“And that’s why you buried the pregnancy?”
“I didn’t bury anything. I just asked Grosso to, you know, keep it out of the reports. I knew it would come out when they caught Vince Whitaker.”
“Unless they never found him.” Keller moves her eyes to the grave.
Arpeggio turns to her now, anger whitening his features.
“You were close with Katie?” Keller asks.
He sighs impatiently. “Her mom asked me to help when Katie got into trouble. I helped find the lawyer who arranged the adoption.”
“Why you?”
“Have you met her father?” Arpeggio shakes his head. “I’ll never know why she married that guy.”
“So that’s the only reason you helped hide the pregnancy?”
Arpeggio gets a confused look on his face. “Why else would I—”
“You were close with Katie…”
“Wait, you’re not suggesting … that’s disgusting. I can’t believe you’d even…”
This time it’s Keller who’s quiet.
“I was a family friend, that’s it.”
Keller checks her phone. No new messages from Atticus. She decides to bluff.
“You were close with one of the Blockbuster victims. And we found a connection between you and the Dairy Creamery victims.”
Arpeggio looks genuinely shocked. “What are you talking about? I didn’t know any of them.”
Keller regards him.
“Look, do what you’ve got to do. But I didn’t know them. And Katie was basically my niece. Her mom was my best friend’s sister, and she asked me to help with things. She was married to a controlling guy, rigid, emotionally abusive. I helped out. Coached Katie’s Little League team. Taught her to drive when she flunked out of driving school. Stuff like that. She was a kid, for Christ’s sake.”
Keller stares at Arpeggio for a long time, and she reaches a singular conclusion.
She believes him.
CHAPTER 67
ELLA
Ella tears out of the garage in a 1970 Mercedes 280SL, her father’s favorite car among his small fleet. It’s a convertible and her hair is dancing in the wind.
Chris still seems out of it. A punch-drunk expression, his body swaying with the curves that Ella’s taking too fast.
Her universe is folding. She’s in another dimension. A Twilight Zone episode. The monster she’s feared for so long was buried two hundred yards from her wing of the family home. Her father—the one who always tried the hardest to understand her—collapsed under the weight of his crime. It wasn’t about her brother’s death, the attack on Ella, or even his controlling wife. It was grief and shame for taking a life.
“Are you okay?” she says to Chris, whose world must also be spinning counterclockwise. In the past twenty-four hours, his mother and brother have both been found, their murdered bodies hidden for years.
Chris holds up some papers. “I read the search warrant. The fathers. They…” His face is colorless, expression distant, as if imagining his brother’s last moments.
“How did they find out where he was?” Ella asks.
“One of the fathers confessed,” Chris says. “The warrant says my father knew, wanted to cut a deal, but one of the fathers flipped. Told them where to find the body.” He swallows a sob. “The last time I saw my brother, he was talking with a group of men. Your dad and the others. My father was there. I thought it was a drug deal to make some cash so he could go on the run. But it wasn’t. It was an abduction. And Vince knew. In his final moments, he was trying to keep me safe.”
Ella screeches around a bend in the road, imagining her father as part of the mob that kidnapped and killed a teenage boy.
“Where are we going?” Chris asks.
Ella doesn’t know where she’s going. She doesn’t know how to process it all. She and the broken man next to her have lived their entire adult lives in the shadow of New Year’s Eve 1999. They’re both the children of murderers.
And they both loved Vince Whitaker.
All at once, she knows where to go. She hears Phyllis’s voice: “I tried to get your father to talk to a psychiatrist, to talk to his brother. I even called that teacher you worshipped so much and asked him to try to talk some sense into your father.”
Soon, she’s in Asbury. A residential neighborhood. She pulls up in front of a modest ranch-style home.
“I need to talk to someone,” she says to Chris.
He nods, unbuckles his seat belt to go with her.