“Oh, Jesus,” Parker breathed. Nausea washed over him.
Fat tears rolled like pearls down Diane’s cheeks. “And she said, in this voice I’d never heard before: ‘He always comes back to me.’ And there was nothing fragile about her.”
Parker could picture the scene in his mind. Diane would have pretended not to react, because she was proud and controlled. While inside she would have shattered like glass.
“A couple of days later I got a package in the mail. A videotape of me and Rob in bed together, him telling me all those things I wanted to hear, wanted to believe. Then there they were, the two of them—Tricia and Rob—reenacting that very same scene, line for line, and laughing about it afterward.”
Parker’s stomach turned at the cruelty.
Diane unfolded herself from the chair and began to move around, her arms banded around her as if she were in a strait jacket.
“Something inside me just broke. It was as if some hidden, festering wound had opened and poisoned me,” she said. “I started drinking. A lot. I was in a bar one night crying to the bartender. There was a man two stools down, listening. He told me he could help me, for a price.”
“Eddie Davis,” Parker said.
“I think about it now, and I can’t believe any of that happened. I can’t believe I hired a killer, and I came up with a plan, and I went through with that plan. It was all like a weird nightmare.
“I asked Rob to come to my house for dinner the night Tricia was killed. To talk about things, I told him, smooth everything over between us. No hard feelings. He actually thought we could still be friends. He said it the day he told me he couldn’t leave poor pathetic Tricia, that his feelings for me had changed, that the sex had been really great but that everything else was over. But couldn’t we still be friends?”
She laughed at that. “Why do men think that can happen? That they can lead a woman on, and lie to her, and treat her like shit, but she should be a sport about it in the end. That’s delusional. Sociopathic. Cruel.”
Parker said nothing. There was no excuse to make for what Rob Cole had done.
“It was so easy,” she said, her eyes blank as she looked back into her mind and watched the memory unfold. “He drank too much, because he always drinks too much. It’s part of Rob’s drama, that the pressure of being him is such that he has to self-medicate in order to tough it out. I slipped some GHB into his last drink. Not a lot. Just enough to know that by the time he got home, he would be ready to pass out. Driving drunk was nothing new to him. I’m sure he wasn’t even aware of the drug taking hold. He would have thought he’d just had one too many.
“Later that night I got called to go to a murder scene.”
“Tricia,” Parker said.
“Davis had killed her with Rob right there in the house. He staged it to look like Rob did it.”
“And Cole didn’t have an alibi because he was there, and he couldn’t very well tell anyone he’d been with a lover scorned just prior to the murder. Even he wouldn’t be so stupid. He had to know you’d be called as a corroborating witness, and you’d crucify him.”
Methodical, cool, smart. Those were words he would have applied to Diane, but never in this context.
“Why kill Tricia, though?” Parker asked. “Why not Rob? He was the more immediate evil, the one who had carried out the abuse.”
“Because to die quickly wasn’t punishment enough. But to send him to prison . . . where he would have to wake up every morning and face a life in hell, where being Rob Cole would never, ever be an advantage, or a ticket to do whatever he wanted with no threat of consequences . . .”
She was right. Rob Cole’s minor celebrity, his too-good looks and cocky attitude, would not have served him in a place like San Quentin. He would have been a target, and he wouldn’t have had any power to do anything about it.
“And the blackmail?”
“Started shortly after. I had money. Joseph left me very well taken care of. Davis thought he deserved a bonus because he’d done such a fine job. I paid him. But then he wanted more. He sent me a photograph of me paying him off. The trial was coming up. Everyone said Giradello had a slam dunk. Davis said he could ruin it.”
“By incriminating himself?” Parker said.
“He didn’t care. He said he’d disappear, go underground. But that wouldn’t stop him from putting the photographs and the story out there. He actually liked the idea of having people know he had killed Tricia and gotten away with it. He thought he could sell his story to the movies while living a dashing life of international intrigue.
“I gave him Joseph’s Lincoln. That wasn’t enough.”
She went to the darkened glass and stared at her reflection.
And then there was her lover, Parker thought, investigating the crime, piecing the story together, working to tie two seemingly disparate crimes together. His big comeback case. He wanted to throw up.
“I offered them two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to sell me the negatives outright, but then everything went wrong, and it just got worse and worse. . . .”
She continued to stare at her reflection, as if she was trying to recognize someone she couldn’t quite remember.
“I just wanted him to pay,” she said softly, her voice strained. “I wanted them both to pay for what they’d done to me. I wanted Rob to be punished. I wanted him to hurt the way I hurt.”
The last threads of her control shredded, and tears came in a torrent. Sobs tore loose from the depths of her soul. The sounds were of something dying inside her.
Parker turned her to him then, and held her as gently as he would a child. He couldn’t connect the woman he knew to the things she’d done. As she had said, the person who had committed those acts couldn’t have been her. And yet the woman he knew would pay, and there was nothing he could do about it . . . except hold her, and be there for her as her demons raked her with their claws.
53
Parker left the building and just stood for a while in the night air. It was closer to morning than to midnight. The empty streets were shiny black, wet with sea mist. No one was around. He wondered what would happen if he just walked away and never came back.
The thought was fleeting. He wasn’t the type to walk away from anything, God help him. He could only be thankful that for now all he could feel was numbness.
Andi Kelly was curled in the passenger seat of his car, huddled in a microfleece jacket he kept in the backseat. She jumped awake like a jack-in-the-box as Parker unlocked the doors and let himself in.
“As a car thief,” he said, “you’re a very good writer.”
“I stole your little plastic emergency key earlier. It let me in the door, but it wouldn’t start the engine.”
She turned sideways on the seat and just stared at him for a moment. Parker started the engine and turned on the heater. The dash lights glowed green.
“How are you doing, Kev?”
“No comment.”
“Off the record.”
“No comment. I can’t talk about this, Andi. Not now. It’s too raw.”
“You don’t have to,” she said. “I just wanted to offer. I’m a good listener.”
“How can that be?” he teased gently. “You never shut up.”
“I’m multitalented. I can juggle a little bit too.”
“Well, you’ll always have something to fall back on.”
“Diane Nicholson is a friend?” she asked carefully.
Parker nodded. He focused his stare on the odometer—something mundane, unimportant—in the hopes that the tide of emotion rising inside him would recede a bit. He hurt. For Diane, and because of her.