“What time did you leave her there?”
“About twelve thirty a.m.”
Mal sits back in her chair and regards Boon in silence for a while. She tries to read him, looking for tells that he’s lying.
“Surely Kit didn’t actually believe Jon and Daisy would be charged with murder, Boon? Surely she’d consider forensic tests of the blood evidence would eventually reveal that the red blood cells showed signs of degradation from being stored outside the body, in a fridge? Or that her creative spatter would show anomalies to a spatter expert?”
“I don’t think Kit ever believed she’d be able to create a perfect murder that never happened. All she wanted was to definitively link Jon and Daisy to an apparently violent crime scene, and to have police arrive and open an investigation that was bound to attract media. She was theatrical that way, Detective. She wanted to be seen. She wanted it all to play out live on TV, in social media, in conversation, speculation. A false narrative. Just like her Instagram account. Designed to poke holes into our fake realities. But she made a lethal mistake—she underestimated Jon. He was too dangerous. She messed with a monster and paid the ultimate price.” Boon takes something out of his pocket as he speaks. He leans forward and sets a flash drive on the table. But he keeps his hand over it. Protective.
“What’s that?” Mal asks.
He sucks in a deep, shuddering breath, and says, “There are two recordings on this drive. Plus copies of two sets of legal documents. The first recording and the documents are what Kit found in a safe at Rose Cottage while cleaning. It’s what tipped her over the edge. The second recording—” His voice catches. He breaks down again, blows his nose. “It’s from Halloween night in the Glass House. Kit recorded her interaction with the Rittenbergs.”
“She captured them inside the house?”
“Yes. All of it.”
“The security cameras were not functioning in the house that night, Boon. We checked.”
“She disarmed the system. She didn’t want it feeding to the website where the Norths could check it. She always disarmed it when she went in to clean. But that night she fixed one of those small sports cameras to a pair of Halloween devil horns she wore on her head. The footage she captured—it was in my in-box when I woke the next morning, an email with links to a Google Drive folder that contained these files. It’s all there. Her entire interaction with the Rittenbergs. The email had a note saying she’d sent me the links the minute the Rittenbergs left the Glass House. As insurance in case something happened to her. I . . . I should’ve called you guys right away.”
“You said two recordings. What’s on the first recording you said she found in the safe?”
“Footage shot with a phone on the night of the sexual assault—the gang rape when she was sixteen. The documents are nondisclosure agreements. One is signed by both Daisy’s mother and Kit’s mother, promising Kit would get rid of the baby and drop charges in exchange for a five-hundred-thousand-dollar payment to Mrs. Popovich. The second NDA is signed by Daisy and Charlotte Waters. Charlotte, or Charley, was another of Jon’s victims. Same deal—Charley would drop all her allegations against Jon for an alleged assault in Silver Aspens, Colorado, a year ago.”
“Okay,” Mal says slowly as her brain races to assimilate this shocking news. “We’re going to need to take a look at everything on that drive, Boon.” And they would need to look at additional CCTV footage to see if Jon Rittenberg was captured returning later to the ADMAC site, possibly with the maid’s body for real this time.
Boon removes his hand from the flash drive, allowing Mal to take it. Quietly, he says, “You’ll see on the recording why Jon had no choice but to return to the Glass House and finish things off.” He pauses. His eyes turn dark and haunted and seem to sink into their sockets. “You can see Kit bit off way more than she could chew. Self-destructive—that was Kit. And I did nothing to stop her. I thought I was helping. But it backfired. When I heard on the news that a body had been found, I realized Jon must have gotten her when she returned to the house, and then dumped her in the water at the ADMAC site.”
MAL
November 4, 2019. Monday.
Before sitting down with her team to watch the recordings Boon has delivered, Mal checks in with Benoit.
“The divers are going back down now,” Benoit says as he picks up her call. “They should have a decent window between now and nightfall. I’ll call as soon as I have more.”
She signs off, then joins her investigators in front of a large monitor.
Silence falls over them and tension is thick as she hits PLAY.
They see Daisy and Jon waiting behind the glass front door, Daisy holding the bouquet of white flowers and the pie. Jon is busy on his phone. They see the Rittenbergs look up as the camera nears. They see raw shock on Daisy’s face as her jaw drops. The door swings open. They hear what must be Kit Darling’s voice.
“Well, hello, Daisy. And you must be Jon? Come in—come on in.”
Daisy appears confused. She says, “What—what happened to—”
“Oh, you mean this?” Darling’s voice.
Mal leans forward as Daisy drops the flowers and pie.
“What—where’s the baby?” Daisy asks.
“You mean my bump?” Darling’s voice again. “Silicone. Do you know how many different kinds of these pregnancy prostheses you can buy online? You should google it. Does make one wonder what people use them for. Fake photo shoots? Just to walk around in? Test-drive pregnancy? Did you know that you can even buy very realistic fake little babies online?”
The investigators watch as Jon and Daisy Rittenberg are led into the living room. They remain riveted as Darling pours the Rittenbergs drinks, then starts to show them footage from the night in the ski lodge. They watch as Jon transfers money, anger black on his face, his body wire tense.
“He looks murderous,” whispers Lula.
They watch Daisy and Jon Rittenberg leave the house. The footage ends.
Suddenly Kit Darling appears on screen. She has turned the camera on herself. She smiles. Up close. Mal feels an involuntary shock of tension as vampire teeth in red lips fill the screen. Kit is heavily made up. She points to the red horns on her head. “The mini sports camera was tucked up here,” she says.
It feels as though their victim is speaking directly to them all, sitting here in the room, talking to them from beyond her watery grave. It’s an eerie sensation. The others feel it, too. Mal can see it in their faces.
“It’s Halloween,” Kit says. “Appropriate, no? The devil gets her pound of flesh.”
The footage ends.
Quickly, Mal pulls up the recording from the sexual assault. She hits PLAY.
The investigators study the old, grainy footage. When it cuts out, they all sit in heavy, shimmering silence.
Mal clears her throat. “We have Rittenberg and some of his teammates on the sexual assault.” She points at the monitor. “Everything we need to bring those charges is right there on that footage alone. Let’s bring him in. Get him in front of a judge. Charge him. We can work on the rest while we hold him.”