Hands trembling, imagination running overdrive, Sonny returned to the kitchen and threw open drawers until she found what she needed. Ziploc bags. Hopefully his bed would have the same sheets from Friday, the night Lisette stayed over.
Sprinting up the steps, taking two at a time, she entered Ben’s room, bypassing the bed and going straight to the master bath. The trash can was empty. Neat freak, she cursed silently. Storming out, she raided the nightstand by the bed, looking for condoms. There was one box, brand new, unopened.
“Thought you were going to get lucky with me, didn’t you? Arrogant bastard.”
Moving quickly, she looked through every drawer, rifling through silk ties and cotton boxer shorts, running her fingertips over stacks of T-shirts and neatly folded jeans. She slid her hands underneath the mattress, got down on her hands and knees to look under furniture, stood on tiptoe in his walk-in closet.
There was nothing. Not even a speck of dust.
She picked up the remote for the plasma screen TV and did a quick channel search. Nothing more titillating than HBO. Sonny wasn’t a tech whiz, but she knew how to find out if he’d ordered any pay-per-view movies or kept DVDs on file.
There was only one title; the date, September 17th. She played it.
“Jesus,” she muttered, sitting down on the edge of the bed. She suffered through the wedding video only long enough to acknowledge that Olivia had been her polar opposite. Tall, dark-haired, and gorgeous, she was lushly feminine, a more womanly version of Carly. The only thing more painful to witness was the look on Ben’s face as she walked down the aisle.
Perhaps he was a pathetic cliche, the sainted widower who watched his wife instead of porn.
Then again, lonely people often acted in desperation.
Sonny flipped off the TV with a twist of her wrist, wanting to throw the remote through the damned screen. Returning to the bathroom, she searched the medicine cabinet for tweezers. Finding a new pair, she ripped it out of the package, then stripped the blanket and top sheet off the bed.
There were no stains, but the expensive white cotton appeared wrinkled, comfortable, slept in. Apparently, he wasn’t so fastidious that he changed sheets more than once a week. Or even after entertaining a female guest.
There was one long, curly hair, obviously a woman’s, probably Lisette’s. The sight of it made her heart sink.
He wasn’t a saint after all, was he?
“You fucked up, Ben,” she said under her breath, collecting the hair meticulously before she began to go over every inch of the sheets for more trace.
CHAPTER 11
Ben wasted a perfectly good session, too distracted to keep his mind on waves. The sport required a Zen-like concentration, and he didn’t have it. He was pissed off at Summer, pissed off at himself, and extremely pissed off at the decent-looking break that kept crumbling to mush every time he got into position.
“Fuck!” he yelled as he resurfaced, startling a couple of regulars who were communing with the surf gods in companionable silence.
Ben gave up. Flipping his wet hair off his forehead, he waded out of the ocean, shoving his surfboard under one arm and storming across the beach.
He couldn’t believe Summer thought he’d slept with Lisette. The girl was young enough to be his daughter, for Christ’s sake. The very idea turned his stomach.
Her interrogation wasn’t just insulting, it also brought back a lot of unpleasant memories for him. Olivia had constantly bombarded him with accusations. Usually, her suspicions were correct, and she had every right to be jealous. While she’d stayed home taking care of Carly, he’d been traveling from one beach to the next, hopping from party to party and bed to bed.
Olivia hadn’t put up with his antics for long. She broke off their relationship just before Carly’s second birthday, issuing the ultimatum that he give up drugs, alcohol, and other women. It took him five years to honor her request.
He regretted every one of them.
After he got clean, he hadn’t so much as looked at another woman, but Olivia had never really trusted him because he’d lied to her so many times in the past.
Ben didn’t need Summer giving him the third degree, thinking the worst of him, reminding him of his myriad failures as a husband and a man.
He did a good enough job of that on his own.
Scowling, he ascended the wooden steps leading to his back patio, assuring himself he was only sorry he hadn’t been able to get her into bed. He knew he was lying, and that he’d handled things badly with her this morning, but damned if he would apologize to her, when she was the one who’d accused him of statutory rape!
Muttering a string of curses, he showered off in the poolroom and pulled on some clothes before he headed inside the house. Carly was sitting at the kitchen table with a pensive expression on her face and dark sunglasses covering her eyes.
Ben cleared his throat. “Ready?”
“Yeah.”
He drove them to the Bruebaker residence in silence. As he parked inside the gated entrance, he noted that the media was out in full force. Although he would have used his notoriety to draw attention to Lisette’s disappearance, her parents hadn’t asked him to, and for that he was grateful.
After Olivia’s murder, the press had hounded him mercilessly. The police had treated him like a criminal. While he’d been in shock, unable to process what was happening, they’d ripped his reputation to shreds and thrown it to the sharks.
The furor died down eventually, but in that first month, the media hadn’t had the decency to leave him, or Carly, alone. They’d made a circus of Olivia’s funeral.
Two weeks ago they started calling again, clamoring for his response to Darrius O’Shea’s death. He had no comment. Countless times, over the past three years, he’d dreamt of tearing the man apart with his bare hands.
Now that O’Shea was dead, Ben felt nothing. Not even relief.
If the media saw him here, they would probably rehash every detail of his wife’s murder, turning his devastation into a tasty news bite once again.
Ben found a pair of sunglasses in the glove compartment and pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his head.
“You look like the Unabomber,” Carly said.
He gave her similar perusal, seeing solemn eyes behind dark lenses. “Why did you lie to that police officer?”
Her mouth made a thin line. Instead of answering, she glanced away.
The aftermath of Olivia’s death had scarred his daughter in ways he could only imagine. At a time when they needed each other more than anything else, the police had kept them apart, questioning them separately, trying to pit Carly against him. Trying to break them down.
He despised them for putting her through that.
Carly might have lied to the police just to be uncooperative. Or maybe she was hiding something. Maybe she knew Lisette had been in his room that night.
His gut clenched at the thought. “Do you know where Lisette is?”
She gave him a disgusted look. “No.”
He decided she was telling the truth, and hoped he wasn’t fooling himself, believing what he wanted to believe. “How are you doing…with the cutting?”
“Fine,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest.
“You haven’t-”
