“Again.” Patrick holds up a hand. “Not while I’m in the room.”
“The evidence will be collected.” Mason rolls his eyes. “Beforehe has a chance to destroy it. Killing Gabriel didn’t work. Bettencourt has to know that by now. If he hasn’t thought about destroying the evidence yet, he will, and he’ll do it soon.
“Evidence of the attempt on Gabriel’s life?” Patrick’s pen is poised above the notepad.
“That’s the first priority. If we can find hard evidence of the conspiracy to kill our parents, I want that, too. The consortium as a whole has probably been involved in more criminal shit than we’re aware of.”
“Generally…” Patrick taps his pencil on the notepad. “In a hypothetical situation like this one, I’d have to steer the injured party toward legal avenues.”
“Of course.” Mason says. “That’s why we’ve asked you to file a police report on Bettencourt’s call to Gabriel.”
“That will only make this happen faster.” I sit up taller on the pillows and try not to sound like my skull feels cracked, which it does. “Bettencourt probably has people in the police department. Isn’t that why nobody looked into Mason’s report before?”
“Bettencourt wasn’t mentioned in the initial report,” Patrick says.
“I didn’t think he was. What I’m saying is that Cyrus Van Kempt took his own life before the police could speak with him. But Mason’s report says that there was at least one other person involved, since Van Kempt claimed not to have started the fire. After his death, nobody ever looked into that, did they?”
Patrick’s brow furrows. “Not that I know of. Last I heard, departmental resources weren’t going to be assigned to the case because the alleged killer was dead.”
Mason gives me a meaningful look, then turns back to Patrick. “I think we’ll also want to look for evidence that he contacted Cyrus Van Kempt after I filed my report.”
“What about my dad?” Charlotte comes into the living room, Elise right behind her. My heart feels like a rumpled shirt, but it smooths at the sight of Elise’s face.
Mason holds a hand out to Charlotte. She perches on the arm of the couch next to him. Elise sits on the ottoman near me and leans in to kiss my cheek.
The air in the room feels as thick as the smoke in the Bettencourt building.
“I heard my dad’s name.” Charlotte smiles, quick and polite, at Scott and Patrick. “I know he wasn’t involved with the fire at the Bettencourt building.”
“No one at the police department looked into my report after your father died.” Mason’s tone shifts completely, losing the hard edge it had during the rest of the conversation. “We wanted to move on, so I didn’t press. In light of what we’ve learned about the consortium, we were considering the possibility that Bettencourt might have influenced the department to drop the case.”
Charlotte bites her lip and glances over at Elise. “You didn’t give them Bettencourt’s name, though.”
“No, I didn’t. I thought your father would when the police questioned him. It would have been second- or third-hand information, coming from me, so I decided against it.”
Mason’s wife almost always looks like a sunny day. As Mason finishes speaking, her eyes drop from his face to the front of his shirt. Her chin starts to dimple, but she takes a deep breath and looks back at Mason.
“Are you saying that there’s a chance—are you saying he might have felt pressured to—to do what he did, instead of talking to the police himself?”
Mason doesn’t shy away from the question. “I think there’s a possibility, yes. If Bettencourt has anyone at the police department, he might’ve heard about my report and spoken to your dad. It’s one of the things we want to find evidence for, if there is any.”
Charlotte nods.
Nods again.
The pain in my chest ratchets up a notch. Elise watches her best friend with a worried wrinkle in her forehead, her lips parted like she wants to say something but doesn’t know what to say.
“Well.” Charlotte stands up from the arm of the couch with tears in her eyes. She tries to smile, at least a little, but her mouth wavers too much to pull it off. “I was about to make macaroni and cheese for Nate and Lydia. I need to—I need to put the water on to boil.”
She sweeps from the room. Mason smoothly extricates himself from under my legs and goes after her with only a slight hitch in his knee. “Sweet thing,” he says, just outside the living room door. “Wait.”
Elise lets out a breath, seeming to notice Scott and Patrick for the first time. She gives them an awkward, adorable wave. “Hi again, Scott. And this must be…”
“Detective Patrick Jordan.” I take Elise’s hand. It feels so good in mine. “This is my girlfriend, Elise Bettencourt.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Patrick says.
Elise glances down at the paper on the coffee table, then leans in closer to look over the tentative schedule. There’s not much to it. “You’ve been drawing up battle plans.”