The Tides Of Memory - The Tides Of Memory Part 38
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The Tides Of Memory Part 38

For a second she was too surprised to do anything. But then she pulled away angrily. "What the hell are you doing? Have you lost your mind?"

A combination of embarrassment and sexual frustration, fueled by one too many drinks, made Tommy react angrily. "What's your problem? It was a kiss. Why shouldn't I kiss you?"

"Why shouldn't you kiss me?" Summer repeated incredulously.

"I didn't realize you'd taken a vow of celibacy."

"I'm with Michael, you asshole. Your so-called friend." Summer stood up shakily.

"Hey . . ." Tommy put a hand on her arm. "Michael was my friend, okay? My best friend. There was no 'so-called' about it. But Michael is dead, Summer."

"He is not!"

"Yes, he is. Clinically and in every way that matters." Every customer in the bar turned to stare at the drama playing out at the corner table. Tommy's volume levels were rising. "Michael's in a coma and he is never going to wake up. Never."

"Fuck you!" Summer shouted.

"Is this what you think he would want?" Tommy shot back, tightening his grip on her arm. "For you to sacrifice your whole life for him, like some Hindu bride throwing her body onto her husband's funeral pyre? Because if you think that, you didn't know him at all."

With a wrench, Summer pulled herself free from Tommy's grip. Grabbing her purse, she ran out of the bar, tears of anger and humiliation clouding her vision as she stumbled toward the exit.

"He wasn't a saint, you know," Tommy called after her. "He wasn't even faithful to you."

Summer turned and glared at him. "Liar!"

"It's true. The week before you came to Oxford, Michael told me about an older woman he'd been seeing. He called her his 'sugar mummy.' She was the one who bought him that damn bike, if you really want to know."

Summer's stomach lurched.

She turned and ran.

The London traffic was so bad, it took her an hour to reach the facility where Michael was being cared for, a redbrick Victorian building close to Battersea Park.

"You look terrible," one of the nurses observed, not unkindly, when Summer walked in. Her hair was disheveled from having run her hands through it so many times and her cheeks were puffy and swollen from crying. "Are you okay?"

"Not really." Summer took up her usual place in the chair next to Michael's bed, but was too upset to take his hand. She knew that what Tommy Lyon had said was true. At first, when she left the Savoy, she tried to convince herself it was a lie, a cruel fabrication that Tommy had made up out of spite because she'd rejected his advances. But as her black cab crawled across the river, she accepted the truth. I knew it myself, all along. That was why I came to Oxford, to confront him. I knew there was someone else.

"How dare you lie there so peacefully, you son of a bitch!" she sobbed into the silence. "How could you do this to me?"

Scores of questions tormented her, like tiny needles pricking at her brain. Had this older woman been there that night, before Summer arrived? For all Summer knew, she could have shared Michael's bed only hours earlier. She wanted to know, needed to know. But Michael had denied her even that small shred of comfort, the comfort of closure.

"You owe me an answer. You owe me!" she shouted at Michael as he slept, willing him to hear her. And she cried because there was no answer.

There would never be an answer.

Chapter Thirty-five.

Police chief Harry Dublowski of the NYPD smiled at the attractive woman sitting opposite him.

Harry knew when the woman called that he'd heard her name somewhere before. It was an exotic name. Aristocratic. International politics wasn't exactly a passion of Harry's, but when he googled "Alexia De Vere," it all came back to him. The new Iron Lady! England's answer to Hillary Clinton, complete with an errant husband. Except that where Bill's worst crime had been having some fat chick give him head in the Oval Office, Teddy De Vere was doing time for murder.

What Harry Dublowski hadn't expected was to discover that Mrs. De Vere was actually a great-looking broad. Most women Harry's age looked like hags. Either that or they had weird surgery faces that made them look embalmed. But Alexia De Vere was a genuine looker. Her Google pictures did not do her justice. According to her bio, she was in her sixties, but she could have passed for a decade younger. In a simple, flesh-colored shift dress and heels, with a caramel cashmere scarf draped across her shoulders, she could have used a bit more meat on her bones. But she was still elegant and, to Harry's rheumy, old eyes, damned sexy. He'd always been a sucker for classy women. God knew he came into contact with precious few of them in this job.

Alexia sized up the overweight, middle-aged cop across the desk and reached a swift conclusion: The man wants to be flattered. In this case, she was going to catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

"Firstly, Chief Dublowski, let me say again how very grateful I am to you for making time to see me."

"Not at all." Harry Dublowski beamed. "Happy to help."

"As I mentioned on the phone, I'm here about the Jennifer Hamlin murder investigation. It's purely a personal interest."

"You knew the victim?"

Alexia said carefully, "She was a family friend."

Harry Dublowski stood up and waddled over to an old-fashioned filing cabinet in the corner of the office.

"Everything's computerized these days," he wheezed, "but I'm a sucker for hard copies. There's something about the physical feeling of paper in your hand that helps you to think, right? Or maybe that's just me."

"No, no," Alexia assured him. "I'm the same. I always insisted on paper briefing notes at the Home Office. I'm sure it drove the young staffers mad."

Dublowski handed her the file, allowing his stubby fingers to brush against hers as he passed it over. "I'm sure I don't need to tell you, Mrs. De Vere, but this is strictly off the record. We're not usually in the habit of showing information from murder investigations to the victims' friends and relatives. And nothing can leave this room."

"Of course not. As I said, I'm very grateful." Alexia was already reading. She remembered Sir Edward Manning handing her the FBI file on Billy Hamlin, after Billy first reappeared in her life. Had that really been two years ago? It felt like yesterday. And yet so much had happened since then. So many terrible things.

"You never arrested any suspects?" She looked up at Chief Dublowski, her eyes a piercing ice blue.

"No." His face darkened. "It was a frustrating case, to be perfectly honest with you."

"How so?"

"Well, as you know, the young lady was abducted and held for some period of time before her death. That usually opens up more avenues for investigation. So we were hopeful at first."

"What sort of avenues?"

"More time in which someone might have seen something-a car perhaps-or heard something. Maybe the girl screamed. Or maybe someone noticed something unusual about a certain residence or place of business. As a general rule of thumb, the more complicated a crime-if it occurs in more than one place, for example, or over a period of days-the more likely the perpetrator is to make a mistake. Clues are just mistakes by another name."

"But that didn't happen in this case?"

"No. This killer was careful. Careful and smart. And he didn't fit the normal profile either."

"Profile?"

"A homicide like this, where a young woman is targeted and killed so sadistically, we'd expect to see more crimes with the same MO. More girls washing up with similar injuries. More deaths by drowning. The start of a pattern. But it didn't happen. Thank God, in one way, right? But it left us kind of nowhere with the Hamlin investigation. Forensics drew a blank on the corpse."

"What about circumstantial evidence?"

Harry Dublowski shrugged. "The victim lived one hell of a quiet life."

Alexia nodded. She knew this was true from her own, limited research on Jennifer. The girl had led the most uneventful, inoffensive existence imaginable. She'd never even gotten a parking ticket.

"What about her father?"

Harry's eyes narrowed slightly. "What about him? You knew the dad?"

"A long time ago," Alexia said hastily. "Like I said, I'm an old family friend. The last time I saw Jennifer's father he expressed concern for her safety."

If it seemed odd to Chief Dublowski that a high-ranking British politician had been family friends with an ex-con from Queens and his murdered daughter, he didn't mention it. Instead he said matter-of-factly: "The father was an ex-con, a paranoid schizophrenic. No offense, but Jennifer's dog woulda made a more reliable witness than her old man. The guy heard voices, and yes, some of 'em were about his daughter. He wanted my men to come and check them out for him. It was sad, really."

"And did you? Check them out, I mean."

"Oh, sure. We have to take all reports of threats seriously, even if they come from crazies. But he had no evidence. Nothing whatsoever. It was all in his head. Besides, all of that was at least a year before Jenny Hamlin was killed, maybe longer. Trust me, there's no connection."

"I see. Well, thank you anyway." Pulling a silver Montblanc pen out of her Balenciaga purse, Alexia smiled sweetly. "I appreciate that the information is sensitive and I can't make copies. But I wonder, Chief Dublowski, would you mind terribly if I took a couple of notes?"

Chief Harry Dublowski hadn't been kidding when he said the police had had little to go on. The smattering of personal information they had on Jenny had almost all been gleaned from a single interview with her former roommate, a girl named Kelly Dupree.

Alexia paid Kelly a visit at work. Kelly's Nails was a hole-in-the-wall manicure place, squeezed into a sliver of a building between a convenience store and a pharmacy in a nondescript Brooklyn neighborhood. But its proprietress had made an effort to bring the place to life. There were stylish leather chairs, the gleaming white walls were newly painted, and an appetizing array of Essie nail colors were arranged in the shape of a rainbow along the back wall, giving the salon the look of an old-fashioned candy store.

"I'll be right with you!" the eponymous Kelly announced cheerfully. She lost some of her sparkle when Alexia explained that she wasn't a customer, that she was here about Jenny.

"Look, I'm working, okay? I don't have time. I already told the cops everything I know."

"I appreciate that. I'm just concerned that maybe the police gave up a little easily."

Kelly's eyes narrowed skeptically. "Uh-huh. You're concerned. Right."

"I'm not a reporter. I'm a friend of a friend."

"Listen, lady. If this is a scam and you misquote me in some salacious bullshit article, I swear to God . . ."

"It's not a scam. A few minutes of your time, that's all I need."

Kelly had to admit that the polished older lady with the British accent didn't look like a reporter.

"Okay," she said, against her better judgment. "I'll meet you in Starbucks when I'm done here. Right across the street. Say five o'clock?"

She was as good as her word. At five on the dot, Alexia ordered coffees and the two women sat down to talk.

Kelly Dupree was red-haired with pale Irish skin and a smattering of freckles across her nose that made her look younger than her twenty-eight years. She had the overplucked eyebrows of a professional beautician, and she tapped her acrylic nails loudly and nervously on the table as she spoke.

"I'm sorry if I was a little abrupt before. It was awful what happened to Jen. But a lot of the newspapers and TV people treated her death like entertainment. As if it were some sort of sick reality show, you know? It's made me wary of talking about her."

"I don't blame you," Alexia said. "I used to be a politician-I'm retired now-but I certainly understand how manipulative the media can be."

"So what is your interest in Jenny? No offense, but I'm having trouble believing you're a 'friend of a friend.' Jen didn't know too many people like you."

"I knew her father, many years ago. We lost touch. When I heard about Jennifer's death and what happened, I felt I owed it to Billy to try and find out the truth. Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seemed to me as if the police kind of let things slide."

Kelly Dupree laughed bitterly. "You're not wrong. The cops were as bad as the media. Worse in a way. For a few weeks Jen's murder was a hot story. Then everybody forgot about it and moved on to something new. They had no leads. Their so-called investigation was a joke. As soon as they realized it wasn't Luca, that was it. They gave up."

"Luca Minotti? Jenny's boyfriend?"

"Fiance. Right. Sweetest guy on earth. Luca wouldn't step on a spider if he could help it. Lucky for him he was in Italy when she went missing, otherwise the NYPD would have pinned it on him for sure. They wanted it to be Luca so bad. That's all they asked me about."

Alexia sipped her Americano. "And what about you. Do you have any theories, any thoughts as to who might have killed her?"

Kelly shook her head. "Not really. Some psycho. I mean she wasn't robbed. She wasn't raped. There was no reason for it. It was so senseless."

"Was Jenny troubled at all before her death?"

"She was cut up about her dad. You knew he was murdered too, right? In London, the year before Jenny."

"Yes," Alexia said quietly, banishing an image of Teddy from her mind. "I knew that. Were they close?"

"Oh God, yes. Very. Billy was a little odd, you know, but Jen was his only child. He adored her. She worried about him a lot."

"About his mental health, you mean?"

Kelly nodded. "Yes, that. And his loneliness. But you know, there were other things. He'd been in jail a long time ago, before Jenny was born. I never quite knew the details, but Jenny seemed convinced he was innocent of whatever it was he got sent down for. It made him paranoid. Right before he died, I remember he called the apartment and told Jenny that the British government was out to get him. That they'd drugged him and put him on a plane or some nonsense. He was really frightened."

Alexia's hand tightened on her coffee mug. Poor Billy! He came to me for help and I scared him out of his wits. And then to have nobody believe him, not even his own family. The guilt was like a stone around her neck.

Kelly Dupree went on. "Things were amicable between Jenny's parents, but her dad never fully got over the divorce. And then there was the business going down the tubes. And his best friend, his business partner, taking off and leaving Billy holding the bag."

Alexia cast her mind back to Edward Manning's file on Billy. She dimly remembered something about a business partner-was the name Bates? But she hadn't realized he and Billy had been close friends.

"Jen used to say it was like her dad was cursed. And we were all like 'no, no, that's crazy.' But it did sort of seem that way, you know?"

Alexia knew.

"The irony was, toward the end Billy became totally obsessed with Jenny's safety. Like, she was here, worrying about him, and Billy was on the other side of the world, obsessing about something happening to her. We all thought he was crazy, to be perfectly honest with you. But maybe he knew something we didn't."

" 'We all'?"

"Me. Luca. Jenny's friends. Her mom."

"So Jenny's mother didn't believe her daughter was in any danger?"

"No. None of us did. Why would she be? We thought Billy was just rambling. Maybe he was. But it does seem kind of odd that Billy gets knifed to death in London and then a year later some psycho does this to Jenny, don't you think? Like, maybe someone out there really really doesn't like that family."