THEY DROVE TO LARCHMONT THE NEXT MORNING. BRENnan hated letting Hunter drive, but she was hungover and didn’t want to deal with the hassle.
“Why do you have a car anyway?” Hunter broke the silence as they crossed the Henry Hudson Bridge into the Bronx.
“Paul and I got it last year. Figured if we were going to have a kid, it would be easier to have one to get around. Obviously, that didn’t happen. Now we share custody of the car. I get it every other week. At least until our lawyers figure out the asset split.”
“You were thinking about having a kid? With our parents?”
“I figured I could only do better,” she said. “But I’m probably wrong about that.”
Traffic was light, and it was too early to knock on a stranger’s door when they arrived in Larchmont, so they found a diner to kill time. The place looked like it was suffering from a forty-year hangover, but Brennan didn’t care so long as they had eggs and hash browns, which they did.
“Should help with the hangover,” Hunter said after they both had coffee in front of them.
“I’m fine.” She added cream to her coffee. It steamed from a cheap, narrow acrylic mug. The feel of the mug told her that she was going to hate the coffee. There was no sweetener on the table, so she asked the man sitting alone at the next table if she could grab a packet from his. She’d noticed him when he sat a few minutes after they arrived. He was only about ten years older than her, handsome, with gray hair that was almost white. He was the kind of guy she would have flirted with if she’d run across him the night before, but she just thanked him without smiling when he passed her the sweetener.
The waitress did everything but dump their plates on the table. Brennan’s scrambled eggs were overcooked and thin, but the potatoes were fantastic, salty and simultaneously crunchy and soft. She knew it was her imagination, but she could feel them absorbing the leftover whiskey in her stomach. Hunter ate a bagel and stared out the window at passing traffic.
“You got Mom tonight?” he asked. They’d been trading evenings with Jane.
“Yeah. Why? Got a date?”
Hunter shook his head.
“What do you even do when you’re not at her place?”
“Same as you, I suspect,” he said. “Work. Hang out with friends.”
“Those are two lies.”
“I have friends.”
“Name one.”
“They’re my friends from the bar. And”—he spoke over what he knew would be a sarcastic response—“I don’t think you’re in a position to judge.”
“I’m sure the bar I stumbled out of last night is a gigantic step up from whatever cave you’re hanging out in.”
“You’re not better than me just because your drinks cost twice what mine cost.”
“I’m just giving you shit, Hunter.” She forced a swig of coffee down, chased it with water. Both tasted the same. She looked up at her brother. “We need Cathy to talk to us. Without pushing her like you did to Walter. It’s why he rushed us out.”
“That’s not what happened. He would have known if we were beating around the bush. Better to get right to it so he wouldn’t think we were playing games. But yeah, he was definitely uncomfortable.”
“So maybe we try a different approach with Cathy.”
Hunter nodded, unconvincingly.
Brennan prodded at the bags under eyes and checked her reflection in the black screen of her cell phone. “Seriously, do I look like shit?”
“You look fine.” The waitress dropped the check without saying a word. Hunter pushed it toward Brennan. “Thanks for breakfast,” he said.
After Brennan paid the bill, they drove to the address Hunter had tracked down for Cathy Cooke. She lived away from the water, toward the Thruway, on a tree-lined side street still dusted with crusty snow. The trees were bare, but there were a lot of them. Brennan figured the block must be beautiful and shady in the spring and summer. Pretty houses stood quiet on crowded lots. Cathy’s, a modest gray house, was second from the corner, the smallest on the block. Hunter parked in front, and they walked to the door avoiding the iced-over parts of the path.
A woman answered the door half a minute after they rang. Brennan tried to find something remarkable about her but couldn’t. Medium hair, medium build, medium height. Her hair was dyed blond, but gray streaks crept in among the darkening roots. She wore a Gap sweatshirt and khaki pants.
“I’m sorry to bother you, but are you Cathy Cooke?” Hunter asked through the plexiglass in the storm door.
“Who’s asking?” Her voice was completely at odds with her appearance. Low and gritty, it carried the remnants of an accent from one of the outer boroughs, like grout stains on a white tile wall.
“My name is Hunter Leigh. I’m a reporter. This is Brennan.”
Just Brennan, she thought. Clever of him not to mention that Lo was her last name. Give Cathy some interesting information—he’s a reporter—so that she was processing that instead of focusing on the omission of her surname.
Cathy gave them a look that said, So what?
“Did you know Jessica DeSalvo?” Brennan asked.
Cathy’s face moved imperceptibly, a shimmer of sly fear before the plain-lady face returned. But when she spoke, her accent strengthened, almost enough to place. “That was a long time ago. What do you want with that?”
“We had a few questions,” Hunter said. “We hoped you could answer them.”
“Why should I talk to you?”
“We’re looking at this case because it wasn’t really resolved,” Hunter said, his words carefully chosen.
“No. I guess it wasn’t.”
Brennan was sure that she was going to close the door in their faces, but instead Cathy opened the storm door and stood back so they could enter. Inside, a small hallway faced a flight of stairs to the second floor. She led them around the stairs, back to the kitchen, and offered them seats at a small dining table.
“Coffee?” she asked as she poured herself a mug.
“Yes, please,” Brennan said.
Hunter asked for one as well.
Cathy poured their coffees. “I make a big pot on the weekends. Not because I’m expecting visitors, but because I like to drink it iced in the afternoon. Even when it’s cold out. This house stays very warm.”
The coffee was perfect—a dark Italian roast—and Brennan had to remind herself to take it slow. It would be harder for Cathy to rush them out if they were still drinking.
Cathy finally sat down. “So you want to do a story about Jess, huh?”
“Can you tell us about her?” Brennan asked, in a sympathetic voice. She could choose her words carefully as well.
“What do you want to know?”
“We want to get a sense of what she was like. How did you become friends? What did you like about her?”
“We met during college. A friend of mine from high school went to college with another girl who interned with Jessica. They put together a beach rental down in Avalon, you know, in Jersey, and I got sucked into it. I ended up hanging out with Jessica a lot that summer. We just clicked, which was funny. She was a super preppy Ivy League girl from Greenwich. And me, Bay Ridge, trying to save enough money for an associate’s degree or paralegal school or whatever I was doing.”
Cathy took a sip of her coffee. Brennan waited patiently. She’d interviewed enough witnesses to know eventually Cathy would keep talking, if for nothing else than to fill the silence.
“She was so much fun that summer. She wasn’t one of those girls who came down, got shit-faced to the point where you were embarrassed for her, or had a different guy in and out of her room each night. But I mean, she wasn’t a Goody Two-shoes either. She was funny, but without being mean. And so smart. It was nice being with her.”
Hunter pulled a digital recorder from his pocket and pressed record as he placed it on the table.
“Do you mind if I record?” Hunter asked and immediately followed it up with: “So you stayed in touch after that summer?”
Hunter’s smoothness in changing focus from the recorder impressed Brennan.
“Yeah. A phone call here, a postcard there. But when she was coming to New York for law school, she asked me if I knew anyone looking for a roommate. I told her we should live together.”
Brennan sipped her coffee as Hunter continued the questioning. “How long did you live with her?”
“Three years. Her whole time in law school. I was back at City College. Got my finance degree.”
“How was she as a roommate?”
“Perfect. She wasn’t the neatest girl, you know. But she was steady, didn’t do drugs, and she was just as fun and sweet as she was that summer down the shore. We’d go to a bar on Fridays, flirt with guys. But she was mostly work, work, work.”
“Do you have any pictures of her?” Brennan asked.
Cathy looked at the ceiling like she could see through it. “Not out. Maybe in an old album somewhere.”
“Was she close to her parents?”
Cathy nodded. “I was jealous of her for that. My mom left us when I was a kid. I barely remember her. She had issues. Drugs, whatever. I wasn’t close to my dad. And then he died when I was a teenager. Work accident. He was a contractor and slipped one day. For some reason, he wasn’t wearing a safety harness and stepped into an elevator shaft. My older brother got me through high school. After, it was just me, basically. But Jessica’s family was always there. Stopping by when they were in the city. Taking us to lunch or dinner. I’d go up to their place for holidays. Nothing had ever gone wrong for them, any of them, in their lives. But you couldn’t resent them for that, they were so nice.”
“What about her husband?”
“Mark?” Cathy glanced out the window. “You talked to him?”
“Not yet,” Hunter said.
“Haven’t seen him in a while. What’s it been? Maybe fifteen years? Twenty?”
“You stayed in touch after Jess died?” Brennan asked.
“Yeah. We were close. Because of her. But, you know, people lose touch. The more his career took off, the less time he had to keep up with old friends.”
Hunter picked up the questions again. “What was he like?”
“Smart. Very handsome. God, Jess was so smitten when she met him. He was all she’d talk about. Then they got married. The three of us would hang out a lot. They were always trying to set me up with guys, but it never stuck.”
Cathy took a long sip of her coffee and looked into her mug. Hunter started to speak, but Cathy held up her hand.
“But this isn’t what you’re here for, is it?”
“We’re just trying to better understand,” Brennan said. “Looking back at old news stories, you don’t get a sense of her. As a person, you know? She couldn’t speak for herself or explain things to the press or at trial.”
“What’s the point? What’s your angle? Nobody gives a shit about an old murder.”
“Don’t you?” Hunter asked. “Don’t you want to know what happened?”
“Me?” Her laugh was like vinegar and curdled milk turned to sound. “I know what happened. That guy, John Lo, killed her and got away with it.”
Brennan’s stomach fell, and her breath hitched. She felt the blood rushing to her face, but hoped her expression of neutral interest hadn’t changed. She didn’t trust herself to pick up her coffee mug. She avoided glancing at Hunter.
“Tell us how you know,” Hunter said.
Cathy leaned back—her simple dinette chair, a throne—and said, “Who else could it have been? That man had everything to lose. His wife and kids, his job. If she told his wife…”
Cathy tried to look somber, but Brennan saw a vicious light in her eyes. Cathy pitched forward. “She thought that she was pregnant.”
“That was in the papers,” Hunter said. “But she wasn’t, according to the autopsy. Let’s take a step back. You saw her the day that she died?”
“No. She had a key to my place. Like I told the cops, I worked and then saw a movie. I was supposed to call her after, but when I did, there was no answer. I figured that she was…you know…occupied.”
“She used your apartment…” Hunter drained the last of his coffee and let the rest of the question hang over the table.
“To have sex? Sometimes.”
Hunter looked over to the coffeepot as he asked the next question. “When did that start?”
Cathy retrieved the coffeepot and refreshed their mugs.
“A few months before. Less than a year, more than six months. It wasn’t a lot. Just a few times. I went to Vegas with a boyfriend for Labor Day weekend, and she offered to feed my fish while I was gone. When I got back, she told me that she had an affair.”
“What did she tell you?” Brennan asked.
“She thought Mark was sleeping around. And work was stressing her out. So she had a fling, something to blow off some steam. It wasn’t anything serious. I thought it was hilarious, this preppy, prim-and-proper girl, getting some on the side. I offered her my place if she wanted to use it.”
Hunter raised an eyebrow. “You were Mark’s friend, too. Were you worried about him?”
“You have to understand,” Cathy said. “She was having a terrible time with Mark. She would show up at my door looking for a place to crash if they had a bad fight.”
“How bad?” Brennan asked.
“Look,” Cathy said, glancing at the recorder on the table, “I’m not friends with Mark anymore, but I don’t want to say anything that will get him in trouble.”
Hunter reached forward to place one hand near the recorder as if he would take it back if she asked. But Brennan knew that Cathy would talk. Everything about her—the look on her face, her posture—betrayed a desire to gossip. She just wanted an excuse, so Brennan gave her one.
“You don’t have to say anything that you’re not comfortable sharing,” Brennan said. “We’re just trying to understand what happened, and your perspective is helpful.”
“Jess and Mark were toxic. They didn’t put that in the papers back then. I mean, Jess was my friend, but she was…volatile as she got older. Especially when she drank. I don’t know how to describe it. It was like she didn’t care about anything. And Mark, he was like a super macho guy, right? Total Jersey Shore. Wouldn’t back down from nothing. No matter how smart he was, or how much he tried to improve himself, that part was always there.”
“You mentioned bad fights,” Hunter said. He withdrew his hand from beside the recorder.
“I saw them hit each other. He corrected her grammar or something, and she just lost it. We were drinking, of course, smoking a cigarette outside the bar, and she slapped the smoke right out of his mouth. He shoved her to get her off of him, but like into a wall. I had to grab her, or she would’ve got right back at him.”
“Just that once?”
Cathy shrugged. “We drank a lot. I saw them get physical with each other a few other times. And they each told me about times when they got carried away when I wasn’t around. It was like they wanted me to, I don’t know, kinda work things out between them. Like I was a goddamned marriage counselor or something.”
“So, you offered her your apartment,” Brennan said.
“Her having sex at my place didn’t seem like a big deal. I figured, her meeting someone was a good thing. Maybe she’d fall in love and get the courage to leave him. She would change the sheets and clean up and everything. You couldn’t even tell that she had been there. We had shared a bed a bunch of times, so I wasn’t…I don’t know. We were kids.”
“Did she tell you who she was sleeping with?” Hunter asked.
“Just that he was married.” Cathy rolled her eyes. “Like it was a huge secret. She was so dramatic about it. ‘Cathy, it could ruin this guy’s life.’ Like I was going to tell the Post or whatever or that anybody cared.”
Brennan asked, “So you didn’t know that it was John Lo until you saw the papers?”
“No. I was surprised when I saw his picture. I mean, I figured she worked with the guy, who else did she have time to meet? But I didn’t think she’d be into a Chinese guy. When she first told me that she’d cheated, I asked what the guy looked like. She said like an average guy. Chinese guys were not our average.”
“How many times was she seeing this guy?” Hunter wanted to steer the conversation away from race. At some point, Cathy might note that he and Brennan were both half Asian and start making connections.
“At work? All the time. At my place, there was that time during Labor Day, then it picked up again after the Christmas before she died. That’s when I told her she could use my place.”
“Do you think Mark knew? That she was having an affair?” Hunter asked.
Cathy’s eyes went to the digital recorder, but she didn’t ask Hunter to switch it off. “He called me once. Said that he thought, you know, that she might be sleeping around. I told him that he was crazy, she’d never do anything like that.”
“He thought you’d tell him?” Hunter offered.
“Like I said before, after a while, it was like I was his friend as much as hers.” Cathy shrugged. “I felt bad about lying.”
Brennan asked, “Would he have hurt her if he knew about the affair? If he thought she was pregnant with someone else’s baby?”
“It wasn’t—” Cathy started, but snapped her mouth shut and thought for a moment. “I mean, who knows? I don’t think so. But he wanted a kid bad. Jess didn’t. It was one of the things they argued about. If someone else got her pregnant and she wanted that baby? I don’t know how he’d take that.”
“You were telling us before about the night she was murdered,” Brennan said.
Cathy watched steam rise from her coffee. “She told me that she needed a place to meet the guy. She called him that. ‘The guy.’ She was tired of Mark. She said that he had issues and she wanted to leave him. But she was worried she was pregnant. She didn’t know whose kid it was. She said that she was going to tell the guy that the baby was his. I said, ‘How can you tell him it’s his?’ She said that she just knew.” Cathy made a face. “I guess she would if, you know.”
“What happened after the movie?”
“I tried calling her. When she didn’t answer, I walked around for a bit and tried again. No answer. But by that point, I thought she must be finished. So, I went home. The door was unlocked. I remember that. I mean, you did not leave your door unlocked in that neighborhood. So that’s when I knew something was really wrong.
“I opened the door. It was a small one bedroom.” She gestured at the space. “My whole apartment could have fit into this kitchen. The main room was tiny. The couch was out of place, so I had to walk over and look over the top of it. She was on the floor, in front of the couch. At first, I didn’t know what I was seeing. I was like, ‘Why is she sleeping on the floor?’ But she was so still. Then I noticed the blood underneath her. The carpet was soaking it up. She wasn’t breathing.”
Cathy shook her head as if it would erase the image, then looked over to Hunter and Brennan. “I’m going to have nightmares tonight.”
“I’m sorry,” Hunter said. “I know this must be difficult.”
Cathy nodded.
“What did you do next?” Brennan asked.
“I banged on my neighbor’s door. Called the police.”
“Anything else?”
“What do you mean? After they came? I gave a statement. Started thinking about where I was going to live. I didn’t think I’d be able to stay at my place even if they let me back in.”
“Before the police came, did you go back and check on her? Look around?”
“No. I was so scared. I only went back twice. That night, to get some clothes with the police, and later to move out.”
“Where did you end up staying?”
“At the Plaza.”
“For the night?”
“For the week it took me to find a new place to live.”
Brennan cocked her head. “That must have been expensive.”
“My boyfriend paid.”
“Why didn’t he let you crash with him?” Hunter asked.
Cathy looked down at her hands, then back to the siblings, but didn’t speak.
Brennan understood. “He was married, wasn’t he?”
Cathy nodded, then stood. “I think it’s best if I had some time alone now.”
Hunter picked up his recorder as the siblings stood to leave.
Brennan said, “Thank you for talking with us.”
Cathy shook her head and said, “It’s just a pity that he got away with it.”