Laura bit back on the stock response of “Who wants to know?” Terry beat her to it anyway.
The woman turned and gave Terry an appraising look. “I’m sorry to have blocked you in. I can move my car if you need to get going.”
Terry stood up out of the car, putting his hands in his pockets. “It’s okay. I’ll stay right here.” He caught Laura’s eye, and she gave him a slight nod.
“I’m Susan. I think you knew my brother, Dermot?” she said.
Laura’s head spun for a moment.
“Dermot said he didn’t have any family.” Laura started to close the door.
“We’d been estranged. I was a lot older than him, and when my parents had him I was almost done with high school. I didn’t realize what home life was like for him, being alone while my parents were already almost elderly.” She paused and gave Laura a long stare. “I know he had a difficult childhood, and that he was trying to make the world better for other kids who were going through that.”
“So why are you here?” Laura asked.
“Because a week before he died, I got a letter from him in the mail, telling me about you. After we got the news about his death, I knew that I had to come see you.”
Laura paused. Then she extended her arm, waved Terry on, and opened the door wider for Susan. “You’d better come in.”
She’d buy the pregnancy test tomorrow.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN TRINA
Charley’s was a dive bar around the corner from the insurance company Monica worked for. Trina’s friend was meeting her there in a few minutes. They’d met at Charley’s a few times for an after-work drink or a liquid lunch, but always more in a celebratory mood than anything else. Monica wasn’t someone Trina went to for drowning her sorrows. She usually preferred to be alone for that, in the dark of her apartment with the curtains drawn and a bottle of wine propped up in her lap.
A brick square with no real charm, Charley’s was a drinker’s bar. Trina hoped there’d be some booths open in the back, away from the day-drinking crowd of nightshift cleaners, a few doctors and nurses from the MedExpress in the adjoining plaza, and the all-out alcoholics. When she stepped inside, the bar hummed with murmurs from a few groups gathered around the tall bar tables and the droning of a baseball game on the TV hung in the corner. She didn’t see Monica yet, so Trina made a beeline for a booth in the deepest corner, away from the jukebox and pool tables.
She wasn’t really sure why she was meeting Monica in the first place, except that her friend had insisted they meet in person. Whatever she had to tell Trina couldn’t be said over the phone, apparently.
Trina ordered a gin and tonic from the waitress making the rounds. When it arrived, the drink was stronger than she’d anticipated and the large sip she took burned going down her throat, making her cough.
“Can’t hold your liquor, huh?” Monica slid into the seat opposite Trina. “And what, you don’t order anything for me?”
“I wasn’t sure what you’d like.” Monica wore a curve-hugging maroon sweater dress that cinched neatly at her waist, knee-high boots, dark stockings, and a fresh blowout of her chestnut hair. “You look gorgeous.” Trina couldn’t stop herself from rounding her shoulders in a bit, shrinking into herself.
“Thanks. I figured I needed to treat myself after the last few days I’ve had.” Monica sat down and swept her hair over one shoulder. The waitress came over and Monica ordered a Scotch, neat. “Top shelf,” she added. “None of that dishwater you keep lower.”
“You, by the way, look kind of awful.” Monica gave Trina a once-over. “When was the last time you slept?”
“I’m fine.” Trina adjusted the neckline on her sweater and ran her fingers through her hair, which she couldn’t remember if she’d brushed or not this morning.
Monica’s gaze softened. “But maybe I can help.” They paused while her drink came, and then Monica settled into her seat, sipping from the short glass.
“I have a friend who used to be a cop,” she began. “She went into private security a few years ago, because the money is a lot—and I mean a lot—better. But she still keeps in touch with her PD pals and so she has connections. When I got the call from that detective on Monday, I got in touch with my friend to see if she had any information about what was going on with your guy. Want to know what I found out?”
“Of course I do. What the hell is going on?”
Trina leaned forward, keeping her voice low. No one seemed to be noticing them, but still she felt paranoid that perhaps one of the detectives had followed her there. She hadn’t felt like her life was her own for so long.
“It looks like this Dermot guy was stabbed with a piece of champagne bottle.”
Trina blanched. She remembered swilling from the bottle waiting in his hotel room. She’d thought at the time, through her fog of free wedding drinks, that it’d been a nice touch—the champagne bottle on ice in his room, waiting for her.
Now, looking back, she wasn’t so sure.
“They haven’t matched fingerprints from the pieces of the bottle they recovered to anyone yet, or from the shard that killed him.”
Monica took another swig, draining the glass. She glanced at her watch. “I’ve got to get back soon. My boss will get snippy if I’m gone too long.”
She reached over and took Trina’s hand. “I wanted to meet you face to face because the cops are clearly keeping an eye on you, and they know that we’re friends. I don’t trust saying anything over the phone or through text, because they can get access to all of that stuff fairly easily now. At least, that’s what my friend says.”
Trina thought back to what she’d been doing on her phone and her laptop since this all happened. If the police were tracking her online movements, then they knew about Simon. But they more than likely already knew about him—and Tom—anyway.
She had an appointment with her lawyer later this afternoon. Simon was paying for it, because Trina didn’t have any savings or money to handle such an expensive and unexpected cost. She barely had enough money to cover Monica’s drink this afternoon.
“Dermot Carine was a social worker, and he had lots of troubled clients he worked with. He specialized in working with teenagers. And he had a few clients, female clients, that may have thought they were in love with him.”
Trina let the information sink in.
“What are you saying?”
Monica started to put her coat on, slipping a few bills onto the table.
“These girls he worked with, they have brothers and fathers and sisters who may not be the best at taking care of them, but they’re good at protecting certain things. This guy you were with, he had enemies.”
“It was just the two of us that night in his hotel room,” Trina said, replaying her evening at the wedding back through her mind. Were there people at the wedding who were angry with him? There was that one woman—almost a girl, Trina recalled—who’d watched Dermot and Trina. The one she couldn’t bring herself to tell the police about.
“I know you feel like this is a terrible tragedy, and that you’re caught in the middle of it,” Monica said. “But you might have also been lucky that night that you didn’t get mixed up in something that ended with you dead too.”
