Curious, she reached for her LFD to learn a little more about the man she might have married. Most of what she found covered his athletic career. Turned out the Richmond Pathogens were an expansion team that had made the playoffs for the first time last season. Levi was credited with being a big part of the team’s success and had come in third in MVP balloting. Not surprisingly, his public persona aside, personal biographical details were scarce—little that might tell her what kind of man he was. Like most of their generation, he’d clearly rejected the obsession with living life online that had gripped the dawn of the social-media age. But based on the handful of interviews he’d granted over the years, she pieced together that Greer was a twenty-six-year-old Virginia native with perhaps the world’s largest collection of hoodies. He’d bounced around the Department of Social Services’ foster system as a child. It wasn’t an experience he ever discussed publicly, but reading between the lines, Con could tell that it had been a brutal time in his life. The happy ending to the story, though, was that when Levi Greer was eleven, he’d been placed with a family in Richmond that had been a good fit and shepherded him through to college. After he signed his first professional contract, he’d quietly started a charity to provide tutoring and college counseling for foster children.
It made for one hell of a compelling story. She wanted to like him. He came off as humble and self-aware, and it was easy to see why he’d been so popular with fans. But now that he’d been accused of murder, the media was using that same narrative to cast him as a controlling abuser with a dark side.
Con put her LFD on the nightstand to charge and lay there in the dark for a long time wondering what her original had gotten herself into. She’d known she was in danger, and she’d known about Laleh. That meant she had to know who was orchestrating the whole thing. But how she knew, that was the real question. Con was missing something essential. Hopefully, Levi Greer knew more than he had told her. Tomorrow, she would pay him a visit in jail.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
One at a time, the visitors passed through a full-body scanner and were patted down. Con had been worried that someone at the jail might recognize her, but her presence didn’t seem to raise any eyebrows among the guards. She and the other visitors were let into a utilitarian meeting area of brute metal tables and chairs all welded crudely to the floor. The visitors spread out around the room to give themselves the illusion of privacy. They’d all had to check their LFDs on arrival, so there was nothing to do but sit and wait. An hour ticked by, then another.
Just when Con started to get concerned, a sad claxon sounded. At the back of the meeting room, a door opened. Prisoners in orange jumpsuits shuffled out. Last was Levi Greer. Where the rest of the prisoners wore only handcuffs, his hands and ankles were yoked with chain to a thick belt at his waist. When she’d met him, he’d looked exhausted. Now he looked about as beaten down as she’d ever seen a man.
A guard led him over by the elbow, but when Levi saw who was waiting for him, he drew back. For a moment, Con thought he would simply turn around and retreat to his cell. But then either curiosity or the inertia of the guard dragging him forward got the better of him, and he let himself be seated opposite her.
“You want to hear something pathetic?” Levi said, drawing a deep breath. “I kept telling myself that the police were lying. You know? Screwing with my head. Some kind of game. It had to be, right? But you saw her? With your own eyes? It’s really true?”
“It’s true.”
Levi leaned heavily against the table as if he needed help carrying the weight of her words. His shoulders begin to shake. Con searched his face for any sign it was an act. She needed more than an Oscar-worthy performance to be convinced. So she sat there feeling like God’s own bitch and let him cry himself out.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, lowering his face to dry his eyes with the heel of his hand.
“We had a deal.”
“Oh right. Yeah, we did.” His voice flat, affectless, drained of any fight. “What do you want to know?”
“Why didn’t you ask me for the GPS coordinates?”
That hadn’t been what he’d expected. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, your wife is missing. And you don’t once ask for them.”
“I told you to give them to the police.”
“Yeah, you did. But if it was me? And someone I loved was missing?” She was thinking about Zhi now, imagining if he’d gone missing for a week or longer. How she’d react if someone showed up who knew where he was. “No way I tell you to take it to the cops. I wouldn’t have let you out of my sight until I had the GPS. I’d have put a gun to your head if that’s what it took. But you let me walk back out of your house like you’d ordered Girl Scout cookies. And then the detective said you went for a drive or some shit?”