Darkness was complete by the time Nicole and Lars returned to the station. Streetlights illuminated small patches of sidewalk, and colored Christmas lights twinkled in store fronts. It was too cold to snow. The temperature on the dash said eleven degrees. They pulled into the parking lot, and Nicole scanned the cars and SUVs, looking for Benjamin even though his return wasn’t likely. Benjamin had an MO. He laid low and licked his wounds while he cataloged every offense and created scenarios where he exacted payment in kind. He planned, although execution took effort, which meant it was often weeks after he made a decision that he followed through.
But she did see a black Escalade. A sticker on the license plate identified it as a rental, and Nicole knew she’d seen the vehicle before, parked at Big Horn—King’s fortress away from home.
“We have a visitor.”
Lars nodded. “King Arthur, Excalibur, and Morgan le Fay. How do you think Kenny felt about his father grooming our vic for medical stardom?”
“Pissed.”
“My thoughts exactly.” Lars pulled into a space and cut the engine.
“His size-ten hiking boot puts him in the lineup.” And motive kept him there. Jealousy. More murders were committed through rage than any other emotion.
“You think he’s a match for the gloves?”
The pair of men’s gloves found under the tree, one on top of the other, like a Christmas present.
“Possible.” Very. She would ask Kenny about them. Better, she would present them like they were his lost possessions. She told Lars the plan, and he called the clerk in the evidence locker and asked that they be processed for checkout.
“I’ll get them,” he said. “You going to put Kenny in the box?”
“He has something for us.” Or he wouldn’t be here. “Let’s get that tucked away and then talk to him.”
She pulled on her wool cap, shouldered out the door, and walked quickly into the station.
Kenny was seated in reception. He had a file resting on his knees, the papers inside disheveled and the edges poking out. He sat stiffly but turned toward the door when it opened and the cold air swept in. His mouth tightened when he recognized her. He stood but waited, clutching the file to his chest.
“Hi, Kenny.”
“I have something here,” he said. “Something you should see.”
Nicole stopped in front of him and put out her hand for the file, but he pulled back.
“I want to talk to you first.”
Lars came through the door next but ignored them. He took the stairs up, where the gloves waited for him.
“Okay, Kenny. Come on back,” she invited, and led the way through reception and into the back recesses of the station to her office. “Have a seat.”
But he didn’t comply. He stood in front of her desk and shifted from one foot to the other.
“Remember when I told you Dr. Esparza wouldn’t give my father the super cell?”
“I remember.”
“So here’s the proof. But there’s more.” He put the file down on her desk and opened it. “Look at this.”
He spread out papers. They were email communications Kenny must have printed from his father’s account. Most of them were brief, a line or two. Many were from Enrique Esparza and dated back more than a year. The bartering of a medical miracle. There were others. She recognized a few of the company names in the URLs. All pharmaceutical. Her eyes caught on Sanders’s name. She pulled the paper out of the fanned pile and read the brief message: Don’t be a sore loser, Michael. It had been sent that morning.
Nicole used her fingertips to right the pile, then slid the papers back into the folder. They had something here. Context and implications, at least. She picked up the folder and moved across the room, opened a drawer, and tucked it inside.
“Thanks for bringing this in, Kenny. It will be helpful.” She sat down behind her desk and invited Kenny to sit as well. “I’m going to look through it. My people will look through it,” she promised. “But there are other things at play here that I think you can help us with.”
“Yeah? Like what?” He sat down but not comfortably. His elbows rested on the arms of the chair, but his hands were restless. He rubbed the tips of his fingers with his thumbs.
“Remember those text messages, Kenny? We talked about them this morning?”
“So what? We talked, we texted, we Skyped. I told you that.”
“And you wanted more. You wanted Beatrice, but she was busy rising to glory. Both her father and yours believed she would have been an excellent doctor.”
He shook his head. His agitation increased, his feet pumping, his legs jiggling.
“It’s true. They championed her.”
“That’s bullshit.” His lips trembled, but it was more than anger or outrage; his feelings were hurt.
“Your father knew Dr. Esparza was breaking the law by experimenting on Beatrice.”
Kenny snorted. “The law didn’t apply to my old man,” he said. “That’s what he thought.”
“What does that mean, Kenny?”
“Yeah, he knew. From the very beginning, and he didn’t care. He knew the FDA would never allow it. And it wasn’t the first time.”
“You’re talking about those cutting-edge treatments for Violet?”
“Some of them were taken straight out of Frankenstein,” he said.
They were interrupted by a knock on the door. Lars opened it without waiting and walked in, the suede gloves, sealed in a clear evidence bag, tucked under his arm.
“Hi, Kenny.” He held out his hand and waited for the young man to take it, an action that was noticeably slow as he adjusted to the intrusion. All of his anger seemed to escape through the opened door, and Nicole watched him deflate. His hands opened, his shoulders sank, and his breath expanded his chest unevenly, catching on the remnants of emotion.
“We didn’t get to meet this morning,” Lars continued. “I’m sorry about your father.”
Kenny snorted and turned toward Nicole. “Who is he?”
“A police detective, Kenny. He’s very good at his job. We’d like to share with you what we know.” She moved her gaze to Lars and said, “Kenny was just telling me that his father has been breaking the law for years, all in pursuit of a cure for Violet.”
“Yeah, and some of them were freakish,” Kenny said. He would have sprung from the chair, but Lars placed a hand on his shoulder and lay the plastic evidence bag with the gloves on Nicole’s desk.
“Take a good look at these,” Lars advised. “Science is a wonderful thing, but of course you already know that. I hear your father was training you, getting you ready for medical school. Isn’t that right, Kenny?”
Kenny’s eyes were locked on the evidence bag, and his composure was shifting under the pressure. His voice became high, thin, desperate. “No. No, he wasn’t. He should have been, but he was all about Beatrice.”
Lars ignored his outburst. “Police work is a lot of things. But what we rely on most is science. We have tests and methods and even the psychology that predicts behavior, and you know what? It’s solid. It’s numbers, and there’s nothing gray about those. It’s tangible, we can hold evidence in our hands”—he raised the gloves under Kenny’s nose—“and say things about them that are absolutely true.”
“Have you heard of epithelials?” Nicole asked.
“Skin,” Kenny said.
She nodded. “And we have equipment that will recover microscopic tags of skin for analysis, and from that analysis we will know—”
But Kenny jumped ahead. “DNA. I get it. So what? They’re my gloves. I left them outside last night.”
Lars nodded. “We know. You took them off because wearing them was awkward. You dropped something—a condom packet—small, slippery, and definitely impossible to pick up when you’re wearing flippers.”
“You took them off, set them aside, and left them in the snow,” Nicole said. “Why did you do that, Kenny?”
“You’re wrong,” he said, but Nicole was already shaking her head.
“Evidence, Kenny. Facts. You knelt in the snow—we have impressions of that. We have your fingerprint on the condom packet. We have your text messages. You wanted her, Kenny, but Beatrice wasn’t interested.”
“So maybe you thought no one should have her,” Lars offered.
“Who gave Beatrice the Rohypnol?” Nicole continued. “You or your father?”
“I did.” He laughed. It was wet with tears and snot. “But she got away from me anyway. How sick is that? Even drugged, I couldn’t get her in bed.”
“She ran and you followed.”
Kenny nodded.
“Beatrice had a head start, and she was fast,” Nicole continued.
“She was slow and stumbling,” he said.
An effect of the drug.
“And you caught up with her.”
“Easy.”
“And then what?”
“She told me she would never love me. Not like that.”
“And you killed her?”
“I didn’t mean to. I just lost it, you know? And I tried to fix it. I gave her CPR, but it didn’t work.”
“How did you do it, Kenny?” Lars asked.
“With my hands.” He held them up, stared at his palms, and then buried his face there. “I choked her. It makes an awful sound. She gasped. She whistled. But she didn’t change her mind.”
“She was never going to love you,” Nicole said, and Kenny looked up and met her gaze.
“Never,” he said.
“And you told your father about it?” Nicole continued.
“I had to. He knew I took the roofie from his supplies. That I was looking for her. That she was gone.” His eyes were glazed, and Nicole could see hysteria building in them. “He thought it was that blond freak. The broker. Because she was looking for Bea too, but I found her first. And then the woman came in and scared her away.”