Lindsey groans and flops onto the crackled leather chair.
“No more talking to the police without me, do you understand? We need to have a conversation with Lucía. I called her from the car, she’s on her way. She needs to talk to Liv, too. It’s going to take all of us working together to keep your heads above water.”
“I don’t—”
“Do you remember when Melanie disappeared?”
“Of course I do.”
“When you were suspect numero uno, we were inundated.”
“It wasn’t that bad.”
Lindsey stands, hands going to her hips in a move so reminiscent of their mother in moments of extreme unction that he fights back a laugh. “Park. Are you slipping into early dementia? You seem to have lost your memory. They interviewed me. They interviewed Dad, and Perry, and the local news heard about it and ran stories. The moment the media put you and your biological son together with Melanie’s death all those years ago, they will smell the blood in the water and attack. Trust me.”
“But I didn’t do anything.” He sounds weak, even to himself.
“Honey. The media doesn’t care. The cops don’t care. It’s a story. A juicy one. The suspect in a splashy murder is your biological kid. That in and of itself would be raw meat to the dogs. And there’s a bunch more biological kids you didn’t know about, which is another great angle. But now they’ve found Beverly Cooke dead in a lake, and another woman is missing. And apparently they’re talking about exhuming the body of the woman you dated in college who was murdered. Think, brother. It doesn’t take more than ten minutes to put you in proximity to another similar murder. You are on their radar. Maybe you thought it was moral support, but trust me, it was anything but. You’re a suspect. Again. We don’t even know that they’re telling the truth about the DNA.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong!” he roars at her, and she steps right into his space and yells back, enunciating every word in tight, clipped fury.
“They don’t care! Don’t you understand? They want to solve this case, and you’re in it up to your eyebrows, regardless of what you did or didn’t do. I refuse to let them railroad you—”
A loud knock, and they both jump. An elegant woman in her fifties, dark hair in a side-swept pixie bob sprinkled with silver dust, wearing thick pastel-framed glasses, sporting bright red lipstick and a white shirt with a popped collar, stands in the doorway. “No one answered the door, and I heard voices, so I came around the back. Am I interrupting?”
Lindsey runs a hand through her icy hair. “No. Of course not. Hi, Lucía. This is my brother, Park Bender.”
Park is still fuming but takes a huge deep breath and gives the lawyer a tight smile.
“I’d say it’s nice to meet you…”
“I understand completely. No one calls me when they have good news. Is there someplace we can all sit down?” Her voice is low and warm with just the hint of an accent, and makes his shoulders drop a notch. The shed isn’t big enough for a team meeting, that’s for sure.
They troop into the house, Park cursing Olivia for bailing on him to go talk about her feelings—not fair, Park, totally not fair—and puts on a pot of coffee. Lucía makes herself at home in the dining room, spreading out notebooks and file folders like she lives there. He ferries in the cups and milk and sugar on a tray like a goddamn fifties housewife, and Lucía takes a sip and smiles.
“Good stuff. Okay. Have a seat, and let’s talk.”
He sits, and Lindsey sits by his side. Lucía hands him a legal pad and a pen with a kind smile. “You may want to take some notes.”
He’s immediately relieved that the pen doesn’t have a name and logo like he would get at the dentist or pharmacy. She doesn’t seem smarmy at all. She seems like a beacon of hope, if he’s being honest. She’s the first person he’s seen in days who isn’t giving him pitying glances under their lashes.
“Should we wait for Olivia?” he asks. “Or should we talk first without her?”
Lindsey glances at Park. “Let’s catch Olivia up later.”
Lucía nods. “All right. So, Mr. Bender, the first rule of crisis management is to not get into trouble in the first place. From what Lindsey has told me, right now you’re still in this category. My job is to make sure you stay there. I want to help you avoid a crisis. You’re going to be a curiosity to the world because of your status as the unknown biological father of a number of children. Add in the police investigation, and you become more enticing. Lindsey tells me you have a past with law enforcement, a girlfriend who was murdered?”
Park shoots Lindsey a look. She’s sitting with one leg bent beneath her, playing with the tips of her hair, looking innocent but concerned.
“Yes,” he replies.
“Tell me. Just the broad strokes.”
“There’s not much to tell. I was a senior in college at UNC Chapel Hill. My on-again, off-again girlfriend went missing and was found dead several months later in a lake. The police arrested my roommate, who was convicted and went to prison. He died soon after. The end.”
“Were you a suspect at any time?”
“No.”
“You weren’t interviewed, give any samples, fingerprints, DNA?”
“Well, yes, I—”
“Then you were a suspect. Tell me about the sperm donation. Again, broad strokes.”
Lindsey smiles. “Pun intended?”
“Gross, Linds.”
Lindsey starts to giggle. Park sits there rubbing his eyebrow with his thumb, trying to massage away the sudden headache that’s taken hold while his sister loses it, going off into gales of laughter, hitting that weird moment of hysterics that makes her shake and cry with no sound coming out, even when the moment isn’t terribly funny. He used to love making her laugh that hard. Lucía starts laughing at Lindsey’s reaction, throaty and deep, and then they’re both lost.
“Sorry,” Lucía finally says, gathering herself. “Stress reliever. The donation?”
Park tries to stay dignified. “A friend suggested I donate. It was a good way to make a little bit of cash, and I liked the idea of helping people. It was really no big deal. They had me fill out an extensive questionnaire, get a physical, but it was my…sperm that they were excited about. I fit some weird box for them. I donated for six, eight months or so. They contacted me once a few years later and asked if I’d be interested in donating again, but I declined.”
“Did they send you any paperwork at that point?”
“I don’t think so.”
“No new releases that they might have on file saying you are aware of your samples being used multiple times?”
“No. Nothing like that. They said something about the limit being ten, but that was it.”
“And you have the paperwork from the initial donation?”
“Yes. That’s part of what was stolen from my safe last night. Though whoever took it left it at Olivia’s build site.”
Lindsey looks confused.
“I hadn’t had a chance to tell you. Some of the things that were stolen from the safe were left for her to find. Someone wanted her to know.”