What Remains of Me Page 8

  “I don’t think so.”

  “She isn’t seeing a therapist?”

  “No.”

  “Friends?”

  “The only friend I can think of . . .” He couldn’t finish the sentence without laughing, so he stopped.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Bellamy,” he said. “Can you please go check on Mom?”

  “I want to hear your answer.”

  “Mom’s a mess. I’m worried about her. We can’t just leave her out there with Flora.”

  “I’ll check on her,” she said, “after you say who Kelly’s friend is.”

  “Fine.” Shane exhaled. “It’s you.”

  “What?”

  “It’s you,” he repeated. “You’re the only friend of Kelly’s that I know of and you know what? I think that even after all these years and everything you’ve done to her . . . I think there’s a part of her that still thinks of you that way. As her friend.”

  Bellamy, for once in her life, was at a loss for words. And for that, and that alone, Shane felt grateful.

  He stood up, gazing down at his sister with a sense of power he knew was only temporary. “Pathetic, isn’t it?” Shane said between his teeth, muscles tensing. He headed out of the room. “I’m going to go check on Mom.” He said it without so much as turning around.

  ROCKY’S SHEETS WERE CRISP AND COLD—SO UNLIKE KELLY’S OWN, which were made of a very thin, soft flannel. She didn’t like thinking of home when she lay here, in his bed—and there really was no reason to. Her troubles with Shane—what the shrink at Carpentia had called intimacy issues—had been going on long before she’d ever laid eyes on Rocky Three. She told herself it was Sterling Marshall’s threats, the fears they inspired, that kept her from getting physical with Shane. But in those very rare moments when she was honest with herself, she knew she could have gotten an IUD, knew she could have gotten her tubes tied if she’d wanted it that badly. It was something else . . .

  She liked to think of Rocky, of this, as a recurring dream—something that existed on a different plane than her day-to-day life, something she couldn’t be blamed for. A drawer that stayed shut.

  Rocky seemed to feel the same way. He called them “meetings,” their times together. He called it a “friendship,” not an affair. And no matter how tender their meetings were, they never held each other after. They lay on their backs, the two of them, gazing at the bleached ceiling of Rocky’s pristine bedroom, his hand covering hers in a way that felt more protective than affectionate—and all of it so right to Kelly, so familiar in that way she dared not voice. Like years ago. Like going back in time.

  “I lied to you, Rocky,” she said.

  He turned. She felt his crystalline eyes on her, his face close to hers, the warmth of his breath. “About what?”

  Kelly kept her eyes on the ceiling. “Earlier, when I said detectives don’t scare me.”

  “They do?”

  “That detective did. I didn’t act like it, but he scared me a lot.”

  “Why?”

  “What he could do to me,” she said.

  “What could he—”

  “I don’t want to go back to Carpentia. I mean it, Rocky. I’d rather die.”

  “Kelly.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Look at me.”

  She turned to face him, this painted creature. The sheet had fallen from his chest, and she brushed her hand against him, traced the outline of the diamond-scaled fish that swam over his heart. They glistened silver—the scales. Something she’d never noticed. That was Rocky. His skin. Always something to discover in it.

  “Look at me,” he said again. “Look into my eyes.”

  She didn’t want to. It always choked her up to look directly into his eyes. Like going back in time. But he’d asked and so she did—her gaze moving up from the eye on his throat, through those creeping vine tattoos crisscrossing his cheeks, curling around his thin, saintlike lips. So much pain he’d gone through, just to look different from the way he used to look, however that had been. She couldn’t imagine him without the tattoos, though sometimes she wanted to . . .

  “My eyes, Kelly.” He said it just as she made it there, into that bright, sad blue.

  “If I ask you a question, will you tell me the truth?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Were you at Sterling Marshall’s house last night?”

  She swallowed hard. “Yes.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “Does it matter?” she said. “Would it matter to them?”

  He brought his hand up to her cheek, brushed away a tear she hadn’t realized was there. “I don’t know,” he said. “Probably not.”

  CHAPTER 9

  When Kelly Lund was found guilty of second-degree murder, Detective Barry Dupree was seven years old. Trials weren’t televised back then, but there’d been courtroom sketches on the news. Barry had vague memories of those sketches on the TV screen in the kitchen, his parents pointing out all the movie stars testifying. He could recall how flat and dull they’d all looked to him, so much less colorful than the drawings in his comic books, or even real life.

  But what Barry remembered most about the trial—what everybody remembered most—was that photograph of Kelly Lund standing outside the courthouse, just after she’d been sentenced.

  What a photo. If Barry closed his eyes, he could still see it—the dead eyes, the shadows playing across that pretty but vacant face and the smile, that smile. The way it jumped out at you. The way it bit.

  It had first appeared on the cover of the Los Angeles Times, and Barry’s older brother Chris had grabbed it off the kitchen table when their parents weren’t around. He’d made the photo dance in front of Barry’s face, holding it so close he could smell the newsprint, Chris chanting at Barry in his cracking adolescent voice, One, two, Kelly’s coming for you. Three, four, better lock your door . . .

  At the time, Barry had no idea Chris had ripped that off from A Nightmare on Elm Street, but Kelly Lund’s face haunted him in a way that Freddy Krueger never would.

  He used to have nightmares—the teen killer, coming for him in the middle of the night with her pistol, shooting holes through his brain, slaughtering his family, her expression never changing. The Mona Lisa Death Smile. Man.

  To Barry, to many who were children in L.A. in the early ’80s he was sure, Kelly Lund was a bogeyman on a level with Richard “The Night Stalker” Ramirez or Charlie Manson. And even as Barry grew, even as he took boxing lessons and stood up to the bullies in school who called him Carrot Top and gave him wedgies on a daily basis, even as he graduated—sixty-five pounds bigger than when he entered high school and knowing full well he’d be a cop one day—even then, and even now, a grown man with a detective’s shield and a black belt in mixed martial arts and a registered .40 caliber Glock in his shoulder holster (Try and call me Carrot Top now, dickheads) he couldn’t shake the uneasiness he felt at the sound of her name.

  Kelly Lund is coming for you!

  Could you blame him? Could you blame anyone who had grown up with that photo emblazoned in his brain?

  Lund had her champions, no question. She had her conspiracy theorists and her marshmallow-hearted movie stars and her knee-jerk feminist bloggers, writing letters to the parole board on this “poor girl’s” behalf.

  But Barry Dupree wasn’t one of them. And when, five years after Kelly Lund’s release, practically to the day, he and his partner had looked at surveillance video of a slim, hooded figure leaving the Marshalls’ house, shortly after the approximate time of Sterling Marshall’s death and getting into a car that resembled Kelly Lund’s, it took every ounce of restraint not to yell “I told you so.”

  Hadn’t Marshall’s wife, Mary, fought for Kelly Lund’s release? Hadn’t she been one of those misguided letter writers? He’d asked his partner, Louise Braddock, about that at the police building at five in the morning, right after they’d caught the case and they were sitting at their d
esks, speed-reading old newspaper articles, mainlining coffee, getting ready.

  “If it wasn’t for Mary Marshall’s letters,” he’d said, jittery from caffeine, “Kelly Lund might have never gotten paroled, and so she would never have killed Sterling Marshall. Am I right?”

  But Louise had reacted the way she almost always did, which was to roll her eyes and tell him to calm the hell down. “Innocent until proven guilty, Barry,” she’d said.

  Sure you make it into Robbery-Homicide, but you get your mother for a partner.

  The worst part of it was, Barry was somewhat indebted to Louise. She’d been in the prestigious division for more than ten years when he arrived six months ago from Monrovia, riding the coattails of a major bank robbery he’d caught simply because he’d forgotten his car keys at the station, and had gone back in to get them when the case had come in. It was a professional job—way too big for their understaffed division, yet working with him, the lieutenant at Robbery-Homicide had been impressed enough by Barry’s thoroughness and dedication that he’d extended the invitation that he had always dreamed of. His big break . . . well, it would be his big break if they could find him a partner.

  As luck would have it, Louise Braddock’s partner had just retired and, given a choice between Barry and a douchebag named Cameron Keogh who stunk as though he stewed in Axe spray six hours every night, she’d gone for the new guy. “Keep in mind, Cameron Keogh gives me migraines,” Louise had said to Barry at the time and continued to say to him, any chance she got. “You were saved by the smell.”

  Whatever. Barry didn’t care what Louise thought. He never cared what Louise thought any more than he cared what his own mother thought, and his mother had long ago made it clear that Barry should do his own thinking.

  This morning they’d assigned two Robbery-Homicide teams to the Sterling Marshall murder—one to canvas the neighborhood, the other, Louise and himself, to speak to the surviving Marshalls. When Louise had pulled Barry aside when they were talking to Bellamy and told him she could handle the family questioning on her own, he hadn’t put up a fight. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll go visit Kelly Lund.” Louise had told him not to get “overexcited.” Barry had done his best not to tell her to pound sand.

  Like John McFadden, Sterling Marshall had been shot in the head—and with his own gun. Yes, the .22 had been registered to Sterling Marshall, outspoken antigun advocate. According to his wife, Mary, he had kept it in a locked desk drawer—never touched it. Sterling would have gotten rid of it, she had said, if it hadn’t been a gift from a dear old friend: John McFadden.

  Shot in the head with John McFadden’s gun, days after talking to the Los Angeles Times about John McFadden’s murder. Days after the anniversary of his murderer’s sentencing. Did Kelly Michelle Lund need to draw them a map?

  And so Barry had driven all the way to Joshua Tree. He’d taken his Chevy Cavalier through this alien land, the desert spring just beginning, weird flowers poking out of cactus limbs in shades of meat and blood and vein. He’d sped through a landscape straight out of the westerns he’d watched on TV as a kid—craggy red rocks, bilious sand clouds, and for-real tumbleweeds, angry, sharp-quilled plants that made you hurt just to look at them. A landscape that made you hear pistol fire.

  He’d driven a series of dust-dry streets with “Springs” in their names—false advertising if ever there was—sun melting through his windshield at seven in the morning, Barry’s mouth dry from it, air conditioner or not. Until finally he’d reached the driveway of a known killer, the bogeyman from his childhood nightmares. (Bogeywoman? Why is there no such word?) He’d crossed the threshold of the clean, craftsman house she now lived in. (Who would have expected Mexican tile in the kitchen? Who would have thought there’d be a gleaming stainless steel fridge or a line of oversize mason jars filled with colorful pastas?)

  And he’d spoken to her. He’d sat across an expensively distressed kitchen table from Kelly Michelle Lund and he’d questioned her, face-to-face. Talk about “looking the devil in the eye.”

  When you’re a detective, you learn to read gestures, expressions. Barry was especially good at it—so good, in fact, that he taught a USC extension course for screenwriters in interrogation techniques.

  At this point in his career, Barry knew how to stay one step ahead of the average suspect, to decipher each blink and twitch and clearing of the throat. He knew the most common tells a suspect might be lying (looking up and to the left was a good one) and how to coax and bend a confession out of her using methods so subtle, she’d never know until it was too late.

  But here’s the thing: in order for an interview to go the way you want it, you need to be calm throughout—and that’s easier said than done when your suspect happens to be the star of your childhood phobias, and she’s standing over you with both fists clenched, asking you how you take your coffee.

  Barry thought he’d done pretty well, considering. Lund had started off cocky, but he’d wound up rattling her so much she started yammering about lawyers.

  And when he’d asked if she’d been home last night, she’d looked up and to the left . . .

  Had she known how Barry had felt, though, sitting in her kitchen, breathing the same air as she did? If she’d known how he’d felt when, at one point, he’d caught a hint of it . . . that smile . . . Maybe she did know.

  Maybe she knew everything.

  Man, he had to get over it. He had to grow up once and for all and put these irrational fears behind him. Kelly Lund wasn’t the first killer he’d shared breathing space with. For God’s sake, he’d been in uniform ten years, a detective for more than five.

  Beyond that, though, Barry needed to take into account the origin of his fears: his brother Chris—a pothead dentist on his third wife and counting who lived three blocks away from their parents, yet every single year was at least an hour late for Thanksgiving. It wasn’t Kelly Lund who had tormented seven-year-old Barry and cursed him with nightmares, who’d sent that chill through his body at the sound of her name. It was Chris and his stupid Freddy Krueger song. Was Barry going to allow his jerk of a brother—his brother at twelve, no less—to mess with the most important investigation of his career?

  “There is no way in hell I will let that happen.” Barry said it out loud, which was a little troubling, seeing as he was washing his hands in the men’s room and there were other guys in here.

  “You say something?” somebody called out from one of the stalls.

  Barry tried to sound genial. “Nope. Just clearing my throat.”

  “Sounded like talking.”

  Barry sighed. Six hours after his interview with Kelly Lund—six hours later, and still his mind was in this state. Chris’s fault. “Nope.”

  He left fast. The guy in the stall was Hank Grayson, a senior detective whom Barry greatly admired—and who had been giving him odd looks all day, probing looks, as though Barry were an imposter. Hank, who had worked OJ, who had worked Phil Spector, who had been a Homicide detective back when Barry was still having Kelly Lund nightmares and wetting his bed.

  Barry headed over to his desk—right next to Louise’s, who had left for the day before he hit the can. Their two desks were interchangeable—devoid of personal touches, sleek and neat as though awaiting inspection. A few months ago, Robbery-Homicide had moved into this building—a soaring glass tower, built to replace the ailing Parker Center down the street, which had been condemned two years earlier after the most recent earthquake. And, much as he appreciated the classy new digs, Barry couldn’t get himself to put down roots here. He had a strange feeling in this building sometimes, a lost feeling. He missed the crumbling Parker Center, where roaches sometimes skittered over your shoes and you tried not to think about the structural damage and the asbestos issues, and the detectives all sat facing each other, their desks arranged in a circle like covered wagons—a real team. He sometimes wondered if Louise felt that way too—if that was why she’d never broken out the framed pictures of her c
at and her twin nephews and sat in her chair in that weird, tentative way. Not enough to ask her about it, though. Louise was never around when Barry had thoughts like this, which was probably a good thing.

  He rubbed his eyes. Man, he was tired. He started to say his goodbyes to the few remaining detectives when he felt a tap on his shoulder and heard someone say, “Hey.”

  Barry cringed. “Hey, Hank.”

  He braced himself for the concerned gaze, the pat on the shoulder, the “You sure you can handle this case?”

  But none of that came. Instead, Hank Grayson said, “You want to grab a beer?”

  “Well, actually I was just about to head home . . .” he started to say. But something in Hank’s eyes stopped him.

  “I have some information that might interest you.”

  “Information?”

  Hank had a military background, and maintained that ramrod posture, even at his advanced age. A man of his size standing that straight was intimidating—no way around that. But the way he was looking at Barry—the way he leaned in close after glancing around the squad room—it made Barry feel privileged, as though Hank had chosen him first for his team. “Information,” he said again, only quieter, between his teeth. “It’s about the family of Sterling Marshall.”

  I LOVE MY HUSBAND, BUT I FEEL UNFILLED, KELLY TYPED. IT WAS THE last sentence of “Gina B,” the twenty-fifth grabber she’d written since getting home—a high output, even for Kelly, who was one of SaraBelle.com’s “top producers” according to “Joel,” the site manager who e-mailed her models’ photos, sometimes two dozen a day, and direct-deposited her biweekly checks from “Creative Choices, Inc.”

  Kelly was about to close the file and send it along when she saw her typo: Unfilled, instead of unfulfilled—which . . . well, that actually works, doesn’t it? She smiled—first time she’d done so since driving back from Rocky’s and opening the door to her empty house and checking all the voice mails to find nothing.

  Unfilled. Why not? Gina B’s needs are simple and physical. (An immature joke, sure, but what do you expect from someone who spent nine-tenths of her adulthood listening to the sophisticated wit of Carpentia guards?)