“Please,” Tally said. “You came into the station wearing her perfume every Wednesday morning for six months.”
Serrano pled guilty through silence.
“And I know the first few months I was with Claire, I was terrified she’d go back to her ex-husband. So Wright and Drummond relapse. She gets knocked up. Isabelle finds out. Probably because Drummond told her, because he’s a doofus.”
“And they decide to kill her rather than let her give birth to Drummond’s kid?”
“Think about how much money they took from her,” Tally said. “If he has to pay child support to her after all that, it’s insult to injury.”
“Isabelle Drummond doesn’t strike me as the kind of woman who would divorce her husband for cheating,” Serrano said. “More like the kind of woman who would kill the girl he cheated on her with.”
Tally nodded. “But still . . .”
“Why would Wright call Sam Wickersham too?”
“Yeah. Why call Sam Wickersham too?”
Serrano thought for a moment. “What if,” he said, “we’ve all been looking at this wrong? You, me, the lieutenant. We’ve always assumed the killer was part of the Albatross crew, the people who ruined Wright’s life. But what if they’re totally separate crimes?”
“Pretty elaborate crimes,” Tally said. “Trying to make her death look like a suicide—that means it was preplanned.”
Serrano said. “And if not for Rachel Marin, it might just have gone down as a suicide.”
“There you go with that Marin woman again,” Tally said. “The lieutenant and I are on the same page about her. There’s something not quite right.”
“What exactly do you mean by that?”
“I don’t trust her. She calls us right after Wright’s murder, comes to the presser, and then shows up at Drummond’s house? And Wickersham—I mean, John, you have to see this too. You and I both know the kind of people that buzz around crimes like this.”
“Don’t even go there,” Serrano said.
“Tell me you haven’t considered it.”
“Considered it and dismissed it.”
“She’s a criminal rubbernecker,” Tally said. “You’ve been around long enough to know civilians who hang around crime scenes and get involved with witnesses aren’t fully right in the head.”
“Maybe, but she’s not a killer,” Serrano said. “But her kids . . .”
“John Wayne Gacy had kids.”
“Come on, Leslie.”
“We’ve both investigated thrill-seeker killers. People who commit murder, then call the tip line. And this lawyer of hers, Jim Franklin? A civil litigation attorney negotiates a routine home purchase? I called Franklin. He claimed attorney-client privilege, refused to answer questions about Rachel Marin, and threatened to sue the department for harassment. Something’s up with this chick.”
“You won’t be able to subpoena Jim Franklin,” Serrano said. “Marin isn’t being investigated for any current criminal acts. You can’t prosecute based on curiosity or theories, and if we push harder, we open ourselves up to a harassment charge.”
“But you know there’s a reason Rachel Marin used this guy Franklin for her home purchase,” Tally said. “There’s something she doesn’t want to get out. Something she wants to keep hidden. How much you want to bet there’s a crime in her past that would connect her to this?”
“I know there’s more to Rachel Marin than she lets on,” Serrano said. “Knew it from the moment she left that message about Constance Wright’s death.”
“See?” Tally said. “You know I’m not totally out of my mind on this.”
He shook his head. But for someone who wanted to keep her past in the shadows, Rachel Marin was not doing a particularly good job of staying hidden in the present. It felt like she wanted to step into the light but was holding back. At this point, Serrano didn’t know what Rachel’s intentions were. And Tally was making him worry he’d made a terrible mistake confiding in her. Something had happened that had tilted the Marin family on its axis. Those children had experienced trauma. And Serrano knew better than anyone that trauma often begot trauma. People who’d experienced evil often committed evil. Was it enough to push Rachel to do something terrible?
Sometimes the most terrifying crimes were the ones with no meaning. No warning. No motive.
“All right,” Serrano said. “We look at Rachel Marin. But if it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere, we move on. Those kids have been through enough.”
“Works for me,” Tally said. “Let’s go see Aleksy Bacik at Irongate Properties. He put together the Marin home purchase with Jim Franklin. He knows something.”
“He won’t show us the closing documents unless we have a warrant,” Serrano said. “And no way we’re getting one without an actual crime or probable cause.”
“I don’t need a warrant,” Tally said as she led Serrano to the car. “I’ll simply tell Mr. Bacik that someone might leak to the press that he was meeting with the police, and he can watch as his client list dries up faster than a puddle in the desert. He’ll talk.”
He will, Serrano thought. And it scared him to think what Mr. Bacik might say.
CHAPTER 35
The first thing Serrano noticed when they entered the offices of Irongate Properties was that they smelled like cookies. Not real cookies, though, not the kind his mother used to make fresh, loaded with more chocolate chips and walnuts than dough. This office smelled like cookies that had been sprayed with air freshener and left inside a dusty closet for a week.
Tally said, quite loudly, “Ashby police. We’re looking for a Mr. Aleksy Bacik.”
Two dozen well-coiffed Realtors stopped what they were doing, stood up, and got terrified looks in their eyes that reminded Serrano of a teenager about to take their first driving test.
Realtors were hawks. They had to be. They were competing against dozens of other firms and often their own colleagues, and even the hint of impropriety could lose them business. So when a pair of cops walked into the office unannounced, they could all see commission checks flying out the window. Tally knew this and knew it could be used as a cudgel.
Serrano saw a man rise slowly from behind a partition like a child checking to see if there was a monster under the bed. Half a dozen people pointed toward the same cubicle. Bacik raised his hand. Serrano and Tally walked over slowly. No need to make anyone think this would be quick.
Aleksy Bacik was in his early forties, with a thick head of dark-brown hair graying at the side but so unnaturally evenly that Serrano got the sense he dyed it gray on purpose to appear more mature and experienced. He was a shade under six feet, with tanned, heavily moisturized skin. Birth records showed that Bacik had emigrated from Slovakia with his family at the age of five and graduated from Loyola and currently lived on Barrister Avenue in an apartment that he had purchased four years ago for $2.2 million.
His career was on the upswing. He was making money. He was good at his job.
But this was the kicker: He had spent four years after college working real estate in Darien, Connecticut. Just two blocks from Franklin and Rosato Associates, the firm that represented Rachel Marin.