Ben was silent for a moment. “What should I do?” he asked quietly.
Nathan was taking the stairs up to the deck two at a time. “Try to stay calm,” he said, motioning for Peter to pull anchor. They needed to get back to the mainland, pronto. “And whatever you do, don’t say anything.”
Before heading to the crime scene, Sonny went back to her apartment, took out her laptop, and ran Arlen Diels through VICAP, the FBI’s main informational database for the apprehension of violent criminals.
Sure enough, he had a history that read like a Spanish-language telenovela.
As a teen, Arlen had spent some time at a boys’ home, and the resident psychiatrist, a man by the name of Sparks, had written detailed notes.
Arlen had been born in Beaufort, North Carolina, to fifteen-year-old Cora Lee Diels. Cora Lee died of a drug overdose in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district during the Summer of Love. It wasn’t a great loss for Arlen, who’d been raised by his grandparents and never known his real mother, but Grandma Lynelle took the news hard. She passed on soon after, leaving Arlen at the mercy of his grandfather, an Onslow Bay fisherman by the name of Max Diels.
Max taught Arlen everything he knew about fishing, fists, and force. Grandpa Max loved his daughter, Cora Lee, more than a father should, but he hated Arlen. Just as Arlen would do with his own son, in a sad, vicious cycle, Max varied between beating his grandson senseless and calling him queer.
After Max drowned, under suspicious circumstances, in the Albermarle Sound, Arlen was placed in protective custody. At Black River Home for Wayward Boys, he quickly obtained a reputation for brutality. He also spent a lot of time in psychotherapy with Dr. Sparks, who found Arlen an excellent subject for study. In the good doctor’s opinion, Arlen Diels was a sadist-and a sociopath.
By the age of nineteen, two years before meeting Anita Vasquez, Arlen had killed a man during a bar fight in Sarasota, Florida. Instead of waiting for the police to sort things through, he fled to California, just like his mother had done so many years before.
The rest of the story Sonny had to fill in from what information she knew of Arlen since his hasty departure from the Southern seaboard.
In San Diego, after spending some time with Anita Vasquez and her young son, Arlen found work aboard a small fishing vessel called Destiny. It was destiny, all right, because when old man Matthews died he left the boat to his only daughter, Gabrielle, along with a quaint little two-bedroom house in Torrey Harbor.
Arlen proposed immediately.
Gabrielle was probably delighted that Arlen offered to take her last name. Stephen came along nine months later. Gabrielle stuck around long enough to get pregnant with James, and to raise both boys into elementary school.
Then she disappeared. When Stephen was sixteen and James just eleven, Gabrielle Matthews fell off the face of the earth, and no one had heard from her since.
Sonny closed her laptop and rose to her feet. She dressed with special care, focusing all of her energy on her outward appearance, because inside she was a mess. In an attempt to maintain a cool, professional façade, she opted for a sedate white blouse, black tailored trousers, and a matching jacket loose enough to hide her SIG.
By the time she arrived at James’ house, Paula DeGrassi and a team of CSIs were already there. Sonny felt nauseous. She wasn’t ready to face the monster who was her father again, even if he was stone cold dead, facedown on the bed.
She forced herself to study the man with detached interest, analyzing details like an automaton, unable to look Sergeant DeGrassi in the eye.
The corpse wasn’t the most gruesome sight she’d seen, not by a long shot. It was the most horrifying, however, because Arlen Matthews didn’t appear to have been strangled, shot, or stabbed. If anything, he’d been bludgeoned, and by her own hand.
She leaned forward, holding her breath against the smell of old booze and fresh death, trying to see if he’d sustained any other injuries. Had Arlen Matthews died in his sleep, minutes or hours after she bashed him over the head?
This was bad. Oh, so much worse than getting caught in bed with Ben.
“His son found the body,” DeGrassi said, referring to her notes. “Stephen Matthews. He sounded just like the kid who reported Lisette Bruebaker.”
Sonny cleared her throat. “Really?”
“Yeah. And this guy was a small vessel fisherman, so it fits. That’s why I contacted your special agent in charge.”
Of course. Sonny hadn’t been checking in, so Grant had no idea that Arlen was connected to the SoCal murders. Neither had DeGrassi, until now.
“I asked this kid, Stephen, about the phone call and he acted like he didn’t know what I meant. Then he said yes, he made the call.” She shrugged. “He’s got another brother, James Matthews, age seventeen, who lives here and has yet to be accounted for.”
Sonny’s mind raced with possibilities. If she didn’t come clean right now, James or Stephen could be implicated in Arlen’s death. Last night, she’d washed her drinking glass and worn gloves while searching for clues. Other than the broken lamp, which might go unnoticed in this heap, there would be no trace of her here.
Then again, James would surely tell everyone what she’d done when they found him. Sonny closed her eyes and clenched her hands into fists, visualizing the dregs of her career swirling down the toilet.
“What’s that?” DeGrassi asked, nodding to one of the crime scene technicians.
A young man in a white jacket and latex gloves was lifting an expensive-looking bracelet from the top of an open magazine. He froze, letting the jewelry dangle from the tip of his forceps. “It’s been photographed.”
“Put it down. I want to look at it.”
Sonny couldn’t believe her eyes. That bracelet had not been here last night. Absolutely no way, not a chance. She’d searched every inch of the place.
DeGrassi stepped forward, adjusting her glasses and peering down at the pretty, custom-made piece. Sonny came up beside her to do the same.
It was a simple platinum disk on a delicate silver chain. On the surface of the disk, a handful of well-placed sparkles, aquamarine and diamonds by the looks of them, made the crest and swell of a tiny wave.
Sonny’s breath caught in her throat.
“Hmm,” DeGrassi said. “Turn it over.”
On the back, so small as to be almost indiscernible, there was a romantic dedication. The engraved words made a chill run down Sonny’s spine.
TO OLIVIA. LOVE, BEN. FOREVER.
Sonny had withheld a lot of information from DeGrassi, but as staff sergeant of the Homicide Division, she must have known Ben was a suspect in his wife’s murder, and that he was at the station being interrogated by Grant right now. “Give the techs a few minutes to see what else turns up, and you can take this to your S.A.C.”
Sonny managed a brusque nod.
DeGrassi’s sharp gaze narrowed on Sonny from over the tops of her reading glasses, but she didn’t say anything more. Instead, she gestured to the CSI, indicating that he continue collecting evidence, and bagged the item herself.
Needing a breath of fresh air, and a moment to recover her wits, Sonny walked out to the backyard. It was as cluttered with trash and debris as the rest of the house. She was amazed that James could show up anywhere looking clean; she felt dirty after only a few minutes inside the place.
Tapping the toe of her shoe against the concrete patio beneath her feet, she pondered the case, searching desperately for some answers. Unless Arlen had roused in the middle of the night and brought out the bracelet, or in her frantic state of mind she’d missed it, the piece of jewelry had been planted.
Perhaps Sonny hadn’t killed him after all. But who had? James, after she dropped him off at Stephen’s? Stephen, before he called to report the old man’s death? Or Ben, sometime between the orgasms he gave her last night and the awesome sex they’d had this morning?