“Yeah, well, I’d love to chat, but I’m behind schedule already due to my inconvenient stay here.” He gestured back at the jail. “I’ve got to get home or my ass will be fired on top of everything else.”
“Where are you going? I’ll give you a ride.” Reed nodded at the patrol car waiting for him down the block.
Justin scoffed a laugh. “Yeah, I don’t think so. I can walk.” He started off again, perhaps headed for the T, and Reed fell into step beside him.
“You were here with your father, to celebrate his achievement.”
Justin gave a thin smile around his cigarette. “I was here because he paid for me to be. It’s not real success unless you have a bunch of witnesses, people to clap for you and tell you how smart you are.”
“Did you go to the conference?”
“I went to the part on the last day where they gave him his crystal trophy. Then I went to dinner with him and some of his snooty friends. I’ll say this for them, though—they bought good wine.”
“What did you do while your father was at the conference?”
“What do you mean, what did I do? I worked my usual job back home and then I caught the train up. You think he’d pay for me to spend more than one night here?”
“After the dinner, what did you do?”
Justin shook his head with a grin and then stuck his tongue out, waggling it in Reed’s direction. “You can read about that part in the arrest report.”
Reed ignored him. “At any point, did you go to the Public Garden?”
“Oh, yeah,” Justin replied with caustic sarcasm. “I took high tea with the mayor and then we went to admire the lilies together. Later, we went to the symphony.”
“What about Newbury Street?”
“Yeah, I bought a Birkin bag and a new pair of heels.”
They paused for a traffic light. “Were you aware that Teresa had a daughter?”
“My dad told me years ago.” He glanced at Reed. “Never met her. Didn’t even know her name until now. Nice, though, that Teresa could just hit the restart button—presto, instant new family.”
“You sound angry.”
“Yeah, my shrink says that to me a lot. I tell him I’ve got lots of stuff to be angry about.”
“Such as?”
The light changed and Justin set off across the street in long strides. Reed hustled to keep up. “The part where people think I murdered my little brother, that’s for starters. Everyone else got to be sad. I got put in a windowless room with two cops who took turns verbally beating on me for twelve hours. ‘Just tell us why you did it, Justin. You’ll feel better if you tell us.’” He halted in the middle of the sidewalk. “They actually thought I would put a bag over his head and smother the life out of him. Murder a little kid like that. Over some money in his piggy bank.”
“You were using drugs,” Reed said, his voice neutral. “Marijuana, pills, cocaine—everything you could get your hands on back then. Your parents had banned you from the house.”
His eyes narrowed. “Teresa kicked me out. My father never gave a shit what I did as long as I didn’t make a mess on his front porch, so to speak. I think he kind of liked the cover, if you want to know the truth. Whatever trouble I made, it gave him space to make his own.”
“What kind of trouble?”
He blew out a long smoke trail and then dropped the butt to the sidewalk, crushing it with his heel. “He ran around on my mom. That’s why they broke up. Later, he did the same thing to Teresa.”
“How do you know?”
“I caught him once. Showed up midday at the house when I was supposed to be at school—and so was he, by the way. I was looking for cash; he was looking at some red-haired girl sucking his dick in the living room.”
“Did he see you?”
Justin looked almost amused. “He wasn’t interested in much else at the time. I used the opportunity to take fifty bucks from the stash they kept in their bedroom.”
“Do you think Teresa knew?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care.” He resumed walking. “She tried to mother me, you know, when they first hooked up. ‘Justin, let me take you shopping for new jeans. Justin, would you like some of these cookies I made?’ She was so damn thirsty for my approval.”
“You were young then.”
“I was five.” He looked sideways at Reed. “I ate those cookies and I hated myself. I felt like I betrayed my mom. My mom, she didn’t go to college. Not like dad, and not like Teresa. She’s worked in the same hair salon for the past forty years. Teresa was in medical school when she and my dad got together. My mom used to say he’d traded up. A doctor. She must be real smart. Not so smart if she couldn’t see what my dad was when he married her.”
Reed registered the contempt dripping from every word in Justin’s analysis. He didn’t think much of his father, and he hated Teresa for falling for Ethan Stone’s act. “What about when Trevor was born?”
Justin stopped again, the hard set of his shoulders sagging. “He was a funny little dude. He used to run around naked after his bath, laughing hysterically while I’d chase him. I’d hold him upside down by the ankles sometimes, you know, like this? I’d swing him back and forth and make bonging noises like Big Ben. He loved that shit. Teresa would get on my case and tell me to stop roughhousing with him, but he couldn’t get enough.”
“What about later?” Reed probed gently.
Justin’s face turned hard again. “I used him, okay? Is that what you want to hear? I stole his birthday money, his Christmas money, and even his bike. Yeah, they kicked me out and I deserved it. But I didn’t … I would never…” He broke off, unable even to say the words. “He was my brother. My little bro. I wouldn’t have done anything to hurt him.”
“Teresa and your father seemed to support you.”
He gave a bitter chuckle, starting to sweat under the hot summer sun. “Yeah, well. They knew the cops were full of shit. It wasn’t me who was there that afternoon. You can tell because nothing got stolen.”
“Who do you think did it?”
He dropped all pretenses, his face open and full of sorrow. “I don’t know. I’ve asked myself that question so many times. It’s the hardest part to live with, you know? The not knowing.”
Reed’s brain kept unwinding all the threads of this story and reweaving them again, trying to find a narrative that made sense. “Do you think it’s possible your father could have been having an affair with Carol Frick?”
“The housekeeper?”
“You said he had trouble remaining faithful.”
“Yeah, but she was like twenty years out of his target range. Old Pops likes ’em fresh off the vine.”
“Like his students?”
Justin pointed at him, double-barreled finger guns. “A new crop each fall, ripe for picking.”
25
“You know, it would be understandable if this case has stirred up bad memories for you,” Dorie said from behind her dark glasses as they drove westward through the streets of Boston, straight at the setting sun.