Two Days Gone (Ryan DeMarco Mystery #1)(35)

DeMarco said, “What about Conescu?”

Briessen looked up at him. “He’s a first-class weasel but…a murderer? Honestly, I don’t think he’s got the balls for it.”

“How about Denton?”

“Dr. Denton?”

“I sensed a lot of professional jealousy there.”

“Well, yeah, but…who wouldn’t be jealous of Tom? He was…perfection.”

And now DeMarco understood. Softly he said, “Did he know how you felt about him?”

A tiny movement flitted at the corner of Briessen’s eye, a twitch, a wince. Then he shrugged. “It was never expressed, never talked about. But I’m sure he knew.”

DeMarco waited for the rest of it.

“The thing about Tom is, right from the start, he treated me like an equal. I mean I might never publish a single word. But he respected my…intent, you know? He respected the dream. More than anything else, that’s what made him so special to me.”

DeMarco allowed half a minute to pass in silence. “You have any idea where he might be, Nathan?”

“I wish like hell I did. Imagine what he must be going through right now.”

“I’ve been doing my best to imagine just that. Where would he go? What would he do?”

“I think he’s looking for the killer.”

“You do.”

“Wouldn’t you, if you were him? I know I would. Hell, I’d be helping him right now if I could.”

“Do you think he knows who did it?”

“I’ve thought about this a lot. And I can’t imagine that he does know. I mean…have you found any other bodies yet?”

“So you do believe he’s capable of violence.”

“Under the right circumstances? Aren’t we all? I mean, could Tom ever hurt his family? Never. Never. Could he waste somebody who did hurt his family? Could you?”

DeMarco chewed on his lower lip, looked at his hands. He still sometimes fantasized about torturing the man who had run the red light and plowed his pickup truck into the side of DeMarco’s car. The man had spent seven months in prison for vehicular manslaughter, but seven years would not have satisfied DeMarco. Not even seven times seven years. Not seven score and ten.

DeMarco felt the stiffness in his jaw, felt his molars grinding. He brought himself back to the apartment, away from the impossible. “So you’ve had no contact with him whatsoever.”

“Not a word. I keep hoping though.”

DeMarco nodded. “As for your whereabouts last Saturday night?”

The young man sat motionless for a while. Finally he said, “A club in Erie. The Zone.”

“And after closing?”

Briessen blew out a slow breath. “Alex Ferris. He’s a student here. Just tread lightly, okay? His parents are…unaware. Un…enlightened.”

Christ, DeMarco told himself. So much fucking tragedy in this world. So much fucking pain.

“Who’s Annabel?” he asked.

“Annabel…?”

“From Professor Huston’s email to you. He said he was going to visit Annabel and invited you to go along.”

“Ah,” Briessen said. “A woman he was using as his model for Annabel. From the novel he’s working on. Was working on.”

“She’s a character in his new novel?”

“Right. The Lolita character.”

“You’re losing me here. Annabel is a character based on the Lolita character?”

“His new novel, the one he was calling D. It’s a contemporary take on Nabokov’s novel Lolita. Tom was calling his character Annabel. The woman he invited me to meet was, I think, the physical model for that character, who, yes, is modeled after Nabokov’s character Lolita.”

“And you met this woman? Professor Huston’s Annabel?”

“I wanted to. In fact I had planned to until late that afternoon.”

“And?”

“A friend of mine called from the road. He was headed north, thought he might swing by if I had the time.”

“Which you did.”

“I mean, I wanted to go with Tom. I hated to turn him down. But at the same time I didn’t want to go with Tom.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Strip clubs, you know? They’re just not my thing.”

“He was meeting Annabel at a strip club?”

“His Lolita character, his Annabel, works at a strip club. In his novel. So that’s where he was doing his research.”

“You’re going to have to bear with me here because I’ve never read Lolita. But what you’re saying is that Annabel is the name he gave to a character he was modeling after a character named Lolita in the novel Lolita?”

Briessen smiled. “No. Lolita is a nickname for a character in Nabokov’s novel Lolita. She’s a young girl, what Nabokov called a nymphet. Not a child but not yet a woman. And the narrator of that novel, Humbert Humbert, is a literature scholar who has an unhealthy obsession with nymphets. He traces that obsession back to his very first intimate encounter, when he was still a boy, with a twelve-year-old girl named Annabel, who died of typhus. Tom took that same name as the name of his Lolita character. He also intended for his Annabel to have some association with Poe’s Annabel Lee, from the poem of the same name, just as Nabokov’s Annabel did.”