Fool Me Once (25 page)

“Can I get you anything?” Melissa Lee asked.

Maya shook her head.

Melissa gave half a smile and looked at Swain. With touching concern in her voice, she said, “Are you sure you want me to leave, Christopher?”

“Yes, please.” His tone was tentative. “I think this is an important step for me.”

Melissa nodded. “I do too.”

“So we will need some privacy.”

“I understand. I’ll be nearby just in case. Just holler.”

Melissa gave Maya another half smile and left. She closed the doors behind her.

“Wow,” Swain said when they were alone. “You’re really beautiful.”

Maya didn’t know what to say to that, so she kept her mouth closed.

He smiled and openly looked her up and down. “You’re stunning
and
you give off that air of unattainability. Like you’re above it all.” He shook his head. “I bet Joe couldn’t resist you the moment he saw you, am I right?”

Now was not the time to play a feminist card or get offended. She needed him to keep talking. “Pretty much, yeah.”

“Let me guess. Joe gave you some cheesy pickup line, something funny but maybe self-deprecating and vulnerable. I’m right, aren’t I?”

“You are.”

“Swept you off your feet, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Oh man, that Joe. The dude was three steps above charismatic when he wanted to be.” Swain shook his head again as the smile started to fall away. “So is he really dead? Joe, I mean.”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t know. No news in here. One of the rules. No social media, no Internet, no outside world. We get to check our email once a day. That’s how I saw your message. Once I did . . . Well, my doctor said it would be okay to read the news report. I have to say, I was shocked to hear about Joe. Would you like to sit down?”

The solarium was clearly a more recent addition that was trying to fit in with the old and not totally succeeding. There was a snapped-together vibe about it. The roof was a dome with faux stained glass. There were plants, sure, but fewer than one might imagine in a room dubbed a solarium. Two leather chairs sat in the middle of the room facing each other. Maya took one, Swain the other.

“I can’t believe he’s dead.”

Yeah, Maya thought, she was getting that a lot.

“You were there, right? When he was shot?”

“Yes,” Maya said.

“The news reports said you escaped unharmed.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I ran away.”

Swain looked at her as though he didn’t entirely believe that. “It must have been scary for you.”

She said nothing.

“The news outlets described it as a robbery gone wrong.”

“Yes.”

“But we both know that’s not true, don’t we, Maya?” He put his hand through his hair. “You wouldn’t be here if it were just a robbery.”

His manner was starting to unnerve her. “Right now,” Maya said, “I’m just trying to put together what happened.”

“It’s incredible,” he said. “I still can’t believe it.”

There was an odd smile on his face.

“Believe what?”

“That Joe is dead. Sorry for harping on that. It’s just that he was . . . I don’t know if it would be right to say he was ‘so full of life.’ That’s so hackneyed, isn’t it? But let’s say Joe was a life force. You know? He seemed so strong, so powerful, like a fire that raged so out of control you could never put it out. There was almost something—I know this is silly—immortal about him . . .”

Maya shifted in her seat. “Christopher?”

He was gazing out a window.

“You were on the yacht the night Andrew went overboard.”

He didn’t move.

“What really happened to his brother Andrew?”

Swain swallowed hard. A tear escaped from his eye and slid down his cheek.

“Christopher?”

“I didn’t see it, Maya. I stayed on the lower deck.”

There was a chill in his voice.

“But you know something.”

Another tear.

“Please tell me,” Maya said. “Did Andrew really fall?”

His voice was like a stone dropping down a well. “I don’t know. But I don’t think so.”

“So what happened to him?”

“I think . . . ,” Christopher Swain said before taking a deep breath, summoning some inner resolve, and starting again. “I think Joe pushed him off the boat.”

S
wain sat with both hands
gripping the chair arms.

“It started when Theo Mora came to Franklin Biddle Academy. Or maybe that was when I started to see it.”

They had pushed their chairs closer together, almost knee-to-knee, somehow needing to be physically closer in this room that seemed to be growing ever colder.

“You probably think it was the old cliché about the rich not wanting the poor sullying their elite institutions. You can almost picture it, can’t you? We rich kids all ganged up on Theo or picked on him. But that wasn’t how it was.”

“How was it?” Maya asked.

“Theo was funny and outgoing. He didn’t make the mistake of backing off or kowtowing to us. He fit right in. We all liked him.
He didn’t seem all that different in many ways. I know people want to paint the rich one way and the poor another, but when you’re kids—and that’s what we were, or what I thought we were, just kids—you just want to hang out and belong.”

He wiped his eyes.

“And it didn’t hurt that Theo was a great soccer player. Not good. Great. I was thrilled. We had a chance to win it all that year. Not just the state as a prep school, which we did, but win the entire state tournament outright, including all the big public and parochial schools. Theo was that good. He could score from anywhere. And maybe that was the problem.”

“How so?”

“He wasn’t a threat to me. I was a midfielder. He wasn’t a threat to his roommate and best friend, Andrew. Andrew was a goalie.”

Swain stopped and looked at Maya.

“But Joe was a striker too,” she said.

Swain nodded. “I’m not saying he was openly hostile to Theo, but . . . I’ve known Joe since we were in first grade. We grew up together. We were always captains of the soccer team. And when you spend that much time with a person, you get a chance to see the facade slip away sometimes. The anger that would come out. His flashes of rage. When we were in eighth grade, Joe put a kid in the hospital with a baseball bat. I don’t remember what it was even about anymore. I just remember three of us pulling him off the poor kid. Cracked his skull. A year later, this girl Joe liked, Marian Barford, was going to go to the dance with Tom Mendiburu. Two days before, there’s a fire in the science lab and Tom barely gets out alive.”

Maya swallowed away the bile. “No one reported any of this?”

“You didn’t know Joe’s dad, did you?”

“No.”

“He was an intimidating man. There were rumors he was in with some rough customers. Whatever, payoffs were made. The family’s more, shall we say, unsavory friends would stop by and request your silence. Plus, well, Joe was good at it. He didn’t leave a lot of evidence. We talked about his charm before. He could fake contrition like nobody’s business. He would apologize. He would cajole. He was rich and powerful, and those moments, that darker side, he could really keep it hidden when he had to. Again, I remind you, I knew him my whole life. And even I saw it only a handful of times. But when I did . . .”

The tears started coming again.

“You’re probably wondering what I’m doing in a place like this.”

She hadn’t been. She had figured that he was an addict of some kind and was here for help. What else could it be? She wanted him to keep telling the story, but if he needed this sidetrack, it would probably be a mistake to stop him.

“I’m here,” he said, “because of Joe.”

She tried not to make a face.

“I know, I know, I’m supposed to take responsibility for myself. That’s what they always say. And yeah, I keep trading one addiction for another. I’ve been in here for booze, for pills, for coke . . . you name it. But I wasn’t always like this. In school I used to get teased because I wouldn’t have more than a beer. Didn’t like the taste. I tried pot once my senior year. It made me nauseated.”

“Christopher?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to Theo?”

“It was supposed to be a prank. That was what Joe told us. I don’t know if I believed him or not, but . . . I was so weak. Check that. I’m still weak. Joe was the leader. I was the follower. Andrew was a follower too. And really, what was going to be the harm? A little hazing. It happens all the time at schools like Franklin Biddle. So that night, we jumped Theo. You know what I mean? We came to his room—me, Joe, Andrew was already there—and we jumped on him and we carried him downstairs.”

He was looking off now, the thousand-yard stare, and a funny smile came to his face. “You know something?”

“What?”

“Theo went along with it. Like he got it. He was getting hazed. This was part of it. He was that cool a kid. I remember that he was smiling, you know, like this was all good. And then we get down to that room and we throw him in the chair. Joe started tying him up. We helped out. We’re all laughing, and Theo is pretending to call for help, that kind of thing. I remember I left this one knot loose. Joe came by and tightened it. Then, when Theo was all tied down, Joe took out a funnel. You know the kind. For drinking? He stuck it into Theo’s mouth, and I remember Theo’s eyes changed then. Like, I don’t know, like maybe he was starting to get it. Two other guys were there. Larry Raia and Neil Kornfeld. We were all laughing, and Andrew started to pour beer down the funnel. Guys were chanting, ‘Chug chug.’ And then, the rest is like a dream. A nightmare. Like I still can’t believe it all happened, but at some point, Joe replaced the beer with grain alcohol. I remember Andrew saying, ‘Wait, Joe, stop . . .’”

His voice faded away.

“What happened?” Maya asked, but it seemed obvious now.

“Suddenly Theo’s leg started thrashing, like he was having a seizure or something.”

Christopher Swain started to cry. Maya wanted to reach out her hand and put it on his shoulder. At the same time, she also wanted to punch him in the face. So instead she just sat there and waited.

“I’ve never told that story before yesterday. Not to anyone. But after your email . . . my doctor, she knows some of it now. That’s why she thought it would be good to talk to you. But that night, I mean, that’s when I went off the rails. I was so scared. I knew that if I said something, Joe would kill me. Not just back then. Now. Even now. I still feel . . .”

Maya tried to keep him talking. “So you, what, stuck the body in the basement?”

“Joe did.”

“But you were there, right?”

Swain nodded.

“So I doubt Joe lifted him alone, did he?”

He shook his head.

“Who helped Joe?”

“Andrew.” He looked up. “Joe made Andrew help him.”

“Is that what made Andrew crack?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Andrew would have cracked anyway. Andrew, me . . . we were never the same after that.”

Javier Mora had been right. It wasn’t grief. It was guilt.

“So then what happened?”

“What could I do?”

There were plenty of things he could have done, but Maya wasn’t there to prosecute or to give him absolution. She wanted information. That was all.

“I had to keep the secret, didn’t I? So I smothered it away. I tried to go on with my regular life, but nothing was the same. My grades tumbled. I couldn’t concentrate. That’s when I started drinking. Yes, I know it sounds like a convenient excuse—”

“Christopher?”

“What?”

“You all ended up on that yacht six weeks later.”

He closed his eyes.

“What happened?”

“What do you think happened, Maya? Come on. You know now. So you tell me. You put it together.”

Maya leaned forward. “So you’re all on that boat heading for Bermuda. You all start drinking. Probably you especially. It’s the first time all of you have been together since Theo’s death. Andrew is there. He’s been in therapy, but it hasn’t done him any good. The guilt is destroying him. So he makes a decision. I don’t know exactly how it worked, Christopher, so maybe you can tell me. Did Andrew threaten you guys?”

“Not threaten,” Christopher said. “Not really. He just . . . He started pleading with us. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t eat. God, he looked horrible. He just said that we had to come forward because he didn’t know how long he could keep this bottled up inside. I was so drunk I could barely understand what he was saying.”

“And then?”

“And then Andrew went outside to the upper deck. To get away
from us. A few minutes later, Joe followed him.” Swain shrugged. “The end.”

“You never told anyone?”

“Never.”

“The other two guys, Larry Raia and Neil Kornfeld . . .”

“Neil was going to Yale. He ended up changing his mind and headed to Stanford. Larry went to school overseas, I think. Paris maybe. We finished up our senior year in a daze and never saw each other again.”

“And you’ve kept this secret for all these years.”

Swain nodded.

“So why now?” Maya asked. “Why are you willing to tell the truth now?”

“You know why.”

“No, I’m not sure I do.”

“Because Joe is dead,” he said. “Because I finally feel safe.”

C
hristopher Swain’s words
echoed in her ears as she walked back to the guest lot.

“Because Joe is dead . . .”

In the end, it all came back to that nanny cam, didn’t it?

Time to get analytical here. There were three possibilities that explained what she had seen on that nanny cam:

One, the most likely, was that someone had set it up using some kind of Photoshop program. The technology existed. She had only seen the video for a brief time. It could be done easily enough.

Two, almost tied for most likely, Maya had imagined or hallucinated Joe, or in some other way, her mind had played tricks on her and thus conjured up the image of Joe being alive. Eileen Finn liked to send her those optical illusion videos, where you think
you’re seeing something and then the camera moves just a little and you realize that your eye has preconceived a certain image. Add in Maya’s PTSD, her meds, her sister’s murder, her guilt about that, the night in Central Park, all the rest . . . how could Maya really dismiss that as a real possibility?

Three, least likely, Joe was somehow still alive.

If the answer was Two—it was all in her head—there was little to be done about it. She still needed to go through all this because the truth, while it won’t set you free, will help right the world in some way. But if the answer was either One (Photoshop) or Three (Joe was alive), then it meant one thing without question:

Someone was screwing with her big-time.

And if it was either One or Three, it almost certainly meant something else: Isabella had lied. She had seen Joe on that nanny cam video. The only reason Isabella would have pretended not to see Joe, pepper-sprayed Maya, grabbed the SD card, and then gone into hiding was fairly simple: She was in on it.

Maya got back into her car, turned on the engine, and hit her playlist. Imagine Dragons came on telling her not to get too close, it’s dark inside, it’s where her demons hide.

They didn’t know the half of it.

She clicked on the app for the GPS she’d attached to Hector’s car. First off, assuming Isabella was in on it, she wasn’t the kind to act alone. Her mother, Rosa, who had been on the yacht that night, would be in on it. Her brother, Hector, too. Second—man, she was thinking arithmetically today—there was a chance, of course, Isabella had gone someplace far away, but Maya doubted it. She was around. It was just a question of finding her.

She retrieved the gun from her glove box, checked the GPS,
and saw that Hector’s truck was currently parked in the servants’ complex at Farnwood. Maya clicked the history button, seeing all the places the truck had traveled over the past few days. The only place that didn’t seem to fit the work pattern of a landscaper was an address he constantly visited in a Paterson, New Jersey, housing project. He could, of course, have friends or a girlfriend there. But something about it didn’t feel right.

So now what?

Even if Isabella was hiding there, it wasn’t as though she could just go to the address and start knocking on doors. She needed to be more proactive. It was coming down to it now. She had most of the answers. She needed to find out the rest and put an end to it once and for all.

Her mobile rang. She saw on the caller ID that it was Shane.

“Hello?”

“What have you done?”

His tone chilled her blood.

“What are you talking about?”

“Detective Kierce.”

“What about him?”

“He knows, Maya.”

She said nothing. The walls were starting to close in on her now.

“He knows I tested that bullet for you.”

“Shane . . .”

“The same gun killed Claire and Joe, Maya. How the hell can that be?”

“Shane, listen to me. You have to trust me, okay?”

“You keep saying that. ‘Trust me.’ Like it’s some kind of mantra.”

“I shouldn’t need to say it.” Pointless, she thought. There was no way she could explain it to him right now. “I gotta run.”

“Maya?”

She hung up the phone and closed her eyes.

Let it go,
she told herself.

She started down the quiet road, distracted by Shane’s call, by what Christopher Swain had told her, by all the emotions and thoughts swirling through her head.

Maybe that explained what happened next.

A van started coming toward her from the opposite direction. The tree-lined road was narrow, so she slowly shifted her vehicle a little to the right to give the van room to pass her. But as the van got close, it suddenly swung to its left, cutting in front of her.

Maya slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting the van. Her body jutted forward, restrained by the straps, even as the lizard-instinct part of the brain came to a realization:

She was being attacked.

The van had cut off any forward motion, so she was reaching for the gear to put the car in reverse when she heard the knocking on her window. She looked and saw the gun facing her head. In her peripheral vision, she saw someone else at the window on the passenger side.

“It’s okay.” The man’s voice was hard to hear through the window. “We aren’t here to hurt you.”

How had the man gotten to the side of her car so fast? He couldn’t have gotten out of the van. There wasn’t that kind of
time. This had been carefully orchestrated. Someone had realized that she would be at the Solemani Recovery Center. The road was quiet. Very little traffic. So these two men had probably been hiding behind a tree. The van cuts her off. They step out.

Maya just sat very still and considered her options.

“Please step out of the car and come with us.”

Option One: Reach for the gear and shift the car in reverse.

Option Two: Go for the gun in the hip holster.

The problem with both options was simple. The man had his gun at her head. Maybe his friend by the other window did too. She wasn’t Wyatt Earp and this wasn’t the O.K. Corral. If the man wanted to shoot her, she would have no chance of reaching either the gun or the gearshift in time.

Which left Option Three: Get out of the car—

That was when the man with the gun said, “Come on. Joe is waiting.”

The side door of the van began to slide open. Sitting in her car, both hands on the wheel, Maya could feel her heart pounding against her rib cage. The van door stopped halfway. Maya squinted, but she couldn’t see inside. She turned to the man with the gun.

“Joe . . . ?” she said.

“Yeah,” the man said, his voice suddenly tender. “Come on. You want to see him, right?”

She looked at the man’s face for the first time. Then she looked at the other man. He didn’t have a gun in his hand.

Option Three . . .

Maya started to cry.

“Mrs. Burkett?”

Through the tears, she said, “Joe . . .”

“Yes.” The man’s voice grew insistent. “Unlock the door, Mrs. Burkett.”

Still crying, Maya weakly fumbled for the unlock button. She pressed it and pulled the door handle. The man stepped back to let the door swing. He still had the gun on her. Maya half fell out of the car. The gunman started to reach for her arm, but Maya, still with the tears, shook her head and said, “No need.”

She straightened up and then stumbled toward the van. The gunman let her go. And that told Maya everything.

The van door slid open a little more.

Four men, Maya calculated. The driver, the van-door opener, the passenger-side guy, the gunman.

As she got closer to the van, all her training, all those hours in the simulator and at the shoot house, started to kick in. She felt an odd calm now, a moment of near Zen, that feeling when you are in the eye of the hurricane. It was all about to happen now, and one way or the other, if she came out of it alive or dead, she was being proactive. She wasn’t controlling her own destiny—that sort of thinking was nonsense—but when you’ve trained and when you’re prepared, you can act with a sort of comforting confidence.

Still stumbling, Maya turned her head just a little, just the slightest bit, because what she saw now would decide everything. The gunman had not grabbed hold of her when she got out of the car. That was the reason she had poured on the fake tears and semihysterics. To see how he would react. He had fallen for it. He had let her go.

He hadn’t frisked her.

That meant three things . . .

She glanced behind her. The man had indeed lowered his gun to his side. He had relaxed. He felt she was no longer an active threat.

One, no one had warned the man that she’d be armed . . .

Maya had been planning the sequence from the moment she started with the tears. The tears were designed to act as a weapon—to make the kidnappers relax; to make them underestimate her; to give her time, before getting out of the car, to plan exactly what she would do.

Two, Joe would know that she’d be armed . . .

Her hand was already near her hip as she started to run. Here’s a fun fact most people don’t know. Shooting a handgun with accuracy is difficult. Shooting a handgun at a moving target is very difficult. Seventy-six percent of the time, trained police officers miss the shot between three and nine feet. The percentage is north of ninety percent for civilians.

So you always moved.

Maya looked toward the back of the van. Then, without so much as a misstep or warning or even hesitation, she tucked into a roll, hit the pavement as she pulled her Glock out of its holster, and came up aiming directly at the man with the gun. The man had noticed the move, had started to react, but it was too late.

Maya aimed for the center of his chest.

In real life, you never shoot to wound. You point the weapon at the center of the chest, the largest target, the best chance of hitting at least something should your aim be off, and you just keep firing.

Which is what Maya did.

The man went down.

Three, the conclusion: Joe had not sent them.

Several things happened at once.

Maya kept rolling, kept moving, so she wasn’t a stationary target. She turned to where the other man was, the one who had been at her passenger side. She swung her gun up, ready to fire, but the man ducked away behind her car.

Keep moving, Maya . . .

The van door slammed shut. The engine roared to life. Maya was behind it now, using it as a shield in case the other guy came up firing. She obviously couldn’t stay. The van was about to move, probably in reverse, probably trying to crush her.

Maya made the instinctive decision.

Flee.

The man with the gun was down. The guys in the van were panicking. The final man was hidden behind her.

When in doubt, do the simple thing.

Still using the van as something of a shield, Maya ran into the woods. The van shot backward, almost hitting her. Maya stayed to its side, and then, fully blocked off from the guy by her passenger door, she turned and ran the last few feet.

Don’t stop . . .

The woods were too thick for her to look behind her while she was running, but at some point, she ducked behind a tree and risked a quick look. The man who had been hiding behind the passenger seat was not following her. He sprinted straight for the van and dove in while the van was still moving. The van completed the K-turn and, with tires peeling the pavement, shot back down the road.

They had left the gunman she had shot by the side of the road.

The entire episode, from the moment Maya tucked and rolled until now, had probably taken fewer than ten seconds.

Now what?

The decision took almost no time. She had no choice really. If she called it in or waited for the authorities, she would certainly be arrested. Being in the park when Joe was shot, finding Tom Douglass, the ballistics tests, now another man shot with her own gun—there would be no quick explanation.

She hurried back to the road. The gunman was flat on his back, legs splayed.

He could be faking it, but Maya doubted it. Still she kept her gun at the ready.

No need. He was dead.

She had killed the man.

No time to dwell on that. A car would be coming any second. She quickly went through his pockets and grabbed his wallet. No time to check his ID now. She debated grabbing his phone—she wouldn’t be able to use hers anymore—but that seemed too risky for obvious reasons. Finally, she considered taking his gun, which was still clutched in his hand, but that was really the only evidence, if everything else went south, that she had acted in self-defense.

Plus, she still had her Glock.

She had already done the calculations in her head. The gunman’s body was near the side of the road. It wouldn’t take much to push it two or three feet and then let it roll down the embankment.

With one quick glance to make sure no cars were approaching, that was exactly what Maya did.

The gunman rolled more easily than she would have thought,
or maybe adrenaline had made her stronger. He slid straight down, his limp body smacking into a tree.

He was, at least temporarily, out of sight.

The body would be found, of course. Maybe in an hour. Maybe in a day. But in the meantime, it would buy Maya enough time.

She rushed back to her car and slid into the driver’s seat. Her phone was going crazy now. Shane calling her back. Probably Kierce starting to wonder what the hell was going on too. In the distance, a car started coming toward her. Maya kept her calm. She started up her car and gently hit the accelerator. She was just another visitor departing the Solemani Recovery Center. If there were CCTV cameras anywhere nearby, they would show a van speeding off and then, a minute or two later, a normal-driving BMW that had an excuse to be in the area driving by.

Deep breaths, Maya. In and out. Flex, relax . . .

Five minutes later, she was back on the highway.

*   *   *

Maya put some distance
between herself and the dead body.

She turned off her phone, and then, because she wasn’t sure if the phone could still be tracked, she smashed it against the steering wheel. Thirty miles later, she stopped in a CVS parking lot. She checked the gunman’s wallet. No ID, but he did have four hundred dollars in cash. Perfect. Maya was low and didn’t want to use an ATM.