Тесс Герритсен - I Know a Secret

I study him for a moment, thinking about what he could do with the truth. Go to the police? Blab to the newspapers? No, I’m not that stupid. “Give me one good reason why I should say anything.”

“For the sake of that little girl’s mother — she’s been waiting twenty years for Lizzie to come home to her. At least give her that. Tell her where to find the body.”

“And fuck up my own life?”

“ Your life? It’s all about you, isn’t it?” He shakes his head. “Why the hell didn’t I see this before?”

“Oh, come on, Everett. You’re making too much of this.” I reach up and stroke his face.

He shudders and flinches away. “Don’t.”

“We had something special together. Good times.” I smile. “And great sex. Please, let’s just put this behind us and forget it ever happened.”

“That’s the thing, Holly. It did happen. And now I know what you really are.” He turns to leave the kitchen.

I grab his arm. “You’re not going to tell anyone, right?”

“Shouldn’t I?”

“They won’t believe you. They’ll call you a bitter ex-boyfriend. And I’ll tell them how you abused me. How you threatened me.”

“You would do that, wouldn’t you?”

“If I need to.”

“Well, I don’t have to tell anyone. Because they’re listening to it right this instant. Every word you’ve said.”

It takes me a few heartbeats to process what he’s just told me. When the meaning dawns on me, I grab his shirt and wrench it open so suddenly he doesn’t have time to react. Buttons fly off and tick to the floor. He stands with his shirt hanging open, and I stare at the telltale wire taped to his skin.

Backing away, I frantically review what I’ve said, words that I now know the police have been listening to. I never actually admitted anything. Nothing I said could be considered a murder confession. While I may have sounded heartless and manipulative, those aren’t criminal acts. There are countless people like me in the world, successful CEOs and bankers whose heartlessness isn’t punished but rewarded. They are simply behaving like the creatures they were born to be.

Everett is different. He’s not one of us.

In silence, he closes his shirt over the exposed wire and I see pain, even grief, in his face. It’s the death of an illusion. The illusion of Holly Devine, the girl he loved. Now the real Holly stands before him, and he wants nothing to do with me.

“Goodbye,” he says, and walks out of the kitchen.

I don’t follow him. I just stand there listening as the apartment door slams shut.

I fling my goblet, and it shatters against the refrigerator in an explosion of glass shards. Red wine drips like blood onto the floor.

Two months later

From the back porch of my father’s house, I can see that something is going on deep in the woods. Parked along Daphne Road are half a dozen police and crime-lab vehicles, and somewhere in the distance a dog is barking. The ground has thawed and they’re finally able to probe the soil, but they don’t know exactly where to look and they have wasted the first two days searching the property where Billy Sullivan lived as a child. Now they’ve moved into the stretch of woods just beyond his property. Twenty years ago, investigators didn’t search those woods; instead, they devoted all their time to combing the Apple Tree Daycare, as well as the section of road a mile and a half away, where Billy abandoned Lizzie’s bike. No one thought to search the woods along Daphne Road, because Billy and I threw them off the scent by directing their suspicions to an innocent man. Everyone believed us because we were children, and children aren’t clever enough to devise such a scheme. Or so people think.

The doorbell rings.

I find Detective Rizzoli standing on the front porch. She’s wearing hiking boots and a dirt-streaked jacket, and a twig is snared in her wiry black hair. I don’t invite her inside. Coolly, we regard each other across the threshold, two women who understand each other all too well.

“We’re going to find her body anyway, Holly. You might as well tell us where to look.”

“And what will I get for that? A gold star?”

“How about Brownie points for cooperating with us? The satisfaction of knowing you did the right thing for once?”

“There’s no gold star for that.”

“That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? You . What’s in it for you. ”

“I don’t have anything to say.” I start to close the door.

She slaps her hand against it, forcing it back open. “I have plenty to say to you.”

“I’m listening.”

“This happened twenty years ago. You were only ten years old when you did it, so no one will hold you accountable. You have nothing to lose by telling us where she is.”

“I also have nothing to gain. What proof do you have that I had anything to do with it? The shaky memory of a witness who was high on ketamine? A taped conversation in which I admitted absolutely nothing?” I shake my head. “I think I’ll stick with silence.”

My logic is unassailable. There’s nothing she can do to force my cooperation. Whether or not they find Lizzie’s body, I’m untouchable and she knows it. We stare at each other, two halves of the same coin, both of us tough and clever women who know how to survive. But she’s the one who cares too much, and I’m the one who cares scarcely at all.

Unless it’s about me.

“I’m going to be watching you,” she says quietly. “I know what you did, Holly. I know exactly what you are.”

I shrug. “I’m different, so what? I’ve always known I was.”

“You’re a fucking sociopath. That’s what you are.”

“But it doesn’t make me evil. It’s just the way I was born. Some people have blue eyes; some people can run marathons. Me? I know how to look out for myself. That’s my superpower.”

“And someday it’s going to bring you down.”

“But not today.”

The crackle of her walkie-talkie cuts the silence between us. She snatches it from her belt and answers: “Rizzoli.”

“The dog alerted,” a male voice says.

“What do you see?”

“Lot of leaf cover, that’s all. But the signal’s pretty definite. You want to come look at the spot before they start digging?”

At once, Rizzoli turns and strides down the porch steps. As I watch her climb into her car, I know this is not the last time I’ll be seeing her. There is a long chess game ahead of us, and this was only the opening gambit. Neither of us has the advantage yet, but we’ve both come to know our opponent well.

I return to the back porch and stare across my father’s yard to the woods beyond. The trees have not yet leafed out, and through the bare branches I can just make out Daphne Road, where more vehicles have arrived. On the other side of that road are the woods abutting the property where Billy’s old house stands. That is where the cadaver dog has caught the scent.

That is where they’ll find her.

Lizzie Dipalma emerged from the soil in bits and pieces. A finger bone here, an ankle bone there. Twenty years in a shallow grave had rotted the flesh from the skeleton, but once the skull was unearthed, Maura had little doubt of the body’s identity. Cupping the cranium in one hand, she brushed away soil from the upper jaw and looked at Jane.

“This is a child’s skull. Based on the partially erupted lateral incisors, I estimate the decedent’s age to be eight or nine years old.”

“Lizzie was nine,” said Jane.

Gently, Maura set the skull on the tarp and clapped dirt from her gloved hands. “I think you’ve found her.”