Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Alexandru
“So who was visiting him?” Ms. Renfield asks on our way back to her little green car.
I say, “The sister, perhaps?”
She stops, regarding me over the roof. “A busy nurse raising two kids on her own is suddenly paying weekly visits to a prison an hour away and bringing money? I don’t see Tilly as a woman with a lot of extra time or money on her hands.”
“Certainly not,” I say.
“But who else would it be? His lawyer must have been visiting him at some point, but why would his lawyer suddenly be giving him money? That’s definitely not how it goes with lawyers.”
I smile. “An unknown player has entered the game.”
Ms. Renfield’s face is illuminated from one side by the streetlights along the river, lending her bold features a certain nobility.
“Let’s see if Dooley Brogan is still up.
” She gives me a sly look, pulls out her phone, and begins to speak to it.
“Just seeing if you’re up… Very urgent question connected to your case. ”
Her phone chimes a second later.
“He wants to know what our question is.” She raises her eyes to mine. “I think not!”
“Agreed, Ms. Renfield.”
She text-narrates some more. “Can we stop by quick?”
A few minutes later, we’re sitting in plastic chairs out on the small back porch behind Tilly’s house. Dooley points to a back window and whispers, “Those are the kids’ bedrooms. We have to keep it down.”
“Okay,” Ms. Renfield whispers.
“I like to sit out here and see the stars. You don’t know what it is to not see the stars for fifteen years.”
Ms. Renfield and I exchange glances. He does not sound like a man who wants to go back behind bars.
She leans forward. “Who was visiting you so much toward the end?”
Everything in Dooley tightens with surprise, even alarm, but he attempts a confused face. “Who-who was visiting me?”
“Yes,” Ms. Renfield says. “We understand you got quite a few visits in the last couple months you were inside. I am asking who that was who was visiting you.”
Dooley blinks. “I’m not sure. That must’ve been my lawyer. We had a lot of visits toward the end when he recognized that there had been a miscarriage of justice.”
The deception in him is unmistakable. There is much he is not saying.
“How often was he visiting?” she asks.
“What does it matter?” Dooley is whispering more loudly now, more urgently. “I can’t remember. A lot, I would say. He was visiting me a lot.”
Ms. Renfield tilts her head. “But you’re not sure how much?”
“Not really! It’s not as if I tracked it!”
“It’s just important that we get all the facts if we are going to help you,” Ms. Renfield says. “Can you tell me about these meetings?”
“I thought lawyer visits were kind of confidential,” Dooley says with a wary glance in my direction. “But honestly, it was just lawyer stuff.”
She says, “He sounds like a pretty good lawyer, working so tirelessly on your behalf all these years.”
“Yes.” Dooley nods vigorously.
I tire of his lies. “Who else visited you?”
Dooley turns to me, alarmed. “I don’t know what a roster of all my visitors has to do with anything. The prosecution withheld key evidence, so of course I would talk to my lawyer a ton. The bottom line is, I didn’t do the crime. I didn’t kill Benson and surely not Razor Johnny.”
I grow hungry, and this man is hiding something. His insistence he didn’t kill feels genuine, but he is not telling all. There are a great number of ways to press a man, to get the truth out. I eye Dooley, considering which to employ.
Ms. Renfield stands up. “I just remembered, we have to go.”
What now?
She gives me one of her significant looks, which tells me that her clever mind has come up with something and turns to Dooley. “Thank you so much for clearing this up. We don’t mean to seem accusatory. It makes total sense that your lawyer would visit you a ton.”
I stand. My little Renfield has thought of something. She puts things together in her own way. She hears “noise in the data,” she once told me.
“Thanks for coming by,” Dooleys says. “And if you want me to figure out how many times my lawyer visited me, I probably could figure it out if it helps.”
“It’s probably not important,” she says.
“He was lying, frightened, hiding things,” I say as Ms. Renfield navigates the car through streets now shrouded in darkness, a great improvement over the cheerful lawns with their geese statuary.
Her eyes flash in the moonlight, a hint of honey threaded through the brown. “Lying about the visits or the whole thing?”
So. My Renfield is going to play coy and conceal her new plan a bit longer. This does not displease me. “Somebody else most certainly visited him, but he does not wish to name that person. His proclamations of innocence do have the ring of truth, interestingly enough.”
“But it could be because he’s a sociopath who believes his own lies, right?”
“Perhaps. The visits are important, though,” I say in a low voice. “I could’ve gotten it out of him. I could have learned all. Why did you want to leave so suddenly? What is it that you realized?”
“Two things. One of which is that you were itching to go beast mode on him.”
This takes me aback. “How is it that you could know such a thing?”
“You have a tell.”
“A tell? I do not.”
She smiles mischievously.
“I have existed a century; I would know.”
“And I realized that I have another way of getting that information that wouldn’t involve waking up the kids or grave bodily harm.”
I turn to her there in the darkness. “What is my tell?”
“Oh, you think I’m going to tell you what it is? Hell no.”
“I do not jest. You will inform me of my tell this instant.”
She turns through the iron gates and into the drive. Gravel crunches beneath us. Oaks arch overhead as the house takes shape in the dark.
“You seem to forget that you are mine to command.”
“I’m sorry—is that in the contract? Let me think. No. I don’t recall a clause requiring me to disclose non-business information.”
“I would choose my next words with great care, Ms. Renfield.”
Nervousness pulses through her as she pulls the car to a stop. It is not an easy thing for her, opposing me.
She gets out and strides ahead of me toward the main door. When she reaches the top step, she spins around to face me. “You have a right to command me in matters of your operations and worldly affairs. You do not have a right to my private observations. My emotions. Or…personal whatnot.”
I sense a flutter of something interesting at the mention of “whatnot.” “What does whatnot mean? What is hidden in there, Ms. Renfield?”
“None of your business.”
Heat blooms beneath her skin. A faint blush climbs her cheek, and memory strikes—
The wedding killer. The knife at her throat. The way I seized her hand and pressed my lips to it, as if I required direct proof that she was still alive. And it was a struggle to let her go.
I was undone by hunger at the time, of course.
I say, “I do not like a closed book.”
She presses her lips together. Her scent shifts. Her skin heats. “Cats do not like closed doors, yet some doors are closed to them and will remain so.”
“I find that cats eventually get their way in such matters.”
She says, “You should be glad that I can detect when you might turn beastly. It makes me a better partner. It made me a better partner questioning Dooley tonight.”
“Is that what you think?”
“Yes. I stopped you before you could reveal that we know he’s lying.
Here’s the thing, Alexandru, there’s another way to find out who visited him: I can file a FOIA, a freedom of information act request, and get the prison visit logs.
I’m thinking the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction probably has a public records officer I can reach out to.
Let’s find out who that person is before he figures out that he needs to warn them. ”
I smile. It always pleases me when she reveals herself to be the battle tactician. “Good. You will file it now, and we will go drag the person out of their bed.”
“Well, wait—it’s not as if we will get the information instantly.
For one thing, it’s nighttime and nobody’s even in the office.
And it’s not as if the people are going to arrive in the morning and get right on it.
The FOIA is a law that says normal citizens get to know what their government is doing and what their government knows, and the government is forced to comply, but it doesn’t mean the government loves to comply.
It can be a slow process, generally seven days, sometimes as many as ten business days if they’re feeling surly. ”
“Unacceptable. We will pay them a visit when they are in their office this morning. Clerks who fear for their lives tend to process paperwork with remarkable efficiency. Unless they are shaking too badly. Spilled ink and so forth.”
Her pretty lips curl into a smile. “I have a better way, Alexandru. I’ll have those reports soon.”
I have the utterly irrational urge to pull her to me right then, to crush my lips against hers, to kiss that smile, to taste her, to—
The thought is so outrageous I recoil from myself.
A Renfield? To kiss a Renfield? To even imagine it?
The door opens. “Overlord.” Gregor stands there, trembling pathetically. She looks over at him and she stiffens. Her jaw tightens. Of course Gregor chooses this moment to put his full wretchedness on display.
But what do I care?
“Please forgive me,” Gregor says, trembling like a leaf. “I was attending to your shoes upstairs and did not hear you come in.”
“Be quicker next time.” I ascend the steps and stop at the threshold and address Ms. Renfield. “You will execute your plan. Best hope the clerks do not dawdle.”
“Whatever you say, overlord.” Ms. Renfield loads the word “overlord” with all the fury her diminutive frame can muster. Her pulse hammers with it.
I proceed to my wing and she proceeds to hers.