NINETEEN
I went back to the Greek restaurant—their melitzanosalata really was quite good—and sat in a booth with my laptop, pulling some background info on Kenny Brayfield. It was hard to imagine the velour-sweatpanted peddler of gold-flake vodka and ginkgo smoothies as a serial killer, but I couldn’t exactly ignore it: he could be linked in some way to all three women. He’d gotten shifty-eyed when I asked him about Mallory Evans. At the time I thought he was hedging about Mallory and Brad, not himself. I sat with that idea for a minute, trying to decide if it worked. The knife in Brad’s car, though. Why would Kenny frame his friend for the murders? Maybe it wasn’t a frame, but an oversight: maybe Brad was protecting Kenny all this time. Maybe he knew. And maybe that was why he told me about Clover Point. I’d thought he brought up the overlook because he was tired of lying after all this time, and maybe that was still true—he was tired of lying about Kenny. Lying for a friend was one thing, but being willing to die for him? Brad definitely gave me ride-or-die vibes where it came to Sarah, but I didn’t get the same feeling about Kenny.
I ordered pistachio baklava for dessert and looked over what I had found out about Kenny Brayfield so far. A woefully immature thirty-four, lifelong Belmont resident, two possession busts from when he was eighteen and nineteen, for both of which he received suspended sentences. No trouble in the decade-plus since.
The Brayfield family money was several generations old and seemed to come from a regional department store they founded, which Kenny’s grandfather sold to Macy’s in the late seventies. Kenny’s father was a venture capitalist and sat on the board of two local charities. Kenny, I imagined, with his Chuck Taylors and absurd business strategies, had to be a bit of a disappointment. Up until an hour ago, he struck me as a spoiled brat but generally well-intentioned. But that didn’t mean much. Anybody could seem like anything if they tried, at least for a while, and there were too many coincidences lining up to connect Kenny to the three—blond—women.
There was really only one question at the heart of every case: How can I prove it? This was going to be no different.
When I had talked to Joshua Evans the other day, I had specifically asked him if his young wife knew Brad. I hadn’t asked about Kenny. At the time, I had no reason to. But that seemed like a good next move to me.
*
Joshua Evans was happier to see me than Lassiter had been. “God, this news,” he said, ushering me inside his small house. “It’s really throwing me.”
“Surreal, I bet,” I said. I followed him into the kitchen, where I took him up on the offer of a beer. I could hear loud, pop-punk music blaring from elsewhere in the house. “Are you doing okay?”
“Yeah, yeah. It’s just crazy. I mean, first you were here asking questions about Mal after all this time. And then they find someone else in those woods. Hard to pretend they’re not connected,” Joshua said. He sat down across from me at the kitchen table, opening a beer that I didn’t think was the first of the day.
I didn’t want to get his hopes up, and I also didn’t want to speak out of turn. But I figured my presence was something of a giveaway anyhow. “I think they are,” I said. “I think the same person who killed your wife has killed other women, and I am going to figure out who it was.”
He nodded, his nostrils flaring slightly. “Like a serial killer.”
“I don’t know. Something,” I said. “Have the police been by to talk to you?”
“Nope.” He took a long swallow of beer. “And unfortunately, I don’t know what I could even add at this point. I told your dad everything I knew sixteen years ago and it wasn’t much.”
“I know, Joshua.” Thinking of what Erin Grantham had said, I added, “And I know you have to compartmentalize a little bit in order to move past something like this, just so you can function. But anything at all you can share might help. Even if you think it won’t.”
He nodded again.
“The other day you told me when Mallory didn’t come home, you contacted some of her friends,” I said, thinking maybe Kenny was among them. “Can you remember who you called?”
He looked up at the ceiling for a minute. I followed his gaze and took in a spiderweb of plaster cracked with age. Then I looked back down. Finally he said, “Carrie. I called her, I’d say she was Mallory’s best friend. She lived down the street back then, but the family moved away.”
“Carrie what?”
Joshua shook his head. “Sorry.”
“Okay, who were some of her other friends?”
He played with the tab on his beer can. “Marisa something,” he said. “I don’t know her last name either but I see her sometimes, around town. I don’t know how close they were, but she called here a lot. Those two are who I reached out to. But they hadn’t seen her. And you have to remember, I thought she was pissed at me. So I left it at that.”
“Do you remember any of her other friends? Ex-boyfriends? The other day you mentioned you thought she was seeing someone at the end.”
“Yeah. But I didn’t know who. I’d just hear her on the phone sometimes, and it didn’t sound like she was talking to one of her girlfriends. And she’d go out at night, all dressed up, and Marisa or Carrie might call when she was out, so she wasn’t with them.” Joshua shrugged. “I confronted her about it a few times, and it never went well. I didn’t know how to talk to her. But I knew there was someone.”
The sound of the loud music from down the hall stopped and a door opened. “Dad,” Shelby called, “we’re going to Target, is that okay?”
“I promise we’ll be back before dinner, for completely selfish reasons,” her friend Veronica added, “because I want to eat here again.”
They both looked into the kitchen through the pass-through. “Oh hey, it’s Roxane-with-one-‘n,’” Veronica said. “So what do you think, Mr. E.?”
“Sure, go ahead,” Joshua said. “LOL.”
Veronica cracked up. Shelby rolled her eyes. “You’re so embarrassing,” she said. She looked at me. “He used to text LOL to me all the time and it, like, didn’t even make sense, a text that just says LOL in response to nothing. So I asked him what he thought it was supposed to mean.”
“Lots of love!” Joshua said. “I think my way is so much better.”
“Now he just says it on purpose to annoy me,” Shelby finished.
“It’s so easy, how can I resist?”
She laughed. “Okay, we’ll be back in a while.” She grabbed a set of keys off the counter and then walked away.
Joshua waited until the door opened before he called out, “LOL.”
His daughter groaned as she pulled the door closed behind her.