“So what does Painter Boy think he knows?”
“I’m not sure. Your name. First and last. And he said he’ll tell your wife about us, so I assume that means he knows you’re married.”
“What did you say?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Thanks for your concern.”
“I’m sorry, Clare. I am concerned. I’m just trying to process the state of play here.”
“Well, I didn’t say anything. I got the hell out of there.”
“How the hell did he find this out?”
Clearly Jason told him. Admitting that, however, opens up an entirely different can of worms.
“I don’t know,” I lie.
He slumps back. I’ve never seen Matthew in any situation in which he wasn’t in total control. But now he looks . . . scared.
“It’s going to be okay,” I say, trying to provide some comfort. “I really think Marco was just trying to scare me. I don’t think he’s going to tell your wife.”
“Easy for you to say. It won’t cost you your marriage and . . . I don’t know how many millions of dollars in alimony in a divorce.”
“I know this is terrible for you, but I also know that I love you. And if the end result of all this is that we’re together, isn’t that all that matters?”
I can tell at once that this is not all that matters to Matthew. In fact, his expression makes me wonder if it matters at all.
“I can’t think about happily-ever-after now,” he says. “I need to fix this immediate problem.”
“How do you propose to do that? Short of killing Marco, I mean.”
From the look in his eyes, it’s clear to me that Matthew’s already come to the same conclusion but does not consider the possibility as outlandish as I do.
“Ask him to meet you here,” he says.
“Matthew . . . no. That’s crazy talk.”
“It isn’t. You know it isn’t.”
“The hell I do. There’s no way I’m going to be a party to anything like that. I love you, Matthew. I truly, truly do. But not enough to help you kill someone.”
I get up off the bench, but Matthew grabs my wrist and pulls me back down onto the hard marble seat.
“That hurt,” I say, more to register my displeasure with him than because it actually caused me pain.
“Listen to me, Clare. I’m not going to sit back and just let him ruin my life. If it comes down to him or me, it’s going to be me. Every fucking time. And I expect you to support that, or you’ll end up just like him.”
I stand again. This time he doesn’t reach for me, but he joins me on the path. At six foot two, he towers over me. For the first time in my life, I’m afraid of him.
“Are you threatening me?” I ask.
“No. I’m warning you. And you’d best take my warning to heart, because I mean it.”
I leave the park in a daze. How could it be that three men—each of whom had told me that they loved me within the last week—had threatened my life in the last hour?
That thought is the last one I remember in my life.
DAY SEVEN
MONDAY
Ella Broden
28.
After telling Dylan that I want to torture and then kill my college boyfriend, I slide back into his arms. On my television, Reese Witherspoon is hiking somewhere, for reasons that I don’t fully understand.
“Do you have any idea where she’s going or why?” I ask.
Dylan laughs, and I thoroughly enjoy the sound.
“No. No, I don’t. But she looks like she could really use a shower.”
The phone rings.
Somehow, I already know what awaits me on the other end of the line. It’s as if I’d previously dreamed the conversation and now it’s coming true.
From the look in Dylan’s eye, he knows too.
“Hello,” I say.
“Ella, it’s Gabriel. We found a body matching Charlotte’s general description . . .”
I don’t hear another word he says.
Less than five minutes after Gabriel’s call, I’m in the back of a taxi that’s hurtling through the streets of downtown Manhattan. At this hour, there isn’t any traffic and the trip takes less than ten minutes. I must not have realized we’d arrived, however, because the cabbie says, “This is it, right? One Police Plaza?”
I’m in that same fog when I enter the building. I show my ID to the cop manning the downstairs security checkpoint.
“Ms. Broden? I asked who you were going to see?”
I look up. The cop asking the question is Steven Lassiter, a guy who’s held this job for as long as I’ve been a lawyer. I didn’t even recognize him at first.
“Um . . . Gabriel . . . Gabriel Velasquez.”
Lassiter calls upstairs and then leads me to the elevator bank. He even presses the button for the eighth floor.
Gabriel is standing at the elevator when the doors open. Lassiter must have suggested I could use some assistance. I step off the elevator and into Gabriel’s arms.
“Come with me,” Gabriel whispers into my ear.
I know that means that I should let go and follow him to his office. But I can’t move. I actually grip him tighter. He shifts my position to his side and then we begin to move together, a slow, four-legged beast.
Once we enter his office, Gabriel lowers me into his guest chair and closes the door. Rather than take his usual seat behind the desk, he drops down to his knees beside me. My head slumps.
“Ella, do you want me to call your father?”
I want to answer him verbally, and try to say something, but words don’t come out. I mutely shake my head to indicate that I don’t want my father to know yet.
“Are you sure it’s her?” I finally manage.
This is my last sliver of hope. That the corpse the police had found was someone else’s sister, daughter, wife, or mother. That it isn’t Charlotte.
“It’s her,” Gabriel says. “I’m sorry.”
I don’t know how I got from Gabriel’s office to the morgue in the east thirties, about two miles away. I’m sure we traveled by squad car, probably with the sirens blasting, but there’s a hole in my memory from the moment Gabriel took my hand to lead me out of his office to a second ago, when we entered the morgue.
The room is large, the size of a banquet hall, with too-harsh fluorescent lighting and a smell that’s an affront to the senses. Some type of cleaning solution. Despite that, everything looks dirty. The walls are dingy and the concrete floor is stained an offensive rust color, which I assume is the remnants of blood. There are a number of empty gurneys, and the walls are lined floor to ceiling with compartments, silver handles sticking out. Bodies lie inside.
Beside Gabriel stands a man in his twenties, in a white lab coat. He’s too young and wears too vacant an expression to be a medical examiner. I presume he’s a tech of some kind. The guy in charge of making sure none of the corpses escape.