“I was expecting your call,” Dillon said as soon as he picked up the phone.
Lucy wasn’t surprised. “I don’t like it when we argue.”
“Argue? That’s kind of strong, don’t you think?”
“I need to talk to Nelia.”
“No.”
“I’m not going to let you damage your relationship with Nelia or with everyone else.”
“Why do you think this is you against the family?”
“You weren’t there!” Lucy rarely lost her temper, but it had been a really awful two days. She pinched the bridge of her nose and willed herself to be calm.
“Luce,” Dillon said softly, “I know this is difficult for you and for our family. You’ve never chosen the easy path. It’s one reason I love you so much. Let me be a buffer. It’s something I’m very good at.”
“It’s too late.”
“It’s never too late.”
Lucy didn’t want to tell Dillon exactly what their father had said. She didn’t want to dump her frustration on her brother. Instead she said, “I guess I was expecting a different response. In hindsight, I screwed up. Why did I think having a nice family dinner would soften the blow?”
“You’re probably right, though I can see why you did it—you were expediting.”
“Exactly. But I was too blunt. I should have considered all the ramifications first, especially on Carina.”
“Did you read her interview?”
“I haven’t had the chance. I will after dinner tonight. Then I’ll talk to her. One-on-one.”
“I think that’s smart.”
Lucy was relieved.
“Just like it’s not smart for you to contact Nelia. I will do it, and I will accept any fallout. She needs to know—even if this reporter you’re working with doesn’t reach out to her, someone will. She’ll hear about it and it’ll be far worse if she hears about it from anyone other than family.”
Lucy hadn’t thought that far ahead. She hadn’t thought about what happened after they found the killer and when the news became public. “Thank you, Dillon.”
“I recognized your focus on the video conference—you’re not going back, are you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not going back to San Antonio until you solve this.”
“I don’t know that I’ll be able to take that much time off.”
“But.”
Dillon was right. “I can’t walk away. I don’t want to lose my job, but this might be my stand. I’ll accept the consequences.”
“You always do.”
“My new boss already doesn’t like me.” She rolled her eyes. “That sounds so junior high.”
“Yet.”
“She started while I was on my honeymoon. I met her the Monday I returned and it was extremely uncomfortable—I can’t pinpoint it exactly. But I’m not comfortable with her knowing so much about me, and I know she has read my files, and talked to Juan as well. I’m sure she talked to Noah, but she knows that Noah and I are friends. She made a comment about it, and maybe I’m reading into the subtext, but it seemed that because Noah and I had been friends, she doesn’t believe anything he says about me. Not to mention that everything that happened in Mexico last October is sealed. No one in my office knows, except for Nate, and I think that bugs her. Because she doesn’t know what happened.”
“It’s difficult for a supervisor to have a staff member who has, for lack of a better word, protection from on high.”
“I don’t want that kind of protection.”
“But it’s there. It’s not something you can turn on and off. Just recognize that her perception is tainted. But also recognize your own motives.”
“I want to find Justin’s killer. That’s my sole motive.”
“Motive was the wrong word. Motivation, because you have been given a lot of leeway in pursuing cases, both on and off book, that in the back of your mind I’m pretty certain you think that you’ll get a pass no matter how long this takes.”
She was about to object, but maybe Dillon was right. “That would make me a total prima donna.”
Dillon laughed. “You’re hardly a prima donna, but you have a certain confidence. How do I explain it? You have an intuitive understanding of how the system works. That there are give-and-takes and some people are treated differently than others. While the FBI is a bureaucracy, it’s still run by human beings, and there is always a level of friendships and trust that supersedes certain situations.”
“I don’t expect Rick to swoop in and rescue my career,” Lucy said. Rick Stockton was the second-highest-ranking director in national headquarters.
“I know, but—”
“I see what you’re saying, and you might be right—except my excuse is that I will find Justin’s killer. I have to. Knowing that we’re this close—I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I walked away and another little boy died. If I lose my job over it, I can live with that.” She didn’t want to lose her job, but she’d resolved that sometimes her decisions didn’t fit into the structure of her chosen profession. She just had to take each situation as it arose.
“Are you sleeping?” Dillon asked.
“Enough.”
“I’ll call you after I reach out to Nelia. Tread lightly with Carina, but I think you’re doing the right thing. She needs to hear from you what you’re doing and why. She’s a cop at heart, but she’s also a mother.”
“Thanks, Dillon. Tell Kate I said hi.”
Lucy hung up.
She still had a hour before she needed to meet Max for dinner. She took a deep breath, considered what Dillon had said. He was right—she did have confidence about her job. Not that she could “do no wrong” per se, but that she could justify her actions.
She considered the situation—would she be willing to walk away if quitting was the only way to solve Justin’s murder?
She wanted to make a flip answer—yes—yet she loved her job. She was good at it. She’d saved people. Last September she had worked on a particularly emotional case involving black-market babies. She’d not only saved several of the women who had been used as breeders, she and her partners in the San Antonio office—in fact, FBI agents across the country—had located nearly every baby who had been sold.
She did good. She didn’t want to quit. She didn’t want to be fired. She would fight it.
Yet.
It all began with Justin.
Her dad thought that she’d given up on her dream of majoring in linguistics and international relations because she’d been kidnapped. But she’d begun to wonder if maybe, just maybe, that had been a false dream. One she told her parents to protect them over the years, because after Justin was killed, everything changed.
Her dad thought she joined the FBI as some sort of … what? Justice after what happened to her? Penance because she’d killed the man who destroyed her life? Yet she had known for a long time that righting wrongs was the only way she could find peace. Even before her rape. Because Justin’s murder had never been solved.
Patrick had an opportunity to be drafted into major league baseball, yet he’d pursued a career in law enforcement. Carina had dropped out of college to join the police academy. Dillon had given up his plan to specialize in sports medicine and turned instead to criminal psychiatry. And Lucy … maybe she knew, back when she was seven and her best friend was suddenly not there, that she had to do something to stop the pain.
She couldn’t prevent her own. But she could prevent other people from suffering as she and her family had.
Lucy sat on the balcony of her hotel room, even though it was getting chilly. The light was good and she enjoyed the fresh sea air. She couldn’t see the ocean, but she could feel it around her, and there was a sense of peace at being home … even if San Diego was no longer her home.
She had the copies that Andrew had given her of the investigation into Justin’s murder. She’d already read all the forensic, autopsy, and police reports. Notes weren’t in the file, which was another reason Katella reviewing the files again was so important. He might remember things they couldn’t know based on what wasn’t written down.
But she hadn’t read the transcript of Carina’s interview with police. Partly because she had so much information to digest and partly because she was a little nervous about it.
But Dillon was right: she needed to know what Carina had gone through. She’d been a nineteen-year-old college student. Not much older than a kid. She’d only lived in San Diego for a few years because she, like every Kincaid except Lucy, had been raised an army brat.
Her nephew had been kidnapped from his bedroom while she was babysitting. The guilt would have eaten her up—a lesser person may never have recovered. Nelia had treated Carina poorly after that, but Nelia had treated everyone that way, including herself. She’d lost her son, her marriage was over, and she felt like she’d lost everything. There were likely many psychological issues with guilt, grief, regret—things Lucy understood on one level, but she’d never lost a child. She’d lost people she cared about, people she loved, but a child was a deep part of a parent, part of the soul of the people who created it. And to be the mother—nine months of sharing space, of feeling a new life grow and move, of holding the infant you had helped create, and nurturing and protecting the young life.
Until violence walked in and everything was destroyed.
Lucy understood violence. She dreaded getting into the mind of Justin’s murderer. It would hurt, it would tear her up inside, but it wasn’t her son who’d been killed. Didn’t she owe it to Nelia—to her family—but most of all to Justin and the other boys this woman killed? Lucy could withstand the emotional pain because if she didn’t, who else would?
It was a cause that drove her, one she barely understood and tried not to think about too much. But in the end, she did what she felt she had to do.
Carina would feel the same. As Dillon said, she was a cop at heart. But what she’d endured those days after Justin’s disappearance had affected her, not only at the time, not only in who she had become, but had instilled a deep-seated angst and unresolved grief.
It became all too clear as Lucy read the transcript.
DET. KATELLA: We found Justin.
CARINA KINCAID: Thank God, thank God, is he okay? I need to see my sister.
KATELLA: Justin’s dead.
CK: No, you said you found him. He’s not dead. He’s not.
KATELLA: He was found in a shallow grave in the park on East Street. Less than a mile from his house.
CK: How? No … please, I need to see my sister. My mom … oh, God, no.
KATELLA: I have a few more questions, Carina.
CK: I just want to go home.
KATELLA: If you tell me the truth, you can go home.
CK: I told you everything I know. Everything.
KATELLA: Let’s go over it again. Last night, you went to your sister’s house to babysit Justin. You told me you hadn’t wanted to go because you cancelled a date.
CK: No I didn’t, I mean—
KATELLA: I can read you back what you said yesterday.
CK: I said I had a study date. I have finals.
KATELLA: Still, a date.
CK: What? I don’t understand.
KATELLA: Your study date was with Ben Jordan, right? He’s your boyfriend.
CK: Yeah, so?
KATELLA: But you had to babysit last minute. Justin was going to be at your mother’s house, but your little sister was sick and so you were stuck babysitting.
CK: I wasn’t stuck. I always babysit.
KATELLA: Not something most nineteen-year-old college students want to be doing on a Friday night.
CK: It’s not like that.
KATELLA: And your sister said you couldn’t have Ben over to study because she didn’t feel comfortable with someone she didn’t know in the house with Justin.
CK: You make it sound bad. It’s not bad. Nelia has always been overprotective. She loves Justin, I get it. He’s a little kid.
KATELLA: You resented her.
CK: No—I don’t understand—why are you doing this?
KATELLA: I just want the truth.
CK: I told you the truth!
KATELLA: Tell me again. What time did you arrive at the Stanton residence?
CK: Five or so—Lucy got sick, and Nelia was panicked, asked me to take him home.
KATELLA: But she was supposed to be home by seven, right?
CK: I thought—I didn’t know that she was preparing for a big presentation. I called her at eight, she told me.
KATELLA: You must have been angry.
CK: No. Irritated, not angry. I wasn’t mad—I wish she’d told me earlier, but really, it … what happened to Justin? What happened to him? Are you sure he’s dead? He can’t be. He just …
KATELLA: And what did you and Justin do?
CK: I ordered pizza and we ate and he watched a movie while I studied. Why won’t you tell me what happened to Justin?
KATELLA: What movie?
CK: I, uh—I don’t remember. I wasn’t paying attention.
KATELLA: Justin watched a movie for two hours and you don’t remember what it was?
CK: I-I was studying at the dining-room table. I wasn’t paying attention. It wasn’t a cartoon. It was one of his tapes, he can watch anything on the bottom two shelves. I didn’t care what he watched—I needed to study.
KATELLA: And after the movie?
CK: He went to bed.
KATELLA: Just like that.
CK: Justin’s a good kid. It was ten, past his bedtime … he’s a good kid. A good …
KATELLA: Here.
CK: I-I—
It was clear to Lucy that Carina had broken down. She was so tense, the pages in front of her were wrinkled. Katella was only doing his job, trying to find the truth, but this was Lucy’s sister. To learn about Justin’s death from a cop, during an interview, at the police station. Without family to support her … without a lawyer.
Why didn’t she have a lawyer? Andrew was an ADA at the time, their dad was still in the military, why didn’t anyone protect Carina’s rights?
Because innocent people never thought they needed representation. Innocent people thought the truth would set them free. And usually, it did. But legal representation wasn’t just to find the truth. It was to make sure that all the rules were followed, that everyone had a fair and just system at their disposal. A lawyer wouldn’t have let Carina answer questions she’d already answered. It was clear that Katella was first trying to find any inconsistencies with Carina’s statement from the night before when Justin first went missing, and second trying to fluster Carina to see if guilt would prompt her to confess.
KATELLA: Can you continue?
CK: I want to go home.
KATELLA: I have just a few more questions.
CK: What?
KATELLA: What did you do after Justin went to bed?
CK: I studied. Then I fell to sleep.
KATELLA: What time did you fall asleep?
CK: I don’t know.
KATELLA: Can you give me an approximate time?
CK: Around eleven. Maybe earlier. Maybe later. I don’t remember. I had a headache and went to sit down on the couch and watch television until Nelia or Andrew came home. I fell asleep.
KATELLA: What were you watching when you fell asleep?
CK: Sports. Baseball highlights or something. There was nothing on and I hate the news. It’s so depressing. And Patrick plays baseball in college, so I like to keep up with baseball. He might be drafted, he’s that good.
KATELLA: When did you wake up?
CK: What? Um … when Nelia came in. She shook me awake. Said, “Sorry I’m so late.” I sat up and started gathering my books. Nelia ran back screaming. “Where’s Justin? Carina, where is Justin?”
KATELLA: And then?
CK: We searched the house. Then I called 911 and Nelia called Andrew and … and now you tell me Justin is dead. And it’s my fault. I can’t believe I fell asleep. I am so sorry. God, I am so, so sorry.