Obsession, Deceit and Really Dark Chocolate (24 page)

“It wasn’t her!”

Detective Kelly sighed and adjusted his diamond-patterned tie. “I know how difficult this must be for you, but we wouldn’t be here talking to you unless we were sure. You’re welcome to come and officially identify the body, but it’s not necessary. The body was intact, so we were easily able to figure out who she was.”

Who she
was.
He was talking about Melanie in the past tense. I stood up and started pacing. Both Kelly and Stone stood up as well and followed me with their eyes. A little voice inside my head told me that police officers didn’t like it when interview subjects became physically agitated, but I couldn’t listen to that voice any more than I could listen to what these cops were telling me. I had to figure out how to get out of this nightmare. I had to find a way to turn these men into liars.

“Let me see your badges again,” I demanded, finally stopping directly in front of them.

Both men silently pulled out their badges. I reached out and touched the one in Kelly’s hand praying that it was a fake. But the badges were made of metal and their IDs looked legit, which meant…

“Oh, God,” I whispered, and backed up until I bumped into my built-in bookcase. “Oh, God!”

“Now, take it easy.” Kelly took a step closer to me, his voice soft and steady.

“What?” I asked. “What are you saying? Are you asking me to be calm about this? We’re talking about Melanie! Do you understand that?” I turned my back to them and leaned my forehead against the sleeve of one of my own murder mysteries. In my life I had seen two dead bodies outside of funeral parlors. Both of them had been murdered and both of them had been acquaintances. I had been the first to find them and the memories of those discoveries would haunt me all my life, but this…this was so much worse.

“Ms. Katz—” I was vaguely aware that it was Stone addressing me this time “—why did you file a missing-person report on Melanie O’Reilly?”

“Because she was missing,” I whispered, not even able to summon the energy to point out that his question was amazingly stupid.

“She was missing for just over twenty-four hours when you filed the report,” he pressed. “That’s not very long for an adult single woman to be out of contact.”

“She wasn’t returning my calls.” I clutched one of the shelves to help me keep my balance.

“Did you think that she was in some kind of danger?”

That was enough to get me to turn back around to face him. “If I had thought she was in danger then I would have found a way to keep her safe,” I hissed. “I would have invited her to stay with me, or vice versa. I wouldn’t have let this happen.”

Kelly slipped his hands in his pant pockets and released a tired sigh. “There are times when we can’t protect our friends.”

“Are we done here?” I asked.

Stone shook his head. “Who had it in for O’Reilly?”

“Melanie, her name is Melanie,” I said. “Don’t talk about her like she’s one of your perps. No one has it in for her. She’s a good person….” My voice was beginning to shake and I looked away. “I told the police in Walnut Creek all of this. I don’t have anything to add.”

“Ms. Katz,” Detective Stone said, “you don’t get to decide when this interview is over.”

“We can do this later,” Kelly declared, ignoring Stone’s scowl. He reached into his coat pocket and handed me a business card. “We’ll be in touch soon. If you think of anything between now and then, please give me a call. We’ll find out who did this.”

I took the card wordlessly and watched as they both exited my apartment. After a few minutes I retrieved my cell phone from my handbag and accessed the saved messages on my voice mail.

Sophie, it’s Melanie, could you call me when you have a moment? I think it just hit me that…Eugene’s not coming back.

I sat down on the floor in front of my bay windows, put my phone on loudspeaker and listened to the message again, and again.

I must have listened to Melanie’s message at least forty times before I finally gave it a rest, and even then I didn’t move from my spot on the floor. Perhaps an hour had passed before there was a knock on my apartment door. On some level I was aware that it was rather late for surprise visitors and that if someone was going to come and see me they should have had to buzz my f lat just to get admittance into the building. But I wasn’t concerned with any of that. I wasn’t even interested in finding out who it was. Instead I just continued to sit there, gazing out at the hazy black sky.

I heard the doorknob turn and finally it occurred to me that I was having a 911 kind of moment. I reached for my phone, but before I could press the three numbers the door opened wide and Anatoly stepped inside. “Your door was unlocked.”

“The door to the building, too?”

Anatoly hesitated a moment. “Do you recall losing the key to your building approximately seven months ago?”

“Yes.”

“I found it.”

“When?”

“Approximately seven months ago…in your purse.”

I stared at him for a moment. It had been the day Anatoly had driven Mr. Katz and me to the vet. I hadn’t realized the key was missing until he was driving us back home. I had spent hours looking for that key, and since both my landlord and Marcus (the only other people who had a key to my place) were out of town, I had been forced to spend three days with Anatoly while I waited for one of them to return. Three days that I should have spent writing that I had instead spent exploring different sexual positions with Anatoly. And all that time he had my key? I should be furious right now. But I couldn’t get there. Instead I turned my attention back to the window.

Anatoly quietly closed the door and after a moment in my kitchen joined me on the floor and handed me a vodka and orange-juice. I studied the little floating pieces of orange pulp. “I guess the police visited you, too.”

“They did.”

I downed half my drink in one gulp. “Did you tell them that Melanie hired you to investigate Eugene’s death?”

“No, I kept her confidence.”

“Why?” I scoffed. “It’s not like she’s around to make you keep your word.”

“I did it for you. I knew you wouldn’t want me to break that promise to Melanie.”

I finished my drink in lieu of answering.

We sat in silence for a few minutes as I waited for the alcohol to dull the pain. It didn’t seem to be working.

“We have to find out who did this,” I said eventually. “And don’t tell me to leave it all up to you. I’m going to track this guy down personally. I’m going to be there in the courtroom when they sentence him, and I’m going to be there when they put the needle in his arm. I want this killer to die.”

Anatoly gently took my empty glass with one hand while he encircled me with his other arm. I leaned my body against him and squeezed my eyes shut. “He killed my friend,” I whispered. “Somebody killed my friend.”

I was sobbing now and Anatoly was stroking my hair. He was muttering something comforting, but I was crying so hard that I wasn’t able to decipher if he was speaking in English or Russian.

He waited until my sobs had been reduced to pathetic whimpers and then with one swift move he lifted me up into his arms. He didn’t throw me over his shoulder the way he sometimes had when he was rushing me to the bedroom. This time he carried me like a princess. I buried my face in his chest as he took me back to my room and laid me down on my unmade bed. Without a word he climbed in next to me and held me close. The tears kept coming until I finally fell asleep in his arms.

16

The best cure for grief is anger.

—C’est La Mort

I WOKE UP WITH WHAT FELT LIKE THE WORST HANGOVER OF MY LIFE.
What had I drunk last night? I forced my tired, scratchy eyes open and stared at my bedside clock until it came into focus. Only eight-thirty in the morning. I heard a noise in the kitchen…a cabinet door opening and closing. Anatoly must have been making himself something to eat.

And then the memory of yesterday hit me like a lead ball to the stomach. I hadn’t gotten drunk last night; this was an emotional hangover. I clutched the sheets and pulled them to my chin. Melanie was gone. How was I going to deal with that?

But I had to deal with it. I had to find a way to suck it up and move forward, because succumbing to depression had never been a viable option for me. In order to be depressed you had to spend a significant amount of time dwelling on terrible things. I didn’t have the strength for that. However, I’m an expert when it comes to giving in to anger and living in denial. I slowly got to my feet. My legs ached as if I had run a marathon. So did my arms, my chest, my heart…the physical aftermath of a mini-breakdown. I found Anatoly at my dining table reading the paper with a cup of Starbucks and an unopened box of pastries in front of him with the name of the bakery down the street printed on the box. When he looked up and saw me, he quickly folded the paper and placed it on the table with the headline facing down.

I swallowed and reached my hand out. “Let me see it.”

“Wouldn’t you like your coffee first? There’s a Frappuccino waiting for you in the kitchen. A Light White Mocha—”

“Let me see the paper.”

Anatoly hesitated, then handed it over. The headline was in the usual black bold print walking the line between gravity and sensationalism: Woman’s Discarded Body Discovered Just Weeks After Husband’s Murder.

“The police have released a lot of information about this,” Anatoly said as I silently perused the article. “They’re probably hoping this will jar someone into remembering something. Supply them with a new lead.”

“It says that the police are unsure if there is a connection between Eugene’s death and Melanie’s,” I said quietly. “They barely mention Fitzgerald or Eugene’s work at all.”

“I don’t think they believe it’s that relevant.” Anatoly took a sip of his coffee. “Eat your breakfast, Sophie. I got us dark chocolate éclairs.”

I looked over at the pastries. “I don’t think I can eat.”

Anatoly studied me for a moment, gauging the gravity of my mood. I never turned down dark chocolate. “Will you drink the Frappuccino?” he asked carefully.

“Oh, yeah, I’ll drink the Frappuccino.”

He exhaled in relief and went to the kitchen to retrieve my drink. He probably saw my willingness to indulge in caffeine as a sign that I was okay…acting like myself and all that. It was a stupid conclusion to jump to. If a rifle owner loaded his gun before hiking off to the woods, it might mean that he was embarking on his usual hunting expedition or it
might
mean that he was about to kill somebody. I was the gun and the caffeine was my bullet. I needed to load myself up before I hunted down Melanie’s killer.

“Anne Brooke is supposed to be meeting with some people from Code Pink in the city this morning.”

“Code Pink…they’re an activist group, right? Women for Peace?”

Anatoly nodded in confirmation. “I thought I’d hang out in front of the meeting spot and see where she went after that.” He gently took the paper from me and dropped it on the table. “Would you like to come with me?”

“You’re
inviting
me to join you on a stakeout? Seriously?”

“I don’t see this as one of my more dangerous missions.”

I stared down at my drink. “I don’t feel like going today,” I said slowly.

Anatoly blinked. “What?”

“I’m not going.”

Anatoly locked me into a staring contest for what felt like five minutes but was probably less than thirty seconds. Finally he asked in a low voice, “Tell me what you’re planning, Sophie.”

“Nothing.”

“C’mon.”

“Anatoly…” I placed a hand on his chest both to soothe him and to absorb some of his strength. “I need to be on my own today. I need to process some stuff. You have to give me space to do that.”

Anatoly paused for a beat, then cupped my chin and stared into my eyes. “Don’t get yourself killed, Sophie.”

“I’ll do my best to avoid it.”

He nodded, and then after studying me for another moment turned around and left the apartment.

For once I had actually been telling him the truth.

Hours later I was sitting in my car gazing at the gray ocean as it reflected the fog hovering above it. This was where she died. Well no, that wasn’t right. Her body was found here. No one knew exactly where she was killed. I got out of the car and walked over to the brush a few yards away. The newspaper said that her body was dumped in the bushes and they had featured a photograph of this exact spot. Dumped. Like she was nothing but a bag of garbage. The ocean breeze deposited little droplets of cool water on my skin, but I didn’t bother to go back to the car to retrieve my jacket.

Three times in five years. That was how many times I had seen Melanie before she had called to ask for my help with Eugene. I saw my dentist more often than that. How could I be so deeply affected by the loss of a woman whose friendship I had treated so casually? In fact, I had never really thought of her as a friend. A professor, a mentor, even a distant relation, but never a friend…until now. Leah had been right, Melanie had silently agreed to hold on to the grief I had felt in association with my father’s death and all this time she had patiently sat back and given me space—just waiting for me to reach a point when I was ready to deal with my feelings. I think she knew I would come to her when that day arrived. But then again she hadn’t expected to die so soon. Now I had two losses to mourn and I wasn’t sure who I should give my grief to, or if I even had the right to give it away at all. I squeezed my eyes shut and imagined how nice it would be if God gave us all erasers so we could remove the painful events of our pasts. All I could do was get revenge. Get revenge, euphemistically call it justice and hope that it granted me some solace.

“It was that damn bear who did it.”

I squeaked in surprise and my eyes flew open. Several feet behind me, standing on the sidewalk, was a heavyset black woman wearing about five layers of extremely tattered clothing and a hat made out of tinfoil. She was clutching a shopping cart filled with what I assumed amounted to her worldly possessions.