Chapter 58

58

Here’s the thing,” Reyes begins, when they’re all seated in the interview room. “Your truck matches the description of the vehicle seen driving away from the Merton house on the night of Easter Sunday, the night that Fred and Sheila Merton were murdered. We know you’ve been keeping that truck in the garage since the description of it went out to the media after the bodies were discovered. So—what were you doing in Brecken Hill that night?”

He shakes his head. “It wasn’t me.”

“It was your truck.”

“I didn’t kill anybody.”

“What were you doing there, then?” Reyes asks.

“Fuck,” Carl says. Reyes waits. “I want a lawyer.”

Now it’s Reyes’s turn to say fuck, but he says it to himself.

“I got somebody,” he says. “Can I call him?”

“Of course,” Reyes says, and he and Barr leave the room.

An hour later, Carl Brink’s attorney arrives and they begin the interview again after Carl has spoken privately with him.

Carl looks nervously at his lawyer, who nods reassuringly. Carl says, “I was out there that night. I took a wrong turn and went past that house. I went to the next house—it was a dead end—and turned around and went back past it again.”

“What time was this?” Reyes asks.

Carl shakes his head. “I don’t know. Eleven? Twelve?”

“Can you not pin it down a little better than that?” Reyes asks.

Carl looks furtively at his attorney, as if for help. But the attorney has nothing to say. “That’s the best I can do. I may have been a little high.” The attorney gives him a little shake of the head. “I had nothing to do with what happened there,” Carl insists. He licks his lips nervously.

“Bullshit,” Reyes says. “Then why didn’t you come forward when we put out the description of your truck? You obviously knew we were looking for it—you haven’t driven it since.”

Carl hangs his head and says, “My license was suspended. I wasn’t supposed to be driving that night. And I’ve kept it in the garage ever since because I knew you were looking for it and I didn’t want to get stopped.”

For fuck’s sake, Reyes thinks. “What were you doing out there?”

“I was meeting a friend,” Carl says, averting his eyes.

“You have friends in Brecken Hill? Really?” Reyes allows his disbelief to come through loud and clear. “Or maybe you were doing some dealing?”

The lawyer clears his throat and says, “My client has some information that might be useful. Perhaps we could focus on that and not get too caught up in what he was doing there that night?”

Reyes sighs heavily and asks, “What kind of information?” The attorney nods once at his client.

“I saw something,” Carl says, “in the driveway where that couple was killed.”

“What did you see?” Reyes asks intently.

“There was a car parked at the end of the driveway, like near the road, not near the house. I thought that was weird.”

“Did you see anybody?”

He shakes his head. “No. Just the car. It looked empty. The lights were off.”

“What kind of car was it?”

“I don’t know. Just a car. But it had a vanity plate. IRENA D.”

---

•   •   •reyes and barr are on their way to Irena Dabrowski’s place. “She gets a million under the will,” Reyes says. “That’s a lot of money for a cleaning lady. We never even searched her car.”

“Well, we can search it now,” Barr says.

“She knew about the suits in Dan’s garage, too,” Reyes remembers.

They arrive at Irena’s and park on the street. When Irena opens the door, she seems dismayed to see them.

“May we come in?” Reyes asks.

She steps aside and lets them in, suddenly pale, as if she might faint.

“Maybe you should sit down,” Barr suggests and guides her to an armchair just inside the living room.

“We have a new witness,” Reyes tells her. “Someone who saw something the night of the murders.”

She looks back at them in apparent dread. “Which one was it?” she whispers.

Reyes is impressed. She’s been acting all along. He’s annoyed at himself for missing it. “It was you, Irena. You killed them.”

She stares back at them, aghast. “Me? What? No. I didn’t kill them.”

“Someone saw your car at the end of the Mertons’ driveway that night.”

She shakes her head in disbelief. “I didn’t kill them. You’re making a mistake!”

Reyes says, as Barr cuffs her, “Irena Dabrowski, you are under arrest for the murders of Fred and Sheila Merton. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. . . .”

---

•   •   •irena has requested an attorney and it is evening when they begin formal questioning. Irena appears to be very shaken, almost in shock.

Reyes watches her without sympathy. She has played them all along. Cleaning the knife when she went back to “discover” the bodies, to make them think she was protecting one of the children. Her reluctant admission that it might have been any one of the Merton kids, when it was her the entire time. She’d thrown them all under the bus.

The attorney asks, looking worriedly at his distressed client, “What makes you think my client murdered her employers in cold blood? She was their cleaning lady, for Christ’s sake.”

“We have a new witness who saw her car—with her very identifiable license plate, IRENA D—parked at the end of the Mertons’ drive on the night of the murders, sometime between eleven o’clock and midnight.”

Irena shakes her head and mumbles, “I wasn’t there.”

“You receive one million dollars under Fred Merton’s will,” Reyes says. “Correct?”

“Yes,” she admits.

The attorney says, “A reasonable enough bequest, considering the wealth of her employers and the length of her service.”

“And motive enough for murder,” Reyes counters. “People have killed for far less.”

“I didn’t do it,” she says again, with fear in her voice. “I didn’t even know they’d left me anything. Why would I kill them?”

“Interfering with the murder scene—you did that to direct attention toward the kids, away from yourself.” She’s gone ashen. “You knew about those disposable coveralls in Dan’s garage, and that he left the door unlocked.”

The lawyer breaks in. “I think we’re done here. You’re going to need more evidence than one questionable eyewitness. Unless you’ve got more—”

“We’ll get more,” Reyes says.