Catch up on the previous chapters here
Ben thought it looked like a conference room, but he’d never been interrogated before, so maybe it wasn’t actually a conference room. They didn’t hustle him into it, exactly, but they seemed on edge until the door was closed. There were a couple other people—agents, he assumed—who looked at them a bit curiously, then all reacted the same way: their eyes got big and they very clearly feigned nonchalance.
Her boyfriend’s dad still worked here, huh? Maybe her boyfriend’s dad killed her. Or, maybe, this boyfriend—she’d had a boyfriend?—killed her, and the dad was covering it up. Could Ben make it work? The boyfriend wouldn’t have killed the roommate thinking it was her, the way some of the theories were running, but …
There was a coffee pot and a mini fridge in here, so it probably wasn’t an interrogation room. Jack got the coffee going and nodded down at the fridge. “Help yourself. You mind if we record this?”
He was pretty sure he wasn’t allowed to mind. “Maybe I should call my agent?” he suggested, making sure he sounded uncertain. “If I’m talking about the book. I don’t … well. I don’t know how this goes.”
There was a knock on the door and Tyler went to open it, but only just enough to accept the delivery of some legal tablets and a copy of Since You Went Away.
A clearly worn copy. Ben felt the pride swell up in his chest, ready to burst, even though the people reading it had combed through it so closely for a killer.
“I think you’re fine,” Tyler offered, holding the book up as his evidence. “It’s already out there, right? They’re not changing anything in it at this late date.”
That was true, but he hesitated a moment longer anyway before opening the fridge—he didn’t actually want anything—and pulling out a tiny bottle of water. It would give him something to fiddle with, anyway, and anyone in his position would be nervous. They were accusing him of having written a love letter to a murderess, after all. He even took the chair Tyler gestured to, which of course put him across from the agent and with his back to the coffee pot so they’d have to circle him for a refill and make him decide whether to turn and face them or let them just lurk back there.
When he’d started that sentence about calling someone, Tyler had winced. He thought the last word was going to be lawyer. Jack didn’t have such a tell. It was a good thing to note.
They settled in across from him, trying for casual with a slight underpinning of urgency, and it helped him relax. Maybe guilty people fell for their act, but it was all too clear to him.
Jack slurped some of his coffee and opened a thin manila folder. “You’re born and raised in Kalamazoo, right?”
He nodded.
“Went into the workforce right after high school … D&L Janitorial … started your own business in late 2019 … how’d that work through COVID?”
Ben let the smirk linger for a moment because that was the right reaction: show the natural one, then realize it wasn’t the socially acceptable one. “I felt like I was fleecing some of those people. They’d invite me in, hide out in a room, and have me deep clean the entire place.”
“And now they call you for crime scenes,” Tyler mused. “You must’ve seen some things.”
The wince could stay longer. “I don’t really like to think about it. The stuff that can happen around here. But, yeah, that’s me. I took over for Dirk when he retired, so … it was kind of a ready-made spot to step into.”
Baseline. They were getting his baseline. It was supposed to make him relax so they could see what he looked like when he told the truth and compare it to how he acted later, when he answered the big questions. So this was the time to fake his tells: start peeling the label off the water bottle and stop himself. Let his leg jiggle. Rub at his mouth. Nothing too extreme, because he hadn’t thought to start any of this back at his house, but hey, they were his usual nervous tics. He’d probably done them anyway, without thinking, just because two strangers in suits had shown up at his door.
“And you live alone?” Tyler asked, and why the hell did that matter?
Baseline questions. They were just establishing his baseline. “Yeah.” He tried a smile. “Ladies don’t exactly flock to you when you drive the clean-up van.”
“No family?”
“No. Ma died a couple years back.” This was usually where he added something like It wasn’t COVID, but that would be oversharing. It was a recognized stress reaction, and he wasn’t supposed to be overly stressed just now. That would come in a minute. Did they think he didn’t know how this went?
“So you were with D&L in 2018 and most of 2019.”
Here we go. “Yes?”
“D&L cleaned between renters at the Sussex Apartments.”
He nodded. “Yeah, sure. I cleaned there a lot.”
“Including numbers 12 and 17.”
This called for a blink. “Sure. I picked places I know. It’s another trick—like the faces?” Except he didn’t name the apartment complex in the book. He didn’t use the real name, and he hadn’t made up a name. It was just the place where Rosie lived, so the name didn’t matter, because there wasn’t another apartment complex and no need to make a distinction.
Jack nodded, even though he’d been speaking to Tyler and telling Tyler about the faces. “It’s the right numbers, though. Ellie Dawson and Heidi Phillips were in 12, and Trevor Laitila and his girlfriend were in 17.”
He shrugged and nodded. “Yeah, sure. The numbers must’ve been in the articles or on the news, and they stuck, because I knew them. They make sense, anyway. First-floor apartments, small building …”
Tyler flipped a page in the folder they seemed to be sharing and bingo, there was the exact article about Heidi that listed her apartment number.
They’d had a hell of a time renting that unit out ever since. As far as Ben knew, it was empty right now, even though they’d done a complete renovation on it. It wasn’t haunted—he didn’t believe in ghosts—but people just couldn’t walk into 12 without thinking about what happened there, like it was the Overlook’s 237. It didn’t matter that this wasn’t the same furniture, or the same carpet, or the same bathtub, or that nothing was still in the place the old ones had been. He was also pretty sure those unlucky enough to end up in 10 or 14 also freaked themselves out with auditory hallucinations, even though nobody had reported hearing anything on the evening of May 24. Whoever killed Heidi Phillips was a ghost.
Unless it was her own roommate, who’d slipped in quietly and unnoticed because she was simply supposed to be there.
“Did you follow the case when it was happening?” Jack asked.
Ben nodded. “You couldn’t really get away from the first one. The Morgan girl. They really kept hammering it on the news, you know? Beautiful college co-ed, how’d she fall so low?”
“They held that candlelight vigil,” Tyler reminded them. “We’ve got footage, actually. Dawson’s there, with Fisher and Phillips.”
He shook his head and shifted. “You don’t actually think Lida-Rose Dawson … killed them?”
“I’m afraid we do.” Jack shrugged to show that no, he wasn’t actually sorry about it.
“But why not put out a warrant?” he pressed. “Track her down that way.”
Jack snorted and slouched casually. “Because she’s disappeared. There’s no record of her past June 2019, so she’s hidden deep. The last thing we want to do is cause a country-wide panic and send lynch mobs after totally innocent women who look a bit like her—”
“And give her a warning so she can flee,” Tyler put in.
“— so it’s fallen to the wayside.” He waited a beat. “Plus Hillier’s muzzled it. He doesn’t want us digging for her, so he’s decided she’s presumed dead and all but closed the case.”
Hillier. That was a slip. Her boyfriend’s last name was Hillier. “How do you know she’s not dead?”
Tyler sighed. “We don’t. But, if she’s still out there …”
“Why don’t you start at the beginning?” Jack suggested. “Why’d you pick this case for a romance novel?”
“It’s not a romance,” he corrected, because that was something he knew had to become habit. “People pick up a romance, they expect a happy ending. It’s romantic, but not a romance.”
Jack just gestured for him to go on.
“Well …” He opened the little bottle and finally took a sip. “It was everywhere when it happened. My mom really fixated on it. She didn’t live with me—I don’t think I could’ve stood that—but she started getting worried, even though they weren’t actually anything like her. You know?”
Jack and Tyler both nodded, so he steadied himself with a breath and prepared to go on.
To: MathyMart
From: LidaRoseElizabeth
Sent: March 19, 2019 2:14PM
This is your warning that, as soon as I see you tomorrow, I’m handcuffing you to that bed and you’re not getting away until I’m done with you.
To: LidaRoseElizabeth
From: MathyMart
Sent: March 19, 2019 3:19PM
Well now. Glad I didn’t read that until all the students left. You don’t NEED the handcuffs, but I’m not saying no.
To: MathyMart
From: LidaRoseElizabeth
Sent: March 19, 2019 3:23PM
You’re not supposed to have your phone out in class and I know you sure as hell don’t check this email on your school computer. XXX
To: LidaRoseElizabeth
From: MathyMart
Sent: March 19, 2019 3:28PM
Are those kisses or is that the rating for tomorrow night’s activities? About to get in the car and head home. Call at 7?
To: MathyMart
From: LidaRoseElizabeth
Sent: March 19, 2019 3:31PM
It can be both. Drive safe. Talk at 7.
Chapter Sixteen – coming January 16
Rebecca Frost 