“I had hidden a fork he had given me to eat dinner with. Normally, he watched me eat, but this time he didn’t. He had a phone call or a meeting. Something.”
Scott always faltered a little bit on this part of the story. Nita’s sister, who was a school counselor, said some memory loss, especially in moments of high stress and trauma, was normal. Nita had asked Scott if he had any gaps in his memory, but he’d shaken his head. She’d asked him if he wanted to speak to her sister, and again, he’d shaken his head.
The only things he hadn’t refused were the television interviews. There were too many of them. It wasn’t healthy for him to do so much. He needed to rest, to heal, to spend time with his family and friends. But he seemed to enjoy this. The crowds of people outside each filming. The emails and letters that poured in. The social media followers. In the two weeks since his escape, Scott had grown obsessed with his follower count, checking it hourly, and seemed to find joy in each new peak his numbers hit. With the swell of followers had come offers. Scott was an influencer now, whatever that meant. He was getting packages of products, dozens of different boxes arriving each day, everything from coconut oil to protein shakes to teeth-whitening kits. And earning money, too. He’d gotten ten thousand dollars just to do a video interview at a shoe factory.
All the people and all the attention seemed to make him happy. Maybe if she’d been tied up in a basement for seven weeks, she’d crave big crowds and screaming fans, too. Maybe she’d shy away from her mother’s hugs, too.
“I bent the tines of the fork and worked it into the clasp of the handcuffs. I can show you if you’d like.”
This was his exhibition time. The host, like all of them, jumped on the idea, and a crew member produced a cheap set of cuffs that could probably be pulled apart by hand. Still, Scott went through the motions, his grin widening as he successfully popped open the clasp to the delights and cheers of the live audience.
“So, a fork. A fork is what took down the BH Killer,” the interviewer gushed. “What happened next?”
Then, according to Scott’s story, he waited behind the door until BH came in to give him his breakfast. It was then that Scott shoved him to the floor and rushed through the house and out the front door, then ran the five miles home. By the time he’d staggered through their gates, he’d been dehydrated and exhausted.
He was different now than he had been before. She wouldn’t say that to anyone outside their family, but that was the truth of the matter. And who wouldn’t be, after that ordeal? Underneath his new clothes, he would always carry the scars of what had been done to him. Physical abuse. Mental. Sexual.
“It’s just amazing,” the woman beside her said. “Unbelievable.”
Nita studied Scott’s wide grin, the wave he gave the crowd as he stood and exited the stage.
The stranger was right. It was amazing, but also . . . unbelievable. Scott was lying about something, and she still couldn’t put her finger on what it was. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe Scott was saying whatever he needed to in order to mentally block out the truth. The pit in her stomach grew sharper, and she pressed a hand to the pain, willing it to fade.
“Mrs. Harden?” Their handler appeared in the doorway of the room. “I can take you to Scott now.”
Nita rose dutifully and waved a goodbye to the woman, moving through the rows of chairs and swallowing the mounting dread that this nightmare wasn’t over yet.
CHAPTER 13
I sat at my desk and took my time with the first few pages of Gabe’s file, examining the photos and screenshots taken from his social media accounts. From the looks of things, he seemed to be a nice guy. No rude responses or asshole posts. According to the file, he had no known enemies, though I was curious how hard the detectives looked at motives, given that his disappearance was casebook BH. Attractive senior. Rich family. Everything going right in his life until one day, when Robert’s son was . . .
Gone.
Gabe had disappeared on a Wednesday. He’d left school around four, according to the CCTV feed by the exit gate of his expensive private school. The camera had captured video of his classic 1969 Mustang, which had pulled left without a turn signal and dropped out of view. The next sighting of the lean soccer star had been at an In-N-Out drive-through, where he’d ordered a Double-Double combo with a large 7UP.
At that point, it was unclear where he went. His Mustang was found in a back parking lot of the Beverly Center mall, in an area not covered by cameras. Its interior was useless, covered in prints from hundreds of different individuals. It was, as one detective noted, probably easier to figure out who hadn’t been in his car than who had. There was no blood inside the Mustang, and the keys were left under the front seat.
Cell triangulations bounced all over the map, and his phone was finally discovered in the back of a stranger’s pickup truck, the driver unaware of its presence.
Gabe had—like five teenage boys before him—just vanished into the city.
I settled back in my chair and pulled out my center drawer, retrieving the bag of gummy bears I kept there. I pulled a green one away from the others.
I didn’t know a lot about Gabe’s disappearance. While I had read practically every news article posted, by that point, the media was starting to tire of the deaths. They were all so similar. Good-looking, smart, athletic, and rich. And, one after another, they were dead. By the time Gabe vanished, Los Angelenos had all become a little calloused at what they knew would inevitably turn up: a naked and mutilated body.
As a city, they stopped caring because they were emotionally exhausted from the mourning. They started to look the other way, grew blind to missing-person posters and bored with the huge rewards and tearful pleas from the families.
I sucked on a red gummy bear. The city and media may have grown bored, but I never had. I’d devoured everything about the murders.
Settling back in my chair, I turned the page, surprised to find that its focus was on Gabe’s family. His mother had died seven years earlier, and I hunched forward, ignoring the chime of the coffee maker. In watching the news reports, I had missed his motherless status. I thought of Robert, sans wedding ring, mentions of his late wife fleeting and detail-free. This felt like a major fact to skip over, especially given her cause of death. Gunshot wound. I stared at the words on the police report, blinking at it just in case my eyes were lying.
Well, that was interesting.
CHAPTER 14
I sat at my round breakfast table and watched Clementine stretch out on the surface, her tail curling atop a spread of photos. Digging a spoon into a large jar of peanut butter, I withdrew a heap of the creamy mixture and reviewed the report on Natasha Kavin’s death.
Some family fates were cursed, others were orchestrated. The chances of Robert Kavin losing both a son and a wife reeked of suspicion, and I could see the evidence of it in these pages. Page after page of detailed notes from the detectives. Multiple interviews with Robert. A transfer of the wife’s file out of cold case and back into active.
Natasha Kavin had been pretty. Hot, actually. That’s how a man would describe her. Thin and blonde, with big, perky boobs that had to be fake, but who cared when they looked that good. My own fairly large breasts did a better job of making me look heavy than they did of arousing anyone.