The Neighbor - Lisa Gardner [158]
“Baby, it was self-defense. We’ll explain it to the police. He hurt you. I can see the bruises on your face. So you had to get away and I was trying to help you. We came back … for Ree. Yes, for Ree, except this time he had a gun and he went crazy on us and I shot him. I saved you.”
“Tell me why you killed her.”
“We’ll go home, baby. You, me, and little Clarissa. Back to the big white house with the wraparound porch. You always loved that porch. Clarissa will, too. We can set up a porch swing. She’ll be so happy there.”
“You murdered her, Daddy. You killed my mother and I watched you do it. Getting her drunk. Dragging her passed-out body to the car. Attaching the hose to the exhaust pipe, curling it around to the cracked window. Then starting the engine, before bolting out and locking the car doors behind you. I watched her wake up, Daddy. I stood in the doorway of the garage, seeing the look on her face when she realized that you were still standing right there, but that you had no intention of helping her.
“I remember her screams. For so long, I fell asleep smelling dying roses, and woke up hearing her goddamn pitiful wails. But you never broke. Never lifted a hand. Not as she tore off her own fingernails on the door latch or bloodied her knuckles against the front windshield. She screamed your name, Daddy. She screamed for you, and you stood there and watched her die.”
“Baby, listen to me. Put down the gun. Sandy, sugar plum, everything’s gonna be all right.”
But Sandy only tightened her grip on the weapon. “I want answers, Daddy. After all these years, I deserve the truth. Tell me. Look me in the eye and tell me: Did you kill Mama because she hurt me? Or did you kill her because I was finally old enough to serve as her replacement?”
Maxwell didn’t reply. But through the haze of pain, Jason could read the expression on the man’s face. So could Sandy. The steel doors and reinforced windows; all these years later, she was still trying to lock Daddy out. Except now she had something better than bolt locks. Now she had a gun.
Jason reached out his hand for his wife. Don’t, he wanted to tell her. What’s done can’t be undone. What’s known can’t be unknown.
But she had already done and known too much. So Sandra leaned forward, pressed the barrel of the gun to her father’s sternum, and pulled the trigger.
Downstairs, the front window finally crashed in.
While in the room next door, Ree started to scream.
“Jason—” Sandy started.
“Go to her. Get our daughter. Go to Ree.”
Sandy dropped the gun. She raced out of the room as Jason picked up the pistol, rubbed the grip clean against his pant leg, then wrapped his own fingers around it.
Best he could do, he thought, and watched the ceiling fade to black.
| CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN |
“You’re telling us you caught a taxi to the Boston Daily offices. All by yourself? Entered the offices with no ID and nobody tried to stop you?”
“Asked and answered,” Ethan Hastings’s lawyer interjected, before his thirteen-year-old client could speak up. “Move along, Sergeant.”
D.D. sat in BPD’s conference room. She had Miller on her right-hand side, and the deputy superintendent of homicide on her left. Across from them sat Ethan Hastings, his parents, and a top Boston shark, Sarah Joss. Two weeks after Wayne Reynolds’s untimely murder in the parking lot of the state police crime lab, the Hastingses had finally allowed the BPD access to their son. Given their choice of lawyers, however, they weren’t taking any chances.
“Come on, Ethan,” D.D. persisted. “Your uncle told me by phone that you had located the Joneses’ computer at the Boston Daily offices. Then, all of a sudden, after wandering the offices for three hours, you changed your mind?”
“Someone changed the security protocols,” Ethan declared flatly. “I already told you that. I’d sent a virus. A newer virus-protection software eradicated it. At least that’s my best guess.”
“But the computer is still there. Has to be one of them.”
The boy shrugged. “That’s your problem, not mine.