was home free. Until you."

"Backup," Christopher said, apparently comfortable enough
to interject. "I'd like to be sensitive about this, but I can't
think of a better way to say it. Just how did you manage to
get pregnant?"

Tina Esposito stood and walked to the dining window. It
was a slow, purposeful walk. The sunlight on her face
showed every flaw. She had been beautiful once, but right now she looked old, tired, and scared. She spoke to the window, refusing to face Christopher or Emily.

"This is very embarrassing," she said, her voice a whisper. "During our visits, he'd pass me a sample."

She hesitated.

"A sample?" Emily asked.

"Oh God, you're going to make me draw you a picture,
aren't you? Of his semen, you know. I'd excuse myself and
use the bathroom" She searched for the most genteel words
to describe what she'd done. Her embarrassment was etched
on her pretty face. "I put it inside of me"

"Jesus," Collier said, his tact evaporating with the outrageousness of her disclosure.

She started crying, and turned to face detectives. "Don't
judge me"

"No one is being critical of you," Emily said. "We just
need to know what happened"

Christopher pushed it. "How did you get a sample?" He
tried to make his affect as flat, as nonjudgmental, as possible. "The semen sample."

"This is the embarrassing part," she said, hesitating while
she tried to come up with a way of relating the information
as clinically as possible. But there was no way to do that.
"He ejaculated into empty ketchup packets"

Neither investigator needed Tina to draw "the picture."
They could see it very clearly now. Walker ejaculated into
the packets, smuggled them to Tina, and she found her way
into a bathroom stall and inserted the tomato-flavored semen
into her vagina.

"It isn't as if I did this dozens of times," she said, seeing
how unseemly as it all must have appeared. "I got pregnant
on my third or fourth attempt. Are we done here? Do you
have enough of what you need to know?"

"Not really," Christopher said. "What were the plans for
the baby? And how did Bonnie get involved?"

"By the time I was pregnant and past the point of an abortion, I knew that I'd made the worst possible mistake of my
life. When I came to visit Dylan one time to talk about his
appeal and our fantasy future together, I had met another
woman at the motel. Her car broke down and she had to stay
another day, otherwise we never would have met. We started
talking about our men on the inside. About a fifteen minutes
into it, we both realized our men were the same man. She'd
been seeing Dylan, too. He'd told her that she was his soul
mate. I wised up fast" Relief washed over her face. She'd
told her story and it seemed to calm her for a moment.