Now he was back downstairs, sitting on the sofa. The actors had cleared out, as had much of the crew. A woman arrived in a sharp yellow suit and took a seat across from him. She introduced herself as Samantha Hawkins, but no introduction was necessary. Connor recognized her from the show.
“Okay, Connor, I just want to prepare you for how this is going to go,” the director said. “Sam’s going to ask you to tell her what she saw and heard, how you felt. That sort of thing.”
As he talked, a makeup artist descended upon Samantha and went to work, fussing over every little thing.
“I didn’t see much,” Connor said. “Like I told you, I was—”
“I know, I know. But we’re going to get it all on film, and we’ll decide what we’re going to keep in post. She’s also going to ask you about your parents’ lives and who they were. We want to paint a picture people can relate to, so be open and be vulnerable.”
“He’s an adult,” Samantha said, barely moving her lips so as not to cause problems for the makeup artist. “He’ll be fine.” She cut her eyes to the director. “Should I ask about the other case?”
“What other case?” Connor said.
“You haven’t heard about it?”
Connor shook his head.
“Mark and Hillary Wilson,” the director said. “They lived over in Westchester. Expensive neighborhood. Big house. The whole deal. Seems a masked man attacked them in the exact same way your parents were attacked.”
“What happened to them? Did they get away?”
“No.”
Connor thought about the two bodies that had been burned in the fire. They must have been the Wilsons. Olivia would put that together eventually, if she hadn’t already. Connor suspected she wasn’t telling him everything she knew, which he decided was fair enough since he wasn’t telling her everything, either.
CHAPTER 16
Olivia loved to watch suspects squirm when she got them into the interrogation room. It was a small space, with cinderblock walls, a steel table and chairs. And, except for the security camera mounted to the ceiling, not much of anything else. It looked exactly like she had imagined interrogation rooms to look before she had joined the academy. She wished she had a reason to get her ex-husband in here.
Aden would have to do.
He was handcuffed to the table, perched upright in the chair farthest from the door, and still naked from the waist up. He hadn’t said a word since Olivia arrested him, hadn’t even asked for a lawyer. That was unusual. Sure, a lot of suspects kept their mouths shut when the cuffs went on, but they almost always asked for a lawyer.
Olivia could tell Aden was angry. His jaw was clenched so tight she could see the thin veins under his chin clearly. His wiry black hair, which had already been a mess when she had arrived at his apartment, was somehow even worse now.
She fingered the keys in her pocket, thought about releasing the handcuffs, but decided against it.
She sat down in the chair opposite him. “Tell me about the bomb.”
Aden smiled. “Is that what you think you saw?”
“Come on, Aden. I’m serious. What the hell were you planning?”
Aden turned his hands over, pulled up on the cuffs as far as he could to make a point. The chain connecting them rattled. “Does it matter?”
“So you’re telling me it’s over?” Aden didn’t strike Olivia as a lone wolf, but she asked the question anyway to see what he would say.
He shrugged.
“The woman in the apartment—does she know what you were up to?”
“Maggie, no. Maggie Magpie is too sweet to do what had to be done. She shouldn’t have even been over at my house tonight. Quite an evening for visitors. You’d think I was the toast of the town.”
“So if she wasn’t supposed to be there, if she was too sweet to do what had to be done, what was she doing inside when I showed up?” Olivia made air quotes around the words “what had to be done.”
“I let her in.”
“Why?”
“I was hoping I might be wrong.”
“Why did you slap her?”
Until now, Aden’s gaze had been all over the place. Sometimes he had been looking at Olivia, other times past her or down at his hands. He fixed his eyes on hers now in a new and deliberate way. “She said she was going to call . . . well . . . you.”
“Me?”
“The police.”
“And what has to be done?”
Aden frowned. “I can’t tell you that.”
“Because it’s not over.”
Another shrug.
“Who else is involved?”
This time, Aden didn’t even shrug.
CHAPTER 17
Connor did his best to give Sam what she wanted during the interview, but his mind kept drifting back to what the director had said about Mark and Hillary Wilson: They lived over in Westchester. Expensive neighborhood. Big house. The whole deal. Seems a masked man attacked them in the exact same way your parents were attacked.
Maybe if he could find out more about them, he would be able to figure out what the attacker wanted from his parents. Connect the dots, so to speak. At the very least, it would give him something to do while he waited for Roland to text him back.
He sat down at his computer in his bedroom. It didn’t take much work to find a news story about the Wilsons on the Westchester Gazette website. (He found no such story on the Times or Post sites.) The headline: COUPLE KIDNAPPED FROM THEIR HOME. It wasn’t particularly imaginative. The story was short and poorly written. Not much more than a recap of the police report, as far as Connor could tell. It included a large photo of the Wilsons’ house and smaller pictures of Mark and Hillary.
The journalist hadn’t drawn the connection between this abduction and his parents’. Likely he didn’t even know about what had happened to Connor’s parents.
He opened another browser window and scoured the web for information on the Wilsons. According to LinkedIn, Mark had been a money manager for Fidelity. And according to
