Last Lie (31 page)

Is that--Holy shit, it is. Huh,
I thought.
Huh.
I scrolled backward. I scrolled forward.

Jonas's breathing never changed.

There were eight photos from the night of the housewarming celebration. I realized immediately that the "taking" that the man had been accusing Jonas of didn't involve things. Jonas had been "taking" photos. The most recent few were from only hours earlier. Two showed partial views of a man from the back. In neither was his identity clear.

I waited in the chair for another ten minutes, offering my son a chance to choose to talk to me about the photographs he'd left for me to see. I also realized it was possible, maybe likely, that the chance he'd just taken was as much as he was able to risk that night.

I used the light from the phone's screen to examine the piece of wood he'd left for me. It had fresh, uneven, very rough cuts on all four edges. In the center of the small plank was an intricate wood carving only a few inches across.

I slipped my son's phone into my pocket as I climbed back up the stairs. I was already formulating plans, knowing that no one outside the family would ever learn what Jonas had seen after the damn housewarming.

In the light upstairs, I examined the carving. Three hearts coming together, overlapping like a Venn diagram. A large heart with a
P.
A medium-size heart with an
A.
A tiny heart with a
J.
In the area where they overlapped, the words
Us Forever.

Peter had created the woodcarving for his son somewhere in the walls of the secret entrance to his son's knothole. Once the house was sold, Jonas had been determined to retrieve the carving for himself. I wondered how many hours over how many days my son had spent cutting it from the wall inside his secret space. What tools he had used.

I also understood where the sawdust on his sneakers had come from.

I sat at the kitchen island for a few minutes trying to decide what to do next.

LAUREN WAS IN BED.

"The call earlier?" I asked. "Someone from work?"

"Unofficially."

I almost said
Tell me.
But I didn't. I waited.

"It turns out the man I shot is Mimi's son from her first marriage. His name is Emerson Abbott. He's seventeen, Alan. A kid. I knew he wasn't a firefighter. I'd arrived home minutes after the first pumper got there. I watched this guy sneak out from behind our garage and grab one of those big jackets off the fire truck, pull it on, and jog immediately toward the back of the house. He wasn't dressed like a firefighter. He had on sneakers and a stocking cap. A hoodie. I knew something was wrong. I followed him as he ran straight to the back deck. Jonas was crawling out the door. I watched him grab Jonas, throw him over his shoulder, and start to run away. But not toward the ambulance. Up the hill."

I nodded. "He had a gun," I said.

She said, "Yes. I didn't see it at first. When I yelled at him to stop, to put Jonas down, he turned and shot at me. Wildly. But I saw the muzzle flash," Lauren said.

"He shot at us, too. Inside. Me and Jonas. A lot."

"God. The call I got in the bathtub earlier? A friend in the office. After she was told that her son was dead, Mimi Snow confessed to killing Preston Georges."

That's what the warrant was. An arrest warrant.
"Mimi was in custody?"

"For questioning. Yes."

"I didn't know. What was the motive? Why did she kill the chef?"

"The rape after the housewarming? She told the sheriff that was her son. She says she learned about it after. How? That part is not clear. Not yet.

"The son apparently wasn't even supposed to be in Boulder. Certainly not in Spanish Hills. Hake had forbidden it. Emerson wasn't allowed to leave his boarding school until Thanksgiving break. But Preston Georges saw him the night of the party--the same guy the caterer told you she saw walking in the lane. Probably. Georges stopped. He and the kid talked, apparently. So the chef knew that Emerson was in town. And at the house that night.

"After the rape investigation started, the sheriff's investigator talked to Georges. But they didn't ask him the right questions. They wanted to know what time he left. Who was still in the house. They never asked him about after, when he was driving away. If he saw anyone on the lane.

"He called Mimi after the sheriff interviewed him. Asked if she knew anything about a guy on the lane, if it was important. He described the kid. She knew it was her son but she played dumb. Georges revealed during the conversation that he hadn't said anything to the sheriff about it.

"Sometime later, when the accusations were made about the sexual assault, Mimi confronted Emerson about the rape. He admitted it. Mimi knew that the chef could recognize her son, place him there, on the lane, that night. She said she felt she had to do something to protect her son. She decided to kill Georges before he told someone he'd seen Emerson."

"God. So, the rape wasn't Mattin?"

I felt I had to ask. Not asking would raise flags I wasn't prepared to hoist.

Lauren shook her head. "Mimi said it was her son. He'd called her from the lane at the tail end of the housewarming. He told her he wanted to see the new house, too. She snuck him into the basement. Made him promise to stay down there until she and Hake left the next day for Napa. He must have come upstairs at some point. How he got the victim to take the roofie, we don't know yet. It will take some time to get the DNA results back to be certain, but if the rape kit confirms . . ."

"You think it was his Rohypnol?"

Lauren said, "Yes, but no one knows that for sure."

"Did Mimi say anything that makes it clear why her son was after Jonas tonight?"

"Nothing. Jonas may know the answer to that. If he doesn't, I'm not sure we're ever going to know. I suppose he may have seen Emerson before at some point. Coming or going down the lane. If Jonas has been sneaking around before tonight, maybe even inside the house. Emerson had apparently been in and out of the house since the night of the party. His mom knew he'd been around, but it was a big secret from her husband.

"Hake absolutely did not want him there. There was a lot of tension. Mimi said something about Hake being convinced that Emerson had stolen from him in the past. This is a guess, but I'm thinking that Jonas must have found out--somehow--that Emerson was around. The kid knew that Jonas knew. Maybe that explains what happened tonight. What do you think?"

I excused myself while I went to the closet to retrieve the wood carving that Jonas had left out on his bed. I showed it to Lauren. I said, "I found this when I was checking on Jonas earlier. He left it out for me. This may be part of the reason Jonas was there. Right after I went into the house tonight looking for Jonas, I heard the man--Emerson, I guess--accuse him of taking something and wondering out loud if he'd done it before." I realized that by telling Lauren a partial truth, I was also telling her a lie. My facility at dissembling was beginning to trouble me. "Jonas had apparently been cutting this carving from somewhere inside his cubby. Obviously, it's something Peter had made for him."

Lauren's eyes filled with tears as she traced the carving with her fingertip. "Lord," she said.

I wasn't ready to show her the photographs. I thought about it. But I wasn't ready.

44

I
rubbed Lauren's calves until she fell asleep. I wasn't able to join her in slumber. I spent a while wondering when the fact that she'd killed a man would become one of the things that kept her awake at night.
Within days,
I thought. A week at the outside.

I gave up trying to sleep just before dawn. I took Fiji outside with me as the sun was cresting the eastern horizon. Our house was still in the shadows of the rim of the valley, but first light was bouncing off the gazillion crystalline edges that are locked in the flat faces of the Flatirons.

Morning light revealed that an ember had caught the roof of Peter's barn on fire. The firefighters had apparently snuffed the outbreak quickly--damage was limited to about a dozen square feet just below the crest of the gable.

Fiji and I followed the perimeter of the crime scene tape as we circled around to the back of the ranch house ruins toward the deck. It, too, had burned to a crisp. Peter's intricate planking was nothing more than a pattern of parallel lines of heart redwood charcoal. I scuffed a couple of lines in the ash at my feet. If I extended the lines, they would intersect in the area where I thought the investigators should start looking for the missing revolver.

I'd tell the sheriff exactly where to start searching when the first investigators arrived later on.

From my high perch on the hill behind the charred house, I was able to watch as a pair of headlights entered the S-turns on the lane. As the car got closer, I recognized Mattin's brooding sedan. He pulled it to a stop in the middle of the lane in front of the remains of his garage.

I didn't approach him. I waited for him to spot me. I was wearing a light-colored jacket and was standing in a sea of dark ash. It wouldn't take long for Mattin to find me in the landscape.

He walked up the hill with his hands in his pockets. Although neither of us was feeling an inclination to shake hands, he did nod a greeting my way, and he actually squatted down to greet Fiji.

She was having none of it. She backed away and barked at him. She usually saved whatever aggression she possessed for squirrels and prairie dogs. I was surprised to see that she had some true fierce in her. I almost said
Good girl
but caught myself. Maybe the puppy was growing up before my eyes.

"Where's the big dog?" Mattin asked.

"Not feeling well," I said. My teeth were clenched. I reminded myself to be cool.

He nodded. I wondered if he knew about Emily's injury. If he'd been responsible.

"Sorry about your house," I said. I didn't want my antagonism for the man to be blatant. Hake probably figured I hadn't yet learned about his wife's arrest or about his stepson's death. Or he didn't care one way or another about what I knew. Maybe the latter. I thought it better not to go down those roads unless he dragged me.

He sighed. "First time I've seen it," he said. "It looks like a . . . complete loss."

"Pretty much. But the firefighters managed to save the barn," I said. "It almost went up, too."

"Small favors."

He said it like he didn't mean it. In another circumstance I would have been tempted to argue with him about the barn's value. What it had meant to a hundred years of ranchers trying to scratch out a living on this dry prairie. To Peter. To Jonas.

"At the end of the day, it was all just stuff," Mattin said. "Sticks and bricks. It can all be replaced. Rebuilt. Restored. Improved."

I found myself amused that Hake was trying to appear philosophical about it all. Since we were omitting his stepson's death and his wife's arrest from our conversation, appearing philosophical about material possessions was a manageable chore for him. I was beginning to get the impression that Mattin Snow liked to play the wise man, the man who kept everything in perspective. I filed it.

"Well," I said, "maybe it's fortuitous that you still had most of your stuff in storage."

"Yeah," he said. "Maybe so." Mattin looked at me sideways, perhaps in recognition that, if I was fishing, I was fishing with a barbed hook.

I reminded myself, again, to be careful with him. He lacked neither smarts nor cunning. "Or maybe it's serendipity," I said. "Could have been serendipity." I meant it ironically but thought I was successful in keeping the coarser notes of sarcasm out of my tone. I was thinking specifically about the temperature- and humidity-controlled wine cellar that Peter had lovingly crafted in the basement. The wine cellar that Mattin had chosen to leave almost entirely empty prior to the fire, despite his twenty-five-hundred-bottle wine collection.

It was almost,
I was thinking,
as though Mattin knew the cellar wasn't going to be a safe place for his treasure.
I was also thinking that it was possible I was chatting amiably with the arsonist responsible for setting the house on fire. But I didn't think I would ever prove that.
Oh well.
Proof is more important at some times than at others.

Mattin changed the subject. "Don't know," he said, "if you heard about the bicycle accident the other night. You ride, don't you? You probably know some of those people." He didn't wait for a reply. "Such an awful thing. Young man who was injured has a family."

Those people?
The hair on my neck was erect. I couldn't think of any logical reason that Mattin would initiate a conversation with me about Rafa and the collision. "I did hear about it," I said warily.

The man's stepson was dead. His wife was charged with murder. His house was gone. And Mattin was choosing to goad me into a discussion about my brain-injured friend?

"One of my attorney's investigators got her hands on a surveillance video from a dry cleaner in the shopping center at Table Mesa. What a find. Speaking as a lawyer? Good investigators are better than gold. They're platinum. What a good one can dig up? The dry cleaner's video shows that the poor guy on the bike"--I gritted my teeth at Mattin's description of Rafael--"actually veered into
my
car after some woman in a Prius failed to stop as she was pulling out of the gas station. The bicyclist was avoiding the Prius and swerved right into my path. Pulled a license plate for the Prius right off the video. Me? I never saw any of it happen. Thank God for that investigator."

His tone was so self-satisfied at the developments that futility and anger were exploding within me. Mattin never saw any of it happen, of course, because he was talking on his damn cell phone the whole time.

Armed with her investigator's video, Casey Sparrow, Mattin's lawyer, would already be pointing her finger at the owner of the Prius. I didn't envy that driver. Casey was a red-haired bulldog. Her investigators were legendary for finding everything there was to be found. If the driver of the Prius had ever sneezed while driving, Casey would somehow end up with the used tissue, and with a video montage of the woman's history of distracted driving.

My mind drifted. I wondered if the surveillance tape was the only video Casey Sparrow's investigators had uncovered recently. If maybe they'd dug up some footage from a theme camp at Burning Man.
I'll never know,
I thought.

"Lucky for you," I said to Mattin.

"Luck? Good lawyers don't believe in luck. I'm a good lawyer, Alan."

For some reason, I thought that sounded like a threat, not a boast.

Mattin returned his attention to the charred remains of the house. "A lot of decisions to make now," he said. "Here."

"I guess," I said. "This"--I waved at the blackened residue--"is a blank slate. For rebuilding." I intended it as a provocation. I was confident he would bite.

"Almost," he agreed, biting.

The obvious exceptions to the tabula rasa in the scene in front of us were the barn, our house, and our garage. Mattin would have preferred, no doubt, that all those structures burn down along with the big ranch house. I wondered if that had been part of his original not-very-urban redevelopment plan.

"You know, when we rebuild, I might push the new house a little farther up here, put the front door about where we're standing now. When you get a little higher up this hill," he mused, "it truly improves the view."

"I can see that," I said. From where we stood uphill from the burned mess, our house and garage fell just below natural sight lines.

In the odd pretense I was engaging in with Mattin right then, I could imagine feeling kind of neighborly and agreeable with the man about his prospects for making architectural lemonade out of lemons after his string of tragedies.

That is, if I didn't feel like kicking him in the teeth.

"Yeah," he said. "I do like it up here. This is . . . a much better place to build." He tagged on the first half of an old saying: "It's indeed an ill wind, you know?"

I should have thought more before I responded. I didn't. I blurted, "That saying? I've always had trouble with it. My experience in life is that there are plenty of ill winds that blow no good at all. But I'm confident that you'll do . . . the right thing here," I said.

Mattin dipped his chin in a dramatic pretense of humility. He inserted, I thought, a little deference into his tone, too. "I will try, Alan. I will certainly try."

He thought I was being sincere and compassionate with him. At another time, I might have chuckled at how badly he was misreading me. For a half dozen reasons, a few of them admittedly kind of pathetic, the way he'd used my name when he said "I will try, Alan" had truly pissed me off. The reality was that I didn't need much of an excuse to get more pissed off at Mattin Snow than I already was.

I realized that the man was preparing himself to be a public victim. A tragic figure who had lost his home, his stepson, and likely his wife, to prison. An object of sympathy, compassion, and endless curiosity. He would create the persona of a survivor--someone strong, someone who could move on. A phoenix.

My hand closed over the phone in my pocket. I ignored a silent caution that was screaming
Don't do it.

I thought,
Okay, so much for agreeable.
The Mattin Snow Show
is so over.

I pulled Jonas's cell from my pocket. Hit a few buttons.

Mattin tried to ignore what I was doing. I could tell he thought I was being rude, playing with my phone while we were having our neighborly chat about catastrophes, assorted other ill winds, and grand future plans.

Truth was, I was being rude. I didn't like it when people screwed around with their phones during conversations the way I was doing with Mattin right then. I didn't care, of course, about his sensibilities. Being rude was nothing compared to what I had in mind for Mattin Snow.

I held the screen out so that Mattin could see what I'd been up to with the cell phone. The picture I was displaying for him wasn't the most lurid of the photographs Jonas had stored on his mobile. But it was pretty damn incriminating.

Mattin glanced at it the way a casual acquaintance glances at proffered vacation photos he doesn't really want to see.

I watched his face as his eyes focused and his cortex made some initial sense of the image he was seeing. His jaw shifted a centimeter to one side and then a full centimeter to the other. He then brought his jaw back to center, as though his jawbone were a rudder, and after a temporary loss of control, he'd succeeded in bringing his craft back to straight and level.

He took a quick look at me, a fiery hot
what the fuck
flashing in his eyes. The flash disappeared quickly. He found his composure.

Mattin was good.

All he saw from me was my well-practiced psychologist mask. And maybe, if he was more perceptive than he'd already demonstrated, he could discern the barest hint of a smile in my eyes. He looked back down at the image on the screen for a few more seconds. He was inhaling slowly the whole time. Through his nose.

He lifted himself onto his toes. I thought the lawyer in him wanted to object to the court about the evidence I was introducing.

When he looked up again, he captured my gaze in a manner that I thought was intended to be intimidating. He thrust his shoulders back, pushed his chest out, and raised his chin. He leaned forward, closing the distance between us to mere inches.

I felt like retreating. I didn't.

His feet moved as he inched even closer to me. I held my ground while I endeavored to contain my sadistic glee at the box I had just created for him. I was truly curious to see what he would do with so little room to maneuver. I wondered whether he had a surprise or two for me.

In the exact same tone of voice he'd used to tell me that he was thinking about building his new house a little farther up the hill, he said, "That doesn't prove anything. Nothing. That . . is just a . . . dirty picture."

"Really?" I said. I had to keep from adding
Tell me.

"It reveals nothing about consent."

I was impressed that he was able to maintain his composure so well. But his use of
consent
? That, I thought, was the magic Kobe Bryant word. Was Mattin one of the lawyers who had learned that lesson well?

Decorum was apparently the order of the day, so I kept my tone even to match Mattin's. I asked, "Does it have to? I mean, really? The dirty picture? Must it prove anything? To be . . . influential?"

I intentionally chose a neutral word. I'd silently ruled out using
devastating
in lieu of
influential.

"I'm a lawyer. Trust me," he said, apparently unaware of the absurdity of the last suggestion. "That photo cannot be used against me. It shows consenting adults. Nothing more."

I wasn't sure what I'd expected--showing him one of the photographs that morning had been a bit of an impulse play on my part--but I think I expected better than that from him. Mattin had to see the flaws in his own reasoning. Then I realized that he was responding as though he was talking to another lawyer. Someone inclined to bargain about words like
consent
and quibble about levels of consciousness. Someone who knew the arcane rules that exist between gentlemen and ladies in these disputes.