Keep Them Close(72)

The man stares back at her.

“Is this your phone, Mr. Luckett?” She holds it up to his face. Before he can reach for it, she turns it back to herself. “I guess it is. It just unlocked. You reported this phone missing?”

Marlow scratches the top of his head. “Been missing a while.”

“Back when that car hit you in that parking lot,” says Louise. “June eleventh. Ten months ago.”

“Where’d you find it?”

“Where do you think we found it?”

“Fuck if I know,” he says. “Is this twenty questions?”

“Not so far,” she says. “We found fingerprints on the phone. And since you have a record of beating the crap out of defenseless women, your prints were on file, so we got a match. Which brings us here.” She smiles. “The police ever find out who hit you with their car?”

“No,” he snorts. “Doubt they even tried.”

“Did you try? Did you find out who hit you? The…lemme see here…” She pulls an extra copy of the police report from her jacket and reads from it. “The ‘muscular Caucasian male, mid-thirties’? Did you ever try to find out the identity of that person?”

Marlow’s beady eyes narrow further still, his upper lip twitching into a snarl. “I don’t gotta answer questions from you.” He looks over Louise’s shoulder and nods in that direction. “What’s with those other cars? It takes three cars full-a cops to bring me back my phone?”

“No, but it does to comb through your house.” She slaps a document against his chest. “Search warrant for the premises, Mr. Luckett.” She turns and nods to the rest of the team.



* * *





The crime scene techs and uniforms brush past Louise, moving inside, their radios crackling faintly. Louise follows, eyes scanning the dim living room: worn plaid couch, coffee table sticky with old spills, a stack of mail unopened on a chair. Another officer moves down the hall, gloved hands brushing doorframes, methodical.

The team works in silence, practiced. Cupboards opened, drawers pulled, closets searched. Louise drifts toward the back door, drawn by the muffled thump of boots outside.

In the yard, weeds choke the fence line. A rusted-out playset rests against the corner—slide pitted, swings long gone. Behind it, a heap of wood: uneven planks, old pallets, scrap piled careless, but deliberate enough to draw suspicion.

“Here,” one officer calls.

They shift the boards aside. Beneath, tucked within a makeshift den, is a red leather duffel. Out of place. Too new. The leather gleams faintly despite the grime around it. Louise crouches as it’s unzipped. Bundles of cash, banded tight, thick enough to choke the bag’s seams.

“Divonti Appagante,” Louise says to Cutty, but loud enough to be heard by Marlow, who has drifted to the porch steps under the watch of another officer. His face is a mask, but the tension in his jaw is hard to miss. “Fancy Italian label. What do you figure that runs retail?”

“Probably, with tax, about four hundred and forty-nine dollars and change,” says Cutty.

“Seeing dark stains on some of these bills,” says Louise. “A lot of these bills. Gives a new meaning to the phrase ‘blood money,’ doesn’t it?”

“That ain’t mine,” Marlow calls out, pointing. “I never seen that bag.”

“No?” Louise returns to the porch, pulls a photo from her jacket. “Ever seen this man?”

“No, no, huh-uh.”

“His name is Finley Brice. Do you know that name, Marlow?”

“Finley what?”

“Brice,” she says. “B-R-I-C-E.”

She sees a glint of recognition cross Marlow’s eyes. But he shakes his head hard. “I don’t gotta answer questions,” he says. “I want a lawyer.”

“That’s a good idea.” Louise nods to the officer standing behind Marlow. “Mr. Luckett, please place your hands behind your back. You’re under arrest.”





65


Louise

—Investigation, Day 10—

“Make the case,” says Bruce Ghadiali, seated in a meeting room inside Grace Park Municipal P.D.

Louise drops a folder on the desk. “June eleventh of last year, Marlow Luckett is found unconscious outside Mortimer College’s athletic building on Woods Edge. Road-rage incident, no question. By all accounts, he chased a car into the parking lot and cornered it. When he got out, the other driver hit him and drove off. He described the other driver only as a big white guy in his mid-thirties.”

“Roughly describing Finley Brice.”

“He’s forty-two, but ballpark, yeah. And the responding officers, I’m not gonna say they worked themselves to the bone to find the driver, given their opinion of Marlow—but they did pull the ALPRs for that night. A camera recorded Finley Brice’s license plate on Woods Edge, southbound, during the relevant time. It checks, too, with what we know from Allison’s investigator, Jennifer Harper. Finley stepped out on the missus every Wednesday night with a woman named Anna Cortese, who lives in some exclusive little subdivision up Woods Edge called Palomino Estates. About the only way Finley Brice could drive home after his little liaison was the route that took him right past the Mortimer College parking lot.”