“Right. So why’s she coming back?”
“That’s what I’ve been saying.”
She lowered her own binoculars, rubbed her eyes. “It’s a mystery, isn’t it?”
I leaned back against the car seat for a moment, cracked my neck and back muscles against the seat, and instantly regretted it. Once again, I’d forgotten about my damaged shoulder and the pain exploded across my collarbone, drove straight up the left side of my neck, and stabbed its way into my brain. I took a few shallow breaths and swallowed against the bile surging in my chest.
“Illiana Rios had enough in common with Desiree physically,” I said eventually, “to make Jay think her corpse was Desiree’s.”
“Yeah. So?”
“You think that was by accident?” I turned on the car seat. “Whatever their relationship was, Desiree picked Illiana Rios to die in that motel room precisely because of their physical similarities. She was thinking that far ahead.”
Angie shuddered. “That woman is intense.”
“Exactly. Which is why the mother’s death makes no sense.”
“Excuse me?” She turned on the car seat.
“The mother’s car broke down that night. Right?”
“Right.” She nodded. “And then the mother called Trevor, which ensured she’d be in the car with him when Lisardo’s friends—”
“What’re the odds, though? I mean, given Trevor’s schedule and work habits and relationship with his wife to boot—what are the odds Inez would call him for a ride? And what’re the odds he’d be there to receive that call? And what’s to say he’d even agree to pick her up, not just tell her to hop a cab?”
“It is leaving a lot to chance,” she said.
“Right. And Desiree never leaves anything to chance, as you said.”
“You’re saying the mother’s death wasn’t part of the plan?”
“I don’t know.” I looked up at the window and shook my head. “With Desiree, I don’t know a lot. Tomorrow, she wants us to accompany her to the house. Ostensibly for protection.”
“As if she ever needed protection in her entire life.”
“Right. So why does she want us there? What is she setting us up for?”
We sat there for quite a while, binoculars pointed up at Jay’s windows, waiting for an answer to my question.
At seven-thirty the next morning, Desiree showed herself.
And I almost walked into her field of vision.
I was coming back from a coffee shop on Causeway Street, Angie and I both having decided our need for caffeine after a night in a car made the risk worthwhile.
I was about ten feet from our car, across from Jay’s building when the front door opened. I pulled up short and froze by a support beam to the expressway ramp.
A well-dressed man in his late forties or early fifties came out of Whittier Place first, a briefcase in hand. He placed the briefcase on the ground, went to shrug into his topcoat, then sniffed and leaned back into the bright sunlight, got a taste of uncommonly warm March air. He put the topcoat back over his arm and picked up his briefcase, looked back over his shoulder as a small group of morning commuters came out behind him. He smiled at someone in the group.
She didn’t smile back and at first the bun in her hair and the glasses over her eyes threw me. She wore a charcoal woman’s business suit, the hem of the skirt stopping just at her knees, a stiff white blouse underneath, a dove-gray scarf around her neck. She paused to work at the collar of her black topcoat, and the rest of the crowd broke for their cars or walked toward North Station and Government Center, a few heading for the overpass that led toward the Museum of Science or Lechmere Station.
Desiree watched them go with flat contempt and an air of rigid hatred in the set of her slim legs. Or maybe I was reading too much into it.
Then the well-dressed man leaned in and kissed her cheek and she ran the backs of her fingers lightly across his crotch and stepped away.
She said something to him, smiling as she did, and he shook his head, a bemused grin on his powerful face. She walked into the parking lot, and I saw that she was heading for Jay’s midnight-blue 1967 Ford Falcon convertible, which had been sitting in the parking lot since he’d left for Florida.
I felt a deep, uncompromising hatred for her as I watched her place her key in the door lock, because I knew the time and money Jay had spent restoring that car, rebuilding the engine, searching nationwide for specific parts. It was just a car, and appropriation of it was the least of her crimes, but it seemed like it was a part of Jay still alive out there in the lot and she was closing in for one last kick.
The man walked out onto the sidewalk almost directly across from me and I stepped back farther behind the support beam. He changed his mind about the topcoat as he got a hit of the biting wind coming down off Causeway Street. He put it on as Desiree started the Falcon, and then he began to walk up the street.
I stepped around the support beam and behind the car, and Angie’s eyes met mine in the sideview mirror.
She pointed at Desiree, then herself.
I nodded, pointed at the man.
She smiled and blew me a kiss.
She started the car and I cut across the street to the sidewalk, followed the man up Lomasney Way.
A minute later, Desiree passed me in Jay’s car, followed by a white Mercedes, which was followed by Angie. I watched all three cars wind up to Staniford Street and go right, heading toward Cambridge Street and an infinite number of possible destinations beyond.
By the way the man ahead of me tucked his briefcase under his arm and dug his hands into his pockets at the next corner, I could tell we were in for a walk. I let fifty yards get between us and followed him up Merrimac Street. Merrimac emptied onto Congress Street at Haymarket Square and another blast of wind found us as we crossed New Sudbury and continued in the direction of the financial district, where more architectural styles mixed together than in just about any city in which I’d ever been. Shimmering glass and slabs of granite towered over sudden four-story bursts of Ruskinian Gothic and Florentine pseudopalaces; modernism met German Renaissance met postmodernism met pop met Ionic columns and French cornices and Corinthian pilasters and good old New England granite and limestone. I’ve spent entire days in the financial district, doing nothing but looking at buildings and feeling, on more optimistic days, that it could stand as metaphor for how to live in the world—all these different perspectives piling in on each other and still managing to make it work.