Now You See Her - Michael Ledwidge [66]
Harris looked stunned as Charlie and I met him in the lawyer visiting room.
“Back again so soon?” he said to me.
“Hate to interrupt your reading,” I said, tossing him a bag of mini pretzels.
“Hey, thanks. They’re my favorite,” he said, actually sounding pleased. He ripped open the bag with his shackled hands, dumped the pretzels onto the interview table, and ate one.
“OK,” I said. “I got you something, Justin. Now you have to give us something. We need to speak to Fabiana, but she’s no longer living in Princeton. She left and didn’t leave any forwarding info. Do you have any clue where she might have gone?”
“You kidding me?” he said with his mouth full. “I haven’t spoken to Fabiana since she threw the engagement ring I bought her in my face a decade and a half ago. That bitch wants me dead, and she’s going to get her way. You’re digging a dry hole.”
“You know what I’m sick of, Justin?” I said, suddenly smashing one of the pretzels on the table with my fist. “You and your attitude. You don’t want me to try to save your life? That’s not macho, that’s just stupid. Or just come out and say it. Have the guts to say, ‘I did it! I killed Tara Foster!’ ”
He gaped at me with his open mouth for a moment before he closed it. “But I didn’t,” he said, spitting crumbs.
I held my hand to my ear. “Holy moly! Did I just hear someone actually defend himself?”
“Who’s running the show here, Charlie?” Harris said.
“Isn’t that obvious?” Charlie said, eyeballing me.
“Fine. Try her cousin Maddie,” Harris said. “She was the one who actually introduced us.”
“Maddie what,” I said, thumbing my iPhone.
“Maddie Pelletier,” Harris said. “She’s a teacher at the high school in Key West now. She was always pretty cool to me. She even writes sometimes.”
I thumbed the phone book app. “I got a Madeline Pelletier on Fogarty Avenue.”
“That’s her,” Justin said.
I stood. “We have to go, Justin,” I said. “But we’ll be back.”
“Yeah, for the execution,” Harris mumbled.
“No, dumbass,” I said, pointing at the barred gate. “To open that door and let your mother hug you again.”
Chapter 82
“HEY, WHO WANTS A BEER BRAT?” Peter yelled, smiling, as he snapped barbecue tongs in front of his smoking grill.
With the festive smell of charring jerk chicken and chorizo sausage, the cries of running children and Neil Diamond playing softly from his backyard speakers, the barbecue seemed more like a birthday party or a christening than an event for the surviving family of serial killer victims.
It was an eclectic group: black, white, brown, rich, poor, even a gay Protestant minister. Death didn’t discriminate. Peter knew that firsthand.
The barbecue was actually one of several events planned for the group this week. Tomorrow, a chartered bus and plane from Miami would take all of them to the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee for a sit-down and some more press coverage, Peter hoped. Then it was over to Raiford on Friday for an all-day camp-out vigil before Harris’s midnight execution. An exhausting schedule for these poor folks but one that he hoped would provide some closure.
Knowing that Jeanine was actually still alive disqualified Peter’s membership in the group, but, hey, who was he to burst everyone’s bubble with a technicality?
Besides, she’d be deader than grunge music once he went back up to New York and hunted her down after the execution.
He was flipping some peppers and onions when the minister formed a prayer circle around the pool.
“In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” Peter said along with everyone as he took his place between his beaming wife, Vicki, and the minister.
Across from them, his new best friend, Arty Tivolli, the multimillionaire, smiled approvingly.
The closing on the golf course was