“Is there a question?”
“It’s the same observation the public was making before that press conference, which is exactly why they inferred suicide. To calm everyone down.”
“Are you saying you now support them misleading people?”
“I don’t support it, but I understand it. Let’s face it, Lilah. You being here in time to make that crime scene leads to the conclusion that you were tipped off to this murder.” She gives a brittle laugh and adds, “Or you were in on the murder.”
I don’t laugh. I sure as hell don’t tell her I think she might be closer to the truth than not. “Again,” I say. “Is there a question?”
“The same one I asked when I sat down. What the hell is going on?”
“I told you—”
“Tell me,” comes a male voice. Rivera’s voice.
He appears beside us, already setting a chair at the end of the table before joining us. That he’s managed to sneak up on us when I have a clear view of the door, something that doesn’t happen to me, makes me think he was hovering somewhere close, possibly listening to our conversation. “What the hell is going on?”
“You tell me,” I say. Noting the scar on his right jawline that wasn’t there when I left, I turn the tables on him. “Start with that knife wound on your face. Who cut you?”
“Start with why you’re here,” he counters.
“I like the coffee,” I reply.
“You know,” he says dryly. “People who are smart-asses hide behind a bad attitude. That, and the few thousand miles you’ve kept between you and this place, really makes me wonder what you’re hiding.”
He’s hit a little too close to home for comfort, and it’s my turn to counter. “People who change the subject and redirect when asked about a knife wound usually didn’t get it honorably.”
His lips quirk. “Let’s not play games, Lilah.”
“But then you wouldn’t be you and I wouldn’t be me, and what kind of homecoming would that be?”
He leans in toward me, ignoring Beth, his plump finger jagging on the counter in front of me, his voice low, tight. “If you want to meet with my medical examiner, you come through me.”
“Your medical examiner?” Beth objects. “I don’t work for you.”
“For a big man,” I say, still focused on him, since he’s in my fucking face, “you’ve always operated with little-man syndrome. I’d be careful about that. It really makes a girl doubt what’s under the hood. But hey. If you want to be a part of this conversation, of course I’ll fill you in.”
He lingers close to me, his breath brushing my cheek, and I’m pretty sure he’s not buying my easy compliance any more than I am. In fact, I’ve just pulled my foot back, with his shin as the target to prove that point, when he settles into his seat again and orders, “Talk.” Like I’ve ever been one to do as told, especially by him.
“Sure,” I say. “I’ll bring you up to speed on what you missed. So here we go. My best friend in the agency is gay. And hot. So fucking hot. I’ve been trying to turn him but I’m failing miserably. From a male perspective, can it be done?”
His face turns a Christmassy shade of red that is my new favorite color. “I know you’re here on agency business.”
“You know what they say about assumptions,” I reply. “They make an ass—”
“Your brother told me.”
I quickly decide that a conversation with Andrew, in which I call him an idiot to his face, is not a bad idea after all. “What is the point of this powwow, Eddie?” I demand, having no choice but to assume Andrew repeated every word I shared with him last night. “Cut to the chase.”
“Whatever you’re after, it isn’t here,” he says. “I have a suspect in last night’s case. I expect to bring him in in the next few hours.”
“Who?” Beth asks.
“Kevin Woods,” he states, still looking at me, not her. “A man with a violent history who dated the deceased.”
Eddie cuts Beth a sharp look. “Your job is to examine dead bodies,” he snips. “Mine is to make sure we don’t have any more. You do your job. I’ll do mine.” He returns his gaze to me. “Cut to the chase, you said. Here it is. This isn’t your case. We have our man. Go back to Cali and enjoy La-La Land. We don’t need you here.” He stands and starts walking. I watch him cross the diner, my gaze catching on the empty table where Alexandra was a minute ago before lifting and following him to the exit. He disappears, leaving me with one thought: this isn’t a simple turf war. There’s more going on.
“I thought this wasn’t official business, Lilah?” Beth demands, pulling my attention back to her.
“It’s complicated,” I reply.
“Clearly,” she states, holding up her cell phone and indicating her text screen. “I’ve been ordered back to the main office. I’m to return immediately, which I suspect has something to do with Eddie showing up here. Just as I was supposed to stay here and say nothing to anyone about this case.”
That the locals want to keep this quiet doesn’t surprise me. That her boss, in the vastly larger Suffolk County, is involved, on a nonelection year, feels worthy of investigation to me. “When you said you were asked to stay here and do the autopsy, but you originally declined that request,” I say. “Who asked?”
“Your brother.”
“My brother,” I repeat, his connection to Samantha Young’s corruption returning to the front of my mind.
“Yes. And I know he is your brother, but if he lets Kevin Woods take the blame for this—”
“Who is this Kevin Woods person?”
“He’s Ciara Matthews’s boy toy. And by boy toy, I mean he’s twenty years younger than her and runs a construction company that’s doing work here locally.”
“Not only did Ciara do several movies with my mother, they were close friends, and my father knows her husband, John, well. A woman with a boy toy doesn’t process to me as accurate.”
“Oh honey, you’ve missed so much. John started drinking and was violent. Ciara let her boy toy Kevin lick her wounds. John found out and it was bad. They fought. Boy toy held a gun on him.”
“Let me guess,” I say. “Between the eyes.”
“Yes.”
“And what happened?”
“Rumor is he was let off, paid off, and left the city.”
“You said he wasn’t a killer. Explain what brings you to that conclusion.”
“He didn’t pull the trigger. He’s not a killer.” She grabs her bag. “I have to go.”
“Wait. You know as well as I do, just because someone doesn’t kill someone the first time they think about it doesn’t mean they aren’t building confidence and working up to it.”
“I do know this. But I’ve looked into that man’s eyes and I’m telling you. He’s not a killer.”
“So you know him?”
“I met him once.”
“How?”
“A party, and while it was brief, when you’ve been doing this as long as I have, you get to know people. You see things in their eyes.”
She’s right. You do, but those who are master killers only let you see what they want you to see. She should know this. She has to know this.
Her phone buzzes again and she glances at her screen, then at me. “I need to go. Call me if you need me.”
I give a nod and she slides out of the booth. I follow her progress as I had Eddie’s, wondering how anyone in the business this long, as she’d noted, could mak
e a statement as wrong as the one she just made. I know from experience that just because you don’t pull the trigger the first time doesn’t mean you won’t pull it the next. Kevin Woods interests me. Her defense of him interests me. But Eddie’s desire to make him the catalyst that gets me out of town interests me the most. Too bad for him, and me both, that I have reasons to stay. My potentially corrupt family. Junior. And the fact that no one who masterfully killed four people without a trace of evidence would implicate themselves in a personal scandal that connects them to murder. Kevin Woods is not the killer I’m hunting. And the idea that my family would let an innocent man take the fall for a crime for political or personal reasons doesn’t even sound like my family. Maybe I don’t know them any more than they know me. But I will before I leave. Of that, I am certain.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I grab my phone and dial Tic Tac, who is actually Jeff Landers. And right now, it’s Jeff that I’m looking for, not Tic Tac.
“You do know it’s only been a few hours, right?” is his greeting.
“I need everything you can give me on Kevin Woods of East Hampton,” I say, my tone all business, another side of Lilah Love those who work with me know and know well. “He’s the suspect for the murder I’m investigating here.”
“Meaning he’s the suspect for all the cases.”
“No. The locals are trying to isolate this case, which ends our opportunity for jurisdiction. Supposedly Woods was dating the victim. I’m not buying it.”
“Hold on,” Jeff says, and proving he’s learned a few things about me in the years we’ve worked together, his tone is no-nonsense, the sound of a keyboard clacking in the background. “Thirty-two. Born and raised in Manhattan.”
Which could represent a connection to the first New York victim, but it feels wrong. “What else?”
“He inherited a construction business from his father,” he continues. “The focus being on high-end, custom-built houses, then and now, but once Kevin took over—”