Carl Mendez’s house was the epitome of suburban blandness, from the white picket fence out front to the generic Ikea furniture and uninspired art inside. I couldn’t imagine the colorful butterfly that was Laini being trapped in the middle of all that beige and oatmeal dullness. Then again, maybe that had been the plan — to provide a lackluster canvas against which she could radiate life and loveliness. The only element of the décor that popped was a series of enlarged photographs of her which hung on a wall in the living room.
I’d been hoping for another cup of coffee, but Carl Mendez merely settled his bulk into the largest chair and rubbed a hand across his stubbled cheeks when Ryan introduced me as a special consultant. I stared at the brass buttons on the leather jacket Mendez was wearing and then looked away, pushing back the flashbacks of that other button. The wooden one.
“… just wanted to clarify a few things,” Ryan was saying when I tuned in to the conversation. “Such as the reason for the breakup in your relationship with Laini Carter?”
“Don’t ask me,” Mendez replied, as though we could still ask her. “It wasn’t my idea. And Laini didn’t give me a reason. Not a real one, anyway. She just said our time together had run its course, and that nothing lasts forever.”
“Was there someone else?”
“She swore not.”
“And for you?” Ryan pressed.
“No! I loved her, I wanted to marry her.”
“We’ve been told that there was a lot of conflict in the relationship.”
“Who said that?” Mendez demanded, gripping the arms of his chair.
“Is it true?”
“No! We were happy! I still can’t believe she did it. That she didn’t even leave me a note. How could she do that — leave one for Bethany and not one for me? I loved her! I thought —” He pinched a thumb and forefinger across the bridge of his nose, as if trying to push back a headache. Or tears. “I thought she’d just take a few days and then come back. I never dreamed …” His voice petered out.
Ryan gave him a moment, then pointed to something I hadn’t noticed — a fist-sized dent in one of the walls. “What happened there?”
Mendez shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “When Laini left, I got mad, you know? I lost it for a moment.”
“Ever lose it with her?”
“Never. I never laid a hand on her in anger. I would never have hurt her. That’s not who I am.”
“And yet, you have a criminal record for assault,” Ryan pointed out.
Aha! I’d known there was something hinky in this guy’s past.
Mendez sneered. “I had a fight in a bar when I was a student twenty-something years ago. That’s a very different thing from assaulting a woman.”
Ryan consulted his notes — more, I suspected, for effect than actually to jog his memory — and said, “The fight was over a woman.”
Double aha. Mendez with his hot temper and aggressive attitude was rising in my suspect stakes by the moment.
Mendez stared incredulously at Ryan. “Yeah, but I didn’t hit her, did I? I’ve never hit a woman. What has this got to do with Laini’s suicide, anyway? Are you thinking that having ditched me, she was so sad we were over that she threw herself off that cliff? Because I can assure you, she hardly seemed devastated,” he said bitterly. “There must have been another reason for why she … why she did what she did.”
“In an unnatural death, we’re obliged to investigate all possible options, Mr. Mendez,” Ryan said. “Including that her death was not suicide.”
“What do you mean? Do you think it was an accident? Or” — he looked from Ryan to me and then back again — “Murder?”
“We haven’t yet established the manner of her death conclusively,” Ryan said smoothly. “We were hoping you could help us with our enquiries.”
Mendez thrust his jaw forward and glared at Ryan. “Are you trying to pin this on me? Do I need a lawyer?”
“If you feel you need a lawyer, please go ahead and call one.”
“But if I call one, I look guilty, right?”
I leaned forward in my chair. “Mr. Mendez, may I ask — did you throw flowers into the quarry where Laini died sometime in the last few days?”
“Who are you exactly? And why are you here?” he demanded belligerently.
“Was it you?” Ryan asked.
“No. Now you’re going to read something into that, too, I suppose? You should check with that creep she works with. Sounds like the kind of thing he’d do.”
“What creep?”
“Jim. He was always bugging Laini, giving her shit she didn’t want. One time he gave her a dried spring hare’s tail. Said he’d chopped it off one he hunted himself. And last month — yeah, get this! — last month he gave her a bra in her exact size.”
Gross. I couldn’t decide what part of that was most disturbing.
“Guy’s a freak, man,” Mendez said, bunching his hands into fists.
“Did she confront him about it?” Ryan asked.
“Sure. But she wasn’t tough enough with him; she felt sorry for him. Said he cried when she returned the bra and told him no more gifts. I wanted to go and sort him out myself, but she begged me not to. With what you’re telling me today — I should’ve. If you think this is murder, you should be talking to him, not me.”
“We’ll certainly interview him again, Mr. Mendez, but right now there are a couple of things I’d like to check with you.” Ryan glanced down at his notes. “You told us you last saw Laini Carter on Saturday the tenth at around nine o’clock in the morning, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And the next day, on that Sunday morning when she died, you were here at home. Alone.”
Mendez nodded.
“Make any calls? Send any texts?”
“No, Laini had begged me to stop, and there was no one else I wanted to talk to.”
“Work on your PC maybe?”
“I was watching golf on ESPN. The World Championship in Mexico.”
“Who won?” I asked, feeling all Sherlock Homey.
“Phil Mickelson, in a playoff over Justin Capshaw,” he snapped.
“Oh.”
“So, there’s no way to validate you were actually here?” Ryan asked.
“I didn’t know I’d need an alibi. I wasn’t planning on murdering anyone. I didn’t murder anyone.”
I glanced at Ryan. If Mendez had been home when he received the text from Laini, surely that could be established from cell phone records? Admittedly, my knowledge of this came from episodes of CSI and Law and Order rather than any clear understanding of how things worked, but I thought there was a way to plot location using cell phone towers and signals. Then again, maybe that only applied to calls, not text messages. Or maybe Ryan was just trying to rile or unsettle Mendez in the hope of getting him to spill more details. I could help him with that.
“How did you meet Laini?” I asked.
But Mendez was clearly pissed off and had decided to clam up. Lucky for me, I’d been knee-deep in the work of psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross the previous afternoon, watching an old interview in which she’d laughingly discussed how to get terminally ill children to talk to therapists. The trick, she’d said, was to keep guessing wrong until the kid’s frustration overcame their reserve, prompting them to correct the therapist. I reckoned it was worth a shot with this sullen lover-boy.
“Maybe you met at the market or at the syrup emporium?”
Mendez crossed his arms across his wide chest and scowled down at the biscuit-colored carpet.
“No wait, maybe you were both in the same cycling club?”
No response.
“A blind date set up by a friend?”
Mendez rolled his shoulders like he had a pain in the neck, and Ryan gave me a disapproving glance. I guessed my questions didn’t fall under the definitions of either “silent sidekick” or “best behavior.” I gave him a look of my own, one that said I-know-what-I’m-doing-just-give-me-a-little-leeway-okay?
“Oh, dear,” I said to Mendez, “don’t tell me you two met on Grinder?”
That got a response out of him.
Balling his hands into fists, he growled, “I’m not gay!”
“Tinder, then? Or Match.com?”
“For your information, I met Laini via Bethany.”
“You dumped Bethany for Laini?”
“That’s not how it happened,” Mendez said. “I’d had a few dates with Bethany, but we weren’t in an exclusive relationship, though I guess she was keen for one. Anyway, she threw a party to welcome Laini to Pitchford, and I was invited. I walked out into the backyard, and there she was, standing in the sunshine, in this crazy blue dress. And that was it. She was so …”
“Beautiful?” I guessed.
Mendez looked from one of my mismatched eyes to the other and scowled.
“Poor Bethany,” I said. “I bet she was heartbroken.”
Mendez made a scoffing sound.
“Or maybe she was really mad and wanted revenge.”
He rolled his eyes. “She was happy for us, okay? She told me so. She was glad Laini had found someone ‘cos she wanted her to be happy. She loved her.”
“Why weren’t you and Bethany a good fit?” Ryan asked.
Mendez stared back mutely.
“Sexual problems, am I right?” I said. “Bethany’s kind of sinewy. And bony — a man could hurt himself on those pointy hips. Maybe it put you off enough that you couldn’t … you know?”
“Garnet, that’s enough!” Ryan said.
Mendez shot me a filthy look and then, to Ryan, said, “We just didn’t click. Bethany was too driven and ambitious. She worked insanely hard at that business of hers — I could see it would always come first with her. Like, it’s her everything. I just wanted a woman who could … be my wife, someone to share my life and grow old with. I thought I’d found her at last. But Laini wouldn’t marry me. She said she’d feel trapped. Trapped — by me! I just wanted to love her.”
Mendez covered his face with his hands. His shoulders were shaking, and he was making soft, guttural noises, but I couldn’t tell if he was truly crying, or just faking it. I opened my handbag, found an only slightly crumpled tissue and walked over to hand it to him. Laying an ostensibly comforting hand on his shoulder, I closed my eyes and concentrated.
Immediately, an image coalesced in my mind.
Laini laughs and shakes her head at Carl Mendez. “Don’t be silly — I’d be a terrible mother. I’d forget to feed the baby and sleep right through its nighttime cries.”
“They’re not babies forever. They grow up. It gets easier,” Carl says, with a smile that looks more like a grimace.
“I wouldn’t be better with an older kid. I’d encourage it to play hooky, or to run away and join the circus.”
“If you just —”
“And it would make me miserable, darling. It would … squash me. I know what I need to do, and that’s to —”
Carl shrugged my hand off his shoulder, ending the vision and leaving me wondering what Laini had thought she needed to do. I returned to my seat.
“You wanted kids, but she didn’t,” I said softly. “Not ever.”
Shaking his head, Mendez stood up and stalked across the room to stand by the window with his back to us. His hands were once again curled into fists, crushing the tissue between his powerful fingers.
Had Laini possibly already been pregnant and contemplating a termination? I got the sense that Mendez would not have been okay with that. It was infuriating that my visions didn’t come with a helpful, orienting context. Had the two of them merely been discussing a hypothetical possibility of having children one day, or had they been talking about a choice they had to make immediately? And when had that conversation taken place — last week, last month, a year ago?
“Was Laini —” I began, but Mendez interrupted me.
“Losing her — it’s killing me. I can’t eat, can’t sleep. The doctor’s given me tranquilizers and told me not to go back to work before Wednesday. But what am I supposed to do here, alone?”
Neither Ryan nor I said anything.
“I’d like you to leave now,” Mendez said, and I could tell that we’d get nothing more out of him.
Outside, on our way to my car, Ryan said, “What part of silent sidekick did you not understand?”
“I got him to open up, didn’t I?”
I was about to tell him about the vision when a police cruiser pulled up in front of my car and Officer Ronnie Capshaw got out.
“Ah shit,” Ryan said softly.
Greeting him, Capshaw said she’d been in the area to check out the Toyota he’d called in and had decided to drop in on the Mendez interview. “Though I see I arrived too late.”
Her shrewd gaze slid to me and then took in the single car — mine. I could see her putting two and two together and assuming the worst. Her face tightened with anger.
“Are you freaking kidding me?” she said to Ryan. “I don’t care how cozy you are with this– this person” — she shot me a look that clearly conveyed she thought any man who cozied up to someone like me needed getting his head read — “but she’s got no business being here.”
“I’m not —” I stuttered. “We didn’t —”
“She's a civilian,” she said to Ryan, completely ignoring me. “And she’s a kook.”
“Hey!” I protested, and shot Ryan a dirty look. What had he told her about me?
“Don’t tell me you buy into all this nonsense, Chief?” Capshaw said.
“Give us a minute?” Ryan asked me, his expression tense and unhappy.
“Yeah, give us a minute, Miss McGee,” Ronnie said. “I’m just dying to hear why my boss included you on an interview, instead of his own officer!”
I left them arguing on the sidewalk and strolled back to the house. There wasn’t much to see in the yard apart from a few leafless shrubs with mushy snow around their muddy bottoms and an empty birdfeeder stuck in the ground near the porch. It seemed Carl Mendez wasn’t as concerned about feeding wild animals as Laini had been.
Glancing back, I saw Capshaw with her hands on her hips, still giving Ryan a piece of her mind, so I kept walking. At the side of the house, a double garage was set well back from the front of the property. When the garage doors resisted my best efforts to lift them, I turned my attention to the trash cans screened by a wooden lattice.
Judging by the mound of recyclables in the green trash can, Mendez preferred his Corona in bottles and his Buds in cans, and he’d been hitting both hard in the last week. I lifted the lid of the black trash can and was hit by an overpowering odor of fish. Gagging, I pinched my nose closed and was just lifting the top trash bag when I heard a car door slamming and the sound of an engine starting.
“Garnet?” Ryan called from out front.
I untied the drawstrings of the trash bag and peeped inside — ready-meal containers, chip packets, empty toilet rolls, a couple of crumpled, moldy oranges, an empty deodorant can. I set the bag aside and, bending over the trash can, reached deeper inside to pull out the next bag. It was clearly the source of the heave-worthy smell, but I wasn’t tempted to open it, because my gaze was fixed on the item that lay in the bottom of the bin.
“Garnet!” Ryan sounded angry.
I quickly replaced the trash bags and scampered around the house, eager to tell Ryan what I’d seen. But one look at his fuming face and I knew that he wasn’t in the mood to hear another word from me — the source of his disagreement with Capshaw.
I opened the car and slid inside, uneasily aware that my hands were dirty and might well be contaminating my handbag, car keys and steering wheel with disgusting microbes. Ryan flung himself into the passenger seat, slammed his door shut and fought with the seatbelt, which locked every time he tried to yank it.
I said nothing and, miraculously, managed to stay silent for the entire uncomfortable drive to drop him back at his house, but all the while, I was thinking about what Laini had been about to say in my vision, and about what I’d seen in Mendez’s trash can — a mangled frame holding a large photograph of Laini Carter, with shards of broken glass radiating out from a central point of impact located directly over her winsome face.