“Yes. He was a surprise.” He paused to smile over the rim of his coffee cup. “The best kind.”
“Were the two of you planning to have kids?”
“Actually, no, not at first. I already had a son, Justin, from my first marriage. Teresa was focused on her career. Once she turned up pregnant, though, we got used to the idea in a hurry. We hired someone to do the nursery, and they handled everything but Trevor’s library. Teresa wanted to stock that herself. She loved to sit in the rocking chair and read with him.”
“What kind of mother was she?”
“Busy,” he replied without thought. “Her work is life-or-death, every day. Hard to walk away from that to watch a little boy play in the sandbox or fix grilled cheese sandwiches. But she loved him. Of course she did. We took vacations to the shore and they’d hold hands, jumping the waves in the surf. They liked to do jigsaw puzzles and riddles together. She would design elaborate scavenger hunts for him on his birthday and hide his presents at the end.” He shook his head. “The last one was just a month before he died.”
“The investigation looks to be thorough from what I’ve seen,” Reed said. “What did you think of it?”
Stone set his coffee cup aside as he considered his answer. “At first, I thought it would be over quickly. I didn’t have any experience with law enforcement, but I guess I’d absorbed the typical narrative from crime fiction—the perpetrator is caught, always, and usually in short order. I remember preparing myself mentally for the image of him. For what it would feel like when the police dragged him from his hole into the light of day. I’d always been against the death penalty, you see. If you think about it from a market perspective, it doesn’t make any sense. The death sentence doesn’t deter other criminals from committing their crimes, and it’s not fairly adjudicated. But when it was my child—” His jaw unlocked briefly, quivered twice before he got control again. “I wanted the person responsible to be evaporated from the earth. I didn’t want a molecule of him remaining, you understand me?”
“I do.”
“I built up all this anger and then there was no target for it. The investigation went on, seemingly endless. They interviewed Teresa’s patients. My fellow professors. My students. Our neighbors.”
“Your son,” Reed added, and Stone’s face darkened, quick as an April sky.
“Yes,” he said. “They had a particular focus on Justin, despite lacking any evidence. We had to engage an attorney to protect him from their bizarre fixation that he murdered his younger brother.”
“One of his fingerprints was discovered on the plastic bag.” Reed didn’t have to specify which bag—the one used to smother Trevor.
“Yes, mine, too. And Teresa’s, and Carol’s, and even Trevor’s. It was a disposable grocery bag. We kept them around in the kitchen pantry to reuse as necessary.”
Reed had read the reports. Justin, at the time of the murders, had been unwelcome in the Stone home at Teresa’s insistence. He’d left rehab after only six days and was crashing with fellow addicts in the city. The detectives wondered how he’d left fingerprints on a bag when he hadn’t been around much prior to the homicides. “How did Justin get along with Trevor?”
“He loved him,” Stone shot back. “Trevor worshiped the ground his big brother walked on. Who wouldn’t enjoy that?”
“I read that Justin took your remarriage somewhat hard.”
“He was five. Five-year-olds want their mommies and daddies to be together forever. Justin adjusted. We had a number of good years after Trevor was born. He—he was happy.”
The spiral into addiction suggested otherwise, but Reed didn’t challenge. “What’s Justin doing today?”
“He’s a sales manager for a home appliance company. He’s good. He’s clean. I don’t want you bothering him with this, understand me? Imagine having your little brother murdered and the cops think you’re the one who did it. He already hated himself so much that he tried to drown his own brain in a toxic miasma of drugs and booze. And then to be suspected of such a monstrous crime … Justin worked damn hard to carve out a life for himself, and I won’t have you people destroying it.”
“I’m not here to destroy anyone. Just trying to get a sense of the facts.”
“Justin didn’t do this. That’s a fact.”
“I’d still like to talk to him.”
“You can’t.” Stone stood up abruptly and went to his window. “He’s—he’s traveling at the moment. Won’t be back for several days yet.”
Reed didn’t have several days. He decided not to belabor the point and shifted gears. “You were in Boston recently for a conference. Is that correct?”
“Yes, at MIT.” Stone turned around again, but he remained wary, on guard. His body posture was closed off and defensive. “I gave a talk last Friday, had dinner with colleagues Friday night, did a little sightseeing on Saturday, and returned home yesterday morning.”
“You didn’t see Teresa or Chloe at any point?”
“No, of course not.” He pointed at Reed. “Wait. You don’t think I took that girl?”
“I don’t have any reason to think that. But I’m sure you appreciate we need to examine every possible angle right now.”
“Did Teresa say something to you? Did she accuse me?”
“No one has accused you of anything,” Reed said mildly.
“God, I would never. The thought is abhorrent.” A stain of color appeared across his cheekbones. “I would never do anything to harm a child.”
“Okay, I hear you. When did you last speak to Teresa?”
He didn’t have to think about it. “Six years ago. We ran into each other at a café in Berlin, if you can believe it. I was there on business and she was vacationing with her family.”
So he knew she had a daughter. “That’s ironic,” Reed said aloud. “How did it go?”
“It was awkward. I spotted her before she saw me, but they were standing between me and the door, so there was no way to make a quick exit. We had to say hello.”
“Is that all you said?”
“More or less.” He forced a tight smile. “One might even call it an achievement of sorts, after all the bitterness from before.”
“What were you bitter about?”
“Losing Trevor, naturally. The police never caught anyone, so there was no one else to blame but each other. She was supposed to have been home that afternoon. She didn’t get a sitter.”
“Was that unusual?”
“Not completely, no. He had just turned twelve and was fine being home by himself for short periods of time. But Teresa’s job at the hospital kept her away for hours. She might not have been back until midnight.”
“But surely you would have been home by then.”
“Too late,” he said, hoarse with regret. “They’d been there a couple of hours already by the time I returned. I called nine-one-one right away, but there was nothing they could do for Trevor.”
“I am sorry.”
Stone’s shoulders rose and fell. “Our lives were ripped to shreds. You’re here to observe the tatters, to sift through the pieces one more time, as though that will change anything. I hope you find Teresa’s daughter. Maybe, somehow, you’ll even solve this case. But you’ll understand, I hope, that I won’t be waiting by the phone.”