CHAPTER 16
Coop insists on walking us back to my place, even though Sam and I are perfectly capable of taking care of ourselves. Last night made that abundantly clear. Sam walks alongside him, matching his pace stride by careful stride.
I lag behind, my face lifted to the sun. It’s a bright, hot afternoon—the last kiss of Indian summer before winter begins its slow takeover. The bruise on my face pulses a little, warmed by the sunlight. I picture it reddening into visibility along my skin. I want Coop to turn around, finally notice it, widen his eyes in concern. But he stays two steps ahead with Sam, their strides still matching as they round the corner onto 82nd Street.
Both of them immediately stop.
I do, too.
Something is going on outside my building. A horde of reporters has gathered there, so large and unruly we can see them from two blocks away.
“Coop.” My voice is weak. An echo of its normal self. “Something’s wrong.”
“No shit,” Sam says.
“Stay calm,” Coop says. “We don’t know for certain why they’re here.”
Yet I know. They’re here for us.
I reach into my purse and grab my phone, which I turned off when Sam and I left the apartment. It springs to life with an explosion of alerts. Missed calls. Missed emails. Missed texts. Worry numbs my hands as I scroll through them. Many numbers I don’t recognize, which means they’re from reporters. Only Jonah Thompson’s is familiar to me. He called three times.
“We should walk away,” I say, knowing it will be only another minute or so before we’re spotted. “Or get a cab.”
“And go where?” Sam asks.
“I don’t know. Jeff’s office. Central Park. Anywhere but here.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Coop says. “It’ll give us time to find out what’s going on.”
“And they can’t stay out here forever.” I squint at the crowd up the street, which seems to have grown in the past thirty seconds. “Can they?”
“I’m not waiting that long,” Sam mutters.
She sets off up the street, marching straight for the reporters. I manage to grasp the back of her blouse and tug, trying to hold her in place. But it’s no use. The silk slips from my fingers.
“Do something,” I tell Coop.
He watches her retreat, blue eyes narrowed. I can’t tell if he’s worried or impressed. Maybe it’s a little of both. All I feel, however, is worry, which is why I rush after Sam, catching up just as she reaches my block.
The reporters see us, of course, their heads turning toward us more or less at the same time. A flock of buzzards spotting fresh roadkill. The TV people have cameramen with them, who jostle each other for prime position. The still photographers duck beneath them, shutters clacking.
Jonah Thompson is among them. No surprise there. He, like the other reporters, barks our first names as we approach. As if he knows us. As if he cares.
“Quincy! Samantha!”
We fall back a few steps, accosted on all sides by the surge of cameras and microphones. A hand lands on my shoulder, heavy and strong. I don’t even need to look back to know it belongs to Coop, finally joining us.
“Come on, guys, step aside,” he tells the reporters. “Let them get through.”
Sam pushes forward, swinging her arms back and forth to clear a path, not caring who she hits.
“Get the fuck out of our fucking way,” she says, knowing how all that swearing will prevent the footage from being used on newscasts. “We’ve fucking got nothing to fucking say to you.”
“So that’s no comment?” asks one reporter. He’s a TV guy, the camera behind him swiveling toward Sam like the eye of an angry Cyclops.
“Sounds that fucking way to me.”
She turns away from him, looking to me instead. All those flashbulbs give her face a luminescent glow. The light flattens her features, making her expression as pale and blank as a full moon.
On the edge of my vision, I see Jonah nudge his way toward me.
“You’re really not going to say anything about Lisa Milner?” he says.
Curiosity stirs in me, pushing me forward. Lisa’s suicide happened days ago. In a 24-hour news cycle, that’s an eternity. This is something else. Something new.
“What about Lisa?” I say, sweeping in close. Cameras fill the spot I just vacated, surrounding me.
“She didn’t kill herself,” Jonah says. “Her death’s been ruled a homicide. Lisa Milner was murdered.”
These are the details:
On the night she died, Lisa Milner consumed two glasses of merlot. She did not drink alone. Someone else was with her, also drinking wine. That same someone spiked Lisa’s glass with a large quantity of anitrophylin, a mighty antidepressant sometimes used as a sleep aid for the seriously traumatized. Lisa had enough in her system to put an adult male gorilla to sleep.
The wine and anitrophylin were discovered in the toxicology tests performed in the wake of Lisa’s death. Without them, everyone would have continued to think she killed herself. Even with them, it would have appeared that way. The responding officers found more anitrophylin on the kitchen counter. What they couldn’t find was a bottle or a prescription from Lisa’s doctor, but that means nothing in an age of online pharmacies that charge three times the going rate for pills shipped from Canada. Any drug your pharmaceutical-deprived heart desires is just a border hop away.
After the tox report lit up like a Vegas casino, a CSI unit was again dispatched to Lisa’s house. They took the closer look they should have done days earlier but hadn’t bothered to because everyone thought she had offed herself. They found Lisa’s wine glass, its bottom crusted with granules of anitrophylin. They found two rings of dried merlot on the dining room table, created by the bottoms of two wine glasses. One wine ring contained anitrophylin. The other did not. What they couldn’t find was that second glass. Or any signs of struggle. Or forced entry.
Lisa had trusted whoever killed her.
The medical examiner noticed something strange about the cuts on Lisa’s wrists. They were deeper than most self-inflicted knife wounds. Especially if the person doing the cutting was drugged out of her mind. Even more telling was the direction of each cut—from right to left on Lisa’s left wrist and left to right on her right one. In most cases, the opposite is the norm. And even though Lisa might have been able to slash herself in such an unusual manner, the angle of the wounds proved otherwise. There was no way she could have caused those cuts. Someone had done it to her. The same person who put pills in her wine and later took the glass with them.
The big question mark—other than who did it and why, of course—is when Lisa made the 911 call on her cell phone. Authorities in Muncie suspect it was after the drugging but before the cutting. Their theory is that Lisa realized she had been drugged and managed to call 911. Her assailant took the phone from her before she got the chance to speak and hung up. Knowing the police would be coming anyway, that person grabbed a knife, dragged a groggy Lisa to the bathtub and sliced. It also explains why her wrists were slit when, in all likelihood, the anitrophylin would have killed her on its own.
What the police don’t know, until they find it on Lisa’s computer hard drive, is that she sent me an email roughly an hour before all of this happened. It jumps into my thoughts as we sit around Coop’s cell phone, set to speaker so all of us can hear the details.
Quincy, I need to talk to you. It’s extremely important. Please, please don’t ignore this.
We’re in the dining room, me standing at the head of the table, too restless with anger and heartbreak to sit down. Lisa is still dead. This new revelation doesn’t change that. But it does leave me grieving in a new, slightly more raw way.
Murder is a stranger beast than suicide, although the end result of both is the same. Even the words themselves differ. Suicide hisses like a snake—a sickness of the mind and soul. Murder, though, makes me think of sludge, dark and thick and filled with pain. Lisa’s death was easier to deal with when I thought it was suicide. It meant that ending her life was her decision. That, right or not, it had been her choice.
There is no choice in murder.
Coop and Sam appear equally as stunned. They sit on opposite sides of the table, silent and still. Because he’s never been in the apartment before, Coop’s presence adds an extra layer of weirdness to what’s already a surreal situation. It’s jarring to see him in civilian clothes, uncomfortable in a dainty dining room chair. Like he’s not the real Coop but an imposter, lurking in a place he doesn’t belong. The fake, cheery Sam, meanwhile, has been left behind at the cafe. Now it’s the real one who gnaws her fingernails to the quick while staring at Coop’s phone, as if she can see the person talking through it and not the featureless silhouette currently filling the screen.
The voice we hear belongs to Coop’s acquaintance in the Indiana State Police. Her name is Nancy. She was a first responder to the sorority house after Stephen Leibman finished his bloody spree. She was also Lisa’s version of Coop.
“I’m not going to lie to you all,” she says in a voice made low by exhaustion and grief. “They’ve got very little to work with here.”
I can only half hear her because the email plays on a loop in my mind, read aloud in Lisa’s voice.
Quincy, I need to talk to you.
“Things might be different if those numbnuts had searched her place the minute they found her body, like I told ‘em to do. But they didn’t and God knows how many people tramped through there before they did. The whole scene is compromised, Frank. Fingerprints all over the place.”
It’s extremely important.
“So they might never know who did it?” Coop asks.
“I never say never,” Nancy says. “But, right now, it’s not looking too good.”
A brief silence follows in which all four of us think about the very real possibility of never getting more answers than what we already know. No killer brought to justice. No motive. No definitive reason why Lisa sent me an email not long before taking that first, unknowing sip of doom.
Please, please don’t ignore this.
Another thought slithers into my head, sinuous and alarming.
“Should Sam and I be worried?” I ask.
Coop scrunches his brow, pretending the thought hadn’t occurred to him, when, of course, it had.
“Well?” I say.
“I don’t think there’s cause for worry,” he says. “Do you, Nancy?”
Nancy’s wan voice emerges from the phone. “There’s nothing to suggest this has anything to do with what happened to all of you.”
“But what if it might?” I say.
“Quincy?” Coop gives me a look I’ve never seen before. There’s a sternness to it, mingling with disappointment that I might be hiding something from him. “What aren’t you telling me?”
Something I should have told him days earlier. I didn’t because it seemed like Lisa’s email was a desperate attempt to be talked out of killing herself. Now I know differently. Now I suspect that Lisa was really trying to warn me. About what, I have no idea.
“I got an email from Lisa,” I announce.
Sam at last looks up from the phone, hand still at her mouth, the nail of her ring finger grasped between her teeth. “What?”
“When?” Coops says, concern burning bright in his eyes.
“The night she died. About an hour before, to be exact.”
“Tell me what it said,” Coop says. “Every word.”
I tell them everything. The contents of the email. When I received it. When I actually read it. I even try to explain why I waited so long to tell anyone but Jeff about it, although Coop doesn’t really care why. His only focus is the fact he didn’t know about it sooner.
“You should have told me the second you got it, Quincy.”
“I know,” I say.
“This could have changed things.”
“I know that, Coop.”
It could have given the police a reason for doing a better search of Lisa’s house, leading them to sooner conclude that she was murdered. It might have even yielded an important clue into who killed her. I know all of this, and the guilt it spawns makes me angry. At myself. At Lisa’s killer. Even at Lisa, for thrusting me into this position. The anger fizzes through me, overtaking my heartbreak and surprise.
“It still doesn’t mean you or Samantha are in danger,” Nancy says.
“It might not mean anything at all,” Coop adds.
“Or it could mean that she thought someone was targeting us,” I say.
“Who would want to do that?” Coop asks.
“Lots of people,” I say. “Crazy people. You’ve looked at those crime websites. You’ve seen how many freaks out there are obsessed with us.”
“That’s because they admire you,” Coop says. “They’re in awe of what you went through. What you managed to survive. Not many people could have done it, Quincy. But you did.”
“Then explain that letter.”
There’s no need to clarify. Coop knows exactly which letter I’m talking about. The threatening one. The scary one. It unnerved him as much as it did me.
YOU SHOULDN’T BE ALIVE.
YOU SHOULD HAVE DIED IN THAT CABIN.
IT WAS YOUR DESTINY TO BE SACRIFICED.
YOU NEED TO BE BUTCHERED.
The darkness of the letters wasn’t uniform, indicating that whoever wrote it had used a typewriter. The keys had been struck so hard that, on the page, the letters looked like burn marks seared into leather.
Every O was actually a zero, meaning that key was likely broken. Coop said this hint could possibly lead authorities to discover who wrote it. That was two years ago. I’m not holding my breath, especially since every other means of identifying its author have already been exhausted. There were no fingerprints on the paper or on the envelope, which had been sealed not with saliva but a sponge and water. The same goes for the stamp. As for the postmark, it was traced to a public mailbox in a town called Quincy, Illinois. That wasn’t a coincidence.
Jeff and I had only been living together a month when it arrived. It was his first real taste of what life with me would be like. I was, of course, hysterical to the point of insisting we had to move immediately. Preferably overseas. Jeff talked me out of it, saying the letter was a very sick but ultimately harmless prank.
Coop took it more seriously because, well, he’s Coop and that’s how he rolls. By that point, our relationship had dwindled to a text or two every few months. We hadn’t actually seen each other in over a year.
The letter changed all that. When I told him about it, he drove into the city to comfort me. Over coffee and tea at our usual place, he swore that he’d never let something bad happen to me, insisting on a face-to-face meeting at least every six months.
“That letter was sent by a deranged man,” Coop says. “A sick man. But that was a long time ago, Quincy. Nothing came of it.”
“Exactly,” I say. “Nothing ever happened to the psycho creep who sent it. He’s still out there, Coop. And maybe he wrote to Lisa or to Sam. Maybe he decided to finally take action.”
I look to Sam, who’s reverting by the minute back into her old self. Her hair has fallen from behind her ears and now covers most of her face like a protective veil.
“Have you received any death threats?”
Sam gives a tiny shake of her head. “I haven’t gotten mail in a long time. One of the perks of no one knowing where you are.”
“Well, they know now,” I say. “It was on the front page.”
A fresh wave of anger crashes over me as I think about Jonah Thompson and what he’s done. My hands ball into fists against my will, clenching and unclenching, aching for the sensation of smashing against his jaw.
“Did Lisa get any threats?” Coop says, leaning into the phone to address Nancy.
“A few,” she answers. “Some more worrisome than others. We treated all of them seriously, even managing to track down some of the guys who wrote them. They were lonely quacks. Nothing more. Certainly not killers.”
“So you don’t think Sam and I could be targets?” I say.
“I don’t know what to tell you, hon,” Nancy says. “There’s nothing to indicate that’s the case here, but it’s better to err on the side of caution.”
Not what I want to hear, which keeps the anger rising. I long for an answer, good or bad. Something definitive and tangible I can use to guide me going forward. Without it, everything is as murky as the fog that shrouded Central Park last night.
“Isn’t anyone else upset about this?” I say.
“Of course we’re upset,” Coop says. “And if we had answers we’d give them to you.”
I turn away, unable to see the earnest way his blue eyes try to offer comfort but reveal only uncertainty. Until today, Coop has always been something solid and strong that I could rely on, even when the rest of my world was tilting into oblivion. Now not even he can make sense of the situation.
“You’re angry,” he says.
“I am.”
“That’s your right. But you shouldn’t worry that what happened to Lisa is going to happen to you.”
“Why not?”
“Because if that was a possibility, Nancy would have told us,” Coop says. “And if I truly thought someone was trying to hurt you, we’d already be on our way out of the city by now. I’d take you so far away from here that not even Jeff would be able to find you.”
He would, too. Of that, I have no doubt. It’s finally the answer I’ve been looking for, and for a moment it’s almost enough to snuff out the anger burning in my chest. But then Coop looks across the table and fixes Sam with a blue-eyed stare.
“You, too, Sam,” he says. “I want you to know that.”
Sam nods. Then she starts to cry. Or maybe she’s been crying for a while and Coop and I just haven’t noticed it. But now she makes sure we notice. When she sweeps her hair off her face it’s impossible to miss the tears slanting down her cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “This—the whole situation—is really getting to me.”
I stay where I am, trying to discern if Sam’s tears are real, which makes me feel awful for even thinking they might not be. Coop, though, stands and rounds the table, edging toward her.
“It’s okay to be upset,” he says. “This is a bad situation all around.”
Sam nods and wipes her eyes. She stands. She holds out her arms, seeking comfort in the form of an embrace.
Coop obliges. I watch him wrap his bulky arms around Sam and pull her against his chest, giving her the hug I’ve been denied for the past ten years.
I look away. I march into the kitchen. I take another Xanax and begin to bake.