She had an angry—and possibly booze-soaked—message from Adam on her real phone:
you bitch you should have just left us alone. You think that _oreen is I to leave me bacuase of what you said to her then you ha ve another thing comgin. she is as angry at you as I am and amybe more now that I told her the wayt hat you tricked me and stoe what was mine. She tld me everything/ bitch bitch bitch I hoper you die.
She set the cell down on the table, feeling as though it had bitten her. She ought to have seen that the situation was going to go bad once she’d lifted the book. Hell, Suzie Lambton had told her it was going to blow up in her face way before that.
I hoper you die too, fuckknuckle, Charlie thought, and deleted the message.
She was trying to calculate just how much she’d screwed up, when Liam Clovin walked into the cafeteria. He was pale and skinny, with a reddish beard. Since he was a classmate of Edmund’s, she knew he had to be around her age, but the scrubs and facial hair made him seem older.
Because he’d done something with his life. Not like her. Charlie Hall, spending half her time trying to blunt her fangs and the rest of it hunting.
She waited until he’d gotten his food and found a table.
“Hello,” she said, sitting down next to him. “Mind if I sit here?”
Now, some guys think that women con artists have it easy. That all they have to do is show some leg, like Bugs Bunny hitchhiking in drag, and the mark screeches to a halt, tongue lolling.
First of all, that’s not even a little bit true.
And second of all, if a woman decides a low-cut top is necessary, that’s because cons work differently for her. Offer a man a business opportunity and he’s suspicious, not that it’s a con, but that because she’s a woman she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. It’s a delicate business, to act clever enough to be taken seriously and still make him feel like he can screw her over.
And if he wants to screw her too, well that’s an even more delicate business.
But while the disadvantages that a woman con artist had were manifold, there were advantages. For instance, women seemed less threatening. If a man had sat down across from Liam, he would have reacted differently. He might not want Charlie there, but he didn’t seem worried she was dangerous.
“No,” he said, annoyed. “I mean, yes, I do mind. I really don’t want compa—”
She reached over and took his hand. He jerked it away from her. Which made sense. Who wanted a total stranger grabbing you?
Charlie let her eyes fill with tears. She pressed her fingers to her mouth in horror. “But it’s the truth!” she sobbed, loud enough for people—including nurses and doctors—to hear her.
He started to stand. No doubt he wanted to get away from her as quickly as possible. A totally reasonable reaction. The problem with reasonable reactions, though, was that they were easy to predict.
She grabbed his wrist, and this time she spoke low enough that only he could hear. “Sit the fuck down, Liam Clovin, or I am going to make such a scene that everyone in this room is going to believe that when you treated my dying father, I smelled alcohol on your breath. I am going to be loud, and I am going to be convincing. Or you can tell me what I want to know, and I will act like you’re a sympathetic doctor comforting a patient through a tragedy. You can even pick the tragedy, if you like.”
That was the other advantage women con artists had, the flip side of not being taken seriously. To the public, they looked like marks.
“Who are you?” He was obviously furious, but he sat in the chair across from her. “What do you want?”
“This won’t take long,” she said. “I just have a few questions about Edmund Carver.”
His frown deepened. “You were at my door the other day.”
She probably had only a few minutes before he managed to shake her. “Where is he?”
“Dead,” he said.
“Try again,” she told him.
He started to stand. “I don’t need to tell you anything.”
“Maybe you also got me pregnant,” she mused.
“This isn’t a soap opera!” he hissed.
“Not yet, it isn’t,” she told him, eyebrows raised.
He glared, but he sat. Put his head in his hand. Then he grabbed his sandwich and started taking it out of the plastic. “Look, he paid me to let him keep some stuff at my apartment and to use the address for mail he didn’t want his grandfather to see. That’s it.”
“What did he keep there?” Charlie asked, wondering if it could be this easy.
“He had a closet with a padlock on it. It wasn’t any of my business what he kept in there.”
“But you knew,” Charlie said, hoping that if she sounded sure, he’d believe she was sure.
“Some.” Liam looked across the cafeteria, as though hoping to spot someone who could save him. “A spare phone. Books from his father’s collection. Clothes. His driver’s license. A fucking krugerrand, if you can believe it. He was planning on leaving, I know that.”
“Then you—what? Broke in there and sold his books to Paul Ecco.”
“He asked me to sell them!” Liam said, a little too loudly.
She smiled to let him know that he’d screwed up, because the sale of those books occurred after Remy was supposed to be dead. “And when was that?”
Liam sighed. “Okay, I saw him that night, okay? He showed up absolutely out of his mind. He was practically naked, wearing a woman’s robe he told me he swiped out of a laundromat. Bare feet. Wasn’t himself. Said he needed me to sell some books for him. I did it. I didn’t know about the girl. I didn’t know about any of it.”
“And then you helped him fake his death,” Charlie said. “You got a body out of the hospital, is that it?”
“No!” Liam half stood before realizing how many people had turned to look at him. He sat back down, even angrier. “No, of course not. I had nothing to do with that. Any of it.”
“What did he say happened to him?”
He shrugged. “He didn’t. What I worry is that he came from killing someone and got rid of his clothes because they were covered in blood. But back then, I figured his grandfather had thrown him out after he discovered Remy had a plane ticket booked for Atlanta.”
Something drove Vince away from that house, after years of going along with whatever monstrous business his grandfather was engaged in. On his own, he’d be broke, after more than a decade of living like a prince. And he’d been poor enough that he wouldn’t have had any illusions about what that would be like—or how quickly a couple of grand of stolen money could get spent. “What was in Georgia?”
Liam nodded, rubbed his face. “His mother. She was the one whose letters he was trying to hide from his grandfather. She died of an overdose the night before he showed up at the apartment. It must have pushed him over the edge.”
“Did he seem like the kind of person who could kill someone?” Charlie knew the way she was asking was wrong, that it was giving him cover to deny it. She wanted him to deny it.
Liam considered the question. “Remy had a morbid sense of humor, but I’ve heard worse. I’m a doctor. Gallows humor is our thing.”
She smiled encouragingly.
“Anyone can do anything under the right circumstances,” he went on. “And look—one of the doctors that works here is known for being generous with prescriptions. I saw Remy’s cousin Adeline buy some ketamine off him. Rich partiers like prescription drugs. They’re more expensive than street drugs but come in safer formulations, and you’re dealing with people unlikely to roll you. Who knows what Remy was into when he wasn’t around me.”
“Ketamine?” Charlie’s friends were more a weed-and-oxy crowd.
“It makes you dissociative,” Liam said. “In lower doses, it confers feelings of euphoria. In higher doses, people enter a state not unlike a coma, except they’re partially conscious. Sometimes unable to speak, they can have hallucinations, and memory loss.”
Charlie wondered what had been in her drink, all that time ago.