Lex’s overdose brought home for me again how good this family could be at keeping secrets and how little I actually knew about them. It was time to move on from what had happened the day Danny disappeared to the suspects. Maybe it was just the effect of sitting in that waiting room not knowing if Lex was going to live or die, but I felt like something bad was coming, nipping at my heels. Like time was running out.
When everyone else was occupied, I made my way to Robert’s office, just down the hall from Danny’s bedroom. There was a filing cabinet in the closet that I had spotted when I’d first arrived and was familiarizing myself with the house. I’d tried to open it but found it locked. Maybe some of the Tate family secrets were kept inside.
When I got to the office, I closed the door behind myself and began to look for a key to the cabinet. If I couldn’t find one, I’d probably be able to jimmy the thing open with a screwdriver or a crowbar, but I didn’t want to leave evidence of what I’d done if I could avoid it. Besides, most people didn’t go to great lengths to hide the keys for these kinds of things.
I sat in the leather chair behind the desk and began to go through the drawers one by one. You’d be surprised how many people leave the keys to a filing cabinet in their top drawer. Robert Tate wasn’t quite that dumb, though. I searched every drawer and the cabinets behind the desk thoroughly, but all I found were dusty office supplies and, to my surprise, a distinctive kind of triangular case that could only hold a small handgun. Another item added to my list of reasons to consider Robert a suspect.
I got up and peered out of the window into the backyard. Lex was in the pool with Mia while Patrick worked on his laptop in one of the lounge chairs. Nicholas was out of the house, and Jessica was upstairs. I had all the time in the world.
I took another look at the filing cabinet. Could Robert Tate be one of the rare people who took home office security seriously? When he lived in a gated house in a gated community? The pistol seemed to suggest so, and this was a big house. He could have hidden the key anywhere. I shined my phone’s flashlight down at one of the middle cabinets, trying to get a look at the gap between the drawer and the cabinet itself, to gauge what kind of tool I would need to get into it.
That’s when I noticed the scratches.
The hardwood floor was scratched, extending about a half an inch from the front corners of the filing cabinet. Not deep scratches, but the diffuse pattern of many smaller ones.
I smiled, grabbed onto the cabinet, and tipped it forward. It scraped against the floor as I did it. Holding the cabinet with one hand, I brushed the other along the back that had been pressed to the wall until I found the key taped there.
Not bad, Robert. But not good enough.
Inside the cabinets I found the usual things. Tax returns, financial statements, lots of business and legal stuff I couldn’t decipher. I kept looking until I found what I was after. In the bottom drawer there was a file on each family member.
Mia’s was the first. It had her birth certificate and social security card, correspondence with the private Montessori school she attended for preschool, and a couple of crayon drawings she must have made for her daddy. Behind it was a second file labeled MIA—MEDICAL that had hospital bills, insurance statements, and other documents related to Mia’s limb length discrepancy. Nothing out of the ordinary, not that I was expecting to find anything there. If there was anyone I knew to be completely innocent, it was Mia.
Next was Danny’s file. In most ways it was similar to Mia’s, except instead of an accompanying file of medical information, there was an accompanying file labeled DANIEL—DISAPPEARANCE. It looked like Robert had made note of every interaction the family had with the local police and later the Feds when the FBI took over. I pulled the thick file out of the cabinet to go through it more carefully later.
Then came Nicholas. His file was the thinnest so far. Birth certificate, some school records, a hospital record from when he broke his wrist in 2009, and a story written in wavering pencil. I pulled it from the file and read it. It was about a knight who saved a poor dragon from a cruel princess.
Nicholas was eleven when Danny disappeared. It was difficult to fathom any eleven-year-old—let alone quiet, controlled Nicholas—killing someone, but his relationship with Danny had been a troubled one, and he was the only member of the family who seemed angry that I was around. Maybe one day all of the anger that Nicholas had been bottling up over his brother’s taunting and petty bullying finally exploded. If Lex and Patrick, and probably Jessica, were going to engage in such a risky and emotionally difficult deception, it had to be to protect someone they really cared about and didn’t want to see punished for Danny’s death. Who could fit that description better than Nicholas? Still waters run deep, and no one’s face was more still than that serious, secretive boy. Maybe he didn’t seem capable of killing someone, but then, lots of killers don’t.
Next was Lex’s file, and it had an addendum as well: ALEXIS—ADDICTION.
Nicholas wasn’t kidding. It was bad.
It had started in high school. There’d been some trouble her freshman and sophomore years—a suspension for fighting in school and an incident where she was a passenger in a car where the driver was caught smoking weed—but things had escalated sharply around the time Ben McConnell killed himself. She was arrested a handful of times for possession and hospitalized twice. Robert pulled some major strings to keep her from being expelled from school. She was hospitalized a third time after Danny disappeared in what appeared to doctors to be a suicide attempt instead of an accidental overdose. She dropped out of school to do six months at an inpatient rehab facility. The next couple of years were a cycle of relapse, chaos, and more stints in rehab. She’d been released from Promises Malibu almost two years ago, and the file ended there. To an objective observer it would seem like nothing more than a troubled, privileged girl struggling with the tragic death of her father. And maybe that’s what it was.
Or maybe not.
I got up and looked out the window again, just to make sure everyone was still in the backyard. Lex was spinning Mia around in the water. It was hard for me to imagine her hurting anyone, let alone one of the siblings she doted on like a mother. But I had to remind myself that a few weeks ago it would have been hard for me to imagine that Lex was pretending to think I was her brother. She was a gifted actress covering for someone, and maybe that person was herself.
I tried to envision how it could have happened. Lex, high on prescription pills, behind the wheel even though her license had been suspended. Too out of her mind to react in time when Danny darted in front of the car on his bicycle. Maybe she panicked and hid the body rather than owning up to what she did. Maybe that’s what she and Patrick were covering up. There was nothing they could do for Danny, but at least they could keep Lex out of jail. The shock of what she’d done made her try to get sober, and the pressure of the FBI sniffing around again made her crack. It was possible.