Brian Freeman - The Bone House

'It sounds like you two were pretty different, though.'

'I told you, I had to run to keep up with her, because she was always going two hundred miles an hour. It was like I was along for the ride sometimes.'

Or maybe you were just the designated driver , Cab thought. He understood the attraction for Troy, who had obviously worshipped Glory for most of his life. It wasn't as clear to him what Glory saw in Troy. The teenager was plain, and simple in a farm boy way, but he had the attraction of being utterly pliable. Cab guessed that Troy's role in their relationship was to do whatever Glory wanted him to do.

'Whose idea was it to go to Florida?' Cab asked.

'Glory's,' Troy said.

'To see Tresa dance?'

Troy shrugged. 'Yeah, that's what she told her mom so she'd say yes. Really, she just wanted a vacation in Florida, you know? Swim and sun.'

'How was it for you two hanging out with Tresa? Big sister, little sister. Did that slow you guys down?'

'Tresa's pretty low-key compared to Glory. Always with her nose in a book. We didn't spend much time with her. She was practicing a lot for the dance thing anyway.'

'Were there any arguments?'

'Between Glory and Tresa? No.'

'How about between you and Glory?'

Troy flushed. 'Just on Saturday. Glory was really pissy with me. I don't know why. That's one of the reasons I left her at the pool. She'd been giving me shit all day over the stupidest things.'

'Did something happen?'

'No, that's the thing. We'd been having a great week.'

'When did it start?' Cab asked. 'I told you, it was Saturday.' 'Not Friday night?'

Troy stopped. He chewed his fingers again. 'Well, that night she went to see Tresa dance, and I stayed back at the room watching basketball. Glory came back around ten thirty.'

'How did she seem?'

'She was quiet,' Troy said.

'Upset? Angry?'

'I'm not really sure,' Troy admitted. 'I was watching the game. I know I should have paid more attention, but I didn't. I found out the next morning that Tresa hadn't done well in the dance competition, and I figured Glory was just disappointed for her.'

'What did Glory do when she came back to the room?'

'She took a shower. I remember thinking she was in there a long time.'

'Then what?'

'She came out and sat down next to me. She had a towel on, and I thought maybe she wanted to have sex, but when I tried to kiss her, she pushed me away. I asked what was wrong.'

'What did she say?' Cab asked.

'She said it was nothing.'

'That's all?'

'She told me that she saw someone she knew.' Troy blinked nervously, as if he realized he'd forgotten to share something important.

'Someone she knew?' Cab leaned forward. 'Who?'

'She didn't say.'

'Did you ask?'

'Yeah, but she didn't answer me. She didn't make it sound like it was a big deal. She just said she was going to bed.'

'Did you ask her about it the next day?'

'No, she didn't say anything more about it.'

Cab laid this nugget of information down in his head and stared at it. Someone she knew?

Not a stranger. Someone who sent her running through the dark corridor of the hotel in tears, nearly colliding with the hotel bartender, Ronnie Trask. And the next night Glory wound up dead on the beach.

It still could have been a random assault. Boy meets girl, boy rapes girl, boy kills girl. Sometimes it happened that way, but Cab was beginning to wonder if Glory's death involved a more personal motive.

'Did you see anyone you knew during the week?' he asked. 'Anyone that Glory would have known?'

Troy shook his head. 'Nobody,' he said. 'Nobody except Mark Bradley.'

Cab found a bag of organic plantain chips in the drawer of his desk. He ate them one at a time as he reviewed the interview notes gathered by the police with guests at the hotel throughout the day. He also reviewed the crime scene photos, and as he studied the body and imagined how Glory Fischer had ended up in the surf, topless, strangled, he found his memory going back to Vivian Frost.

The girl he'd asked to marry him. The girl who had said yes.

It wasn't a big leap from Glory to Vivian, not that they looked alike or had anything in common about their lives. What they shared was the similarity of their deaths.

Glory, a dead body on a beach in Florida. Vivian, a dead body on a beach north of Barcelona.

A dozen years later, he could still picture her face, vivid both in life and death. He'd always assumed that the memory would fade, but it didn't work out that way, no matter how much he tried to outrun her. She followed him as he moved from place to place and job to job. Whenever he felt the urge to let down his guard, Vivian was there, reminding him that trust was a dangerous thing. Lala and the other women in his life since then had paid the price.

That was another reason he hated beach bodies. They came with a lot of baggage.

Vivian Frost. His mother had warned him that he was falling too hard and too fast. Tarla Bolton was a Hollywood actress, which meant by definition that everyone was trying to screw her. She'd tried to protect her son with an emotional suit of armor, but back then, in his early twenties, Cab was still young enough and naive enough to reject her view of the world. He hadn't been burned as a cop or as a man, and he didn't want to end up as disillusioned as his mother. Vivian changed all that.

He'd gone to Barcelona as a newly minted special agent with the FBI, dispatched to Spain to liaise with local authorities in the search for an American fugitive named Diego Martin, who'd been caught on videotape in a bar on Las Ramblas. The waitress he'd interviewed at the bar, a divorced woman ten years older than he was, languid and sensual, was Vivian Frost. She was a British expat who'd married a Spanish computer executive and been kicked out of his estate after she got tired of his cheating. Like most Londoners who moved to Spain, she had no interest in going home, even after she'd found herself alone and mostly penniless in the city. She worked long hours. She smoked incessantly, the way everyone smoked there, and it gave her a husky voice. She had bone-white skin in a city of golden faces. She glided where everyone else walked.

After an interview in which Cab decided that Vivian knew nothing about the man he was chasing, he went back to the bar that same night and sought her out again for his own purposes. She professed to be utterly uninterested in men, and the more she rejected him, the more he returned to the bar like a moth to a flame. He became obsessed with Vivian. He fell completely under her spell.

The fruitless investigation dragged on for weeks, then months. There were no more leads. The American fugitive, Diego Martin, had gone underground or left the city entirely. Cab's superiors in the Bureau wanted him back home if the trail was cold, but he gave them hope where there was mostly no hope at all. What he wanted was more time with Vivian. His lies bought him three more months, and slowly, cold indifference on her part gave way to a few casual dates and then to their first night of sex in her cramped, smoky apartment, with the neighbors listening on the other side of the thin walls. He found her to be uninhibited, making love with abandon, unlike any other woman he'd known. After that night, they were inseparable.

When the Bureau finally ran out of patience with his delays, he quit. He walked away from the job he'd sought from his earliest days out of college. His mother told him he was insane and that he didn't understand women or how manipulative they could be. He told her he was in love. Madly in love, and that was the truth. He told her he was staying in Spain and getting married. Looking back, he remembered those days as the one time in his life when he'd been innocent enough to be happy.