It had gone on for almost five years, his spying, this constant craving to punish himself for something that had been stolen from him—which, he would later learn, explained why he had turned from a heavy drinker into a full-blown alcoholic. Frank, his friend since childhood, stepped in, got him into a ninety-day detox and into AA. Frank knew about his obsession with Ava, and Sebastian eventually confessed it to the man who became his AA sponsor, and they both told him he was engaging in alcoholic behavior even though he was no longer drinking, that the only way to move forward was to stop moving backward, and that meant putting his past to rest—his prison sentence, the life taken from him, everything. It meant putting Ava behind him.
And he did.
Or at least he thought he had. So why was he thinking about her now? Why was he thinking back to the last time he’d seen her—not in person but through a pair of binoculars, something he had admitted to no one, including Frank, because he had known it would make him sound like a major-league pervert even though he had never watched her get undressed. That would be wrong. Watching was never about sex. Watching her was about—
“I love the way the natural light fills the room,” Celine Marcus said, her voice echoing in the cool, cavernous space. The current owners had been forced to unload all the furniture in the house in a fire sale. “So beautiful and peaceful.”
“Absolutely.”
Celine turned to the picture windows overlooking the backyard, with its pool and private spa, the thick lawn and the covered patio with its ample alfresco dining space. Sebastian turned his thoughts back to the last night he’d seen Ava. He had watched her getting ready for bed, coming out of her bathroom, her hair still damp from the shower. She wore a pair of gray boy shorts and a matching tank top, her Colombian skin dark with a summer tan, her curves still there but firm with muscle. She slid into the king-sized bed she shared with her husband—the bed empty a lot, he saw, her husband, some sort of hedge fund douchebag, out entertaining clients most nights—and Sebastian thought, I should be lying there next to her. He would have had that life with her if the judge hadn’t sent him off to prison for beating someone to death—even though it was self-defense and an accident.
“The architecture,” Celine said, “is beautiful.”
Ava had visited him every Saturday the first two months and then stopped when she got into a bad car accident that broke her leg and injured her spine. Prison didn’t allow him access to a phone, unless he was contacting his lawyer, and he couldn’t use email, but it did allow good, ol’-fashioned snail mail, and she wrote to him—long letters at first, then, by the end of his fourth month, short and vague notes featuring highlights from her life, the sort of thing you wrote to a long-distance aunt or cousin out of obligation. Five months into his life sentence the letters had reduced to a trickle, and then they stopped. No more visits, either.
His mother visited him, though, every Saturday, until the bone cancer progressed. Frank brought his mother up every Saturday. Frank continued to visit him when his mother no longer could. Frank was the one who had told him that Ava had moved in with another man. Told her she had gotten married. Was pregnant.
His phone vibrated once; he’d received a text.
It was from Frank. Two words: Call ASAP.
“Excuse me for a moment, Mrs. Marcus.”
Sebastian went outside, through the front door. He could hear waves lapping in the distance as he made the call. Frank picked up immediately.
“What’s up?” Sebastian asked.
“Not what. Who. Your stepson.”
Sebastian bristled. He hated it when Frank—hell, when anyone—used that word. Paul wasn’t his stepson—not in any legal way, Paul simply being a part of the package when Trixie moved in . . . Christ, twenty-two years ago? Had it been that long? It had, he realized; Paul had been two, still in diapers. They had never married, he and Trixie—had just lived together until the day she died. It was coming up on a year now, her death, Trixie marooning him with her now twenty-four-year-old son, Paul, full of ugly tattoos and misplaced anger and confidence.
“How bad is it?”
“When I get through telling you,” Frank said, “you’ll want to order his headstone.”
CHAPTER 4
ELLIE TOLD THE paramedic she thought she was going to throw up.
“Not a problem,” he said. His name was Brad and he was somewhere around her age, she guessed, in his early to mid-twenties, and had a boyish, almost angelic face. He smiled, all perfect white teeth, when he handed her a good-sized barf bag. “Nausea is a perfectly normal side effect from the adrenaline dump you just suffered.”
As was crying, she supposed. Ellie didn’t tell him how badly she wanted him to leave the back of the ambulance and lock the door so she could break down, get it all out of her system.
She wouldn’t cry—couldn’t cry. A woman caught boo-hooing on the job, even if the reason was that she had seen her partner get wasted, was immediately branded as weak and unreliable. Always remember to grieve on your own time, a prominent female detective had once warned her. If you cry, show any emotion of any kind, the boys will never look at you the same way again. They’ll automatically think you don’t have what it takes for when the shit really hits the fan.
So far, she’d kept it together throughout the whole ordeal that followed the shooting. In a strong, clear voice she took her supervisor through how it all went down.
Her voice didn’t break once, and it hadn’t broken when she’d had to give her official statement to the pair of investigators from the “shooting squad.” She didn’t balk when they bagged her firearm and placed it into evidence, or when they demanded she give a blood sample for toxicology testing, to see if she had been under the influence of alcohol or drugs when she fired the weapon.
Now, though? Now she felt like she was coming apart at the seams.
Brad checked her blood pressure again. “Still a little low, but not too bad,” he said. “Again, that’s normal, given what you’ve gone through.”
The back door suddenly swung open, letting in a blast of hot air and jarring noises—crackling police radios and voices shouting over one another. She also heard the sound of a helicopter, maybe more than one, hovering somewhere overhead.
A patrolman she didn’t recognize motioned for her to come out. “Commissioner’s here, wants to see you,” he said.
“Before you go,” Brad said to her, “your blood pressure and heart rate may decide to suddenly drop, so the second you feel light-headed? Sit down immediately, because there’s a good chance you’re going to faint.”
Ellie thanked him and got out, surprised to see how much the area had changed during the two hours she’d spent sequestered inside the ambulance—dozens of cruisers, their lights flashing, and people, mostly reporters, she guessed, crowded behind blockades; news copters hovering in the sky, taking aerial footage of the backyard and the chaos in the surrounding streets. A patrolman was stationed at the front doors, his sole job to write down the name of every single person who entered the home. She spotted two more patrolmen, holding clipboards, standing near the gates along the fence. It was overkill, yes, but it was always better to control the chaos as much as possible—and have plenty of paperwork to prove to a jury that no one had slacked off on maintaining the integrity of the crime scene.