Burning Blue (21 page)

Nicole didn’t come “right back.” She was in the bathroom for a while. She was pale when she came out. She said she was feeling under the weather. I checked the window: perfect sunset, balmy breeze. “I’ll let you get some rest,” I said.

“Stay.”

“I have to go to work anyway.”

She walked me to the door. We hugged, and when I broke to leave, she held on a little longer before she let me go.

I was on one of our archaic computers, checking to see if BJ’s online had an item we had sold out of in the store, a forty-dollar piece of junk chiminea. The customer I was trying to help was practically leaning his head on my shoulder, trying to see the computer screen. His breath reeked of the onion rings we try to get you to buy when you walk in, because of course everybody needs to have his mouth stuffed with fried junk food while shopping for staircase bunk beds with a merlot finish.

I was about to log out when the sidebar ad changed from one that tried to sucker you into thinking that only a 99-inch television was acceptable when watching
X-Factor
to one about weed killer. A cartoon spider climbed a daisy. The spider was a happy little guy. He lay back on the flower, put four of his arms behind his head and winked.

Why didn’t Barrone seem at all happy after Angela Sammick’s arrest?

“Jay.” Dave Bendix gripped my hand and clapped my shoulder. “Thank you, man. For everything you did for Nicole.”

“How’d you know I work here?”

“Nic told me. I told her I had to talk to you. Look, I want you to know it’s okay. You and Nic, I mean.”

“Dave, again, we’re just friends. Seriously, nothing’s going on.”

“Maybe not on your end. I heard it in her voice.” He teared up. “I want her to be happy. You’re a good dude. I just wanted you to know that we’re still cool, okay? You have a tissue?” I gave him my coffee napkin. He blew his nose. “What gets into somebody’s head that they ruin somebody like that? Did you get any sense from Detective Barrone why Angela did it?”

And that’s when I knew Dave Bendix was hiding something big. “No,” I said. “It’s a mystery.”

Ten minutes before we closed, I picked up the cheapest laptop BJ’s offered, came to a hundred and eighty bucks cash with my employee discount. The police had seized my computers, but fortunately not until two hours after the kill call, according to our building super, who had to let them into the apartment.

I rode my bike home, two blocks past my building to this house that had been foreclosed on and abandoned. In the basement was a bucket of filthy rags. Beneath those were a bunch of computer parts and one totally sexy bandwidth thief I’d picked up at swap meets, all untraceable. I mixed and matched them into the crappy laptop shell, and in half an hour the machine was built. I was invisible again.

The next day, Friday, the story went wide under the title GOTH GIRL BURNED BEAUTY. The detectives found Angela’s laptop in her backpack. She’d done it all, the chem lab video post, the emails to Mrs. Marks, to me. I was particularly grateful to her for the one with the strobe lights. I was betting that at her size, she wasn’t having a good time in jail. No bail for Angela Sammick, obviously. The more I thought about her, the madder I got, and not just at her. I was disgusted with myself for having let her dupe me. Not wishing serious pain on her was a challenge.

Nicole invited me over for lunch, but I was going to have to pass. Her father was spending the day at the house. I admired him in some vague way, but in the end he had to land on my jerk list. I just didn’t want to be around the guy, his intensity, those eyes that cut right through you and made you feel like you were hiding something, even if you weren’t. I had some digging to do anyway.

I had hit Dave’s Facebook page at least twenty times in the past couple of weeks. I’d scanned everything he’d posted, and I’d never found anything out of place. Yet I went at it again, reviewing every picture, clip and comment for anything I might have missed. Nothing. I shifted over to what wasn’t there anymore. You might think you deleted that goofy picture you slapped onto your wall when you were huffing Magic Markers, but the moment you clicked it up there, it was and is there forever and for the taking by anybody with kindergarten-level hacking skills. Once you post, you’re toast.

Sure enough, Dave had deleted a video from his gallery. He’d pulled it from his wrestling videos folder the day after the attack. It was a recording of one of his matches from the previous spring. In the video, he finishes crushing his opponent with a savage pin job. Nicole, watching from the first row of the bleachers, jumps up clapping and screams,
“Woohoo.”
She leans out from the bleachers toward the home team wrestlers’ bench. Dave is sitting now, and Nicole whispers something into his ear. He turns to her, glares, and then turns back to watch the next match. Nicole leans back into the bleachers. The whole exchange lasts less than two seconds.

I replayed the video again and again. Sure, every couple has arguments, but Dave was treating Nicole coldly. They’d only been going out for a couple of months at that time. No way Dave would disrespect her like that. I zoomed in. The girl whispering into Dave’s ear wasn’t Nicole. She was a dyed chestnut Angela Sammick.

My quandary: Do I tell Nicole that Dave was cheating on her? No, she has enough sadness in her life.

Dave had held back information from the police, the kind that could have led them to Angela a lot sooner. That’s obstruction of justice, the same charge I was facing. If I’d seen this video, so had Detective Barrone. Did Dave know she was onto him? And why hadn’t Barrone arrested Dave?

“Perhaps it fascinates you,” Schmidt said.

I was still suspended, but as part of my bail agreement I was required to honor my obligation to meet with her once a week.

“You mean
she,
don’t you, Doctor?”

“I was referring to her disfigurement.”

“I don’t care about it, okay? It’s so not important. What, you’re afraid that once I see it, I won’t want to hang out with her anymore, right? That once the mystery of what’s underneath those bandages is over, the fascination will have worn off for me. Or that maybe it’ll disgust me? The lack of symmetry? Is that what you’re thinking?”

“No, Jay,
I
wasn’t thinking any of those things at all. I wasn’t even aware you hadn’t seen the burn yet. I was merely suggesting the act fascinates you. That it may well be impossible for a person like you to understand how someone could willfully do such a thing to another human being.”

“A person like me?”

“Yes.” She leaned forward, tapped a note into her computer. “I’ll have to write a letter to the DA about you, of course.”

“Going to tell him I’m a nut job, right? Thanks a bunch, Doctor.”

“I’m going to tell him you’re a great kid.”

I was actually touched, but not so much that I was above setting my magic phone onto her desk and ripping off her BlackBerry’s new password.

Later that Friday afternoon and into the night, I raided Schmidt’s patient files for Angela Sammick’s case folder. Angela had made no mention of Dave Bendix, but she had body image issues that Schmidt rated severe. She noted that Angela had a plastic surgery wish list on perfectbeauty.com. I torched through the firewall, maybe five seconds. Angela had uploaded pictures of herself. Using the site’s graphics tools, she reconstructed her body, but most of her wish list focused on her face, new nose, chin, cheekbones.

I went out onto the fire escape with a cup of what I thought was instant cocoa until I sipped it. It was one of those no-frills brands, and the label had said chocolate mint, but it tasted more like boiled Scope. The fresh air felt great for all of ten seconds before it became too cold for somebody wearing a tee and boxers. The stars didn’t so much twinkle through the pines as sever them.

I sat on the living room floor, pressing my back against the radiator grate. Across the room, the wall looked weird. Until two days ago, my father’s paintings had covered it entirely, gifts from friends and artists. But now there was a box of blank wall where the painting hocked for my bail money had been, I couldn’t remember which. The art had become ordinary, the way you rarely look out a window to take in the view after a month or so of living in a place.

Nicole called. “My dad just left,” she said. She sounded really groggy. “I can’t drive. Come over. Please?”

The security company SUV was back out in front of the Castro house. The door opened. Sylvia was teary. She led me to the kitchen, where Mrs. Castro was crying. “A hit job,” she said. “The detective thinks it’s possible the Sammick girl was paid to do it.”

I’d been contemplating the same idea on the ride over. That new Angela on perfectbeauty.com didn’t come cheap, $135,000. Now I understood why Detective Barrone hadn’t seemed too happy when Angela was caught. She was holding back on the arrest in the hope Angela would make contact with the person who hired her to do the hit on Nicole. Could Dave Bendix have promised to pay for all that plastic surgery in exchange for Angela’s burning Nicole? Why, though? How could burning Nicole help Dave? It couldn’t. Being connected in any way to the attack almost guaranteed he wouldn’t get into Harvard.

“Your father’s book,” Mrs. Castro said. “Did you remember to bring it?”

I hadn’t. “How’s Nicole about all this?”

“Actually, she seems to be hanging pretty tough about the Sammick situation. We just got the call. Emma died this morning.”

Her bedroom was cold and dark, but sweat glistened on her forehead. The only light came from a miserable crescent moon being dunked into brown clouds. She was lying on top of the covers. Her pajama bottoms stuck to her legs. She wore a thick hoodie. The front was rolled up to cool her sweaty stomach. The window was open. I went to close it. “Leave it,” she said. “Please.” Her hair was messy, straggly over the bandage on her cheek. She put out her hand for me to hold it. “Prozac,” she said.

I looked to her night table for a prescription bottle and found none. “Where is it?”

She shook her head. “The shrink made me take it. Or made Mom make me.”

“I thought Schmidt was a psychologist.” You needed to be a psychiatrist to prescribe Prozac. My father was on it after my mother was killed.

“The other shrink,” Nicole said. “I can’t get out of bed now, but I don’t want to be asleep. I took her with me to the national Girl Scouts conference speech last spring. The pageant directors, you know? They set up these events. This was one of my first speeches after the coronation. All those mothers looking up at me, their daughters looking up to me. I was trembling. Emma calmed me down. She introduced me, not a twitch of nervousness I could see. She spoke so well, a little adult. She was amazing. ‘You are so going to rock this,’ she whispered into my ear as I took the podium. ‘No way you can’t. I’m your good luck charm.’ She was, too. She was my good luck angel. People say it all the time: The world was a better place with her in it. You dismiss it as a cliché, but the problem is it’s true. It also means that the world is a worse place without her in it.” She put her hand to my cheek. She pulled me to her so that I was spooning her. She smelled of strawberry shampoo and antiseptic. We watched the moonlight go weak on the walls with the thickening clouds. After a few minutes she started to breathe more slowly and then snore, very lightly. Then she sneezed and fell into a sneezing fit. She went to the bathroom.

The neighbor’s cat was at the window, staring in. When I went to close the window, the cat jumped away. Nicole watched from the bathroom, blowing her nose.