Authors: Alison Gaylin
He could blend in
. Tall and striking as he was, Meade had been able to stand right behind Brenna Spector during and after the press conference, overhearing everything she said to her assistant—even taking notes on the steno pad he’d brought along to look like a typical earnest reporter.
He was fast
. Now, Meade left Brenna Spector’s line of vision, brushing quickly past the dispersing press. He headed down three blocks, then up the quiet side street where he had parked his car. He’d parked near a willow tree, browning in the fall chill, and in its shade he pulled the pad out of his pocket and went over his notes.
Buffalo convenience store
. He didn’t care much about that—he’d already taken care of Buffalo. What got his attention here was
Klavel Investigations
—a name he’d never heard Nelson Wentz mention over the phone.
He ran his gaze over Klavel’s phone number, then the address. Another thing Meade’s father had taught him:
When it comes to doing business, face-to-face meetings are always best
. Meade pulled out his iPhone and transferred the address into his GPS. Only twenty minutes away. He could drive there now, start acclimating himself. On the street behind him, a squeaky bicycle passed. He glanced up and saw the rider—young girl in a yellow helmet. He paid her no notice. Another of Meade’s strengths was his ability to focus, exclusively, on the matter at hand. And today, the matter at hand was a face-to-face meeting—its planning, and execution.
He was loyal. He was very loyal
.
B
renna and Trent were greeted at the door by Mr. Fischbein—though “greeted” was perhaps too generous a term. The old man pushed open the door and moved past them, muttering something in the process that might or might not have been “Hello.” Once inside, Brenna called out Nelson’s name but heard nothing in response. Eventually, they found him—a small beige lump on the living room couch, head in his hands as if his neck was on strike.
“Nelson?” Brenna said. “How are you?”
“My lawyer quit.”
“Mr. Fischbein?”
Nelson nodded into his hands.
“ ’Cause you smiled?” Trent said. “What a pussy.”
Brenna shot him a look.
“What?” Trent said.
She glanced around the room. Apparently, Nelson had done more than schedule the press conference last night, because the braided rug was once again flush with the fireplace, the couch was moved a few inches forward, the coffee table was back in its original position, the faint residue of fingerprint powder on the windowsills was wiped clean. Again, these changes were something only someone with perfect memory would notice, but still it was a significant amount of work. “I see you cleaned up,” she said.
“I can’t stand things out of order.” Nelson glanced up at Trent. A look of horror crossed his face, as if he’d just found a man-sized dust bunny under his couch that happened to be wearing the Ed Hardy catalog, but if this registered with Trent at all, it wasn’t showing.
“You’ve met my assistant, Trent, right?” Brenna said. “At my office.”
“Oh, right. Yes. Hello.”
“Hey, Nelson. If you could show me where your computer is, I’m gonna do a bit by bit transferal of your hard drive.”
“Excuse me?”
“Oh, I’m just gonna copy the shit off your computer, see if we can find anything your wife may have downloaded and deleted.”
Nelson stared at him, anxiety building in his eyes.
“Don’t worry, man. I’m like a doctor. You got porn on there, I’m not gonna say nothin’.”
Nelson’s gaze shifted to Brenna. “How do you think I did out there?”
“I’m the wrong person to ask. I warned you against talking to the press in the first place.”
“I know, but . . .”
“It isn’t important what we think. And the sooner we figure out what really happened to Carol, the sooner your name will be cleared.”
“I laughed at my grandma’s funeral,” said Trent.
“Nelson’s office is upstairs. First room on your right.”
“Okay. Fine. Jeez.”
Once her assistant had left, Nelson looked at Brenna. “I was hoping she might be there,” he said under his breath.
“Who?”
“You know . . . Iris.”
“That reminds me.” Brenna opened the folder, removed the photo, and handed it to Nelson. His eyes widened.
“It’s the age-enhanced photograph of Iris Neff. Remember? I told you Trent was making one?”
Nelson exhaled. “She looks so . . .”
“Like her mother.”
“Yes.” His voice was choked.
She stared at him. “Nelson?”
“Yes?”
“Is there anything you haven’t told me?”
“What do you mean?”
Brenna took a step closer. “About you and Lydia,” she said quietly. “About Carol, and any fights you may have had. About any tools you noticed were gone from your garage . . .” She took a breath. “But especially, Nelson, about you and Lydia.”
“No.”
“Trent is upstairs. Whatever you tell me will be just between you and me. I promise.”
His gaze dropped to the floor. “I’ve told you everything.”
“All right.” The words sighed out of her.
Nelson was looking at the picture. “You know, I haven’t seen this girl,” he said. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. I haven’t been out much. I think Iris is alive, Miss Spector. I think Carol was trying to save Iris, and that’s why she had all those files. I think maybe she found Iris, and was trying to track down . . . Iris’s mother, so she could . . .”
Nelson kept talking, about how possible it all was, how it would all make so much sense. After all, no one had ever found Iris’s body, and what if she was like that girl, you know, the little blonde girl in California who had been held captive for eighteen years . . . But all Brenna could do was recall the phone conversation she’d had with Morasco the previous day.
“During the Iris Neff case, we never questioned Carol Wentz.”
“Yeah. You told me that.”
“But we did question Nelson Wentz.”
Nelson had not told her everything. She wondered if he ever would. Nelson was saying, “. . . and that young girl sounded so upset about Carol. What other young girl would be that upset about—”
“Did Carol have any connection to Buffalo?”
His smile dissolved. “What?”
“We have her credit card bill,” Brenna said. “It looks like she spent $42.89 at a Buffalo convenience store.”
“She has an aunt in Buffalo.” The spark faded from his eyes. “Carol never spent that kind of money.”
“You didn’t know everything about her,” she said. “So what?”
Nelson’s gaze dropped to the floor.
“What you
didn’t
know about her isn’t important, Nelson,” she said. “What you
did
know. What you
do
know. That’s what I need.”
Above them, Trent’s heavy footsteps moved toward the stairs.
“It’s not that I didn’t know everything about Carol,” Nelson said. “I knew
nothing
about her.” And Brenna knew her words had been lost.
“And Carol knew . . . she knew very little about me.”
Brenna stared at him.
“Dude!” Trent called down from the top of the stairs. “Are you aware that you’ve got Mailkeep?”
Trent arrived in the room and said it again.
“I don’t know what that is.”
“You get some work done on your computer on August 29?”
Nelson thought for a moment. “Yes. At least I’m pretty sure that’s the date. I’ve had some spyware issues, and the Kleins’ oldest son, Jonathan, took a look at it.”
“Did he download any new programs for you?”
Nelson nodded. “Some antivirus programs to allegedly erase the spyware. None of them very good . . . Oh, and he said he threw in a few extras—word processing and the like.”
“Well, one of those extras is Mailkeep. It automatically makes a copy of all e-mails and saves it to the hard drive.” Trent grinned at Brenna. “So in other words, we can check out everything OrangePineapple98 wrote without having to hack her password.”
Nelson looked at Trent. “OrangePineapple98?”
“Your wife’s screen name for her e-mail account. I was gonna ask—any idea what that might mean?”
Nelson’s eyes were flat as quarters. “I didn’t even know she had an e-mail account.”
The phone rang. The three of them turned toward it. The machine picked up right away, and Brenna started for it, hoping it was the girl calling again.
The machine beeped and the caller began speaking before Brenna reached the kitchen—not a girl at all but a grown woman, the voice shrill and angry and more than a little off-balance. “I saw you on TV, you evil smiling piece of shit. Smiling after you
butcher
your wife. You’re gonna die.
Die and rot in hell
,
scum
.”
Brenna picked up the phone and disconnected on the caller, but the voice still hung like a fog in the house. She went back into the living room, hoping Nelson hadn’t heard. But she saw the look in his eyes and she knew he had. The phone rang again. “It’s only the beginning,” Nelson whispered. “Only the beginning.”
N
elson seemed a little better by the time Brenna and Trent left his house. Of course that was like saying someone with a terminal illness who’d tripped and fallen seemed a little better—simply on the basis of his having gotten up off the floor.
After the third hate message (didn’t these people have anything more productive to do with their lives?), Brenna had tried convincing Nelson to get an unlisted number, but he refused.
If I do that
, he’d explained,
Iris will never be able to call me
. So she’d set the answering machine to pick up after only one ring and turned the volume all the way down, and then she’d made Nelson call Phil Reznik, a good criminal defense attorney she knew, and set up an appointment with him for 5
P.M.
Next, she’d gone into his immaculate upstairs bathroom, found some sleeping pills in the medicine cabinet, given him one, and made him go to bed. Mission accomplished.
Throughout it all, Trent had remained quiet. Strange for him, but Brenna hadn’t really thought about his reasons until they were on Nelson’s front step with the door closed behind them, the few remaining reporters shouting questions from the curb. “Excuse me, ma’am? Sir? Are you relatives?” “How do you know Nelson Wentz?” “Can you answer a few questions about Mr. Wentz’s current state of mind?”
“No comment!” Brenna said. But as she started to step down onto the walk, Trent took her arm and said, through his teeth lest reporters read lips, “What makes you so sure he didn’t do it?”
She stared at him.
“Don’t go all Pollyanna on me, Spec. People do bad things. No one knows that better than you.”
“Excuse me,” said Brenna, “but did you just call me
Spec
?”
“New nickname I’m trying out. You likey?”
“I hatey. It’s even worse than TNT, which—
Christ, why can’t you just talk like a normal person?
”
“Hey, chillax.”
“You think Nelson killed his wife. You think he stabbed her to death, shoved her body in the trunk of her own car, then begged the police and me to find her.”
“I’m just telling you what’s on my mind. The cops think he did it.”
“No they don’t.”
“Some of them do. The press thinks he did it . . .”
“So therefore you think he did it, too?”
“I’m just saying I don’t know. He’s one of those little guys with the psycho eyes. One of those dudes his neighbors always say, ‘He was such a quiet man,’ and ‘He kept to himself.’ ” Trent surveyed the reporters across the street, then leaned in closer. “And not for nothin’ but his wife takes a shitload of money out of the bank and doesn’t tell him, but tells her
book club
she is feeling ‘guilty’ and ‘unfulfilled’? She doesn’t even tell him she can work a computer? Come on. Even
I
know that’s a sucky marriage.”
“He reported her missing. He begged the police to investigate. He hired
me
. Twice.”
“It’s a good cover.”
Brenna sighed. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Just sayin’.”
“I hate that expression.
Trent gave her a little nod, then started to head down the walk, reporters shouting at him again. Midway, though, he stopped and spun around, as if he’d forgotten something. “Brenna?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re not mad at me are you?”
“Not any more than usual.”
“Okay because . . . I don’t know if you know this, but you’re more than just a boss to me.”
She looked at him.
“I mean it. You’re like my hot female brother.”
Brenna smiled. She couldn’t help it. “I’m not mad at you.”
“Cash.” Trent turned and took the rest of the walk quickly, then jogged out onto the street, past the news throng to his car—a surprisingly staid gunmetal Ford Taurus he’d inherited from his parents.
Brenna headed down the walk. Several of the reporters asked for her name and how she knew Nelson Wentz, and Brenna said, “No comment” again, grateful to Faith for not having told them who she was. There was safety in anonymity. They were directing their stares and shouts at Brenna, but she wasn’t being watched or spoken to, not really. She could escape into her thoughts.
Brenna had reached the end of the walk and the reporters’ shouts were getting louder now, more insistent. She heard, “Ma’am, did Nelson Wentz kill his wife?” A familiar voice. She turned. The reporter’s name was Cyrus Whitney. She’d seen it six years ago, in white letters, sandwiched between the New York 1 logo and “StormWatch ’03!” He’d been covering the nor’easter on February 22, heavy parka shielding his face, shouting over the sound of pelting ice. Brenna smiled at him and said, “Moved up in the world, huh?”
He squinted at her.
She sighed. “Never mind.” She turned back toward the street.
“Ma’am?” Cyrus Whitney said again. “Did Nelson Wentz murder his wife, Carol?”
Brenna didn’t reply. She couldn’t. She was staring through the windshield of a passing car.
The cop
.