She's Not There (25 page)

Alex looked at Joanna. “I didn’t kill Mary,” he said softly.

Joanna just stared at him, tears in her eyes.

Alex shut his eyes. Plausible deniability . . . that was what had come to his mind that night standing by the canal. He knew the law. He knew that if he helped McCall push the car into the canal with Mary unconscious in the driver’s seat he would be guilty of first-degree murder. So he had just stood there and watched as the car sank into the black water, because he knew that if this ever came to light, he could claim plausible deniability.

Such a lawyerly term. Such a clean term. It meant he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Alex looked back at Joanna. “You are her friend. Why did you do it? How could you leave Mel out there to die?”

McCall stepped between them. “Enough.”

“No!” Alex said. “I need to know.”

“I need to sit down,” Joanna said. “Let’s—”

“No! Tell me here. And tell me everything, from the beginning.”

“You don’t want to hear this, Alex.”

“Yes, I do.”

Joanna shook her head slowly and took a long breath. “I knew something had been bothering Amelia for a few weeks. But she wouldn’t tell me anything. The party on Marco Island . . . I thought maybe if we drove over there together alone, I could get her to open up to me. So I called her Friday, but she told me she wasn’t going to go. I convinced her to change her mind, and she picked me up around six.”

“You don’t have to do this,” McCall interrupted.

“Yes, I do, Owen,” Joanna said sharply.

She looked back at Alex. “Amelia was very quiet on the drive, and I finally asked her if there was anything wrong between the two of you.”

“Why would you ask that?” Alex demanded.

She shook her head again. “Oh, Alex. You only see what you want to see.”

“But she loves me.”

“She was getting ready to leave you,” Joanna said.

“Bullshit,” he said softly.

“She told me she didn’t want to go to Marco Island, so she made up some story to tell you about visiting a friend who had a miscarriage.”

“You said she changed her mind. Why?”

“She wanted to tell you in person that she was leaving,” Joanna said. “She said she owed you that much.”

“You’re lying. I would’ve known if she was that unhappy. Why wouldn’t she tell me?”

But then he stopped because he knew. Mel had been afraid of him. That was why she had bolted from the hospital. She thought he had already killed one woman, so why not his own wife as well?

He looked back at Joanna. “But why?”

“Why what?” Joanna asked wearily.

“I know what you made Jack do. Why did you try to kill Mel?”

McCall was there suddenly, his arm around his wife, guiding her down onto a bench in the foyer. Joanna slumped back against the wall and closed her eyes.

“It wasn’t planned,” McCall said. “Joanna didn’t even tell me until Amelia showed up at the hospital. It wasn’t planned, Alex. You have to believe that.”

“I don’t know what to believe anymore,” Alex said.

“Look, things got out of control, that’s all,” McCall said. “Your wife got out of control and she started talking about shit she knew nothing about and—”

“Owen, stop,” Joanna said.

McCall rose slowly and went to a window, his back to both of them.

Alex looked at Joanna. “You still didn’t answer me.”

“What?” Joanna whispered.

“Why you tried to kill Mel.”

McCall turned around, his eyes locked on Alex. Then he went to Joanna and picked up her hand.

“She was going to ruin us,” she said. “I couldn’t let her do that.” She looked up at her husband. “We still can’t.”

“We’re in this together, Alex,” McCall said.

Alex stared at Joanna and McCall. The law firm motto? That was all this came down to now? Some fucking perverted idea that if they closed ranks and stayed together they could survive this?

Alex moved toward the stairs, feeling like he needed to sit down. But then he stopped and looked back at McCall.

“I’m finished,” he said.

McCall took a step toward him. “That’s a little dramatic, Alex, we can still fix—”

“No,” Alex said. “I’m finished. With the firm, with you, with all of it.”

He started for the door, but McCall grabbed his arm. Alex pulled away hard.

“Where are you going?” McCall demanded.

“To find Mel. I’m going to make things right with her, and then we’ll go away somewhere. You won’t have to worry about either of us again.”

“It’s too late,” McCall said.

“What do you mean it’s too late?”

“She’s probably dead by now,” McCall said.

Alex’s eyes swung to Joanna, then back to McCall, as he tried to make sense of what McCall had just said.

“Don’t you get it?” McCall asked. “When she turned up with amnesia, it was a godsend. Even after she left the hospital, I figured we could bring her home and just get her back under control.”

Alex’s mind was spinning, trying to make sense of it, trying to get one step ahead of McCall. But he couldn’t.

“But after she disappeared from Georgia, after she started thinking for herself, I had to adjust the plan,” McCall said.

Alex suddenly knew what was coming.

“Buchanan,” he said.

McCall didn’t blink, didn’t move a muscle.

“You turned him,” Alex said. “You told him to kill her.”

McCall looked down at his glass and then calmly raised it to his lips and finished it off.

“How much?”

“Two million.”

Suddenly, everything started to dim, like the light was being sucked away by the closing of a lens that left only McCall’s face in his view. Rage took over, and Alex charged across the foyer at McCall. The glass shattered to the floor and a spray of red spattered across the white wall as Alex slammed McCall’s head into it.

Joanna screamed but Alex’s fists kept flying, even as McCall sunk to the floor.

“Stop it!” Joanna shrieked. “Stop it!”

Finally, Alex stopped swinging and stepped back, drawing in hard breaths as he glared at McCall. McCall was crumpled near the stairs, gasping.

“Where?” Alex demanded. “Where is she?”

McCall wiped his mouth. “I don’t know. I haven’t heard from the bastard in days.”

Alex ran a shaking hand across his face and shut his eyes tight. When he opened them, he looked up and saw Megan standing at the top of the staircase.

She was frozen, staring at him with her hand to her mouth. She took a step down the stairs.

Alex spun to the front door and jerked it open.

Megan shouted for him to stop, but Alex ignored her. The rain washed over him as he stumbled to his car. Once inside, he started the engine and jammed it into gear.

He roared out of the driveway and down the street, almost hitting another car as he swung wildly onto the main road leading back to the beach.

It was another mile, weaving through the traffic on A1A, before he eased off the gas. He swung into an empty parking lot bordering the ocean. For a long time, he just sat there, hands gripping the wheel, watching the dark beach appear and disappear in the slow sweep of the windshield wipers.

He pushed out of the car and started walking through the darkness, the rain pummeling his face, the ground beneath his feet turning from concrete to sand.

He could see nothing but he could feel everything.

He had been stupid, so damn fucking stupid. Not because he had picked up that damn plastic flamingo. But because he had believed that money could be spun from air. Because he believed he needed to partner up with a man like McCall. Because he believed a marriage could be kept alive on memories.

The pain was like a knife to the gut and he doubled over, sinking to his knees in the sand.

Oh God, Mel, what have I done?

He didn’t believe McCall. He
couldn’t
believe him. Couldn’t believe Mel could be dead.

Where are you, Mel?

The phone . . .

He dug into his coat pocket and withdrew her iPhone. He pressed the power button. It took a few moments but finally the screen lit up, the only light in the pitch-black darkness. The battery was almost dead.

When he slid the lock open, the message came up:
9
M
ISSED
C
ALLS
F
ROM J
.

Joanna. Fucking Joanna . . .

Alex was about to turn the phone off but then stopped. Why would Joanna call nine times?

He hit the phone icon and brought up
R
ECENTS
. All nine calls from J were listed, the newest one yesterday and the oldest call Friday, the night of Amelia’s accident.

He hit the information icon for the most recent one.

The phone number was there, but Alex just stared at it in confusion. It was a 415 area code. It couldn’t be Joanna. Where the hell was 415?

The phone went dead, and the darkness engulfed him. Alex struggled to his feet. He had to get home, get the phone recharged, and find out who “J” was.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Alex looked down at the two open cases on the bed. One was his briefcase and held their passports, his iPad, and a second cell phone he had purchased at a 7-Eleven, a phone that revealed no caller ID and had no registered owner. McCall had told him Buchanan had bugged the old woman’s house in Georgia. Alex had no doubt McCall could find a way to hack his phone, too.

Phones . . .

They could tell people a lot. Amelia’s phone had told him things. Things that hurt. Things that made him mad.

His gaze drifted to Amelia’s pink phone, lying on the dresser, still attached to the charger. Last night, he had brought it home and plugged it in, swiping the start screen like a maniac to get it to open again.

Then he had spent an hour scrolling through her calls, contacts, text messages, and websites. He was not surprised to find that Mel had made phone calls only off a limited contact list of friends, businesses, and this person “J.”

This
man
called “J.”

The 415 area code was in San Francisco, and a reverse directory had provided Alex with a name: Jimmy Reyes.

The name had been familiar, but it took a Google search to bring it all back. Reyes had been a dancer with the Miami City Ballet. Alex had seen him dance with Mel a couple of times, but he remembered him best from watching him offstage at galas and parties. Alex remembered how Reyes would circle the room as sleek as a panther, planting kisses on the cheeks of men and women alike.

Alex had seen the strange electricity between Reyes and Mel, something that went beyond what they did on stage. Reyes whispered things to her, smiled at her from across the room, always connected to her by something only the two of them understood.

Once, Alex had lost his temper when Reyes seemed especially attentive, and Mel had warned Alex to never do it again, that she was not a possession.

So he had stood there at that party like a putz, holding a watery drink and smiling like a fool.

Last night, he had started to call Reyes several times, but always stopped. He knew
he should warn Mel that Buchanan was after her. That was the right thing to do, the best thing for Mel, but he couldn’t bring himself to actually call Reyes’s number.

It was selfish, but he didn’t want to warn this man that he was coming to San Francisco to get his wife back. If she was already there, she might be safe from Buchanan, at least while she was with Reyes. And if she wasn’t there yet, there was no way Alex could warn her of anything.

So he would just go and hope she made it, too.

He turned back to the two cases on the bed. He set the pink iPhone in his briefcase and snapped it shut. Then he finished packing his small suitcase. When the clothes were neatly in place, he added an old green and blue repp tie. He had bought the tie at Nordstrom’s back when a fifty-dollar tie was a lot of money for him, and wore it to his first criminal trial, a case he should have lost but won on a bizarre turn of events during closing arguments. He had always considered the tie his talisman, with
juju
that somehow always turned the jury his way.

When he joined up with McCall, he had put the tie away in the closet. But now, as he made his plans for a new life, he wanted it with him.

He paused, trying to figure out what else he needed to pack. Shoes. Damn it, he forgot shoes.

Alex returned to the closet and grabbed brown loafers and running shoes. He was about to close the closet door when his eye caught a small wooden box sitting on the shelf. It was the box that he had found in his office days ago. He had brought it up to the bedroom but hadn’t opened it.

He grabbed the box from the shelf, took it back to the bed, and sat down. He ran his fingers over the letters that had been burned into the varnished top.

ALEX

Nine . . . he had been only nine when he started collecting things in the box, his things, things he could hide away from the others. But eventually, he had put the box away and it collected only dust. He had found the box when he and Mel were packing up to move to the new house. He had almost thrown it away then, but in a moment of reflection on his new partnership with McCall, had decided to keep it to remind himself how high he had climbed. He had never opened it, never feeling the need to reminisce.

He opened the box now.

On top were two faded snapshots of himself—as a toddler sitting in the sand at a beach, and as a tanned boy in a T-shirt and shorts straddling a bike outside a yellow stucco motel. The memories came hard. The beach was somewhere up in the Panhandle, near Destin. The motel had been one of a dozen places they had lived in after his father left them. The bike was an old Huffy, a donation from the Boy’s Club, and he was so ashamed of it that one night he had abandoned it behind a 7-Eleven and told his mother someone stole it.

He picked up a third picture. A tall thin man stared back at him, wearing a black gown with a garnet and gold Phi Beta Kappa sash. It was his graduation photo from Florida State, taken by one of his professors because his mother had moved away to Texas by then and hadn’t been able to make it back to see her only kid start his new life.

He set the pictures aside and picked up the next item, a newspaper clipping folded in a square. It was dated 1993, when Alex was sixteen. The headline read:

Renowned Attorneys Establish Innocence Project

He had forgotten he had this, but the memory of saving it was clear. He’d been busing a dirty table at Beachside Burgers in Panama City and picked up the discarded
New York Times
. As he read the article about Barry Scheck, it struck him as strange that someone would give up fame and money to fight the justice system. But he had ripped the article out and stuffed it in his apron. Had it been the reason he had become a defense attorney? It was too long ago, and he wasn’t sure any more.

Alex refolded the article and looked back into the box. A red plastic slap bracelet. A couple Mercury Head dimes. A fake gold ankle bracelet, returned to him after a breakup with a girl in sixth grade whose name was lost to him. His first watch, a Timex with a frayed leather strap. And a pin.

Alex held the pin up to the light. It was an inch long, an octagon-shaped emblem with two embedded rubies. The embossed letters on the front said “NFL.”

He had won it when he was seventeen, but it had nothing to do with football. The National Forensic League had awarded the pin to him for accumulating five hundred points in speech and debate tournaments.

You’re just like your goddamn father. You can talk your way in or out of anything.

He shut his eyes. God, he had been good. He thrived on the tough mental preparation, staying cool as his opponents sweated and stammered under the hot white stage lights. And he loved the feeling that came after a win, the applause rolling over him like waves of warm water. He remembered suddenly what an opposing prosecutor had once said to him after Alex won his case.

You’re a natural, Tobias. You can seduce a jury faster than a thousand-dollar-a-night hooker with a silk-lined hooch.

Alex put the photos back in the box and set it aside, trying to decide if there was anything in it he wanted. But maybe “wanted” wasn’t the right word. Did he need it? Did a man need his past to have a future?

His eyes drifted up to a mirror. He needed a haircut. And a shave. And another drink.

How pathetic was that? How pathetic was he? Drinking himself into a coma last night. Drinking to kill the hours between his fight with McCall until this morning when the banks opened and he could get done what needed to be done.

Well, he would stop soon. He would get himself back under control when he found Mel. When things were right again, he would be right again. He placed the box inside the suitcase.

He closed the suitcase and carried it down to the foyer. He stood staring into the living room for another minute, looking around to see if there was anything he had forgotten. Just ornaments, he decided.

“Esperanza!” he called.

The housekeeper appeared in the doorway. He didn’t know her well, never paid much attention to her moods, but it wasn’t hard to see she was upset.

“I’ll be leaving for a while,” he said.

“For how long, sir?”

“I don’t know. But I need you to keep coming here and maintaining the house, like you’ve been doing. I need you to make sure the gardener and the pool guy come as scheduled. Can you do that?”

“Yes, sir.”

Why had he told her that? He had no intention of ever coming back here. But it seemed important somehow, seemed
right
to keep things clean.

He hesitated, and then walked to her and pulled out his money clip. He had been to the ATM the previous night and had taken out as much as his bank allowed on one visit—four thousand dollars.

“Here’s some money to make that all happen, plus some for you,” he said, handing her the bills. “I’ll send more when I get where I’m going.”

Esperanza accepted the cash with trembling hands. The woman’s eyes were filled with tears.

Tentatively, he placed one hand over hers. “Everything is going to be okay. You’re going to be fine. I’ll take care of you, no matter what. Do you understand?

She nodded. “What do I tell people if they ask where you go?”

He hesitated. He couldn’t avoid people forever, but he needed to buy enough time to get across the country and find Mel.

“Tell them you don’t know,” he said. “Don’t tell anyone I left with suitcases. As far as you know, everything is completely normal.”

“Excuse please for me saying,” she said softly, “but things not normal in this house since I come here.”

She didn’t wait for him to reply, just turned and walked slowly back into the kitchen.

She was right, Alex thought. Nothing had been normal here in years. Nothing was normal now. He’d realized that days ago, when he was sitting in his study, going through Mel’s scrapbook.

The Story of Us.

He turned toward his study, struck with an idea. It was stupid, a gesture triggered more by the haze of last night’s vodka than any real sentiment, but he would do it anyway.

In the study, he pulled out the scrapbook and carefully peeled away the dry Scotch tape around the
fede
ring he had given Mel in France. He wrapped the ring in a Kleenex and put it in his pocket.

When he found Mel, he would offer it to her a second time, convince her to start another story with him, a better one this time.

As he started to put the scrapbook back in the desk drawer, he saw something that stopped him—the .45 automatic SIG Sauer handgun.

He had bought the thing when he was a public defender and had received a threat from a client who had accused him of “meet ’em and plead ’em McJustice.”

Alex picked up the holster and pulled out the gun. The steel was cool against his palm, and it brought back the same discomfort he had felt when the dealer had first placed it in his hand. It was the only gun he had ever owned, the only one he had ever fired, and that was only a few times at the range with a cop friend where he rarely hit the X in the center of the target.

You own the gun, Alex. It doesn’t own you.

His friend thought he was afraid of the gun, but he was wrong. It was just that Alex had never seen much use for them. They were the weapons of cretins and cowards. Civilized men worked out their problems using their brains, their ability to communicate.
That
was a skill he did have, one that had served him well in the courtroom.

But he was not walking into a courtroom now. He was going to face off against Clay Buchanan. A thug who wouldn’t listen to reason.

Alex holstered the gun and returned to the foyer, where he tucked the gun into the suitcase. As he shut the suitcase, a strange thought crossed his mind, strange enough to give him pause.

Maybe the gun could be used to scare off Jimmy Reyes.

Had he really just thought that?

He pushed the latch into place and picked up his bags.

It was just the vodka talking. That’s all it was. Just the booze.

Alex made three stops on the way to the airport. His accountant was just coming back to the office from lunch when Alex showed up. He told the man to make arrangements to take care of all his financial obligations for three months. He didn’t know why he’d chosen three months, it just seemed like enough time to find Mel and set up a life somewhere else. Then from wherever they were, he could sell the house, the cars, the yacht, and everything else.

His accountant asked a lot of questions, but Alex didn’t answer them, just gave him the authority to see things through.

The second stop was at his broker’s office. Alex instructed him to dump every fund and stock he owned. The broker asked a lot of questions, too, and advised him he was going to take a huge loss on a recent Japanese ETF, but Alex told him he didn’t care. Two-thirds of the funds were to be sent to the Cayman Islands accounts and the rest to his bank in town.

The third stop was at the bank, where he picked up a hundred grand in cash. He was on his way to the door when it occurred to him that there was another way to kick McCall in the balls on his way out of town. It would be a small kick, but it would piss him off. He went back into the bank and wrote a company check for two hundred grand, the maximum he could withdraw without a second signature.