The Perfect Stranger (10 page)

“Ah, but I so enjoy breaking your chops.”

So here she is, in first class, yes, but stuck in an aisle seat at midnight, numb with exhaustion after racing all over Los Angeles on just the few hours’ sleep she’d caught the night before. She would like nothing better than to close her eyes and wake up in New York, but knows from experience that she won’t be able to get comfortable enough to sleep.

Certainly not without the prescription sleeping pills Cory gets for her, which she mistakenly packed in the bag she checked.

Oh, well. She lands at five-something, and if she goes straight home to bed until noon, she’ll almost get a full night’s worth of beauty sleep.

Left with five hours to kill, she can either try to read a magazine, or she can use the in-flight WiFi to get online and see if there are any updates about Meredith. She’s had so little downtime today that she hasn’t had a chance to see what’s going on.

Jaycee takes her iPad out of her carry-on in the overhead bin and checks to see if anyone is paying any attention to her as she waits for it to power up.

The lucky businessman in the window seat beside her is huddled under a blanket, out cold, snoring softly, his head resting on a pillow wedged against the window. Across the aisle, a woman is similarly asleep against her own window, wearing a sleep mask—freebies here in first class on the red-eye. The woman’s seatmate appears completely absorbed in whatever he’s typing on his open laptop.

Good. The last thing she needs is some nosy fellow passenger snooping over her shoulder, trying to get a look at her screen.

She checks e-mail first.

She has several different accounts—a personal address, a business address, and one she uses for blogging. She usually doesn’t open that as often as the others, but today, because of Meredith, she’s been keeping an eye on it.

Since she last checked, Elena has responded to the e-mail BamaBelle sent this morning with her phone number and the link to the Cincinnati newspaper article about the murder. Elena sent a reply-all message expressing her sorrow over Meredith’s death and saying she’d be working late but would call Bama tonight.

To Jaycee, it sounds as if she’s trying to dodge having to make the phone call. She can certainly understand that—she herself had hesitated before making the call this morning. There were so many reasons not to cross that line from a strictly electronic relationship to more personal contact.

In the end, she concluded there were more reasons to call than to avoid it—primarily because the others might get suspicious if she didn’t, especially at a time like this. As long as she was careful not to give anything away, she decided, it would be fine.

And it was—for the most part. She managed to keep the conversation focused on Meredith and evade any sticky questions she sensed Bama was about to ask.

Like her real name. After Bama volunteered her own, Jaycee quickly changed the subject.

Not that anyone was likely to recognize her
real
real name, the one she’d been born with nearly forty years ago, in a tiny Minnesota town pretty much no one has ever heard of, not far from the border with Manitoba, Canada.

But still . . . you just never know. Which is why she hasn’t used it in ages.

Anyway—Landry Wells? With a name like that, no wonder she goes by a pseudonym. All anyone has to do is plug it into a search engine, along with Alabama . . .

Jaycee types it all in now, including her mother’s maiden name—Quackenbush—presses Enter, and finds herself looking at BamaBelle’s life story.

It’s basically all there, if you have time to sift through the results—and right now she has nothing but time. She peruses a wedding announcement, a real estate sale for an address in Point Clear, birth announcements for two children—Addison Landry Wells, who would be seventeen now, and Robert Tucker Wells IV, fifteen. There’s information about volunteer work and PTO posts, and there are pictures, too.

It’s not as though Jaycee doesn’t already know what BamaBelle looks like—she has a head shot on her blog. But it’s interesting to see her as a young bride, as a PTO mom, and, in a photo taken just last week, in the Mobile society pages at a charity ball with her husband and another couple identified as Robert Wells’s law partner John Sanderson and his wife Mercy.

She’s also been tagged here and there in candid shots on other people’s social networking pages. Landry Wells doesn’t have one of those herself; her Internet activity seems limited to her blog page—which, interestingly, does not come up on the search engine.

That means BamaBelle has done a good job of keeping her real self separate from her blogger identity. Not everyone is successful at that.

Meredith wasn’t.

But I certainly am.

The man beside Jaycee stirs in his sleep. Skittish, out of habit, she quickly closes the screen she was reading.

It’s just as well. Who cares who BamaBelle really is?

Who cares who I really am?

That’s the beauty of the Internet. There, you can be anyone you want to be. You can escape your real life.

That’s all Jaycee ever really wanted, from the time she was a little girl, abandoned by her unwed mother to be raised by grandparents who took her in out of duty, and nothing more.

She wanted to escape.

That’s why she used to hide in the shed behind the house, until she got so cold or hungry that she had to drag herself back inside to face reality—usually, with punishment for not answering when they called her name.

It’s why she looked forward to going to school every day, while her classmates complained and lived for the weekends.

And it’s why she discovered that she liked being on stage when her freshman drama teacher convinced her to audition for the high school musical. She could step into the spotlight, leave behind her real life with all its problems, and for a few hours, at least, become someone else—anyone else.

At seventeen she fell in love with Steven Petersen onstage—and off. That was the year everything happened: the year her grandmother died, the year she got pregnant, the year Steve broke her heart, and the year she gave up her newborn for adoption.

Not that you wanted to keep her anyway. You didn’t want anything tying you down, holding you back.

At eighteen she finally got to escape for real.

She left behind the name she’d been born with and the miserable house where she’d been raised, and the godforsaken northern town where few people ever really gave a damn about her. She changed everything she could: hair color, build, clothing style, the way she walked, the way she spoke . . .

She rests her chin in her hand, remembering. That was the first time she truly, officially, became someone else. But it wasn’t the last. Not by any stretch.

As she muses, she realizes that the flight attendant, leaning against the galley counter reading a magazine, is glancing in her direction.

She averts her own gaze out of habit—all those years of trying not to make eye contact, afraid someone is going to recognize her, engage her in conversation.

Usually if you do that, people get the hint that you want to be left alone.

“Doesn’t everyone?” Cory likes to ask her when she gets paranoid.

“I didn’t always,” she’s reminded him—and herself. There was a time when she craved attention—from anyone. Even strangers.

Maybe there’s a part of her that still does. That would explain it all, wouldn’t it? Even why she couldn’t leave well enough alone and simply lurk online; why she was compelled to engage by writing the blog, interacting with people online . . . people like BamaBelle, who have no idea who, or what, she really is . . . or isn’t.

Yes, she wants to—
needs
to—interact with them at a safe distance. But face-to-face?

No, thank you.

Sneaking a peek at the front galley just in time to see the flight attendant glance again in her direction, Jaycee casually reaches up to block her face under the pretext of finger-combing her bangs, careful not to knock her wig askew. Then she pulls a sleep mask out of her pocket, places it over a good portion of her face, and turns her head away.

Leave me alone. Please. Just leave me the hell alone.

Home at last, Detective Crystal Burns is greeted at the door of her West End Cincinnati town house by Ginger, her Chesapeake Bay retriever.

“What’s up, Gingy?” She tosses her keys and badge onto the counter and bends over to pat the dog. “Did you miss me? Huh?”

Panting and obviously thrilled to see her, the dog follows her into the living room, where Crystal’s husband, Jermaine, is snoring on the couch. Presumably, he’d also have been thrilled—if not panting—had she arrived home many hours earlier, in time for their planned candlelight anniversary dinner.

They were married two years ago today. Well, technically, two years ago yesterday, since midnight came and went a few hours ago.

Jermaine—fellow cop by trade, amazing chef in his spare time—finally had the day off on the heels of a grueling sting operation.

He went out and picked up a couple of steaks this morning, plus all the ingredients for Crystal’s favorite garlic truffle mashed potatoes, asparagus with hollandaise, and fresh strawberry shortcake in homemade pastry shells.

That was before she got bogged down in the case she’s working.

“It’s okay,” Jermaine said when she told him she wouldn’t be home in time for dinner. “I get it, baby.”

“I know you do.”

That he gets it is the beauty of this second marriage.

Crystal’s first husband worked in corporate insurance and not law enforcement, and thus failed to understand that when you’re working a homicide, the case—and the endless paperwork that goes with the territory—has to take precedence over just about everything, including anniversary dinners.

Despite her many differences with her ex, she hung in there for almost twenty years of that first marriage. Long enough for their only child to graduate high school and join the military. Sometimes she wonders if she hadn’t filed for divorce before her son was killed in Afghanistan two years later, would she ever have done it? Leaving that marriage had been hard enough as it was. The man wasn’t just clingy and possessive; he was all but helpless when it came to running a household without her.

Jermaine is quite the opposite—efficient and self-sufficient enough to let her breathe. He doesn’t work the homicide unit—he’s vice—but they’re both in law enforcement.

That’s not all they have in common. Crystal met him at a bereaved parents’ meeting. He, too, was divorced, but his marriage didn’t falter until after his teenage daughter died.

It was a drug overdose. Tragic. Jermaine and his wife had their share of problems before that—what couple doesn’t? But their marriage, like so many, couldn’t withstand the trauma of losing a child.

Every day, Crystal gives thanks to the Lord that as they emerged simultaneously from the wreckage of their lives, she and Jermaine found each other. And she would have given anything to have been here with him tonight, celebrating the one reason she found the strength to go on living in this grim world where she hasn’t just lost her only child, but spends each day confronting the rock bottom worst of humanity.

Leaning over the couch, she kisses the spot at the edge of her husband’s receding, graying hairline.

Jermaine lets out a final loud, waking snore and opens his eyes.

“You’re home.”

“Nah . . . you’re jus’ dreamin’.”

“Then how ’bout you make it a sweet dream, baby.” He grins, pulling her down. “I haven’t seen you in weeks.”

“Feels that way, doesn’t it?”

In the past couple of days, between his strip club sting and her homicide, they’ve only managed to connect on the phone.

But there are worse things. Far worse.

Crystal settles into his arms with a kiss and a deep yawn, resting her head against his barrel chest.

“Paperwork finished?”

“Finally.”

“How was Cleveland?”

“Oh, you know . . . it rocks,” she says dryly.

“Find what you needed?”

“No, we did not.”

She and her partner, Frank Schneider, had driven up there two days ago to check out Hank Heywood’s alibi for Saturday night, when his wife Meredith was murdered. He said he’d been home all night at his mother’s house, cleaning out her closets and cabinets now that he’d moved the old lady into a home.

Crystal and Frank talked to the people who lived on either side of the mother’s condo, hoping to find elderly busybody types who have nothing better to do than keep an eye on the neighbors.

Unfortunately, the single mom who lived on one side had gone away for the weekend with her kids. She’d seen Hank Friday afternoon as they were packing the car, but not since.

“For what it’s worth,” she told the detectives, “Mr. Heywood is such a nice guy. I can’t imagine that he had anything to do with a murder.”

It wasn’t worth anything at all, thank you very much.

Crystal has met more than her share of cold, hardened criminals lurking behind Mr. Nice Guy facades.

She and Frank had better luck with Professor Malcolm, who lived next door on the other side.

He said he’d run into Heywood carrying a bunch of heavy-looking garbage bags down to the parking lot Dumpster at around seven o’clock Saturday evening, when he himself was on his way out to dinner. He returned to the building before eleven but didn’t recall whether Heywood’s truck was still parked out front.

That could mean that it wasn’t there.

It could also mean that it was, and Professor Malcolm simply hadn’t noticed it.

He did notice it when he left for church on Sunday morning, headed to an eleven o’clock service.

“Well?” Frank asked on the way back to Cincinnati. “If you were a betting woman—”

“Oh, you know I’m a betting woman, Frank.”

He grinned, well aware that she and Jermaine like to sneak off to Vegas or Atlantic City every now and then.

“So if you were playing the odds,” he went on, “would your money be on the husband?”

“It’s not just about the odds. If you look at the victimology and possible motives—who stands to benefit most from the death?”