Kill the Messenger

52

Diane sat on a chair in a front corner of the interview room, her feet tucked up, her arms around her legs, her cheek pressed to her knees. No makeup, no veneer of control. Parker had never seen anyone look more vulnerable. Not in the vulnerable way of a child who trusts, but in the way of a grown woman who knows better but has no defenses left.

Parker closed the door behind him and sat on the edge of the table.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” she said in a voice so small and thin, it seemed to have come from another room.

She had stretched the sleeves of her black sweater to the point that only the tips of her fingers showed. She used the sweater to dab at the tears that fell at random. Her gaze moved from point to point around the small white room, not lighting on anything for more than a few seconds. Not touching his face at all.

“Are you cold?” he asked, already slipping off his jacket.

It wouldn’t have mattered if she had said no. He wanted the excuse to touch her. He wrapped the jacket around her shoulders and touched her cheek with his fingertips.

“Who’s watching?” she asked, looking across the room at the two-way mirror set into the wall.

“No one. It’s just us. Do you have an attorney?”

She shook her head.

“I’ll take care of it.”

“Kev, you don’t have to—”

“It’s done.”

She sighed and looked away. “Thank you.”

“So . . . you hired Eddie Davis to kill Tricia Crowne-Cole, and set up Rob Cole to take the fall,” Parker said. Drained of energy himself, he didn’t think he could project his voice any farther than the next chair. “That’s a pretty harsh sentence for having a married guy hit on you.”

She looked away and closed her eyes. The only sound in the room was the annoying buzz of the fluorescent lighting. It was late. Parker had gotten her shipped to Central Division before RHD could make a move. The territorial dispute was being left until morning. Spending the night in one holding cell was pretty much the same as spending the night in another. And no one was going to question her without an attorney present.

“It’s just us, Diane,” he said. “I’m not here as a cop. Hell, I probably won’t even be a cop by this time tomorrow. I’m just here as me. Your friend.”

“I play it through in my head,” she murmured. “It’s not me. I can’t believe it’s me in those memories. I’m too smart, too cynical. I’m too sharp a judge of character. I’ve listened to women friends cry about this guy or that guy, and the promises they made, and the excuses the women made to cover when none of it happened. And I would think, What’s wrong with her? How stupid is she? What kind of self-respecting woman would stand for that? How pathetic can she be?

“And then I found out. It’s some kind of insanity. The intensity, the passion, the unbridled joy. It’s like a drug.”

“What’s it?” Parker asked.

“Love. The kind people write about, but no one really believes in. I always wanted to know what it was like to feel that, to have someone feel it for me.”

“Cole told you he did.”

“No one has ever made me feel the way you make me feel. No one has ever understood me the way you understand me. I’ve never loved anyone the way I love you.” Her mouth twisted in a bitter smile. “I know. I know. What’s wrong with her? How stupid is she? I look back now, and I say the same thing. How pathetic am I? But I believed everything he told me because I felt the same way. I said the same things, and I meant them. I wanted to believe he meant them too. I should have seen him coming a mile away.”

She rested her head on her knees again, her eyes staring at nothing.

“He’s an actor,” Parker said. “He’s been playing that role for a long time.”

“The poor, misunderstood bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks,” she said. “Victim of his own popularity. Trapped in a loveless marriage. He’s finally found the love of his life. If only we could be together. But I was married . . . and he was married . . . and Tricia was ‘fragile.’ And then suddenly I wasn’t married . . . and things became difficult . . . and Tricia was practically suicidal, he said . . . and he had an obligation . . . and he had to sacrifice himself . . . and do what was right. . . .”

She closed her eyes and the fluorescent lights hummed. Parker thought she might have fallen asleep, and he didn’t even care. It wouldn’t be long before everything changed, and she would be surrounded by people, and there would be no late-night chats, just the two of them in a room alone.

Very softly, she sang a few bars of a song she’d once heard on the radio. “I never believed it could happen to me. Something like this only happens to dumb girls.”

“Why kill Tricia?” Parker asked. “Why not Cole? He deserved it.”

“You can’t know the rage I felt,” she whispered. “My marriage was already falling apart when I met Rob. I was vulnerable, lonely. He knew just how to prey on those feelings. And then, when Joseph died . . . The guilt was terrible. Not that I’d caused his death, but that I hadn’t been a very good partner, that I’d cheated him, and cheated on him. And Rob knew just what to do with those feelings too.

“I trusted him. I gave him everything I was. How dare he take that gift and break it?”

She was trembling. She squeezed her eyes shut, straining against an inner pain Parker knew he couldn’t imagine. He waited for the moment to pass with the sad patience of someone knowing nothing good was coming and there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

“And then one day, I got in an elevator at the Crowne building. I was there . . . something to do with Joseph’s pension. And there was Tricia,” she said. “Just the two of us riding up to the highest floors in the building. And she stood there looking at me with this smug, evil, superior look on her face.”

“She knew?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, laughing without humor. “She knew. She knew everything. She knew things she couldn’t possibly have known without having witnessed them happening.”

Parker’s blood went cold as the implication of what she was telling him sank in.

Diane’s mouth twisted in a bitter smile. “You see, I wasn’t a game just to Rob Cole. I was a game to them both.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Parker breathed. Nausea washed over him.

Fat tears rolled like pearls down Diane’s cheeks. “And she said, in this voice I’d never heard before: ‘He always comes back to me.’ And there was nothing fragile about her.”

Parker could picture the scene in his mind. Diane would have pretended not to react, because she was proud and controlled. While inside she would have shattered like glass.

“A couple of days later I got a package in the mail. A videotape of me and Rob in bed together, him telling me all those things I wanted to hear, wanted to believe. Then there they were, the two of them—Tricia and Rob—reenacting that very same scene, line for line, and laughing about it afterward.”

Parker’s stomach turned at the cruelty.

Diane unfolded herself from the chair and began to move around, her arms banded around her as if she were in a strait jacket.

“Something inside me just broke. It was as if some hidden, festering wound had opened and poisoned me,” she said. “I started drinking. A lot. I was in a bar one night crying to the bartender. There was a man two stools down, listening. He told me he could help me, for a price.”

“Eddie Davis,” Parker said.

“I think about it now, and I can’t believe any of that happened. I can’t believe I hired a killer, and I came up with a plan, and I went through with that plan. It was all like a weird nightmare.

“I asked Rob to come to my house for dinner the night Tricia was killed. To talk about things, I told him, smooth everything over between us. No hard feelings. He actually thought we could still be friends. He said it the day he told me he couldn’t leave poor pathetic Tricia, that his feelings for me had changed, that the sex had been really great but that everything else was over. But couldn’t we still be friends?”

She laughed at that. “Why do men think that can happen? That they can lead a woman on, and lie to her, and treat her like shit, but she should be a sport about it in the end. That’s delusional. Sociopathic. Cruel.”

Parker said nothing. There was no excuse to make for what Rob Cole had done.

“It was so easy,” she said, her eyes blank as she looked back into her mind and watched the memory unfold. “He drank too much, because he always drinks too much. It’s part of Rob’s drama, that the pressure of being him is such that he has to self-medicate in order to tough it out. I slipped some GHB into his last drink. Not a lot. Just enough to know that by the time he got home, he would be ready to pass out. Driving drunk was nothing new to him. I’m sure he wasn’t even aware of the drug taking hold. He would have thought he’d just had one too many.

“Later that night I got called to go to a murder scene.”

“Tricia,” Parker said.

“Davis had killed her with Rob right there in the house. He staged it to look like Rob did it.”

“And Cole didn’t have an alibi because he was there, and he couldn’t very well tell anyone he’d been with a lover scorned just prior to the murder. Even he wouldn’t be so stupid. He had to know you’d be called as a corroborating witness, and you’d crucify him.”

Methodical, cool, smart. Those were words he would have applied to Diane, but never in this context.

“Why kill Tricia, though?” Parker asked. “Why not Rob? He was the more immediate evil, the one who had carried out the abuse.”

“Because to die quickly wasn’t punishment enough. But to send him to prison . . . where he would have to wake up every morning and face a life in hell, where being Rob Cole would never, ever be an advantage, or a ticket to do whatever he wanted with no threat of consequences . . .”

She was right. Rob Cole’s minor celebrity, his too-good looks and cocky attitude, would not have served him in a place like San Quentin. He would have been a target, and he wouldn’t have had any power to do anything about it.

“And the blackmail?”

“Started shortly after. I had money. Joseph left me very well taken care of. Davis thought he deserved a bonus because he’d done such a fine job. I paid him. But then he wanted more. He sent me a photograph of me paying him off. The trial was coming up. Everyone said Giradello had a slam dunk. Davis said he could ruin it.”

“By incriminating himself?” Parker said.

“He didn’t care. He said he’d disappear, go underground. But that wouldn’t stop him from putting the photographs and the story out there. He actually liked the idea of having people know he had killed Tricia and gotten away with it. He thought he could sell his story to the movies while living a dashing life of international intrigue.

“I gave him Joseph’s Lincoln. That wasn’t enough.”

She went to the darkened glass and stared at her reflection.

And then there was her lover, Parker thought, investigating the crime, piecing the story together, working to tie two seemingly disparate crimes together. His big comeback case. He wanted to throw up.

“I offered them two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to sell me the negatives outright, but then everything went wrong, and it just got worse and worse. . . .”

She continued to stare at her reflection, as if she was trying to recognize someone she couldn’t quite remember.

“I just wanted him to pay,” she said softly, her voice strained. “I wanted them both to pay for what they’d done to me. I wanted Rob to be punished. I wanted him to hurt the way I hurt.”

The last threads of her control shredded, and tears came in a torrent. Sobs tore loose from the depths of her soul. The sounds were of something dying inside her.

Parker turned her to him then, and held her as gently as he would a child. He couldn’t connect the woman he knew to the things she’d done. As she had said, the person who had committed those acts couldn’t have been her. And yet the woman he knew would pay, and there was nothing he could do about it . . . except hold her, and be there for her as her demons raked her with their claws.