Chapter Forty-Eight
JOHN RETURNS TO the home of Nadya Sokolov, the Westcotts’ cleaning lady.
He watches it from outside for a short while and determines that probably no one is home.
She must be out cleaning houses, and there are no signs of life inside, no sign of the son.
It’s midafternoon. He wants to get inside.
Nadya Sokolov has access to the Westcotts’; he wonders about the son.
He checks his surroundings, but the street is deserted.
He walks confidently between her house and the house next door as if he’s got a reason to be there.
There is no one around to see him. No dog barks.
He takes a quick look and doesn’t see anyone watching out of a window.
He opens the unlocked gate into the backyard, then walks up some cement steps to the back door and opens the screen door.
The inner door is locked, but he expected that, and he brought his lockpicking tools with him.
This one is no trouble at all. He keeps glancing over his shoulder, to make sure no one is watching, but he feels completely alone.
The lock gives, and he opens the door with a squeak of its hinges.
He tries to be quiet, in case the son is at home sleeping.
Maybe he works nights. John pauses inside the door, then closes it quietly behind him.
The silence is complete. He doesn’t think there’s anyone else here.
Not even a cat. The back door opens into a small kitchen.
It’s seen better days, but it’s quite well kept and clean.
He pokes quietly around, curious. There’s a photograph on the refrigerator.
That’s unusual. Hardly anyone bothers printing out photos any more.
He moves closer and realizes the photograph is quite old and shows a couple with a young child on the square in front of the onion domes of the Kremlin.
He wonders what happened to the husband and whether the photo is there because she misses him, or because she misses her homeland.
He leaves the kitchen and walks quietly down the hall toward the front door. There’s a small table with a pile of mail on it. He stops and glances through it. Bills. Flyers, the usual crap.
He goes next into the living room at the front of the house.
The curtains are drawn and it’s dingy, the furniture worn and sagging.
The television is old. A cracked remote is sitting on the scratched coffee table.
The painting above the brick fireplace is a cheap reproduction of one of Monet’s Giverny paintings.
He wonders how this woman feels, cleaning the homes of rich people every day, polishing their expensive furniture, their porcelain, their fine art, to come home to this drab and ugly place.
Did it make her greedy? Resentful? He wouldn’t blame her if it had.
He carries on upstairs. He looks through the bedrooms, hers first. He finds an old laptop, but nothing else of interest. He snatches it up and slips it into his backpack.
In the son’s messy bedroom down the hall, there’s nothing on the desk.
There are clothes all over the floor. He sees the corner of a laptop under a dirty T-shirt on the floor.
He picks up the T-shirt and tosses it aside.
He reaches down and picks up the laptop from the floor beside the bed.
‘That fucking bitch,’ Jill seethes. They are back home, in the kitchen, having driven back from Min’s.
Min knows. The way she looked at them, the way she spoke.
But did she actually catch them admitting to murder on camera?
‘How dare she be so judgemental,’ Jill says waspishly.
‘She probably would have pushed him off the boat herself if she was in our shoes.’ She takes a breath and says, ‘If she planted the cameras, I’d love to see her go to jail. ’
‘She couldn’t have done it alone,’ Ted says. ‘She wouldn’t know how to plant hidden cameras, would she?’
‘I don’t know. There’s probably a YouTube video.’
‘But to get in, past our security, how would she do that?’
‘Maybe she hired someone.’
‘That’s risky, though. If she was found out, it would leave her open to a felony charge.’
‘Maybe it’s her boyfriend,’ Jill suggests. ‘She’s been with him for about a year and we don’t know anything about him.’
‘No, but we know his name,’ Ted says. ‘She introduced us at the memorial, remember? It’s Robert Carrera.’ He grabs his laptop on the kitchen island and pulls it toward him and googles Min’s boyfriend.
Jill comes around the island and reads over his shoulder.
‘This is him,’ Ted says. ‘I recognize him.’
Jill recognizes him too. She studies the photograph intently. Is this the man who’s destroyed their lives? She remembers how he didn’t offer a word at the memorial.
‘He’s a design engineer at a tech company,’ Ted says. They silently read his profile on LinkedIn. ‘Fuck,’ Ted says. ‘He’d probably know how to circumvent our security and plant the cameras.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. With credentials like this he could probably hack in and disarm the security system online somehow, and then just get in through a basement window or something.’
‘It must be them,’ Jill says, convinced now, her heart pounding. ‘God, I’d like to make them pay.’
But it’s going to be her and Ted, paying them.
And paying Lara, and maybe John Burnley too.
They’ll get the inheritance some time next summer and then they’ll have to start paying all these parasites, and they’ll go through their money in no time.
They’ll be broke. Ruined. And there are too many people who think they know what they did.
Jill stares malevolently at the back of her husband’s head. She wishes she’d never agreed to his stupid plan to murder his brother. Greg probably would have been dead soon anyway, and they wouldn’t be living this unbearable nightmare.
She wishes she’d never married Ted. She wishes she’d never met him.