Good God.
That took “woman scorned” to a whole new level.
“Who figured out the Betty angle?” I asked.
“That’d be Robertson. Though it’s Robertson because we talked shit out, I mentioned Ray, and Betty, and he got a hunch. He had her pulled in first thing. When she found out what happened, she spilled. She’s beside herself, because he saw no way out, which was probably why he retreated to his own cabin. Though honest to Christ, don’t know why he stayed local and didn’t bolt, but I suspect something was in that cabin he didn’t want us to see.”
He paused to throw back a hit of coffee.
And then he went back to it.
“Even though, in the brief shootout, he also tagged one of the agents who’d been brought in for the hunt. Everyone was all geared up, and we’d been willing to run him to ground, so we were ready to wait him out, even if it meant starving him out and that took a year. So he was going to get no joy. He went to his cabin because he’d rigged that cabin. It was an inferno before anyone could spit. He died inside. She loved him, or convinced herself she did, because she convinced herself he loved her, when he didn’t.”
Bohannan’s look on me intensified.
“He dominated her.”
“Good Lord,” I murmured, not missing what he was saying.
He gave her her kink, and that spilled into life.
“It’s still hot, but they already found his body.”
“Audrey was best friends with a woman whose husband she slept with?” I asked.
Bohannan shrugged and forked up more eggs. “I guess you take ’em as you can get ’em. Though, he set that up. What we missed was, Alice wasn’t part of her afternoon kid club until this school year. Betty recruited her at the end of last year. What we also missed, but only because he wouldn’t let on and she made sure she didn’t, Ed’s one serious dick. And that ‘pin money’ was all she had to play with, because he holds the purse strings, and he’s not stingy with playing golf and taking scuba diving trips, but he is with her. She was tired of a lot of the other moms, especially ‘the ones who work,’ having Louis Vuitton when she was carrying Target. She charged twenty bucks a day per girl, five girls, she shared pretty proud that she’d earned herself a Louis Vuitton, a Valentino and a Fendi.”
“Sounds like Betty had a lot to get off her chest,” I noted.
“Betty lost her psychopath boyfriend and sang like a canary,” Jace muttered.
I shot him a smile and looked back to Bohannan.
“And Malorie?” I asked after he swallowed his eggs. “Like you thought, just a pawn?”
“Malorie was because Betty was ticked that Lana didn’t invite her into her crew. Malorie also was because Malorie drove Betty crazy. Lana was caught powerless to get out of a situation that harmed her. This meant she taught her daughter to be sure to be able to make her own way. Malorie was an overachiever, and a bossy one. She was apparently always organizing things or setting up things or making suggestions about how people could do things better, which Betty wasn’t big on. Because this included Betty, who Malorie apparently told should open up her own daycare and shared she thought she was making a big mistake when Betty declined that option.”
I glanced at Celeste.
She bit her lower lip even as she stretched it out.
So that was Malorie to a tee.
Poor Malorie. Probably trying to be helpful and forge her own path and someone cut that path off permanently.
“That’s a part I don’t get,” Bohannan continued. “Because Malorie might have been a pain in her ass, but she was gone, acing all her classes, pre-law and on a trajectory she’d probably never come back to MP. And Betty never told anyone she knew Ed screwed around on her. So I don’t know how she expected Lana to know to send an invitation.”
I didn’t know that either.
I let them all eat.
Bohannan got through most his eggs, a triangle of toast, and two rashers of bacon, before he picked it up again.
“He had a boat.”
And it kept coming.
“No stripe, but it was night, and mist can play tricks.”
I bet.
“And you?” I asked.
He shook his head. “They didn’t mention it to her under interrogation. She didn’t either. And I would say she had no clue this was all about him dicking with me. Pillow talk about how Ed done her wrong, how Audrey had to pay, which naturally, for her, formed into a plan where they worked together, without her having that first clue she was being played or it had anything to do with me. She knew about Alice. She knew about Malorie. She’d heard about David, but she swears it wasn’t him. When it was because Robertson ID’d him as the guy we were chasing. She thought they were done, letting the dust settle and then she was gonna leave Ed, and they were going to ride into the sunset.”
“Did he look like the sketch?”
“Not exactly. Same build. Also dark hair. But he’s got Italian ancestry and looks it. I’d say attractive, but not pretty, like the guy down in Cali. Either the composites weren’t quite right or whoever that guy was, was probably paid and picked for build and because they share some similarities. Betty didn’t know about him, but she said our guy didn’t go down to Cali except to get Malorie, so there are parts of his gig he didn’t share. Though why he would choose someone who looked remotely like him, I don’t get, because you couldn’t miss the similarities, and if it was me, that wouldn’t be what I’d be going for.”
I didn’t get it either.
And I guessed now we’d never know.
I was careful when I queried, “How did a decorated, ex-army sniper with a weekend warrior camp in the next town fly under radar?”
“He didn’t. I mentioned him to you weeks ago. We checked him out. He had alibis. He was hunting lynx in Canada during Alice’s disappearance and murder. Had passport stamps and his name on flight manifests to prove it. But this guy has the skills to cross back over the border without anyone seeing, which Betty told us he did. He also had a side piece, a woman that Betty didn’t know about, who alibied him for Malorie. They’re trying to find her, but my guess is, she’s gone. And as we know, he did David.”
“Ace athlete?”
“All-state cornerback.”
“Functional family?”
“That we don’t know. Though, the dad was floored and then he started sobbing when he got the call his boy went up in a ball of flame he lit himself after he was the target of a three-day manhunt because he allegedly committed two murders and attempted one. So I’d say, maybe.”
“So you profiled him almost exactly,” I remarked.
Bohannan held my gaze in a way I found strange.
And replied, “Yeah. Almost exactly.”
I’d let them finish eating.
It was later, in our room, after he showered, I sat on the counter between the basins as he shaved the skin of his neck.
“You don’t like him for this?” I asked.
“I love him for it,” Bohannan answered. “And I’m excellent at what I do. But it’s like he came to life in my profile.”
“Something missing?”
“I can’t see it if there is. Betty copped to all of it, but David.”