backyard.” He sounded so calm, like a stranger was speaking for him. “She was under the concrete slab. Stephen and I helped my dad pour it out.” He blinked, fragments of memory floating through his mind, pictures more vivid than the blood on his hands. “I still remember that day. My dad was in a weird mood. He was sober, for once, and didn’t hit me all day. I can’t remember another day like that. It was a nice day.
“We all worked together,” he continued, “mixing the concrete, smoothing it over with trowels. Doing men’s work. He said we did a good job.” He laughed, looking from Ben to Carly, not really seeing them. “Can you believe that? We did a good fucking job, making my mother’s grave.”
Carly slipped around Ben and rushed forward, hugging James. He held her woodenly, not sure how she could cry when he couldn’t.
“We need to take you to the emergency room,” Ben said.
James took the T-shirt away from his hand. The cut could use a few stitches, but he’d had worse. “No. I have to go to Stephen’s.”
“James,” Carly protested, her pretty face streaked with tears.
In that moment, he almost hated her. How dare she cry about anything, standing in her rich, perfect house, next to her handsome, perfect dad, wearing her expensive, perfect clothes, tears marring her lovely, perfect face? How dare she cry over his mother, when he felt nothing, had nothing, was nothing?
He set her aside. “It’s fine, Carly. Just get away from me, okay?”
Her eyebrows drew together in confusion. “James, you’re hurt. Why are you-”
“Look at me,” he interrupted. “Look at my hands.” Holding them up for her, he said, “Can’t you see that I’m all fucked up? If I touch you, you’ll get fucked up, too.” To prove it, he put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her back, leaving bloody prints all over her pristine white T-shirt. “See?”
Ben strode forward and pulled Carly away from James. “Go put some shoes on. And get my keys.”
Carly went, hugging her arms around herself.
James wanted to leave, too, but Ben was blocking the exit. “That’s not going to stop bleeding on its own,” he said. “Why don’t you put some pressure on it?”
Annoyed, James put the bloody T-shirt back to his hand.
“No,” Ben said. “Use your fingers. Like this.” Taking James by the hand, he placed his thumb over the vein that was pumping blood to the injury.
James flinched, uncomfortable with Ben’s touch.
Ben released him. “Put pressure on it with your fingers, like I showed you.”
He complied, feeling the humiliating press of tears burning at the back of his eyelids. “I have to go,” he insisted. “I can’t be here right now. What if I had done that to Carly?” He jerked his chin at the demolished phone.
“It’s a machine, James. It didn’t feel a thing.”
“She can’t see me like this.”
Ben assessed him with cool brown eyes. “She lost her mom, too. You think she’ll consider you less of a man if she sees you cry?”
“I’m not a man,” he whispered, feeling very small and infinitely vulnerable.
Ben put one hand on James’ shoulder and guided him toward the door. “You’ve got a pretty good right hook, for a kid.”
Sonny trudged up the stairs to her upper-floor apartment, a sense of hopelessness dogging her every step.
Stephen hadn’t taken the news of his mother’s death very well. She’d expected him to be more like James, stone-faced and silent, completely unable to show emotion. It wasn’t that he’d broken down and sobbed. He’d just sat there, his red-rimmed eyes filling with tears, a wealth of sadness on his gauntly beautiful face.
She’d known better than to try to comfort him, or to ask any more questions. Leaving her card in his slack hand, she patted his shoulder once and walked away, fighting to hold her own tears at bay.
Hopefully, Rhoda would be selfish with that twenty-dollar bill and stay gone for a while. The last thing Stephen needed was her company. Or more drugs.
Sighing heavily, she turned the key in the lock and opened the door. As soon as her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she went for her SIG, training it on the man sitting in her living room.
Grant didn’t even flinch.
She leaned against the door, returning her gun to its holster and willing her heart to slow, rather than arrest. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“I could have done a lot more than scare you.”
Biting back a caustic response, she pushed the door shut behind her and ventured farther into the room. He was right, of course, and having him get the drop on her for the second time in as many days didn’t bode well for her.
Had she lost her touch, along with her objectivity?
She trailed her fingertips along the island between the kitchen and living room, reluctant to start any difficult conversations. “You thirsty?”
He grunted a maybe. “What have you got?”
“Diet Coke,” she said coyly, knowing he watched his waistline.
He shrugged, as if he wasn’t secretly jonesing for one, so she popped the top off two cans and brought them to the awful retro coffee table, taking a seat in the dreadful vinyl chair.
“Who does your decorating?” he asked.
Neither of them smiled at the halfhearted quip.
Grant took a sip of his drink and set it aside, his manner turning brusque. “Arlen Matthews’ fingerprints are all over the duct tape and garbage bags he wrapped his wife in.”
Sonny nodded, expecting as much.
“We also found fibers from the pillow slipcover in his lungs, and broken lamp shards with your fingerprints on them in his trash can.”
She choked on a mouthful of Diet Coke.
Grant was only getting warmed up. “Yesterday, after interviewing your new boy toy, I discovered that his daughter is dating the son of our current prime suspect. Do you know how fucking stupid I looked, learning details like those from Paula DeGrassi?”
“I’m sorry,” she croaked.
“You’d better be. And you’d better start explaining now, before I haul your ass in for sexual misconduct, manipulating evidence, and who the fuck knows, maybe even murder!”
Whoa. She put her can down and her palms up. “I admit I hit Arlen Matthews over the head with a lamp. I knew James had reported Lisette’s body, and that Arlen frequented prostitutes, so I went over there in disguise. Looking for clues.”
Grant’s eyes narrowed. “He made a move on you? You acted in self-defense?”
“Not exactly. He got a little…fresh, and I overreacted.”
He muttered an expletive. “So you bashed him over the head, and then what? Shoved his face into the pillows?”
“No. James and I put him to bed. He was alive when I last saw him.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“It’s the truth,” she said, her stomach sinking.
“What about the bracelet?” he asked. “How in the hell could evidence like that escape your attention?”
“It wasn’t there,” she admitted. “I swear to God, it wasn’t there.”
Grant studied her expression, his own revealing nothing. She wanted to tell him an even more disturbing truth, to confess that Arlen Matthews was her father. But the idea of saying those words aloud paralyzed her with fear. Grant would never believe she hadn’t set up Matthews, or killed him on purpose, if he knew the man had abused her mother.
“DeGrassi doesn’t like Matthews as the SoCal Stranger,” he admitted. “MOs are different. Matthews killed his wife, no doubt about it, but the guy we’re looking for is highly intelligent and extremely organized.”
Sonny took a moment to breathe. This was going better than she’d hoped.
“I’d like to take another crack at Fortune,” Grant said.
