Hold Tight

“That was how he got that bruise on his face,” Adam said.

“You punched him?”

Adam nodded.

“You were his friend,” Betsy said. “Why would you fight?”

“We were drinking and getting high. It was over a girl. Things got out of hand. We pushed and then he threw a punch. I ducked it and then I hit him in the face.”

“Over a girl?”

Adam lowered his eyes.

“Who else was there?” she asked.

Adam shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me.”

“It shouldn’t. I’m the one he had the fight with.”

Betsy tried to imagine it. Her son. Her beautiful son and his last day on earth and his best friend in the world had struck him in the face. She tried to keep her tone even, but that wasn’t happening. “I don’t understand any of this. Where were you?”

“We were supposed to go to the Bronx. There’s this place there. They let kids our age party.”

“The Bronx?”

“But before we went, Spencer and I had the fight. I hit him and called him horrible names. I was so mad. And then he ran away. I should have gone after him. I didn’t. I let him go. I should have known what he would do.”

Betsy Hill just stood there, numb. She remembered what Ron had said, about how no one forced their son to steal vodka and pills from the house.

“Who killed my boy?” she asked.

But she knew.

She had known from the beginning. She had sought explanations for the unexplainable and maybe she would get one, but human behavior was usually much more complex. You find two siblings who were raised in the exact same manner and one will end up sweet and one will be a killer. Some people will chalk that up to “hardwiring,” to nature over nurture, but then sometimes it isn’t even that—it is just some random event that alters lives, something in the wind that mixes with your particular brain chemistry, anything really, and then after the tragedy, we look for explanations and maybe we find some, but it is just theorizing after the fact.

“Tell me what happened, Adam.”

“He tried to call me later,” Adam said. “Those were those calls. I saw it was him. And I didn’t answer. I just let it go into voice mail. He was already so stoned. He was depressed and down and I should have seen it. I should have forgiven him. But I didn’t. That was his last message to me. He said he was sorry and he knew the way out. He had thought about suicide before. We all talk about that. But with him it was different. It was more serious. And I fought with him. I called him names and said I’d never forgive him.”

Betsy Hill shook her head.

“He was a good kid, Mrs. Hill.”

“He was the one who took the drugs from our house, from our medicine cabinet . . . ,” she said, more to herself than to him.

“I know. We all did.”

His words rattled her, made it impossible to think. “A girl? You fought over a girl?”

“It was my fault,” Adam said. “I lost control. I didn’t look out for him. I listened to the messages too late. I got to the roof as soon as I could. But he was dead.”

“You found him?”

He nodded.

“And you never said anything?”

“I was gutless. But not anymore. It ends now.”

“What ends?”

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Hill. I couldn’t save him.”

Then Betsy said, “Neither could I, Adam.”

She took a step toward him, but Adam shook his head.

“It ends now,” he said again.

Then he took two steps backward, turned, and ran away.

33

PAUL Copeland stood in front of a plethora of network microphones and said, “We need your help in finding a missing woman named Reba Cordova.”

Muse watched from the side of the stage. The monitors flashed an achingly sweet photograph of Reba on the screen. Her smile was the kind that made you smile too, or conversely, in a situation like this, ripped your heart right down the middle. There was a phone number on the bottom of the screen.

“We also need help in locating this woman.”

Now they flashed the photograph from the Target store surveillance video.

“This woman is a person of interest. If you have any information, please call the number below.”

The nut jobs would start in now, but in this situation, the potential pros outweighed, in Muse’s view, the cons. She doubted anyone would have seen Reba Cordova, but there was a real chance that someone might recognize the woman in the surveillance photo. That was what Muse was hoping anyway.

Neil Cordova stood next to Cope. In front of him were his and Reba’s two little girls. Cordova kept his chin high, but you could still see the tremble. The Cordova girls were beautiful and haunting and all eyes, like something you’d see staggering away from a burned-out building in a war newsreel. The networks, of course, loved this—the photogenic grieving family. Cope had told Cordova that he didn’t have to attend or he could attend by himself without the kids. Neil Cordova had shaken that off.

“We need to do all we can to save her,” Cordova had told Cope, “or those girls will look back and wonder.”

“It’s going to be traumatic,” Cope replied.

“If their mother is dead, they’ll go through hell no matter. At least I want them to know that we did all we could.”

Muse felt her phone vibrate. She checked and saw it was Clarence Morrow calling from the morgue. About damn time.

“The body belongs to Marianne Gillespie,” Clarence said. “The ex-husband is positive.”

Muse stepped up a little, just so that Cope could see her. When he glanced toward her, she gave a small nod. Cope turned back to the microphone and said, “We have also identified a body that may be connected to Ms. Cordova’s disappearance. A woman named Marianne Gillespie . . .”

Muse turned back to her call. “You questioned Novak?”

“We did. I don’t think he’s involved, do you?”

“No.”

“He had no motive. His girlfriend isn’t the woman in the surveillance tape, and he doesn’t match the description of the guy in the van.”

“Take him home. Let him tell his daughter in peace.”

“On our way. Novak already called the girlfriend to make sure she kept the girls away from the news until he gets back.”

Back on the monitor a photograph of Marianne Gillespie appeared. Weirdly enough, Novak did not have any old photos of his ex, but Reba Cordova had visited Marianne in Florida last spring and taken some snapshots. The picture was taken by the pool, Marianne working a bikini, but they’d cropped it into a headshot for the cameras. Marianne had been something of a bombshell, Muse noted, albeit one who had probably seen better days before the hard living. Things weren’t as tight as they might have once been, but you could still see she had it.