“Arvind.” Fear stretched the storeowner’s reply across the space of the store.
“I’m Simon. What about you?” He tilted his head towards the man holding him.
“I’m not giving you my fucking name! Just give me the money.” The man shifted his hold on Simon, and a waft of body odor rose through the folds of his thin coat. Simon thought he smelled the acrid scent of urine, and silently moved his hand to his pants to check if he’d wet himself.
He hadn’t.
The storeowner started to reach down, but the man pressed the knife further into Simon’s throat. A sharp pain shot through Simon’s skin as the knife’s edge dug in.
“Hey, hey! What are you doing?” the man shouted at the storeowner.
“I’m getting the money.”
“Slower. Go slower.” The man moved Simon forward as he stepped towards the cash register. “Easy now.”
“I feel like I should know your name.”
The storeowner kept moving his hands below the counter.
“I said slower.” He took the knife from Simon’s throat and jabbed it towards Arvind.
But it was too late. The storeowner brought a shotgun from under the counter, braced it against his shoulder, and pulled the trigger. Simon moved out of the man’s grasp and fell to the floor just in time. He ducked below as the sound of the gun’s report threatened to burst his ear drums, and then wetness sprinkled onto his face.
The man who held him at knifepoint didn’t have a chest anymore. It was a bright red mass, and even though Simon was a trained surgeon, he couldn’t make sense of the pieces that tore apart from each other.
“Help me! Help me,” the man begged. Simon knew he should go over, assess his wounds, start to provide first aid. But he couldn’t make himself move from the ground. Simon’s body felt like a hard plank of metal come loose from its fittings. Unmovable.
“Simon!” the man called out.
At the sound of his name, Simon looked up and locked eyes with his would-be captor. He saw his pain. He saw his desperation. “My name’s Terry. Please, help me.”
But Simon didn’t move. He remained where he was, waiting for the police to arrive and for someone else to take on this burden.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE TRINA
There were police cars parked at her corner when Trina returned to her apartment. An ambulance was parked near the R&S Convenience market, but no lights flashed as she watched two EMS workers roll a stretcher into the back of the vehicle and close the doors. A sheet was pulled over the top of the stretcher, but two heavy boots peeked out from below on the other end. She figured heart attack, but knew it could be something much worse. There had been several robberies at the store already this winter. Trina went there to buy liquor when she was desperate, otherwise she went to the ritzier Wegman’s across town, where she could pretend that she was going to buy groceries and just happened to buy a few bottles of wine. Although the storeowner was always friendly to her and made a point of looking away when she showed up with smeared mascara and bed creases on her face, desperate for a Red Bull.
Her hallway was empty, and Trina let herself into her apartment with a quick swish of her keys. She’d dropped Addy off back on campus, where she had to do some revisions on her dissertation. Trina didn’t know where Laura and Rosie went, although they exchanged numbers and made tentative plans to text each other for another meet-up. Trina had promised to update everyone with what she found on Dermot’s laptop.
It sat heavy on her shoulder and Trina set her bag down on the counter. She still couldn’t believe the other women had let her take it home without much protest. Trina expected them to fight her for it, or to demand that they review the contents all together. But after Laura’s confession about Dermot’s lying, the energy of the room shifted and everyone seemed to want to get the hell out of his apartment. Like something of his own problems might taint each of them if they stayed there too long.
Trina poured herself a huge glass of Chardonnay from the fridge and settled into the couch. She hadn’t eaten much of anything for the last several days, which meant she’d be feeling a buzz sooner rather than later. She’d need it to give her the edge necessary to poke around a dead one-night-stand’s computer. On her way home, she considered for a second it might be wise to drop the laptop off at the police station, but she dismissed the notion almost as soon as she recognized it. What she needed more than anything was to get as far away from the police as possible, not to give them more reasons to suspect she was involved in all of this. And if she showed up with Dermot’s laptop, which she magically found somewhere, she’d have to explain how she was able to get into his apartment and discover it when the police had been unable to—which still struck her as ridiculous, given that hiding things under a mattress was something every thirteen-year-old knew to do. Trina didn’t want to get Addy, or Laura, or anyone else caught up in this mess any more than they already were.
She was betting, too, that there wouldn’t be much on Dermot’s laptop, or that it’d be password protected and no one would be able to get into it. In other words, she wasn’t expecting much joy from her little foray into cyber-crime. Still, she had to try, just in case there was something on it that could help her show picking up women at weddings and cheating on his teenage pregnant girlfriend weren’t the worst things Dermot had gotten up to.
It was a small, neat laptop with an icon of a soccer ball positioned over Dermot’s name. Trina clicked on it, expecting a password to pop up, but instead it took her directly to the home screen. The background Dermot had set revealed nothing—a generic sunny field that came pre-canned with the laptop. There were a few folders on the desktop. One labeled Bills. Another listed as Photos. The last folder was called Misc. Miscellaneous.
She’d look at those in a moment. First, she opened up the web browser and examined Dermot’s email saved in the recent history. He seemed to use a Gmail account, like a billion other people, with his username being Derm5028, which sounded like a skin condition to Trina. She clicked into his account’s login and it opened straight up to his inbox, but even after going through the Trash and Junk folders, Trina didn’t see any messages. The entire email was empty.This struck her as odd, because Dermot died on Sunday, and he hadn’t been able to check into the account for several days. There were no junk emails or spam. It was completely blank.
Which meant that Dermot was using this email for a select set of correspondence. Not to sign up for free accounts to get discounts or free shipping. And whoever he was writing back and forth with didn’t communicate often. Or they were the ones who killed him, and knew he wouldn’t be able to reply anyway.
A noise came from the hallway outside her door. Trina listened for a moment, thinking it was Darlene or her son coming home, but there was no sound of keys jangling in the lock or of doors opening.
Delivery, probably. Trina took another sip of wine.
She clicked on the small green box in the bottom corner, opening up Dermot’s text messages linked to that laptop. Very few conversations were listed, and none of the numbers had names identified with them. Instead, there were four or five different conversations with different numbers, each coming from local area codes. The numbers listed addresses, and then Dermot would reply with a C or NC.
“Coming” or “Not coming”, Trina figured.
Trina skimmed through the addresses. She didn’t recognize any of them at first, but then she saw one number at the very end of the list. There was only one text exchange from the number, whereas the others had several different back and forths with addresses and confirmations. Trina recognized the location. She put the same address listed in the text into her phone last Saturday night, looking for the Marriott after taking a wrong turn down Delaney. Someone texted Dermot the address for the hotel, and he had replied C.
She looked at the date on the text. It was sent Saturday morning, and Dermot replied that Saturday afternoon.
Who had wanted him to go to the Marriott?
Suddenly, Trina felt a cold draft blowing in across her living room. She got up, following the chill into her bedroom. Her bedroom window was cracked slightly, and icy air streamed in from the open top. Sometimes her windows shifted size, growing and shrinking with the humidity of summer and the freezing temperatures of winter, and could open on their own.
Trina shoved the window closed, grabbed a blanket from the end of her bed, and wrapped it around her shoulders as she walked back to the living room.
She started to put in the other addresses that Dermot had texted with. Each one came up as a hotel or motel in the area. What was Dermot doing, and who was he meeting? There were no pictures attached to the messages, no emojis or other indicators that there might be some sort of affection between Dermot and whoever he was messaging with. All different numbers, with four or five exchanges before it’d switch to the next number.
Trina clicked over into Dermot’s photos. These were organized into folders labeled “Hiking” and “Work”. Trina clicked through them and found little else besides some group birthday photos of who she assumed were Dermot’s coworkers, and lots of photos of trees and other pretty landscapes. She didn’t see the photo of Laura that Dermot posted on Facebook.
Scrolling through the “Hiking” folder, Trina found another folder, seemingly randomly labeled with numbers and letters. It looked like the kind of folder your phone would sometimes create when it connected to your computer, downloading photo items without you realizing. It would stay on your computer, even after you deleted it from your phone.
Trina clicked on the folder to open it and saw a small thumbnail of one picture. She could tell just from the miniature preview that it was a photo of a naked woman. Holding her breath, Trina opened the file, waiting for it to load onto the screen of the laptop.
As the image came into resolution, a deep pit of fear and anger formed in her stomach. Or course it was her. Her.
Trina finally opened the Misc. folder. There was only one document stored there. The details for the file showed that it was created and last updated nine months ago.
Trina opened the file, read it, and immediately thought she’d be sick. Her stomach heaved.
Two competing desires pulsed in Trina’s chest. She needed to show everyone what she’d just read. And no one could ever see what Dermot had written.
A rage-filled scream rose from her lungs. But she’d never get the chance to let her despair out.
From behind Trina, a voice broke into the quiet that had settled over the apartment. “So now you know our dirty little secret.”
The rope slipped around Trina’s neck smooth and supple, like a lover’s hands. She couldn’t work fast enough to move her fingers underneath the garrote before it tightened.
Trina realized she was dying.
It didn’t take long, Trina thought, her brain flooded with Tom’s brown eyes as he lay there with Simon bent over him, pain streaking across his face in short, intense bursts. At least it didn’t take long this time.
CHAPTER THIRTY LAURA
It was the second time Laura had been called by the police in under a week. Her brain buzzed with adrenaline as the uniformed officer guided her down the hallway and into the room, where the same two detectives who interviewed her about Dermot sat across the table. Bechdel had her hair down and tucked behind one ear. Kirkpatrick was flipping through paperwork, but he looked up with a kind turn of his mouth when Laura came into the room.
