“Lisbeth is there and-”
“No, she isn’t,” he said.
I stopped and faced him. “What?”
“She’s not there. There was no one in the house when I stopped by.”
Half a dozen bad scenarios streaked through my head like so many comets, the worst of them being that Kulak had gotten rid of her while he was lying in wait for me. “We have to find her,” I said.
“We’ll find her.”
“No,” I said. “You don’t understand. We have to find her. She knows what happened.”
Landry squinted at me. “What do you mean, she knows what happened? We know what happened. Walker killed Irina because she was pregnant. She was going to ruin his life. He killed her and dumped her body.”
I shook my head. “No. I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so? You’ve been selling Bennett Walker as a killer from day one.”
“I don’t think he did it, James,” I admitted. “I watched Alexi Kulak torture him. The only thing Kulak wanted to know was why. Why did he kill her? And all Bennett could say was that he didn’t know, that he couldn’t remember doing it.”
“So? Who would cop to anything that would piss off Alexi Kulak?”
“But that pissed off Alexi Kulak,” I said. “If Bennett had had an answer, he would have given it up. I think he believed he did it. I think he woke up Sunday morning, found a dead girl in his pool, and convinced himself he must have done it.
“He couldn’t give Kulak the answer, because he didn’t have one.
“And what makes you think Lisbeth does?”
A hunch, I thought, a feeling. A feeling that had been slowly taking root in the back of my mind as small scraps of information melded together.
“When Barbaro recanted his statement,” I said, “I asked him if he had seen anyone who could corroborate his statement. He said he’d seen Lisbeth. As he got back to his car at Players, she was walking across the parking lot. But Lisbeth told me she went home long before that.”
“So Barbaro’s lying,” Landry said.
I shook my head. “That doesn’t make sense. Why would he lie about something so stupid? Why not just say no one saw him? It’s impossible to disprove a negative.”
“And why would Lisbeth lie about being there,” Landry said, as the picture started becoming clearer to him, “unless she had something to hide.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Yesterday I showed a photograph of Irina and Lisbeth to a mentally disturbed woman who hangs around Players and the Polo Club. I asked if she had ever seen Irina. She looked at both girls and said that they were very naughty. I think she meant ‘they’ as in ‘together.”“
“You think Irina and Lisbeth were involved?” Landry asked.
“I think so. I think Lisbeth thought so, anyway.”
“But why would Lisbeth kill Irina?” Landry asked.
I thought about it for a moment, replaying all the broken little pieces of memories. The photographs of Lisbeth and Irina together, Lisbeth so happy and smiling-and the photos of Lisbeth standing a little apart and uncomfortable in the snapshots of herself with men. Too many pictures of Irina on her fridge, I had thought.
I thought about how hard Lisbeth had argued with Irina about the after-party. I thought about the abject grief and the abject guilt.
“Irina was pregnant,” I said. “She wanted a rich American husband, not a naive lesbian farm girl from East Backwater, Michigan.”
“Rejection,” Landry said.
A deep sense of sadness came over me as I thought about it. As motives for murder went, it was one of the oldest stories in the book. Unrequited love. It never ceased to amaze me that an emotion that was supposed to be so good and bring such joy so often turns so destructive.
And no matter how often life tries to teach us that lesson, we keep going back for more.
Chapter 67
The moon was bright as Lisbeth walked along the dirt road. She didn’t know what time it was. Time didn’t matter. She had been walking for quite a while, though, she thought.
She had never walked into the wild countryside alone. The idea would have frightened her. But not Irina. Irina would have laughed at her fear of snakes and alligators, and teased her into going. Irina knew how liberating it was not to feel fear. Lisbeth was only just beginning to learn what that meant.
She knew where she was going because the location had been described in great detail over the last few days among riders and barn hands, on the news. It was a pilgrimage of sorts, to go to the place where Irina had been found, where her body had been destroyed. It was no less a holy place than any other for her.
She had worshipped Irina. Irina, so smart, so sophisticated, so bold, so brave.
She had loved Irina as she had never loved anyone in her life. She had needed Irina. Irina had been her big sister, her best friend, her… her mentor. Irina had been everything Lisbeth was not.
Lisbeth had tried her hardest to follow in Irina’s footsteps-to be casual, and careless, and carefree, and elegant; to look life in the face and grin a wicked grin.
It would have been so perfect, if only it could have been just the two of them.
Funny, she thought. When she came to South Florida she had such very different ideas about what she wanted from life. She had wanted what she had been taught to want-a husband, a family- even though she had known from past experience with men that there were no happiness guarantees, that love could be a hateful, frightful thing.
And she had learned that lesson all over again… and again… and again…
Irina had taken her under her wing. Irina had been her one true friend and her protector-or so she had thought.
Never in her life had Lisbeth been with-or thought she would ever be with-another woman. She had been raised to believe that was wrong. But with Irina she had felt right, and safe, and, Midwestern guilt aside, happy.
Lisbeth paused along the trail to bend over and cough and to struggle to fill her aching lungs with air. She sat down for a moment’s rest on a cypress stump.
The night was clear and warm. Teeming with life, if a person cared to notice. She did. She listened to the frogs and the squawks and ratchet sounds of the marsh birds.
It was, of course, the animals that could be neither seen nor heard that came with the most danger in them. Love was an animal like that. And jealousy. And hurt.
Lisbeth sat on the stump along the oily black canal, waiting for them to come to her.
Chapter 68
“Barbaro told me Irina wasn’t shy about her plans to entertain the boys that night,” I said. “Lisbeth begged Irina not to go, but Irina went anyway.”
“You think Lisbeth came back later to confront Irina?” Landry said. “That was when Barbaro saw her.”
He pulled into the drive and parked next to my car near the cottage.
I felt a terrible sense of urgency as I got out of the car. The fatigue that had taken hold of me burned off on a new rush of adrenaline.
Lisbeth was alone somewhere. I had a feeling Lisbeth had been alone a very long time. I thought that was perhaps the source of my sympathy for her-that I looked at Lisbeth Perkins and saw in her all the things that life had burned out of me long ago.
