Incriminated (24 page)

“We need an alibi.”

Paolo passed around the burgers he'd just bought from Jack in the Box in Pacific Palisades. Maya had insisted that they didn't stop in any public place closer to the house or to Malibu Canyon—“just in case.” All four housemates unwrapped their sandwiches.

Lucy looked at hers and put it back in the paper bag.

“Yes,” Maya said vigorously, “an alibi. Probably easiest if we say we were hanging out at the beach.”

“Or the pier at Santa Monica,” suggested Paolo.

John-Michael held his burger an inch from his mouth, waiting to hear the plan. Paolo seemed pretty calm after their ordeal. Almost happy. Whereas John-Michael had collapsed onto his knees and vomited as soon as he was out of sight of the others and dumped the various items that could link them to the two deaths. Even now, he felt queasy.

“Not Santa Monica Pier,” Maya said. She seemed a little antsy. “We need to think of a place where there wouldn't
be security cameras. But before we get into that, let's just do one last checklist of everything else. Okay, John-Michael, rug?”

“Burned and then dropped in the second Dumpster we saw after got off the 1.”

“The burner phones?”

“Ours—crushed and dumped in the trash can right over there,” John-Michael said, pointing. “The other guy's burner phone is on the ground beside his hand. Where he left it after he texted his partner.”

“The zip ties they used on you?”

“Trash can of the men's room at Jack in the Box.”

“Mr. Shooter's smartphone?” Maya said, a little insistent. “There's a lot of evidence there. Not least of which, the GPS tracking.”

“That's more difficult,” admitted John-Michael. “We're going to have to hit it pretty hard with something heavy.”

“All right, but the sooner the better. I've already disabled the app that allows it to be traced,” she said. “Guns?”

“The revolver? Fingerprints wiped and back with Mr. Shooter. And the other gun is with Mr. Fifty Ways to Mess You Up.”

Maya frowned. “Huh?”

“You wanna take a look at my bruises?” John-Michael said resignedly. “I'm gonna turn seven different shades of purple in a day or so.” His stomach was finally settling down, so he took a bite from the cheeseburger. But when he tried to swallow, all John-Michael could think about was
the yelp of pain that the hit man's associate had made when he'd finally lost his footing on the edge.

He'd have killed us both if he'd had the chance.

Three deaths on his hands now. Unexpected, for someone who found it hard to kill a spider.

For a few moments, the quiet sounds of chewing were the only noises in the car. All four housemates seemed content to settle with their own thoughts. Or maybe they were as choked up as John-Michael. Maybe their emotions were teetering, on the verge of letting go with a scream like the one that refused to be shaken out of his memory.

Maya finished her food and wiped her fingers carefully with the napkin before speaking. “We may need to discuss the situation with the cash.”

“You want to split it up?” Paolo said.

“You better not spend a dime of that money,” Lucy piped up, adamant. “You don't know who's gonna come after it.”

“Who's going to come after it?” Maya asked, frowning. “The only two people who know about it are dead.”

“Unless the money is from Dana Alexander,” said Lucy.

“All that money?” Maya said, unconvinced. “No
way
can it cost that much to scare one defenseless teenage girl.”

“Until we changed things,” pointed out Lucy.

John-Michael agreed with Maya. “If any part of the money was from Dana, it's a small part. There are a ton of reasons they might be carrying that much cash. Most of them illegal. Unless Dana Alexander has a secret life as one
scary-ass crime boss, all she knows is that they got whatever payday she agreed on—probably via a third party.”

There was no way the cash could be traced to them. Even if the second guy had called someone on his way out to Malibu Canyon, he couldn't have known who he'd be dealing with when he found the hit man's body.

Lucy shook her head. “Still, I say we get that under lock and key and leave it until this whole situation goes extremely cold.”

“You're right that Dana Alexander's still an issue, though,” Maya said thoughtfully.

It was a good point. Alexander would find out soon enough that her attempt to silence Lucy hadn't worked. Better that she found out from inside a jail cell. “Grace's dad will get taken off death row,” John-Michael added. “It's win-win.”

“Not necessarily,” mumbled Maya. For a second or two it seemed to John-Michael like she was maybe thinking of saying more, but she didn't elaborate.

John-Michael just nodded and took another bite. How much would Lucy tell the cops? If they knew what had happened tonight, they'd probably take her into protective custody. Much as John-Michael worried about not seeing her again for who knew how long, Lucy needed to be safe. And simply telling the cops that Dana had planted a spy in their household wasn't likely to cause all that much concern.

“Maybe we should tell the cops that Mr. Shooter
threatened Lucy,” he said cautiously. “And that he went away.”

“I don't know,” Maya said, shaking her head. “Seems to me that if we say anything about him at all, it could come back on us. What if they investigate?”

“Why would they?”

“When they find the body,” Lucy said, sounding jaded.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh yeah. Well, maybe you make up a description? How would that be?”

“Uh-uh,” Lucy said. “For once, I'm gonna agree with Maya. We keep quiet about the whole thing. The guy was never there and we don't know
anything
. Same goes for telling Grace and Candace what happened tonight,” Lucy said, sounding more confident. “We say
bubkes
.”

“Bubkes?” echoed Maya.

“
Nada
. Zip,” said Lucy. “If you expect me to go to the cops, you'd better be damn sure that everything that happened tonight is inside of a full-scale Armageddon containment field. The ‘vault' won't cut it here—I'm talking Pentagon inner-circle-level secrecy.”

“Also, it's kind of unfair to expect the others to keep this secret,” Paolo said. “It's not that I don't trust them, that's not it at all, it's just that—”

“Yeah,” Maya agreed, grimacing. “It's a burden. And they don't deserve to have this dumped on them.”

“Also, they weren't here,” Lucy added pensively. “They might not understand.”

The housemates seemed pretty unanimous, at least on
this point. “So that's decided then, is it?” said John-Michael. “We're protecting them?”

“And ourselves,” said Lucy.

“Yes,” Paolo said. “But where do we tell them we've been all night?”

John-Michael thought for a moment. “Why don't we just tell them that we can't say? That way we admit that bad stuff went down, but we don't get them in any deeper.”

“Yeah,” murmured Paolo. “That might work.” Maya nodded her agreement. John-Michael looked across at Lucy, hoping for a reply. She'd lapsed into a pensive silence, staring at her hands, folding and wringing them in her lap. After a minute she went for the door handle. “I need a milk shake. Anyone want anything else?”

“I could go for a chocolate milk shake,” Maya said with more than a hint of relief.

John-Michael said, “Can you get me a strawberry?”

“I'll help, Lucy,” agreed Maya. She unbuckled her seat belt.

The minute the girls were out the door, John-Michael was astonished by the sound of Paolo whimpering, as though he were gulping back a sob. Watching him, John-Michael inhaled sharply. The moment passed mercifully fast. Whatever emotion had risen so hard and fast to swamp Paolo was soon under control.

“I'm sorry, man,” Paolo managed to say, struggling to breathe across his gasps. “I don't know what got into me.”

John-Michael watched his friend for a moment. He
resisted the temptation to reach out with a hand and touch Paolo's shoulder. “It's okay,” he said after a while. “This is how . . .” John-Michael paused, swallowed. “You're going to feel up, and then you're going to feel down. This is how it feels after something like . . . like what we did.”

Paolo said nothing. His eyes were large and round, open with sudden understanding as he studied John-Michael's face. For a second or two, John-Michael could practically read his thoughts.

Maybe John-Michael actually did kill his father.

You couldn't blame the guy for thinking that way. Not after what had happened tonight. After tonight, Lucy, Paolo, and Maya had to be thinking the same exact thing.

Lucy was the first into the house. The lights were off in every room except the living room, where only one of the two floor lamps was switched on; dimly, at that. Grace and Candace were stretched out, one on each sofa, half asleep. As Lucy and the others walked in quietly, the two girls pushed themselves into an upright position. And stared, bleary with confusion.

With every minute that passed, the bag of money worried Lucy more. They should have left it behind. She'd felt this at the time, but had been too shocked, too generally overwhelmed to make any kind of argument. The other three had been so confident that it was safe to keep the money.

Theft was theft. Maybe it
wasn't
as bad as killing, but it might end up being more dangerous.

The night's events were already coiling into a knot of hideous complexity. She could barely stand to think back
on any part of the evening. Earlier that day, Lucy had still been struggling with the immensity of her own revelation, after the hypnosis. A huge deal at the time; something to be absorbed slowly and considered.

Right now, Lucy would give anything to be back there. To be able to rewrite history. Why had she even waited until the afternoon before going to the cops? Maybe if she'd gone first thing in the morning, they wouldn't have been so busy?

Grace cleared her throat, struggling on sleepy legs as she stood. “Where have you all been?”

“Has anyone come by the house?” Maya asked, ignoring Grace's question. Maya was all about that, tonight: ignoring what didn't suit her, acting like some weird kind of cold-blooded badass. A teenager playing out a life she'd only ever seen in the movies—totally relatable. Real life had no context for what they'd been through in the past few hours. At times, Lucy had felt like she was back on a studio lot, sleepwalking through a scene straight out of a cop show.

“No one,” Grace answered, shaking her head. She was examining each one of them curiously. “Which one of you got hurt?”

Paolo was the last into the house. In silence, he went up to Grace and hugged her. Lucy noticed the girl's eyes closing for the briefest moment as he held her, the way her limbs instantly relaxed, and it was like a light going on. Briefly, a tiny smile found its way through her anxiety.

Grace and Paolo have started something.

After a second or two, Grace pushed Paolo off her gently. “Was it you?”

Paolo shrugged, trying to hide a guilty expression with a puzzled grin. “Was
what
me?”

This time, Grace shoved him, hard. “Stop lying. We saw the blood.”

Candace stepped forward. She also looked angry. For Grace, however, Lucy could sense it was personal. Something was brewing there, for sure.

“You've made us sick with worry,” Candace said, agitated. “We were about to call the cops. The only reason we didn't, the
only
reason . . .” She paused as her voice cracked. “Don't even think about lying to us.”

Lucy was still as she watched Candace struggle to control her emotions. You were never quite certain, with an actor, what was true, what was fake. But Candace did seem kind of overwhelmed.

“Thank you,” John-Michael said. His voice was sincere with gratitude. “Please do
not
think about calling the police.”

Grace stared from Lucy to John-Michael. She couldn't seem to look at Paolo, Lucy noticed. At her sides, Grace's hands tensed and relaxed, over and over. “So we were right, something bad happened?”

Lucy checked with her coconspirators. One by one they responded with the slightest of nods. She turned to
Grace and Candace. It was time to lay out the story they'd prepared. “We knew you'd worry. And we love you all too much to lie to you,” she began, her voice shaky.

“Good,” Candace said. Her lower lip was trembling. “Don't.”

“But that means that we can't tell you a whole lot. Because anything you know could be used against you. And us.”

The sisters' facial expressions crumpled. Candace said, “What the hell?”

“Yeah,” Grace said, gasping. “You don't get to leave us hanging.”

“We thought about it a lot,” John-Michael admitted.

“Yes,” Paolo added firmly. “We thought about telling you the truth, we thought about lying. We can't do either one of those, because, like Lucy says, we love you guys too much for that.”

“You love us, so you won't tell us where the four of you have been, why you left your cell phones here, presumably so we couldn't contact you, why there's blood on the floor, why you took the stupid rug?” Grace stopped abruptly, incredulous.

“Which is where, by the way?” Candace asked.

No one answered that.

“We care about what happens to you. Which is why we can't tell you. It might . . .” John-Michael paused. “It might put your lives in danger.”

“Oh,” Candace said blithely. “That's okay, then. I mean—it's not like you did something bad and didn't want us to get you into trouble.”

“It's also that,” Lucy confessed. “If we want them to trust us, we have to be honest about whatever we can.”

“Lucy,” Paolo said softly, “of the four of us, you're the one who did nothing wrong. Not a thing. You're not going to take any heat for this from anyone. I'll see to it.”

Grace stared at both with undisguised hostility. “Which is it, then? You
all
did a bad thing? Or just some of you?”

“All of us,” Lucy said, now decisive. “The details don't matter.” She may not have delivered any of the damaging blows, but she also hadn't stopped any of it from happening. She'd driven the car, she'd aided and abetted, at least. This night had made criminals of all of them. There was no pretending otherwise.

Candace ran one hand through the straggles of her hair. “So, let me get this straight. You've put
all
our lives in danger?”

Lucy forced herself to nod. The two hit men were dealt with, but the person who'd ordered the hit was still out there. The idea that Dana Alexander, movie star, Shakespearean actor, could have any involvement with the kind of people who arranged murders . . . It sure
sounded
delusional.

And yet. Lucy knew what she'd seen, that night at the Hollywood party. Dana Alexander, holding a man down
underwater. Until all the struggling stopped. Until he bobbed, motionless, to the surface. And she knew what she'd experienced afterward, Dana Alexander's seductive persuasion, bending reality to her own ends.

Who knew what kind of people Dana Alexander was mixed up with? Who she could buy? If the housemates were right about Ariana, the movie star had managed to plant a spy in Lucy's life years ago. And when Lucy had moved to Los Angeles, another spy had been found—Maya.

Someone like that must move smoothly in pretty scary circles.

“I know I'm in danger,” Lucy admitted. “And I can't tell the cops how bad it really is. Please don't ask me why, Gracie. But I
will
give that testimony.” She paused. “I'm going to find that nail polish, the bottle that Dana gave me that night. I know it's in my room in Claremont, somewhere. Then the cops will know that I really did talk to Dana that night. We'll make her sorry that she ever made me feel like a dopey little kid who couldn't tell the difference between a dream and reality. When she tries to change her story about what happened, you'll see, the cops are going to become real interested in her background. Who knows what else they'll find?”

Grace stepped back. Her eyes grew large. She wrapped both arms around her chest, trembling. “Thank you.”

Gently, Lucy smiled. “I will do whatever it takes to make this right. Your dad's been in prison for long enough.”

At this, Grace burst into tears. This time it was her
stepsister who was at her side in an instant, taking her into her arms for a close, comforting hug.

Lucy felt tears of her own, stinging and hot at the corners of her eyes. Not just from relief, but fear. It was long past time that she faced up to the truth of that night, almost nine years ago. But that didn't make the possible consequences any less terrifying.