Darker Than Any Shadow

Chapter Thirty-five

“It’s called a Dirrrty South,” I said. “Here, try it.”

Rico moved the straw to his side of the glass and took a sip. Behind him the dance floor was a slow grind. I tried to shake another cigarette out of an empty pack.

Rico pushed the straw my way. “You were saying?”

“Nothing really, just that sometimes we’re only sex, you know? Hormones and chemistry, nothing real. I mean, Trey’s real. Mostly real. But sometimes—”

“No, not Trey. We’d moved on to the murder.”

“We had? Which one?”

“Both.” He looked puzzled. “I think.”

I stared into the drink. “I can’t keep track. It was a robbery, it was a serial killing. People getting shot, people getting strangled, snakes appearing out of nowhere.”

Rico shook his head. “I still don’t get the snake.”

“The snake’s innocent. That’s all I know.”

I looked Rico in the eye. He’d put the silver studs back in his eyebrow, and they pulsed with the strobes of the dance floor.

I leaned closer. “I know you did it.”

“Did what?”

“Stuck Lex’s phone in Trey’s pocket.”

Rico narrowed his eyes. “Really? And how do you know this?”

“Because of the diagram thingie. See?” I drew little circles on the table. “There’s you, and there’s Lex, and there’s no way you and Lex had a fight in the parking lot that did not end with you taking his phone away and erasing every blackmailish thing on it. Plus, the night of the memorial, you were sitting at the table where I put Trey’s jacket while I doctored his scraped-up hand. So you had easy access.”

“You figured all that out with a diagram?”

“I did. And also because Cricket brought over a bunch of Lex’s stuff yesterday afternoon, and I am certain—absolutely certain—that you told her to do it. Which means you people are working me outside the lines.”

Rico regarded me over the edge of the drink. “Really?”

“Really. And I understand. The situation required a certain…flexibility.”

The music pounded behind him, the bass thumping so strongly I could feel it in my chest. He beckoned me closer. I moved my face right next to his, so close I could feel the rasp of his whiskers.

“You are known for your flexibility,” he said.

“Exactly.” I patted his face. “And while I appreciate the compliment, let’s deal straight up from now on, okay?”

He nodded seriously. “Okay.”

“Good. Now about that phone.”

He leaned even closer, his breath sweet with Courvoisier. “You’re right. I put that phone in Trey’s pocket.”

“I knew it!”

“But I’m not the one who took it.”

And then he explained. And then the rest of it made sense too.

***

Back at Trey’s, the apartment was dark. I moved as quietly as I could, even though there was no need. Trey didn’t just sleep like a baby; he slept like a drugged narcoleptic baby. I could crash through the plate glass window, and he wouldn’t notice. I changed in the dark, kicking my smoky, sweaty clothes into the corner. In the half-light, I saw Trey’s profile against the pillow, his breathing as regular as a metronome.

I closed the bedroom door and switched on the floor lamp in the living room. All of my papers and files were now sorted on the coffee table, with color-coded stickers on the tabs. I saw nine folders, one for each team member, plus one for Padre and one for Jackson and one for Debbie and one for each murder. A separate pile included all my other research—pythons, stage magic, timed incendiary devices—with everything organized alphabetically and cross-indexed. He’d placed Lex’s box next to that stack. I opened it and smiled. He’d paper-clipped all the scraps together chronologically.

The one thing he hadn’t filed was the DVD from Garrity. He had, however, marked it with a yellow sticky note emblazoned with a question mark.

I opened the case and stuck it into the DVD player. Then I dragged myself to the sofa, grabbed the remote, and hit play.

“This better not be some lame public service announcement,” I muttered.

It wasn’t. The first thing I saw was a wedding cake, triple-tiered, as tall and blinding white as Mt. Everest. A harp played in the background, violins too. The camera work was a little unsteady, an amateur at work no doubt, panning a buffet table spread with hors d’oeuvres, sherbet-colored gifts, a sign-in book.

And then.

Trey.

He wore a black tuxedo with a gray morning tie, inexpertly knotted. This Trey had no silvery scars at his temple, none on his chin either. His face was still a sketch artist’s dream—angles and planes, cheekbones and jaw line—but softer. This was a Trey I’d never met, and as I watched, he addressed the camera’s operator, his voice serious.

“I’m sorry, but I cannot reveal any details from last night. It would be a violation of my sworn oath.”

The tux was a standard rental, not Armani. And his hair, which I’d only seen short and precisely combed, tumbled across his forehead.

“Just one little thing?” the flirty female voice behind the camera pleaded, deep South, teasing. “C’mon, Trey.”

He shook his head and put a finger to his lips. “It’s my formal duty as your brother’s best man to deny your request.”

And then he grinned.

My heart clutched. I leaned forward and touched the image of his face, right at the corner of his mouth. He had a dimple when he smiled. Suddenly, Garrity was on-screen, his arm around Trey’s shoulders. He too was tuxedo-clad and twice as untidy, but hearty and happy and so bursting with good cheer he was practically shiny. His marriage may have ended in ashes, but it had begun in joy.

“You tell her,” he said. “Last night is strictly on a need-to-know basis.”

The woman laughed, and the camera shook. “Trey Seaver, you look like the itty-bitty groom on top of that cake. Maybe you should be getting married too.”

Trey shot his gaze sideways, still grinning though. “Cut it out, Annabelle.”

Until that moment, the Trey on the screen was a stranger, but suddenly I knew him. I recognized the slanting throwaway glance, the embarrassed disconnect. It was still paired with that dazzling smile, so it was as foreign as Rome, but I knew its underneath—shyness, bafflement, a tender confusion.

As I watched, Trey disengaged smoothly from Garrity’s embrace and ducked to his left, right into the path of an older woman in a dark green dress. She tsk-tsked, hands on hips. She was short, with salt-and pepper hair and a plain face, but her eyes made her beautiful—large and heavily lashed, as blue as liquid sapphire.

Trey’s eyes.

“Already with your hair,” she said, a hint of Irish lilt in her voice. “What have you been doing, son, climbing the trellis?”

The tears came hot and fast then. Siobhian. Trey’s mother. She’d died at the scene of the accident, and except for the rosary beads in his glove compartment that he didn’t talk about, there wasn’t a single piece of her in his life anymore.

Onscreen, he made an exasperated noise, but still smiled as the camera moved on to include other guests, waving and laughing. I shut off the DVD and sat there in the silent darkness for a while.

Then I wiped my eyes, blew my nose, and snatched up my phone. When Garrity answered, his voice thick with sleep, I said, “You’re a son of a bitch, you know that?”

“What?”

“The video.”

“Oh. Yeah.” He exhaled slowly. “It wasn’t supposed to upset you.”

“Just scare me.”

He sighed. “Only a little.”

I hiccupped back a sob.

“Ah hell, I’m sorry. I should have warned you. But I wanted you to understand I was serious when I said there’s something at stake here.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning he’s got it in his head that he’s supposed to protect you and your friends, and he’s going to do it come hell or high water. That’s why he asked me to go tonight. He couldn’t, but he had to do something, and I was the best solution he could come up with.”

Perseveration. Once Trey initiated a behavioral sequence, there was no stopping, no veering, and no reverse.

“So what’s that got to do with me?”

“It means you’ve got to stop keeping him up all hours and dragging him from suspect to suspect.”

“I don’t always drag him, you know. Trey likes unpuzzling things.”

“I don’t care what he likes, I care about what he needs. He’s found something that works, as screwed up as it is. But if you push him too far, he’s gonna break. And if he breaks, that guy on the video will be gone forever. And I miss that guy like crazy.”

I’d known this about Garrity, but I hadn’t understood the sum of his loss until that second. The Trey on the screen hadn’t come back. A version of him still existed, one tempered by the flame, honed like steel. But not Garrity’s Trey. Not anymore.

“I’m going to bed now,” I said.

And I did. But I didn’t sleep. Instead, I lay there for a long time, in the layered dark, listening to the steady respiration of the only Trey Seaver I knew.

Fiercely missing the Trey Seaver I didn’t.