BRENNAN WATCHED THE GARLIC BROWN IN THE OIL BEFORE dumping the chopped broccoli into the pan. She rocked the pan, flipping broccoli to coat all of the pieces with oil. There was a brief flash of flame as water from the crowns vaporized in the oil, aerosolizing and igniting it.
“Look at you,” Hunter said from the doorway. “Fire and everything.”
Brennan dusted the broccoli with white pepper, then pushed it into a serving bowl with chicken she’d already sautéed and put the pan back onto the flame. She added fresh garlic to the pan.
“It’s a nice apartment,” Hunter said, returning from his “tour” of her two bedroom. “How long have you lived here?”
“Bought it ten years ago? Something like that.”
“I know I’m not in town much, but I can’t believe I’ve never been here.” He lived ten blocks away.
“I’m sorry. It never occurred to me that you might want to visit.”
“Anyway, glad we’re meeting here tonight. And thank you for cooking. I’m so tired of Harris’s conference room.” They’d spent nearly two weeks of evenings in it, even after the call to their mother’s apartment.
The constant scanning for people tailing her was exhausting. Hunter had waited outside Harris’s building one evening for thirty minutes before entering to see if anyone was surveilling the entrance but hadn’t made anyone out.
Brennan refocused on her cooking before the garlic burned. She tilted a package of lo mein noodles into the pan, then added oyster sauce to the noodles while tossing them.
“You’re good at that little flip.”
“Thanks.”
“Looks tasty.”
“Dad’s recipe.”
“Seriously? You can’t possibly remember.”
Brennan shrugged.
Hunter looked back over his shoulder. “You have his desk. He leave a recipe in it?”
“No recipe. Mom cleaned it out before she let me use it when we were kids.” From the day she started doing real homework, she sat at that desk. When she took her dad’s office as her bedroom, the desk stayed—Hunter wanted nothing to do with it. When she was in high school, Brennan told her mother that she wanted it when she graduated college and begged her to hold on to it when Jane moved crosstown into her current, smaller apartment after Hunter left for college. Brennan dragged the desk through her starter apartments—the hulking slab of it occupying as much space as her twin bed in small New York City bedrooms. It was another piece of magic she tried to weave, keeping his desk as if it might one day conjure his return.
“Obviously she left some stuff in it,” Brennan said. “Paper clips and whatever. But nothing like his papers or anything. I have his pen. The fancy one he used. That was in there.”
Brennan brought her focus back to adding all of the components of the lo mein back to the pan—chicken, broccoli, and fresh scallions—but she sensed Hunter shaking his head behind her. She added more white pepper, tossed the lo mein in the pan, then tipped everything back into the serving bowl. They sat at her table and served themselves.
Brennan watched Hunter’s face as he pulled the noodles dangling from his chopsticks into his mouth. He looked at Brennan, his stare an accusation.
“This is exactly—” He took another bite. “How did you do this?”
“I remembered the flavor and texture. I asked Mom what she remembered, which wasn’t much. I stalked Chinatown for the right noodles and oyster sauce. Luckily, the packaging was pretty much the same as what I remembered as a kid. The trick was the white pepper. I had to look up recipes to see what other people added and then play with it until I figured it out. With just the oyster sauce, it was close, but not exactly there.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Hunter said. “I never really cook. You know, being on the road and everything. Also, I’ll tell you this, I always felt self-conscious trying to make Chinese food. Like I was faking it or something.”
He took another bite. “But this takes me back.”
It took Brennan back, too. She remembered how her father smelled when she would rest her head against him as a child. She couldn’t describe it—it wasn’t fragrant like soap or laundry, or musky like a cologne, or herbal like a mint. It was subtle; she remembered having to be close to him to pick it up. But close up, it filled her head like the scent of warm bread. Nobody she’d ever met smelled like him—except for rare moments over the years, standing near her brother, when she thought she imagined it if the air moved right. But she hadn’t given her brother more than a perfunctory hug in more than a decade. Even when he first left to cover fighting in Afghanistan and the Middle East, he’d squeezed her shoulder at arm’s length.
“You ever run across anyone that knew him?” Hunter asked.
“Only Walter Roberts. At least, he’s the only one who mentioned him to me.”
When they finished eating, Brennan cleaned up while Hunter set up his laptop on her table. Brennan returned with two beers.
“Anything in the files or transcript change your mind?” she asked.
“I don’t think so. You?”
She shook her head. “What was the biggest gap for you? What do you think is the biggest problem with the theory that he did it?”
“The handprint on the overturned chair. That was the only clear set they couldn’t identify. They had prints for Cathy, Jessica, her husband, Mark, and Dad.”
“I still can’t fucking believe they buried it.”
“I did some thinking after we talked about it.” Hunter sat forward on his chair and turned to face the back. “If anyone sat in the chair and leaned back, it’d get wiped away, or at least smudged, right? Implies that it was a pretty fresh print.”
“Detectives asked her about it indirectly,” Brennan said. She’d read Cathy’s statements carefully. “She said she hadn’t brought anybody to her place in the months before the murder.”
“That might be true, I guess. Maybe Cathy only saw her guy at hotels or something?”
“Why pay for a hotel if she has an empty apartment sitting there?”
They sipped their beers while they considered the possibilities.
Hunter broke the silence. “What about you? Biggest issue with the theory he didn’t do it?”
“He was there that night,” Brennan said. “The car-service voucher shows he took a car from the firm to an intersection a block away. Clever police work, to check those.”
“Yeah, I saw that testimony, but explain it to me so I’m sure I understand it right.”
“Big law firms, like the one dad worked for, they use car services to drive lawyers home when it’s late. Back then, the attorney swings by the dispatch desk, gives them the address they’re going to and the client that should be billed, and the dispatcher fills out a voucher. The vouchers used to come in little books with carbon copy backs. The lawyer gets the original to give to the driver and the copy stays in the books.”
“I think I saw the original books in the police files. Harris had copies.”
“Which you scanned out of order.” Brennan had resisted reordering them in order to move through the rest of the evidence.
“Not my fault. That box was a mess.”
“In any event, now it’s all computerized or they use an app, but even when I got out of law school, they were still using the voucher books.”
“Okay. So he took a car somewhere close.”
“And his prints on the broken beer bottle.”
“They were partial prints. Not a conclusive match,” Hunter said. Brennan appreciated his concession and offered her own.
“Yeah, but they’re suggestive. Along with the car-service voucher, it puts him in the apartment,” she said.
“So you accept he was there, somehow broke the bottle, but didn’t kill her?”
“Like I said, it’s the biggest problem with the theory that he didn’t do it. But how do we know he broke the bottle?”
“So he drank a beer, and someone broke the bottle later?”
“It’s possible. Don’t forget there were partial matches to Jessica’s prints on it, too. Maybe she picked up the bottle to use as a weapon?”
Hunter sighed.
“I know,” Brennan said. She wondered how she’d already almost finished her beer. “We can speculate all night.”
“If it was Dad, the only people who know what happened in that room are dead. There’s no way to be sure.”
“The way to conclude it was him is to rule everyone else out. That’s what they tried to do at the trial. It’s why they had to bury that handprint.”
“The husband,” Hunter said. “Cathy said he hit Jess.”
Brennan picked up the thought. “He found out about the affair, maybe? And maybe she told him that she was pregnant. Cathy said he wanted a kid, and Jessica didn’t want one with him. Her having a kid with another guy makes him jealous. They fight and it gets out of hand? Or he stews and decides to follow her and kill her?”
“His alibi was weak, too.”
“Not just that, though. Cathy’s, too. The whole thing kinda stank. By the end, Harris had the jury believing either of them could have killed her. Not to mention a random stranger.”
“Maybe.” He didn’t sound convinced, but he acknowledged, “I thought the husband’s testimony was bad.”
“What stood out to you?”
“Said he worked to ten, then walked home. But he told the police he took one route and then gave another at trial.”
“Yep. And did you notice the cops’ interviews of his coworkers?”
Hunter took a moment to understand. “There was the guy he worked with who said that he left before nine.”
“And Mark said he was home by eleven and was there for an hour before he got the call from Cathy that something happened. But the doorman told the police that he thought Mark was in and out, maybe twenty minutes at most.”
“Doorman changed that when they reinterviewed him. Said he didn’t remember. Maybe it was an hour.”
“He said that more than a week later,” Brennan said. “After Dad was arrested.”
She brought her beer to her lips and discovered it was empty.
Hunter grabbed the empty bottles from the table and walked around the island to her kitchen area. As he searched for a recycling bin, he asked, “What’s your issue with Cathy’s story? Aside from the fact that she didn’t mention her affair or the fighting to the police.”
“She knows a lot and she knows nothing. Jess tells her about her lovers, but doesn’t give her the names? Weird. She has a married boyfriend who can pay for her to stay at the Plaza for a week but who hadn’t been to her apartment in months? She doesn’t tell them that Jess and Mark fought? That Mark wanted a kid, but Jess didn’t? I guess I can see it if I squint at it. She couldn’t believe that Mark did it for some reason and was trying to protect her friends. Did you see that in any of the cops’ notes?”
“Nope. Maybe they didn’t ask her? Maybe she didn’t remember to tell them?” He opened her fridge.
“Doubtful. But my other problem is her story of where she was that night. Movie, alone, then a drink at a bar, alone. Cops asked her which movie and the bar, but did you see any notes that they checked on her alibi?”
Hunter walked back over with fresh beers. “No.”
“And going back to the prints. Cathy’s make sense. She lives there. But why did they pick up Mark’s prints there? There were a couple on the cabinets, right? According to him, he only showed up when Cathy called him about the murder. Said he was there once or twice for dinner with Jess, but not close to that night. Did the cops let him wander around the scene touching things?”
“It’s interesting to see you like this. Is this what you’re like at work?” Brennan shrugged one shoulder. “Sometimes.”
“You’re good at this.”
“I did it for a living.” It occurred to her that he was complimenting her. “Thank you.”
“I wonder if we can get that handprint run.” Hunter flipped his laptop open and started to type. “I guess I can ask my guy.”
“What else?” Brennan asked. “Anything in the photos of the scene?”
“I was just pulling them up again.” He turned his laptop so they both could look at the screen. Brennan couldn’t tell if it was a good scan of a bad photo or a bad scan of a mediocre photo. The photographer had tried to get most of the room in frame, but the flash had washed out the foreground while leaving the background in heavy shadows. A narrow band in the middle was properly exposed. In that space, Jessica’s bare feet appeared from behind the couch, which obscured the rest of her body. An end table sat, incongruously, behind the couch, which must have been turned during whatever struggle occurred.
“Next one?” Hunter asked.
They flipped through the photos together, matching the angles to a sketch of the scene one of the detectives had made. The scene was as Cathy described it to them. Small room, the couch and Jessica in the middle, head turned toward the couch, eyes closed. The blood showed in the photographs as a nearly black patch in a dark carpet. The overturned chair—the one with the handprint—was next to the table. The broken beer bottle was scattered against the base of the opposite wall. A foot to the right, it would have shattered the window.
“I don’t think we’re going to get that much out of these,” Brennan said.
“Maybe where the handprint chair is? Someone comes into the apartment, puts his hand on the back of the chair, like this”—Hunter stood to demonstrate—“to lean against it. Leaves his prints. Then flips the chair down, maybe as he attacks her?”
The next photo was an autopsy photo. Hunter closed it. “We don’t need to go through those, right? I’ve seen enough bodies.”
“No.” Neither of them were doctors. They wouldn’t learn anything from the photos that they didn’t already know from the medical examiner’s report. Jess had been stabbed, once, underneath her ribs. It was probably a kitchen knife, which had never been recovered. Jessica died quickly—the knife had been driven diagonally upward underneath her ribs from her left to right, slicing through one lung and part of her heart.
Perhaps it was the image of the autopsy photo that made Hunter ask, “What about the threats to you? To us? What should we do?”
Brennan shook her head. “I don’t know. Keep being careful?”
“What if we leak that they hid the handprint? If the damage is done,there’s no point in hurting anyone to keep it a secret.”
“Except for revenge,” Brennan said. “But more importantly, if it becomes a story, who’s going to talk to us? Plus, doesn’t it burn your source?”
Hunter nodded. “It just makes me nervous. For you. And Mom.”
“Same here. We’re being careful. We’ll be okay.” Brennan hoped her voice conveyed the confidence that she didn’t feel. Her phone chimed. “Mom.”
“She okay?”
“Yeah. But maybe we should head over. You got anything else going on tonight?”
Hunter smiled, then shook his head as he closed his laptop. Brennan tried to follow along as his face cycled through a series of expressions. He finally noticed she was staring at him.
“What?”
“You didn’t answer the question. What’s going on?”
“Nothing. I can go with you to Mom’s.”
“But if you have plans, I got it,” Brennan said.
“It’s fine.” He sighed. “I was going to head over that way anyway. I have plans. They’re on that side of town.”
“Oh?”
“It’s nothing. I’m meeting a friend at a bar over there.”
Brennan pulled her coat on. “That bar near Mom’s place? The one with the waitress?”
Hunter smiled. “I’m taking the Fifth.”