It was a good thing my mom had her back to me as she went, because my mouth hung open. Chief McTavish might not have liked me prior to this, but at least he’d respected me. Now he’d see me as weak, just the way my parents did, because my mom had intervened.
“What do you think they’re talking about?” I asked Mark.
He shrugged. “Whatever it is, I bet your mom is winning.”
My mom always won, but this time, her win would still be my loss.
They were back out in less than five minutes.
Chief McTavish barely looked at me, but he hooked a thumb toward the interview room where Becky waited. “I’m going in with you.”
He stalked down the hall.
I paused beside my mom. “What did you say to him?”
“The truth. That you’re the best I’ve ever met at reading people, and if he wants a conviction on this case, you’re his best chance.” She made a shooing motion. “Now go.”
Maybe I’d once again misjudged my mom. That sounded an awful lot like praise.
Becky sat on the far side of the interview table when we entered. Her mouth turned down so far at the edges that it almost formed an upside-down U.
Chief McTavish immediately took a seat on the opposite side of the table from her.
If I sat next to him, it’d be the worst possible way to start out. It’d make her feel like I was siding with the police against her—which technically I was—but her friends had been betrayed by the police before. To win her over, I needed to show her I cared and I wouldn’t ignore or try to silence them.
I moved around the table, and pulled out the other chair on her side so that I could face her rather than sit next to her the way I would have if I’d been her defense counsel.
She looked at me like I’d randomly hauled out and kicked her anyway. I felt it like a punch to the throat, stealing my air and making me want to cry out.
“This isn’t what you think,” I said.
She crossed her arms over her chest. “You’re not here to try to trick me into confessing? Because that’s what it looks like.”
I didn’t dare look at Chief McTavish. Not even out of the corner of my eye. I could already hear him thinking about how he never should have let me come in here, and how I was going to do more harm than good.
Or maybe that was simply the voice in my head that always tried to tell me I wasn’t good enough.
It was time to tell that voice to buzz off.
“I’m not here to trick you at all.” I made sure not to flinch away from her glare. “There’s no need to trick you because we know what you did. I’m here to talk to you because I believe you only wanted justice.”
Her arms slid down from her chest to rest around her waist, but she didn’t release them completely.
She wasn’t arguing. That was a step forward. I had to keep building on that foundation. “The police didn’t bring charges against Bruce or Penny’s husband. They should have.”
“Bruce told her she couldn’t expect all the perks of a boyfriend and not put out.” Becky lowered her hands to her jeans, and her fingers curled into claws. “Then he drove her home like nothing unusual had happened. The police refused to charge him because Julia was dating him at the time.” She shot a reproachful look at Chief McTavish. “Like that made it all right. Chief Wilson said no one would believe she hadn’t wanted it.”
It wasn’t a confession yet, but she was talking now. My parents had taught me that if you could convince someone to talk, eventually you could also catch them in a lie.
“That didn’t make it right,” Chief McTavish said. “I would have encouraged her to press charges. She could have come in again after Chief Wilson was gone, or she could have talked to someone else. Did either of your friends try speaking to another officer?”
Becky’s headshake was subtle, but it set her earrings swinging, drawing attention to the motion. “What reason would we have had to think they’d be any different?”
I knew Chief McTavish was only trying to help, and possibly to see if she’d name a name he could use in his malfeasance investigation, but it showed how much he didn’t understand. What had been done to Julia, and to Penny, was humiliating enough without having to grovel to multiple people, hoping they’d be believed.
Besides, Chief Wilson was in charge at the time. They couldn’t have possibly known that if they spoke to someone like Erik or Quincey instead, they would have received different treatment.
Chief Wilson had built in them a deep distrust of the Fair Haven police department, and because it’d happened to both of them, their minds were set. If they wanted justice and to be free of their abusers, they’d have to handle it themselves.
Except Chief Wilson had been gone since last fall. That meant that all of this happened at least six months ago. “Did Bruce leave her alone after that?”
Becky nodded, then shook her head. “At first. But then a few weeks ago, she saw him with another woman she knew. Julia wanted to protect her, so she told her what Bruce did. The woman dumped him. Bruce was angry. He said he never raped her, but that he could show her what rape was if she kept spreading lies about him.” A visible shiver ran over her. “And I had to work with him, knowing what he was. Every time he looked at me…”
That explained why this happened when it happened. The thought of being around someone even related to the people who’d attacked me made me sick. I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for Becky, knowing that she was working with a rapist, for Julia worrying that Bruce might hurt her again out of vindictiveness, and for Penny, whose husband wouldn’t stay out of her life.
“So you decided someone had to stop him—them?” I kept my voice as soft as possible. I didn’t want to seem like I was attacking her when she saw them as the victims.
Becky pressed her lips shut and leaned back in her chair.
There’d been a part of me that hoped she’d want to confess now. We’d given her a chance to explain why she felt they’d done the right thing. Oftentimes, vigilantes wanted to admit to their actions because, deep down, they believed no one would actually convict them for it.
Becky was clearly smarter than that. How carefully her part of the murders had been orchestrated spoke to that as well.
Maybe I was approaching this wrong. Maybe she didn’t care about what others thought about it. In her heart, what she did was right, and she didn’t need outside approval enough to risk her freedom over it.
But that only held if she’d only hurt the original perpetrators. She hadn’t. She’d hurt innocent people as well.
