Even after a long stint in rehabilitation for the mental break he had suffered—a break he was clearly not quite over. A compulsion to watch the survivor of the crash, to observe him whenever possible—which seemed like it was an ongoing thing, from the way he had spoken—was not a healthy response to the trauma.
Brady Seabrooke was still not well, and he’d turned into something of a stalker.
“How often do you watch him, Brady?” Laura asked, trying to soften her voice, to sound more sympathetic. He would be more likely to tell the truth if he thought they understood.
Brady shrugged a little, moving his head in that same way, looking away at the wall. “Sometimes.”
That wasn’t precise enough to give them much, but it did tell Laura something. It was probably a lot more regular than he was making out. The avoidance, the way his concentration had broken and wandered to the wall, told her he didn’t want to talk about it. He was probably in denial, or at least trying to avoid getting into a lot of trouble.
“What were you going to do after you finished watching him?” Laura asked. They needed to know whether his intentions were dangerous. Whether his frustration spiraled into something else, made him violent. It would make sense. He was looking more and more like their most viable suspect so far—a psychotic break, an obsession with his dead twin, stalking behavior…
“Nothing,” Brady said. He was looking at his hands again. Telling the truth, Laura decided. “I would just go home.”
“What about when you figured out the answer?” Laura asked, trying a different tack.
This time, Brady lifted his head and looked right at her. “The answer to what?” he asked, clearly puzzled.
“To why he survived,” Laura said. “Once you figured it out, what would you do?”
He seemed to struggle with this question for a long time, his brows furrowing down over his eyes, his mouth working without opening. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “Nothing. I just want to understand.”
Laura watched him again for a moment without speaking, the way he kept his eyes on his hands, his fingers constantly working. He was telling the truth, she thought. But it was hard to assess. Someone who’d had a psychotic break—they might disassociate from their own actions. They might not really know what they had and hadn’t done.
“Where were you last night, Brady?” she asked. She tried to keep her tone conversational, like it was a point of curiosity and nothing else. To keep it light. If it got too heavy, he might clam up.
“I was there,” Brady said. His fingers traced a line on the table, a swooping circle that twisted into a figure eight. “Outside.”
“Outside the house where we found you earlier today?” Laura asked, to be sure.
“Yes.” Brady’s fingers didn’t stop moving. “He had a nice dinner with his family.”
“Okay, Brady. And the night before?” Laura asked.
“Yes,” Brady said, like he was just confirming she was correct.
Laura sighed, leaning back in her seat. Brady didn’t look up. He was too entranced by whatever he was doing on the tabletop.
This was impossible. His alibi was useless. There was no way to prove he’d really been there—after all, the fact that he had seen someone eat dinner wasn’t proof of anything. It could just be a good guess, given that most people ate dinner in the evening.
And with his state of mind, there was really no way to be sure whether or not he knew that he had done anything. They would need to get an actual psychiatrist in here to have him assessed. Then there would be a lot more work to put into tracking his movements, trying to trace down any cameras that might have caught him, before they could be sure where he had been for the last two days. It was the kind of investigation that could take a long time.
“Have you heard of a woman named Ruby Patrickson before today?” Nate asked, his voice cutting across Laura’s thoughts in a low rumble.
Brady tilted his head, still for a minute, as if he was frozen. Then he shook it slowly. “No. I don’t know who that is.”
“How about Jade Patrickson?”
“No.”
“Kenneth Wurz?”
“Who are they?” Brady asked, looking up at Nate properly for the first time.
“They’re all twins, like you were,” Nate said. “Do you know what happened to them?”
Brady was stilling somewhere inside; Laura could see it behind his eyes. Fear. “No,” he whispered, his head barely even shaking from side to side now.
“They died,” Nate said. “Do you know who did that to them?”