Chapter Thirteen
Beatrice summoned me to her glass tower one more time, and when I walked in, the conference room looked very different.
The neat folders had multiplied into boxes.
A second lawyer from her office sat taking notes, and a laptop faced an empty chair.
Beatrice stood at the window with her glasses in her hand, which I had never once seen her do.
“Sit,” she said. “Today is the day.”
“It’s ready?”
“It’s been ready since the garden incident.
Your recording of that ambush was the last brick.
A jury could convict on the file as it stood, but after that performance, they’d do it before lunch.
” She came back to the table and sat across from me.
“So, here’s what happens now, and for once I’m going to tell you everything, because from this point forward, secrecy protects them, not you.
This afternoon, I deliver the file to the district attorney’s office and to the detectives I’ve been consulting with, quietly, hypothetically, while we built the file.
The video. The toxicology. The lab results on both pouches, including the fresh one your friend hand-delivered in front of witnesses.
Dr. Kent’s records against Dr. Parks’s records.
The texts. The emergency-control document with its edit history.
Your recordings from the meeting and the garden.
Motive, means, access, and intent, cross-referenced and indexed. ”
“And then?”
“And then it stops being mine. Warrants get drafted. Search warrants first, for the house, the devices, Kent’s office and billing systems. They’ll move on all three locations at once, at an hour nobody expects company, because the entire point of the coordination is that Karl, Dara, and Bill find out you know at the same moment they find out the State of California knows.
No warning shot. No lawyer-to-lawyer courtesy call.
They’ve had two years to prepare a story about your death.
They get no time to prepare a story about their arrest.”
I sat with that. Somewhere across the city, three people were living an ordinary morning, coffee, calendars, a concerned text about my protocol probably already drafted, and none of them knew the floor would be soon gone from under them.
I searched myself for pity and found the search came back empty. I decided I could live with that.
“I want to be there,” I said. “Not in the way. Parked down the street, even. I want to see it with my own eyes when they walk him out of my house.”
“No.” Beatrice didn’t soften it. “Three reasons. One, if a defense lawyer ever learns you watched, they’ll spend a week painting you vindictive in front of a jury, and vindictive muddies a story that is currently spotless.
Two, the detectives don’t want the victim within a mile of an active warrant, full stop.
And three.” She took off her glasses. “Because you don’t need it, Mrs. Barber, you only think you do.
I’ve had clients who watched. The watching gives you one morning.
What you’ve built gives you the rest of your life.
Don’t trade the second thing for the first.”
“You’ll tell me everything, though. Every detail you’re allowed.”
“I’ll probably tell you more than I should. It’s a flaw of mine.” She smiled.
“What do you need from me?”
“Two things. First, your formal statement. Detectives Alvarez and Whitfield will take it here, today, start to finish, on the record. It will take hours and it will be miserable, and you’ll do it anyway, because your statement is the spine everything else hangs on.
” She slid a card across the table with two names on it.
“Second, and I want your full attention on this one. Once the warrants execute, this becomes news. Not immediately, but soon, and loudly. Famous artist, poison, husband, best friend. You need to be somewhere private, with someone you trust, and you need to not answer any number you don’t recognize.
Sandra will handle press. You will handle nothing. ”
***
The statement took four hours. Detective Alvarez asked short questions and let me answer at whatever length the truth needed, and Detective Whitfield typed and occasionally asked me to spell a name.
Between them, they walked me through the whole year, and then the whole marriage, and then, gently, the whole friendship, all the way back to a chemistry class where a girl let me draw on her homework.
I told it all in order, out loud, in one sitting, for the first time.
Nobody had ever heard the complete version, not even Nick, not even me, and hearing it assembled in my own voice in a quiet room did something I didn’t expect.
It made it finite. A thing with edges. A thing that could be handed to professionals in boxes and carried out of my life.
“Last question,” Alvarez said, near the end. “And it’s one we have to ask. Is there anything you’ve done during this period, anything at all, that we’re going to find out about from them instead of from you?”
I thought about Karl in the garden and what he’d said: “You have no idea what I can prove about you.”
“He’ll say I was having an affair with Nick Quinn,” I said.
“I wasn’t. I fell for him somewhere in the middle of all this, and he fell for me, and we’ve kissed exactly once and drawn a line and held it.
I’d testify to every word of that under oath.
Beyond that, detective, they’ll find that I lied to my poisoners about drinking their tea.
I hope they frame it exactly that way in court. ”
Whitfield stopped typing. “That’s all we need.” he said.
Then I did the hardest thing Beatrice had asked of me all month. I went back to the hotel, and I waited. I let other people do the rest.
Nick came and waited with me. We didn’t try to work. He ordered food I barely touched, and we sat on the terrace steps where I’d once cried for an hour. We watched the garden go dark, my phone lying between us on the stone, face up, ringer on, the loudest silent object in California.
“Say the thing you keep not saying,” Nick said, somewhere in the second hour. “You’ve swallowed it four times. I’ve counted.”
“It’s ugly.”
“I’ve got a strong stomach.”
“I keep hoping he doesn’t sleep tonight.
” I said it to the garden, not to him. “Not fear, even. I know he doesn’t know yet.
I just keep thinking about all the nights I lay next to him doing arithmetic about my own body, apologizing to him in my head for being sick, and I want the universe to give him one night, just one, of lying awake feeling that something is wrong and not being able to name it.
That’s the ugly thing. That’s what I’ve been swallowing. ”
“That’s not ugly,” Nick said. “Ugly was their scheming. This is just justice, arriving late.”
“Tell me something about the movie,” I said. “Anything. I need my head somewhere else.”
“Reyes signed this morning.”
I turned and stared at him. “She signed? The studio caved?”
“The studio reviewed it. Turns out they’d believed in her all along.
There’s going to be a press release about their bold casting vision, and I’m going to let them have it.
Because I got the signature, and Luma got her voice.
” He bumped my shoulder with his. “I was saving it for a better night. Then I figured out there might not be a better night for a while, and this one needed it most.”
***
The phone rang at six the next morning. Beatrice, and behind her voice, a working office, other phones, motion.
“It’s done,” she said. “All three locations, simultaneously, no incidents. They executed at the house first. Karl and Dara were both there, Mrs. Barber, both of them, at six a.m., which the detectives noted with some interest, and which Karl attempted to explain before anyone asked him anything. The devices are in custody. Kent’s office systems were locked down before his staff finished their coffee. ”
“Are they arrested?”
“Detained and questioned today, arrests to follow as charges are finalized, and they will be finalized. But listen, because the morning has already produced results. The forensic people work fast when the map is this good, and we gave them a very good map. Deleted messages between Karl and Dara are already coming off the devices, more than we had, and worse. A purchase trail is emerging. It seems that getting thallium takes some doing, and every step of it leaves receipts. They’re also finding versions, Mrs. Barber.
Drafts of the emergency-control document going back months, revised over and over, like a man polishing a speech.
A letter out of Kent’s system, a physician’s certification of incapacity, drafted and ready, needing nothing but a signature and a bad day.
And a folder of estate projections. Karl had spreadsheets modeling the value of your company after your death, with the movie release factored in as a growth event.
He’d formatted them. Headers, colors. He was proud of them. ”
I stood at the terrace doors with the phone at my ear and looked out at the flowers.
Nick came to stand behind me, close enough that I could lean back if I needed to.
I didn’t need to, and knowing I could was enough.
He’d waited with me all night, on the couch while I lay in bed staring at the ceiling.
“And Bill?” I asked. “You said questioned today.”
“Bill.” For the first time in our whole acquaintance, I heard Beatrice almost chuckle.
“Bill Kent lasted ninety minutes. They tell me it was barely an interrogation. The detectives laid out the records comparison, his file against Dr. Parks’s labs, and they let him look at it.
Then they mentioned, truthfully, that his sister and her husband were being questioned in other rooms, and that the first cooperator in a conspiracy tends to be the only one the system remembers kindly.
Ninety minutes, Mrs. Barber. Then he asked for a lawyer, and then he asked for a deal in the same breath, and then he talked for three hours.
He admitted the arrangement. He admitted Karl and Dara directed it and paid him.
He admitted faking your results, in detail, test by test. His exact words are already in a report, and I’m going to read you one sentence of them, because you’ve earned this most of all.
” A page turned. “He said: ‘I kept telling her she was fine. She was never fine. They always knew exactly how sick she was, because I told them before I told her.’”