Incredibly, the first thing she saw as she walked into the large, noisy, glass-fronted room was a couple who fit the description from Tahoe. They sat at a table against the windows overlooking busy Massachusetts Avenue. The boy, dark-haired and much better-looking than his description, studied
The girl huddled in a big chair, trim legs crossed, a laptop computer propped on her knees. She raised and tipped a coffee mug, sucking thirstily, all the while fastening her eyes on her monitor. Attractive in an Italian-film-star way, full-lipped, healthy-cheeked, tousle-haired, she wore a long-sleeved white sweater over jeans, with thick socks and incongruous flip-flops on her feet. A chair next to her held their winter coats. At her feet, long leather boots lay akimbo, like a pair of abandoned legs.
They seemed to be here for the duration. Nina went to the counter to order a super-sized vanilla soy latte and a muffin. She needed them. Removing her coat, she looped it over the arm carrying her tray and walked back to her prey. She set the tray down on a low table in front of a cluster of chairs near them and tossed her coat over the chair back. “Hello. Are you Raj?”
The boy put down his newspaper. A wary expression spread over his face. He said nothing.
“My name is Nina Reilly. I’ve been looking for you. And you must be Silke!” She smiled and nodded at the girl. “Glad to meet you. Nina Reilly.” She sat down across from them, broke a piece of muffin off, and ate it, following up with a long wash of coffee. “No breakfast,” she said apologetically. “Just got off a plane.” Not true, but while they considered the information she had time to take another bite and another swallow. As the caffeine rushed to warm her chilled extremities, she began to feel very happy to be in Cambridge sitting with these two kid fugitives, making progress at last.
“A plane?”
“From California. My card.” She found one in her pocket and handed it to Raj, who scrutinized it and handed it to Silke.
“You’re a lawyer,” Silke said. Her clipped delivery suggested to Nina that English wasn’t her first language. “Professor Braun told us a lawyer called him.”
“That was me. I’m here to discuss that trip you guys and your friend took to Tahoe two years ago. No doubt you remember it.”
Their young faces showed they did and weren’t pleased at the memory, although they tried to hide it.
“When you got robbed. Not an easy moment to forget, I bet.”
Silke looked at Raj, who lowered his eyelids.
“The woman who died that night was named Sarah Hanna. She was pregnant. Her husband watched her die. I represent him.” Nina took guilty pleasure in watching the girl wince. She
“How did you find us?” Raj said.
“Why did you run away? Why didn’t you stay and talk to the police?”
“Maybe we shouldn’t talk to her,” Silke said to Raj.
“What’s the harm?” Nina asked. “You were just witnesses, right?”
“We can’t be involved,” Raj said.
“Oh, but you are. I have involved you,” Nina said. “That mode won’t work anymore.” She drank some more coffee, reflecting that her excitement was turning to anger at these cavalier kids who had left Dave Hanna to sink into his misery. Taking a deep breath, she tried for calm, and failing that, decided why shouldn’t they see how upset and mad she was? She flipped open her briefcase and touched a button on the hidden recorder.
“We don’t have anything to say to you,” Silke said, fright leaking into her voice, her accent more pronounced.
“Please, don’t give me a hard time about this. I don’t need much of your time, and considering the circumstances, talking to me is the absolute least you can do to make up for fleeing the scene.”
“Did we break any laws by leaving?” Raj asked. Unlike Silke, he seemed relatively composed. “I don’t believe we did.”
“Are the police here going to-what does this mean, you coming here after us?” Silke asked.
“I have a few questions, that’s all. The police here aren’t involved. Not yet.” Thus implying they would have first shot, if the two didn’t cooperate.
“I never felt right about leaving,” Silke said. She put her laptop on the low table, closing it gently. “But we were so scared.”
“What’s your last name, Silke?”
The boy and girl looked at each other.
Nina drank latte, settled in.
“Kilmer.”
“You’re from Germany?”
“Yes. Heddesheim.”
“A math student here at MIT?”
“I’m a Ph.D. student with about two and a half years left until I finish my thesis. If all goes well, that is.”
“How about you, Raj? What’s your full name?”
“Sumaraj Das.” He answered pleasantly enough, but she could tell now that he had been deeply shocked by her precipitous arrival. Nina wondered how long her air of authority and their astonishment at being found would keep them talking.
“And where are you from?”
“ Silver Spring, Maryland.” Raj had already had enough. “What do you want from us?”
“I need to know what happened.”
“Look, I followed the news reports online. We don’t know anything the papers don’t know. We have nothing to add. Why did you come all this way?”
“The woman’s husband needs to know who killed his wife. Wouldn’t you want to know?”
Silke put her hand over Raj’s. “We should talk to her,” she said. “It’s wrong to stay silent.”
Nina observed as Raj sat back in his chair and relaxed, allowing Silke to decide for them both. A complicated man, she could see that. Strong but flexible. Unpredictable, Nina thought.
Silke turned to Nina. “We were there. We were robbed, as you said.”
“With your friend. His name?”
“You must mean Elliott. Elliott Wakefield.”
“Where is he right now?”
“He doesn’t go to MIT anymore.” She’d obviously just had second thoughts about giving him up after the name had slipped out. “We don’t know where he is.”
But Nina had his name. The third witness was as good as bagged. “Why were you at Tahoe?”
“Vacationing,” Raj said. “De-stressing. You can only stuff your brain so full. Once in a while you need to get blank, do you know what I mean?”
“We gambled,” Silke said simply. “We won a lot of money that night. I had it in my purse. The robber must have followed us from the casino. We were happy, you know, in a celebratory mood. Not noticing him.”
“What’s your game?” Nina asked.
“Blackjack.”
Of course. The game of the smart, or wannabe smart. “Go on.”
“We got to the motel-the Ace High-late, after midnight. There’s a flight of stairs by the vending machines around a corner of the building, but it’s very dark there, and there are dark corners where you can’t see anything. Before we could climb the stairs to get to our rooms, a man jumped out in front of us.”
“Pointing a big, fat gun in our faces,” Raj added.
“
“But then our friend got too brave,” Raj said.
“Elliott rushed toward the man, trying to knock him over or something. The gun went off.” Silke’s white skin whitened further at the thought. “Oh my God. The sound of that shot.”
“Your friend hit him and the gun went off?”
“I think he came into contact with him,” Raj said. “The gunman fired one warning shot, and I think the second happened about when Elliott reached him. We always thought he wasn’t aiming, because if he had been, we’d be dead. We were so close, only about ten feet from him, and Elliott was even closer.”
“Elliott’s a genius, perhaps,” Silke said softly, “but one of those who is not well-adapted to normal life. You can’t depend on him to behave logically-at least, not according to your logic or mine.”
“When he heard the shot, Elliott let him go, but the gunman fired another shot. It went high, too,” Raj said.
“Do you think he was trying to kill us or just trying to scare us?” Silke asked Raj.
He shrugged. “It’s been two years. I’ve thought about that night so many times, and I can’t figure it out.”
“Did you see a couple on the balcony on the second floor behind you?” Nina asked.
“No. We never saw them. We read about it the next day, when we got back to Boston, and found out someone died. I guess when he fired those wild shots…” Silke said. “A random death, like a lightning strike or a car crash. So sudden. So awful.”
“Then what happened?” Nina asked.
Silke said, “Elliott jumped away. He yelled at us to run. Raj and I ran around the corner. Our room was right there on the ground floor. We were very scared. We grabbed our stuff and about a minute later Elliott was pounding on the door, saying the gunman had run away. We went into his room and got his stuff. We ran back to Harveys. From there caught a cab to the Reno airport. We took the next flight east.”
“Do you believe the robber followed you from Harveys?”
“Nobody would mistake us for rich people.” Silke pulled at the few frayed threads around the hem on her wrist. “We look like poor students. We were staying at that cheap motel. No, he knew we had money somehow. He followed us and got all of our winnings.”
“How much was that?”
“A lot,” the girl said.
“Hundreds?” Nina asked.
Silke shook her head.
“Thousands?”
She evaded that. “We didn’t count exactly.”
