“What happened next, Ray?”
“I was still catching up behind her. I didn’t see it happen.”
“You didn’t see what happen?”
He licked his lips. “We need to go back to the beginning. To what happened before June sixth. You wanted the truth? Congratulations. Here it is.”
She kept an eye on the semitruck still parked on Hairpin Bridge’s opposite lane, the driver still inside on his radio with emergency services, as Raycevic took a shaky breath and whispered, “Cambry was my girlfriend.”
“Excuse me?”
He repeated: “She was my girlfriend.”
“Uh, wow. No.”
“Yes.”
“Try harder.”
“I was having an affair with her.” He forced an ill smile. “My wife got fat, you know?”
“You’re lying.”
“I was lying. Until now. I misdirected the investigation into her death. I kept my romantic involvement with Cambry under wraps, because I have a marriage and a career to protect.”
Romantic involvement. The words went straight for Lena’s gut, as heavy as a roiling mass of maggots. Squirming, shivery revulsion.
“Think about it. Just please, hear me out, and think about what I’m telling you. Think about all the lost time in Cambry’s path, between when she robbed Blake in Florida and June, when she died on this bridge. That’s four months unaccounted for. She lived nomadically, stealing, using, paying with cash, and giving her name to no one. What does someone do with all that time?”
“She drew. She read. She smoked. She enjoyed the solitude.”
“For four months?”
“She was traveling.”
“No, Lena, she was traveling until March. But I promise you: April, May, June, she lingered in the greater Howard County area. Black Lake. Rattlesnake Canyon. Magma Springs. The investigation didn’t conclude this, because I scrubbed the evidence.”
I scrubbed the evidence. Uttered so casually.
She couldn’t believe it. He had to be lying. She felt herself getting flustered, her tongue thick in her mouth. Her thoughts refusing to fire.
“Why would I lie about this, Lena?”
None of these new pieces fit together. Cambry’s Corolla had been minimalist and sparse, yes, but so was her sterile bedroom all throughout Lena’s childhood. Her stuffed animals were ignored. Her Barbies were turned faceless. Cambry didn’t collect objects. She collected sights and sounds.
She forced herself to speak. “You . . . you admit, right there, that you destroyed evidence.”
He nodded. “Anything that connected her to me, and to this region. Receipts. Her knife. Her stolen gun. My number in her flip phone. Her—” He stopped himself.
Her drawings. Her heart squeezed with rage.
Still, it didn’t make sense. A big question: “How did she die, then?”
“I told you. She jumped—”
“Bullshit, Ray. My sister would never talk to you. She sure as hell wasn’t your girlfriend.”
“I’ll prove it, Lena.”
“Yeah? This’ll be good.”
“I can.” Twisting his cuffed wrists, he slipped his fingers into his back pocket. “Right now. I’ll show you a photo I have of Cambry and me fishing on Black Lake, taken the day before she—”
“I’m supposed to believe you keep a photo of a dead woman in your wallet?”
“It’s all I have left.”
His voice wavered with something that sounded like heartbreak. It was the best acting she’d seen from him all day. It halted her. What if he was telling the truth? Was he really one of Cambry’s trademark Terrible Guys, to be used up and discarded?
Unthinkable. She couldn’t reconcile it.
The handcuffed cop was still struggling to produce his photo from his pocket. His fingers fumbled behind his back and then a wallet dropped to the concrete with a dry clap.
He looked back up at her. Almost apologetic. “I loved her.”
I loved her.
Her stomach swirled. Nausea now.
“Our grief isn’t the same, Lena, but please know I lost her, too.” Raycevic swallowed. “And I’m sorry I lied to you about my involvement with her before her suicide—”
I loved her. His words looped in her mind, awful echoes: Why would I lie about this?
The wallet rested on the pavement at his feet. It was right there. Right there. Reach for it? She urged herself not to, reminded herself that it was almost certainly another evil trick. That he’d seize on her moment of distraction, knock the Beretta from her fingers, stomp her skull in with his boot—
“Two steps back,” she ordered. “Give me space.”
He did.
Keeping the Beretta trained on the cop and her finger on the trigger, she quickly knelt and picked up the wallet. The moment passed; he didn’t attack. She opened the billfold one-handed. A taco-stand punch card fluttered out. A few loose receipts.
He watched. “In the back. The very last photo.”
But now another problem: She couldn’t swipe through the tightly packed cards one-handed. She had to keep the Beretta in her dominant hand, aimed at Raycevic. This was non-negotiable. She couldn’t let her guard down.
She wouldn’t.
That echo again: Why would I lie about this?
Then two things occurred to Lena Nguyen, like twin thunderclaps inside her skull. The first: their positioning had changed gradually over the past thirty seconds. Raycevic now stood five paces to her left. He’d been edging gingerly away ever since he first dropped his billfold on the pavement. This hadn’t been a fumble. It had been deliberate, as careful as a chess move. He was edging away from her, as if anticipating a lightning strike.
The second: an answer, finally, to Raycevic’s question. It chilled her spine.
He’s trying to distract me.
She had her back to the parked SIDEWINDER truck now. This had been necessary, because Raycevic’s subtle repositioning had guided her away from it—He’s distracting me—and she couldn’t see the semi’s darkened cab and didn’t dare turn around, because that would blow perhaps the only advantage she had left—He’s distracting me—and reveal she knew his girlfriend story was all a ruse and recognized the hidden gunsights tingling on the back of her neck at this very instant.
He’s fucking distracting me.
She held a swollen breath in her chest, looking at Raycevic. His wallet in her left hand, the Beretta in her right. Afraid to exhale. Afraid to move.
He’s distracting me so his buddy in the truck can shoot me.