Foster reached over and stopped him from swinging, turning him around to face her. “Listen to me. Toddie? Listen. Nothing. Nothing you did or said caused your mother pain, you hear me? She loved you both so much, every hair on your heads, inside and out. That’s the truth. What happened was not your fault. It was just a tragedy, a very sad thing that happened.”
“Like with Reggie,” he said.
For a moment, the mention of her son’s name stunned her. “Yes. Life is hard sometimes, Toddie; it just is. Terrible things happen, but good things happen too. All we can do sometimes is hold on for the good things and reach out to the people who love us.”
“Like you?”
She held his sharp chin gently between thumb and index finger. “Like me and your dad, Jamie, your grandmother, your friends. All of us are here for you. Always. Your mom would want you to be so, so happy, especially today. She’d want you to be okay. So will you try? Just a little?” She got a tentative nod. She smiled. “I’ll try too. But if you ever need to talk, if it all gets too big, you can always call me. Promise you will?”
“I will. Your number’s in my phone.”
“Good.” She tousled his hair. They went back to swinging in silence. The boys on the grass had given up on the football and were just rolling around on the ground.
“What if there aren’t any good things?” Todd asked.
“There are,” she said. “There’ll be lots of good things.”
The chains on the swings squeaked as they swung back and forth. There was the smell of the grass, the cleanness in the autumn air. Inside adults laughed and joked around, the sound of it breaching the screen door. The entire world moved, went on with what it was doing as a little boy who’d lost his mother came to terms with it on a squeaky swing in a backyard on his birthday.
“She hurt too much to stay for my birthday,” he whispered. “It was nothing I did.”
Foster could feel her eyes begin to fill but fought it back. “No, Toddie. I promise you it was nothing you did.”
“I’m still not playing any dumb football or rolling around in the grass like an idiot. I’m ten now.”
Her eyes narrowed at the wrestling boys. “I feel you, bud.”
CHAPTER 48
Another dead girl, another article cut out and tacked to the board. Silva stood at her board studying the photos, noting the similarities between the victims. The police weren’t going to use her. She hadn’t made an impression on Foster or Li. Now what? How could she get close to the investigation? She needed to be in a consulting position with access to Bodie Morgan.
She walked over to her desk and booted up her laptop to the first two chapters of her book in progress. She needed more, a lot more, but she couldn’t finish without her jewel in the crown. Books needed to be sensational, provocative, sexy. They had to have a hook, a draw. Three young women murdered in the streets? A predator on the loose? And her so close and yet so far from the center of the action? Infuriating.
Silva slammed the laptop closed, grabbed her coat, and left her apartment, ending up a short time later in front of Bodie Morgan’s apartment. It was after ten and the street was empty. She noticed an unmarked police car sitting outside his building. They were watching him. So they’d taken her seriously, after all. What lies had he told when they’d questioned him? Could they now see what she saw so clearly?
She wanted desperately to go in and try again to get Bodie to come back to Westhaven, to her, but she hung back, hesitant to try again, at least this way. He would know by now that she had brought him to the police department’s attention. Approaching him now would not be wise. No, she had to outthink him, maneuver him into a position that left him few options. Silva drew her collar up against the cold, then walked away.
Soon, she thought. Soon.
CHAPTER 49
Li was at her desk when Foster came in a little before eight the next morning. The office was still relatively sedate. It was even quieter outside for a change, the protests not yet started up for the day. Someone had already burned the office coffee, though, the scorched smell of scalded beans floating overhead like a cloud of slow-moving acid rain. Same old, same old.
Something about Dr. Mariana Silva worried Li. How many psychiatrists hovered over their patients after they’d been released from their care? Was the woman neglecting her other patients as she ran after Bodie Morgan? Did the woman really believe her former patient was a killer and that more lives were at risk?
Foster stood at her desk, smiling slightly. “I know you went home. You’re wearing a different shirt.” It was an echo of Li’s words to her when she’d beaten her partner in by hours the other day.
Li looked up, grinned. “Touché, partenaire. I’ve pulled up everything I could find on Silva. There’s something there. Did you get that feeling?”
Foster sat in her chair, stowed her bag in the bottom drawer. “Yeah. She seemed almost eager to throw Morgan under the bus. I get that she believes he’s dangerous, but from what she told us, she couldn’t have that much information on him to base that opinion on. We can’t take her belief in his guilt to court.”
“He was jittery,” Li said.
“Most people we talk to are jittery,” Foster said.
“Well, I get suspicious when people are too helpful,” Li said. “It’s unnatural. I’m going to find out what Silva’s deal is.” She leaned back in her chair, eyed Foster across the desk. “You sure interested her, though.”
Foster grabbed her coffee mug and prepared to hit the coffeepot. “What?”
“You didn’t see how she stared at you? She was trying real hard to figure you out, and you were doing the same with her. Me? I’ve nailed her already. She’s got a screw loose. She’s worked so long in antisocial personality disorders that some of it probably rubbed off.” Li slid a legal pad across the desk filled with her scribbled notations. “But like we found out yesterday, she’s who she says she is. Leading psychiatrist, flying all over the world giving speeches, research, writing books, lecturing, tops in her field, head of a prestigious program at Johns Hopkins. A real star . . . until three years ago.”
Foster scanned Li’s notes. “What happened three years ago?”
“No idea. I can’t find a single thing. Just one day she’s the ‘it girl’; then she’s nowhere. She shows up at Westhaven a year later, and she’s been there since. So now I’m wondering, what happened to the missing year?”
“Maybe she got tired of the grind, burned out, and took time off,” Foster said.
Li wasn’t buying it. “Does she look like the kind of person to take time off? She’s wound tighter than steel wire rope. She was practically climbing our walls.”
“I’m playing devil’s advocate here,” Foster said. “Maybe the decision was personal. Is she married? Have kids?”
Li shook her head. “Her career’s her life. Looking at her career trajectory, if anything, she should be running Westhaven. Instead, she’s one of four psychiatrists on staff. On Westhaven’s website, Silva’s not even listed as a senior staff member, and she’s got more on her CV than the guy running the place.”