The dreams, Clare thinks. They come to her like omens.
In the bathroom, Clare undresses and steps into the shower before the water is even warm. She uses a facecloth to scrub at her skin. She washes her hair, then steps out to towel off and move naked into the hotel room, rummaging through her duffel bag for something clean to wear. Clare has thought so little of her appearance these past months, her figure thinning and expanding according to the rhythm of her days. She dresses, finds her cell phone on the bed and sits to reread the chain of emails with Malcolm. Everything about her dream felt real, Malcolm sitting on the edge of her bed, the motel room dark. I killed her, he’d said with such calm in his voice, a twinge of a smile on his face. Clare hits reply and types,
If you’re close by, like you said you were, then I want to meet. I want the whole truth.
Clare throws her cell phone on the bed again and moves to the window. She looks for signs of the ocean through the buildings. Lune Bay feels less like a suburb and more like a village, as Donovan had called it. Clare’s phone pings. It’s a text message from Austin.
I have it on good word that you’ve been released. Can we talk today?
Clare rolls her eyes. Before she can type a response, someone knocks. Clare peeks through the spy hole and sees Somers. She unlatches and opens the door, stepping aside to allow Somers to enter. Somers carries two coffees and a paper bag, a satchel over her shoulder. She spins on a heel at the far side of the room to shoot Clare a deadly look.
“You get some sleep, gunslinger?”
“I slept a few hours,” Clare says. “I feel better.”
“Are you ready to explain yourself? Because I don’t like waking up to voice mails from jail. I don’t like having to catch the earliest flight out.”
“Well,” Clare says, “I don’t like getting arrested.”
Somers hands Clare one of the coffees and a paper bag with a pastry inside. She flops into the corner armchair. Clare sits on the bed and rips a bite off the croissant.
“I had a friend up here send me a copy of your arrest report this morning,” Somers says.
“You have friends everywhere,” Clare says.
“I do,” Somers says. “You’d be smart to remember that. I most certainly do.”
Somers is smiling; she means it in jest, but her tone nonetheless irks Clare, the veiled threat of it.
“The woman’s name is Kavita Spence,” Clare says. “I was at the bar last night with her and Charlotte Westman. Jack’s daughter. They were mixing drugs and alcohol. Kavita was completely out of it. There was this meathead with his friends trying to take advantage of her. Apparently he was an off-duty cop.”
“He is a cop,” Somers says. “He was named in the report.”
“Whatever. He was going to hurt her. And he wouldn’t back off.”
“So you waved your gun around.”
“I overreacted.”
Somers sips her coffee. “That’s one way of putting it.”
Clare sighs. “I found them in the back alley behind the bar. And you know what? The guy called Kavita Kendall. Kendall Bentley is one of the women who disappeared from Lune Bay. Just like your girl Stacey Norton. Kendall’s father’s been searching for her for nearly two years. That’s quite the name slip for that cop to make, don’t you think?” Clare shakes her head. “I don’t know. It triggered me. And now my face is everywhere because of that video.”
“We can work on that,” Somers says. “Do a bit of scrubbing. Germain is already on it. Your name hasn’t been published.”
“You can’t scrub the internet. It’s only a matter of time until my name comes out too.”
“Will you please let me try to deal with it?” Somers asks. “Do you trust me?”
Clare is silent. She looks out the window, avoiding Somers’s stare.
“You really think I might be in on it?” Somers asks. “That I’m some kind of dirty cop?”
“You lied to me,” Clare says.
“I withheld,” Somers says. “There’s a big difference.”
“I don’t see it that way,” Clare says, her voice rising. “You had information that you didn’t give me. You didn’t tell me that you’d worked on a case related to Malcolm, to the Westmans. That’s not an omission, that’s a flat-out lie.”
“Listen,” Somers says, sitting up and setting her coffee on the hotel room desk. “I get that your instinct is to mistrust. To not believe anything anyone tells you. But in police work there’s this thing we call confirmation bias. If you believe someone is guilty or something is true, then you’ll look for clues that support your theory. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have met you, Clare. Because you truly are a set of fresh eyes.” Somers opens her satchel and lifts herself off the chair to hand Clare a file. “I didn’t want to tell you about Stacey because I felt it would bias you. You wouldn’t be objective. You couldn’t be.”
“Maybe you underestimate me,” Clare says.
“Quite the opposite. I believe in you so much that I didn’t want to spoil it with elements of my own failures.” Somers sighs. Her expression softens. She too appears tired. She would have risen in the dark of night to catch her flight. “It burns me to think that I’ve lost your trust. Because this connection between us? This link between an old case of mine and your guy Malcolm? It was a coincidence. I’ve worked over a thousand cases in my career. I could find links from Gandhi to Brad Pitt if I want to. I swear. I wanted your fresh eyes. And if I’m going to be honest, it appealed to me that you’re not bound by the same rules that
