I gazed blearily at my rows of beautiful spices—deep orange turmeric, red peppercorns, priceless strands of saffron, my trademark chicken rub. I was exhausted.
There was only so far I could get before I needed new license plates. Would the police put out some sort of statewide search for a mother and a kid who was in the wrong place at the wrong time? I knew my brain was scattered, frazzled, delusional.
But it felt as if I could see the truth clearly: Barton Hills was not the place where I would own my home and be safe. I had to go somewhere else, find someplace new where I could stay, where I could finally rest.
I was so worried for Annette and sweet Bobcat. But what could I do? As soon as the detective had flashed his badge I had panicked. Worse: I knew him! I’d had sex with Detective Revello a million years ago. Wonderful sex! As he stood before me saying he was going to arrest a kid I thought of as my son, I had watched his lips, remembered kissing him. I was a mess. I was full of desire and fear. My life had exploded so quickly.
My most valuable item was impossible to move: a Big Green Egg barbecue smoker. Charlie had won the grand prize at his elementary school carnival in third grade: a giant green ceramic cooker worth thousands of dollars. It had taken three dads to transport the thing in Louis’s F-150 truck, and Charlie and I had screamed with delight when it arrived, watching the DVD immediately and learning how to use it together. We fired it up twice a month or so now, along with its accoutrements （called, cringingly, Eggcessories: a meat thermometer with a remote sensor you clipped to your belt, pizza stone, wok, vegetable basket, meat “claws” for brisket, matching aprons, and two BGE branded folding chairs）。 We’d even attended the Big Green Egg Fest when Charlie was thirteen, joining meat smokers from around Texas for the weekend. Had I hoped I’d find a boyfriend among all those portly guys in aprons? I had.
* * *
—
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” said Charlie, appearing at the kitchen door.
“I’m…” I said. “I’m just organizing things.”
“You’re packing. I’m not blind, Mom.”
“Charlie,” I said, opening my palms.
His eyes bored into me. After the incident at the pool the day before, we’d barely spoken. “Listen, Mom, I know you’re scared,” said Charlie. “I’m scared, too.”
“I’m not scared,” I said, moving toward him to hold him and give him comfort, the way no one had ever done for me. “Everything’s OK,” I said. Becoming the mother I’d always yearned for, I said, “I’ve got you…and we’re safe.”
Charlie slipped from my arms, shaking his head, backing away from me. “It’s like you just can’t stop lying, even when I need you!” he said. “We are NOT SAFE, Mom!”
“Charlie,” I said. “You need to calm down. We need…”
“What I need,” said my son, “is reality. I need to tell you the truth, and I need you to listen to me!”
“Charlie—”
“My dad came here, OK?” said Charlie. He started to cry. “I get it. I know why you left. He’s a junkie, Mom! He’s a fucking waste! I get it! Why didn’t you just tell me? You let me think…you let me believe…”
“Your father?” I said. “Patrick? He was here?”
Charlie ran into his room and slammed the door.
I sank down, lost.
I wrapped my empty arms around myself.
-8-
Salvatore
IT WAS AN OPEN and shut case, and Salvatore knew he wouldn’t get many of those in his career. The teenage girl had been selling drugs she probably stole from her parents and her friends’ parents—that part of the equation was still to be determined. Maybe she was hooked in to a bigger dealer, which would be a lucky strike for him. Regardless, busting a so-called Craigslist drug dealer was a big deal. A career-defining deal.
Finally, he could stop worrying that everyone thought he was broken.
They had not released her name, but some internet sleuth had figured it out—photos of Roma （culled from her own social media） were burning up the internet like wildfire: her long hair, the short shorts, her wounded yet haughty expression. She was the epitome of a rich child gone wrong. “Affluenza” in pink pajamas.
And her parents! Whitney and “The Lion” Brownson were semifamous real estate moguls focused on gentrifying the city, exploiting people’s fears to sell multimillion-dollar “doomsday bunkers” and homes with giant, remote-controlled gates. The Brownsons had helped usher in the “new Austin,” a soulless megacity of overpriced real estate and chain restaurants, and they’d actively profited off the changes.
The public was out for blood, and Roma Brownson was a flesh-and-blood teenager in custody. Her lawyer would get her out on bail within hours, unless the judge believed she was a flight risk. She was a flight risk, of course: the Brownsons could easily spring their daughter and flee. A cursory Web search showed Salvatore that the Brownson Team, in fact, specialized in foreign properties; a whole section of their website was devoted to New Zealand and countries known for money laundering: the Cayman Islands, Liechtenstein, and the Isle of Man.
The Isle of Man!
For at least a few hours, though, Roma was in police custody. Salvatore opened the door to the interrogation room. It was 10:00 a.m. on the dot; they’d moved Roma from her cell twenty minutes early to give her some time to fidget, get nervous. “Good morning, Roma,” said Salvatore. “Can I get you anything? Coffee?”
He’d interviewed many teenagers in his career, mostly abused and/or abandoned kids who’d turned to crime to save themselves. They were usually terrified, whether they were masking their nerves with bravado or sobbing openly. They were kids, the same as his own children, no matter what they’d been through. Salvatore was expecting Roma Brownson to be the same; he’d assumed this situation would be horrible for her, but might change her fundamentally into a better person. Kids were kids, and malleable. There was always a chance to help them.
But as soon as Roma Brownson looked up, Salvatore knew he had been wrong.
She looked at him steadily, her expression ice-cold. Salvatore felt a shiver in his low back—he remembered a sociopath he’d prosecuted years before named Carl Kress. Carl’s gaze had been the same. There was something wrong with this girl, something fundamental.
“No,” said Roma. “I don’t want your sad coffee, but thanks.”
“OK,” said Salvatore, sitting down opposite the girl, trying to arrange his face so that she wouldn’t see how her demeanor chilled him.
Roma crossed her arms over a thin chest. She wore scrubs and hospital socks, the same as all the juveniles at Gardner Betts.
“Let’s start with the evening of May thirty-first,” said Salvatore. He pulled out a pen, wrote the date on top of a steno pad he kept in the interrogation room.
“I was home,” said Roma. “Someone took my phone. This is a setup. The only question is who. Who is setting me up? That’s your mystery right there. But I have faith in you, Detective. I know you can figure this out.”
Salvatore sat back in his seat, the metal edge of the chair hitting his back at a bad angle. He winced. “You were home,” he said, “when your brother and his friends found Lucy Masterson’s body?”