Open Season (Alex Delaware #40)

Chapter 35

Chapter

35

I thought plenty but it led to desolate dead ends. I kept that to myself over dinner, figured I’d done a good job of pigeonholing so I could be good company for Robin and Blanche.

The dishes washed and dried, Robin and I settled on the terrace nursing bourbon Manhattans, Blanche curled up between us. Enveloped by the night. Nice. I concentrated on that.

A couple of sips in, Robin said, “What’s wrong, honey?”

“It’s that obvious.”

“No, actually it isn’t. You’re great at keeping things buttoned up, I’m sure that’s good for your patients. And I’m also sure a casual observer wouldn’t notice but casual ain’t us.”

She rubbed the back of my neck. “I have developed Alex ESP. No big whoop, you’d do the same for me. That said, if you don’t want to talk about it.”

I did.

—

She said, “Poor, poor kid. Destroying yourself over a grade.”

“Likely more than a grade.” I told her what I’d said to Milo about depression.

“Even worse,” she said. “There he was dealing with that and no one noticed because it was all about achievement.”

I said, “Teens are great at hiding stuff. Serious depression can be mistaken for adolescent moodiness.”

“We had something like that when I was in high school. Brilliant girl, long-distance runner and student council vice president on top of straight A’s. Allison something. One day they found her in the girls’ locker room, laid out on the floor with an empty bottle of her mother’s antidepressants next to her. They rushed her to the hospital but couldn’t revive her. That was a message, no? Using Mom’s pills? And Mom also being depressed. Is it genetic?”

“It can be.”

She smiled. “Spoken like a guy who testifies in court. Let me ask you this: Are bright kids more susceptible?”

“Actually, their suicide rate is lower,” I said. “It’s the struggling kids who are at higher risk because having fewer resources leads to a tougher life. But there’s plenty of room for exceptions. Especially when high expectations fall short.”

“One B minus,” she said. “I’ll remind myself of that next time I’m sweating over a millimeter of veneer. So how’d you survive, being all precocious?”

“No problem, I was anything but a golden boy.”

“Oh sure.”

“Really, babe. No one expected anything from me. Includingme.”

“Even though you were always straight A’s. Right?”

“In my family, it didn’t matter.”

“What did?”

“Nothing.”

“Well,” she said, “you sure got past that.”

“Gradual process.”

“College at sixteen is gradual?”

“I didn’t think about it, was just happy to get away. And I had bills to pay.”

“Guess we share that,” she said. “Low expectations. I was no star student, no one thought I’d amount to anything except Dad. And then he upped and died and Mom didn’t exactly build me up.”

Her voice faltered. She drew herself up. Grinned. “Pain followed by gain. Guess we’re the lucky ones.”

We drank in silence, her head on my shoulder.

A few minutes later, she said, “In a way isn’t this case kind of like the other one you told me about? The hip-hop producer with the smart fragile kid? Both murders could be about family rage, no? Parents avenging their kids, only the producer didn’t wait for it to get tragic.”

My gut tightened.

She felt it. “What?”

“Now that you mention it, it could also fit the woman in the boat. She was embroiled in a custody dispute. Faced claims she was an unfit mother. Getting killed by someone protecting her child is twisted but maybe you’ve hit on something.”

Which led me to the case I hadn’t talked about. Couldn’t. The grieving family of a young woman brutalized and left as a shell of herself.

No police report filed not because the Saucedos had been content to be compensated with money? Because they’d decided to take matters into their own hands?

I took Robin’s face in both my hands and kissed her.

She said, “Whew. All that for letting my mind wander?”

“All that for a whole bunch of brilliant.”

—

We sat out there for a while, drifted into the bedroom and made unusually silent, easy love, then showered, streamed a few minutes of a Nordic-noir movie that turned out to be turgid, and switched off the lights just after ten p.m.

Robin slept peacefully. My slumber came to a halt just after four a.m. when I woke wide-eyed in the midst of a dream I couldn’t remember. Something that had set my heart pounding.

Muddled thoughts began coming at me like cards from the trick deck of a sleight-of-hand magician. Vanishing before contact, only to be followed by another bizarre onslaught of what-ifs that finally took shape as I flashed back, lucidly, to where Robin had led me.

People hiring a ruthlessly accurate killer for the sake of their kids.

In the cases of Keisha Boykins and Errol Moffett, gifted kids. Two sets of parents, unknown to each other, putting aside reason and morality in favor of crazily focused protectiveness?

Golden kids. Both high school juniors. I’d treated enough eleventh-graders to know that year was often the peak of anxiety about college acceptance.

Parents of high school juniors had been known to bribe, con, and swindle in order to get their offspring into top universities. If you bought into the fantasy that enrollment at a selective institution guaranteed lifelong ecstasy, why not take it further?

On the other hand, college issues had nothing to do with the death of Whitney Killeen, mother of a toddler. And Vicki Saucedo was a woman in her twenties.

So forget the narrow focus and concentrate on the process.

Children of any age as objects of selfish love.

Jarrod, the prize in a custody battle.

Vicki, the physically beautiful but vulnerable sib. That was harder to fit. So maybe a simple revenge plot.

The more I thought about it, the more consistently it came down to families and offspring. I chewed on that for a while but it didn’t take long for early-morning inspiration to pale.

All I’d created was another theory, useless for moving the case forward.

I got up and began trudging back to bed when it hit me.

Jarrod had two half sibs in college, Vicki Saucedo, a brother in college. Brilliant, on scholarship at an exclusive college, what was his name…?