Catch up on the previous chapters here
Nell was almost asleep on the couch in front of the television, head on Kent’s shoulder, when she sat up suddenly. “Oh my God.”
“Nell?” That wasn’t just curiosity. Kent’s voice was overloaded with concern.
“No, I …” She pressed her fingertips to her temples like her skull needed the extra force to keep her brain from exploding it into shards.
Kent sat up and paused the movie, almost hunching over her protectively but literally biting his lip to keep himself from spewing a torrent of questions.
Her drowsing thoughts drew the connections, but Nell forced them to surface more fully so she could test them. Make sure everything actually did lead into everything else. God, she needed a calendar … their old emails … it might still work without proof, but if they could actually back this up …
Nell fumbled for her phone and checked the time. Still early enough, maybe, that he’d answer, but if he’d been in the car coming back from Des Moines today … she hit dial anyway, and then put the call on speaker as Kent shifted, ready to grab her in a bear hug like it would protect her from whatever she was thinking.
“Hello?” Adam answered, but she couldn’t read him as well as Kent, so she wasn’t sure if she’d woken him up or if he was concerned or annoyed or what.
“I just thought of something where, if it’s true, you need to hit him with it.”
There was a pause, but Nell and Kent waited it out. Then Adam said, “Okay, go.”
“Someone needs to figure out how many weekends Heidi told me she was with her friends back home, and if she actually was with them at any of those times,” she started, forcing herself to speak slowly even though her heart was still jackhammering. Then she waited, in case Adam was taking notes.
After a short pause, he said “Okay” again.
“I don’t think anyone checked that except for the last weekend, but if you have those dates …”
“What are we doing with those dates, Nell?”
“First you have to see if you can prove he was in Kalamazoo all those weekends. O’Connell.” She shook her head a little. “Beckett.”
Kent swore softly under his breath.
“And then—was there anything in our apartment that seemed weird?”
Adam cleared his throat. “Define ‘weird.’”
“Anything that wasn’t from one of us. Anything …”
“From Beckett,” Kent finished. “You think Beckett was secretly dating Heidi.”
“If he was, there doesn’t have to be anything in the apartment,” Nell continued, “because maybe he didn’t come over. Maybe he fed her some sort of story that means she’d hang out with him.”
Over the phone, Adam sighed. “You said she didn’t go out evenings. All your friends came over. Heidi had no social life.”
“Outside of those weekends she told me she went home,” Nell argued. “Did anyone ask her parents if they actually saw her? Because that was more than once a month. And some weekends, when I was gone … I don’t know if she was there or not. She didn’t text me that she’d gone anywhere, but that hardly means anything.” She blinked and shook her head. “Can her phone be traced? After all this time?”
“Nell …”
“Because that’s how you’d need to do it.” Nell took a deep breath. “You’d have to lay out all the evidence and outline the gaps. Prove there are gaps. If her phone says she was in Kalamazoo the whole time … if it pinged the towers where he lived … you could nail him with it.”
“Nail him with the gaps.”
She shook her head a little to keep Kent from saying whatever he’d drawn in a quick breath to say. “I never shared my location with Heidi, but she’s the one who asked me to text her about my plans. She’d know when I was in the apartment and when I wasn’t, and when I had an alibi if something went down and it got connected back to me.” Even though it hadn’t even gotten all connected to itself until after Heidi died. “You’ve got copies of those texts, right? Or maybe you could pull more? Longer, for the whole year …”
“To prove you’d spent senior year keeping your roommate appraised of your whereabouts?”
“And you’re going to tell Beckett you know she only did it because he asked her to. Check her records. See if you can prove she never asked anyone else.” A thought struck. “Sienna. Find Sienna and ask her if Heidi was ever like that when they roomed together.”
“People are allowed to change, Nell.”
“Sure, but if you’ve got that, if you can hit him with it … all of it at once, just laying down the evidence …”
More silence, but this time Kent didn’t try to speak, either. He caught Nell looking at him and nodded slowly, the sort of respectful acknowledgment given to geniuses lucky enough to be recognized in their own time.
“Okay,” Adam finally said again. “I don’t know how much of this we’ll really be able to get, but I’ll pass it on. Off the record, though …”
As though any of this was actually on it.
“You believe it?”
Her half-sleeping subconscious clearly did, but Nell took a moment to truly consider the question. “It’s always bugged me,” she finally said, “that Heidi lied about where she was supposed to be that weekend. That nobody missed her.” Maybe that second part more than the first, because people deserved to be missed. “She told me that her friends were picking her up, the same way she’d told me before, but nobody was there. You guys tracked them down, and they said no, they hadn’t seen Heidi in ages.”
“True, but she wouldn’t be the first person to lie to her roommate.”
Nell sighed. “No, but they never figured out why she was lying. Did they.”
“So now you think it’s Beckett.”
“You’re going to have to do a lot of research before you can convince me it’s not.”
“Fair enough. Except I’m not the one who’ll be doing it, but … I’ll make sure they do. Anything else?”
“That’s not enough?” Kent snapped, unable to hold it back any longer.
Adam actually laughed. “It’s plenty. And creative. I think you were just so adamant back then that she didn’t have a boyfriend … or a social life …”
“Shouldn’t they have looked into it anyway?” Kent countered.
“Lots of things should happen, but don’t. But this one will now. If that’s it, I’ll call them right now.”
“That’s it,” Nell confirmed.
“I’ll keep you updated.” That was Adam’s way of saying goodbye, because the call ended and the screen of her phone lit up momentarily with that news before dimming again.
Kent settled back into the couch, but she could still feel how tense he was. She’d really startled him. “Sorry.”
“No, it’s fine. I just …” He tried out a grin. “I’m not really convinced we can relax, so I’ve been even more on edge than before. Which doesn’t make any sense.”
“Makes sense to me.” She tucked herself up against him. “Mammal brains don’t adapt well to change, and just because we like to think humans can reason better than any other species …”
“Are you calling me a monkey?”
“You and me, baby, ain’t nothing but mammals.”
That made him laugh and kiss her hair. “They do it on the Discovery Channel in front of cameras, and I can’t say that’s my thing.”
“But otherwise sure, let’s go again?”
This laugh was more of a chuckle. “I think you wore me out last night. I need some more time to recover.”
“Recover, huh? Are you getting old?” she teased.
“Older every day. You know, a lot of things always bugged me about Heidi,” he said abruptly, making her sigh inwardly and sit up properly again so they could have a serious conversation when she didn’t fall asleep in the middle. “She was weird around you.”
“She was weird around you,” Nell countered. “The very few times she saw you.”
But he shook his head. “You’re the last person in the world who’s going to diss someone in an email and even you had trouble writing about her. You’d say she was weird about chores because you didn’t want to call her ‘controlling.’ And you never admitted how much of yourself you put into a little box around her so that she didn’t explode. That’s classic abuse right there.”
“It was fine.”
“Nell …” Kent shook his head once. “That’s not okay. You were stuck, and that made it worse, but it wasn’t okay. She wasn’t a very nice person, but we definitely couldn’t say that after she was dead, so maybe a lot of that was just … left alone after she died, because we left, and it went cold, and just … even knowing all that, even thinking all that about Heidi, I wouldn’t have jumped ahead to ‘she was actually helping the killer.’”
“I don’t think she knew she was,” Nell countered. “Especially not her own killer. And she would’ve been pissed if she was with someone who would rather talk about me.”
He raised an eyebrow. “So she dated Beckett, but he …?”
“Hid it. Serial killers are great at hiding things. That’s totally the definition: they go back to normal life between the murders, and everyone’s like oh, no, he was such a nice neighbor.”
Kent suddenly straightened, holding up a wait a minute finger as he got to his feet. He came back with the laptop and set it on the coffee table, waiting impatiently for it to wake up so he could go to Google and type in Bentley Beckett’s name.
Nell shook her head a little, because she hadn’t thought of doing this before, and leaned in when he let out a low whistle.
“Doesn’t look like anyone’s going the ‘such a nice neighbor’ route,” Kent observed as she read the headline: Man accused of assaulting federal officer described by acquaintances as ‘Norman Bates.’
“Acquaintances,” she murmured.
“Huh?”
“Not friends.” Nell reached over to search for that word, instead, and read the sentence with the highlight: “I don’t think he ever had any friends,” Halliday continued.
Kent wrinkled his nose. “So we’re feeling bad for the poor friendless man who beat the crap out of a guy he thought was my dad?”
“Oh, I’m not feeling bad for him,” she protested. “I think they’re more painting him as the sort of guy who’d totally do this, and if they let him off with a slap on the wrist, he’d totally do it again.” That was, of course, the sort of man he’d always been to her, even before he had a name: the kind who wouldn’t stop. The one who’d just keep being a threat.
Her husband cleared his throat. “It’s up to twenty years. Assaulting a federal agent with a deadly weapon.”
Up to, but not a certainty. And that came with the risk of getting out early, didn’t it? And even then … In twenty years, Beckett would be about fifty. According to her Nell Green birth certificate, she’d be forty-three. If they had kids, not all of them would be adults by then.
His arms held her tight. “I think you need to dose up on melatonin and try to sleep.”
“I’m not sure melatonin’s going to cut it tonight.” But she got up all the same when he let go, reaching back for his hand to make sure that he came with her, because having Kent nearby was worth more than a whole bottle of sleep gummies.
This is the end of Part Five.
Chapter Thirty-Seven – coming February 6
Rebecca Frost 