Chapter Twenty-Three

Letty rode in Christian's car back home from her latest appointment with her obstetrician in a mild euphoria. The results from the largest round of prenatal tests had returned: all negative. So far, no birth defects, no damage done to her baby girl from her mom's freaked-out bender before she knew she was pregnant.

And it was a girl. Javier's daughter. Letty caressed her six-month baby bump with a growing tenderness that she hadn't quite allowed herself up to that point. Maybe things were all going to work out okay, after all. She shared a grin with Christian, who was driving, as usual.

The good feeling lasted all the way home, but evaporated on seeing the black-and-white car sitting by the curb in front of the house. Two uniformed police officers were sitting inside, watching intently as Christian's old blue Ford turned into the drive. Then they climbed out and began slowly walking towards the car.

"Who are they here for? You or me?" Christian muttered.

"Why would they be here for you?" Letty was genuinely perplexed, but there was no time to work that out. "Whichever one it is, the other one says absolutely nothing, right?"

"Right," he returned, opening his door.

They met the officers at the back bumper, Letty leaning against the car to ease her lower back, arms crossed above the baby bump. Christian copied her stance and greeted the visitors politely. "Good afternoon, gentlemen. What can we do for you?"

Letty didn't bother to catch their names, only where they were from: South Carolina. Shit. And they were both looking at her. One of the officers was black, the other white, but other than that, they were virtually interchangeable. It didn't even matter which one was talking at any given moment; they seemed to be on precisely the same wavelength. Wouldn't they like to go inside the house to talk? one asked politely, gesturing towards the front door.

Letty gave them a patently dishonest smile, and shook her head. "We're fine, right here. What do you want?"

"We've come to ask you some questions, Mrs. Pereira, about the house you own on the beach."

Ouch. They weren't wasting time, and neither did she. "Excuse me? I have no idea what you're talking about. I've never owned any house, anywhere."

"Your name is on the deed."

"My name?" she asked derisively. "Or just one that matches mine?"

"Not too many Letitia Raineses out there. None other than you, in fact."

She shrugged, uninterested. "Is my signature on this deed? Because I sure as hell have never signed one." That was the absolute truth.

They hemmed and hawed, and finally admitted that no, it wasn't.

"Then why are you assuming it's my house?"

Her husband had purchased it for her, they said, before he died, for a cool one million dollars, cash. Letty lost it at that, bursting out in harsh laughter. "My husband never had that kind of money in his life – not his whole life put together. He was an itinerant line cook, and sometimes private chef, out of work more often than not." Deflectors on, she thought, and charged back at them. "What the hell makes you think it was him?"

"We have a witness, the real estate agent, who says she helped him purchase it. She's quite sure of the identification."

Letty shook her head, but filed it away as a worry point. "Then she's wrong," she said flatly.

"So you were never in the house last January?"

"I don't even know where this supposed house is!" They gave her the address, but she shrugged. "Never been there." She felt Christian flinch against her shoulder in remembrance, just the tiniest bit, and yelled at him in her mind to be still. Neither of the cops appeared to notice it, though.

"Where were you last January, around the seventeenth?"

She shrugged again. "I have no idea. We moved around a lot the whole time we were together. I'd have to recreate it – and that could take a looong time. We might even have been in LA already," she added casually, hoping to send them down a rabbit hole. "Why are you asking all this?"

"Because we have reason to believe the house may have been the scene of a murder," came the chilling reply, as they watched closely for her reaction.

But Letty was, after all those months, on top of her game. She barked an astonished "What?" looking back and forth between the men. "And you think I had something to do with it? Or my husband?"

"Well, he is suspected of multiple homicides."

Letty saw red. "None of which are proved. They're all just conjecture – just like you're doing. Throwing things at the wall to see if anything sticks, now that he's dead."

Christian, bless him, couldn't stay silent any longer; his professional instincts were shouting at him as well as his personal ones, to protect this woman beside him. "Do you have any evidence that places her in this house – or her husband, for that matter?"

"And who are you?"

"Christian Woodhill. I'm a friend of Mrs. Pereira's. And I am also a former parole officer, and a current employee of Florida Department of Corrections, so I am pretty well versed in police procedure, thank you. Now please answer the question." Letty was impressed in spite of herself: she'd never seen Christian be so brusquely, effectively official.

The officers glanced at each other, trying to decide what to say. "Fingerprints?" Christian continued to prompt them. "DNA samples? Hair? Footprints? Anything?"

Letty was screaming in panic inside. She vividly remembered Javier wiping down the floors with bleach, and even the kitchen counter – but what about all her clothes, her wigs and shoes, that she had abandoned in the closet? They couldn't not be drowning in her DNA. And both their fingerprints had to have been everywhere, on every surface!

Finally, one of them admitted: "No physical evidence, exactly."

"What does that mean?" Christian pushed, as Letty managed not to gape.

Finally, it came out. The house in question had burned to the ground several months earlier. Letty did gasp at that, but instantly charged back in. "And I suppose you're going to try to hang that on me, as well?"

"No," one admitted reluctantly. "We already have the perps for that." It had been a large – very large – group of teenagers who had broken in, partied all weekend with all the drugs and alcohol that implied, and of course had started a fire in the fireplace. "And then they kept tossing more and more stuff on the fire, till it spilled out of the box – got out of control and ended up burning the whole place to ash." He paused, then tried for tricky. "It's a real shame, too – that was such a gorgeous house, wasn't it?"

She wasn't biting, though. "How should I know?" she shot back, utterly bereft of any familiarity with the place.

Letty couldn't stop herself then from trading astonished glances with Christian. "So you have absolutely no physical evidence that puts me there. Or Javier. Or even that it was a crime scene before the kids trashed it. What the fuck do you have? Do you even have a body? Who was supposed to have died, anyway?"

Oh, they had a body – what was left of it. It was the Extra Safe Security guy. He had gone missing, along with his work truck, in the middle of his rounds – the last of which was the house in question. The truck had been found three months later, also totaled by fire, but with the ashes of not one, but two human corpses inside: the missing Security guy (identified by tooth DNA) and another, as-yet-unidentified male. Letty ruthlessly squashed even the whisper of the thought, Teo, letting nothing show on her face even then.

"And do you have any evidence from the truck that places either of the Pereira's inside it?" Christian was nothing if not tenacious.

No, was the reluctant reply. No evidence remained there, either. It had possibly been wiped, and the fire and time had done the rest.

Letty held up both hands. "So, let me get this straight. You have absolutely nothing that ties either me or my husband to either the house or the truck. Only the word of a single person, this real estate agent, who was probably into money laundering – I mean, really: a million dollars, cash? And she just so happens," her voice dripping sarcasm, hands dropping to hips, "to claim it was my husband who gave her that money? On what, a photograph?" That was a wild stab, but from their faces, it hit. "Hell, for all you know, she saw his picture on the news from LA and then decided to hang it on him, along with everyone else in the country with an unsolved murder. And whoever did buy it put my name on the deed? They could have gotten that name any number of ways. It doesn't put me anywhere near it." She took a breath, then plowed on. "You don't even have anything that puts the dead man at the house. All you have is his burned corpse – with another man's, too – how far away, fifty miles? Maybe you should be looking to identify him, and go from there?"

Staring back and forth between the now extremely uncomfortable and uncertain cops, Letty threw up her hands again. "We're done here. Done. Go away, and leave me the fuck alone! And leave my husband alone, too! Stop pinning shit on him now that he can't defend himself, and you've got all these unsolved crimes. Try looking for the real criminals, instead!"

From the looks on their faces, the two officers desperately wanted to stay and keep questioning her, but they had no idea how to regain control of the situation. She had won this round.

As they walked back to their cruiser, Letty dropped her voice to the merest whisper, managing to say without moving her mouth, in what would have made a ventriloquist proud: "Not. One. Word, Christian. Not now, not ever."

"I wasn't going to," he breathed beside her.

At last the police drove off and left them. As they turned the corner out of sight, Letty let her breath out in a huge, explosive huff. "I sure as hell hope you don't still have any texts or pictures on your phone."

"Nope. New phone, new number – hell, new company. That's all long gone."

"Good." Straightening up from the car bumper at last, she turned to him. "Put the car in the garage, and always park it there from now on. And keep the garage locked at all times. And never... let them or any other cops into the house, for any reason."

"Why?" her terminally honest friend was bewildered.

"So they don't have any chance to drop bugs," she informed him.

"That's illegal."

"Yeah? So? You want to bet your life that will stop them? Or mine? You've worked with the Innocence Project, Christian. You know perfectly well how easy it is for them to get a false conviction, on One. Wrong. Word. Don't give them a chance to get it." She waited a beat to make sure she'd made her point, then sighed. "I'm going to take a bath. Suddenly I feel filthy."

Christian waited for her to go inside, then turned to do as she bade and moved the car inside. Later, when he thought back, he was impressed all over again at Letty's astonishing acting ability. If he hadn't known damn well that he'd taken her to that address, received in a text from Javier, he would have believed her himself. Not that he was ever going to breathe a word about any of this to anyone. Not even her.

And the dead men? a tiny voice in his head asked. It got no reply.