Beach Wedding(40)

Darren’s eyes squinted as he gave me a weak smile.

“I know you?” he said.

“No. Name’s Terry Rourke. I’m a journalist. I’m writing a book about the Noah Sutton case, and I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions.”

He looked at me. I looked back at him.

I’d interviewed enough people on the job to know a few things. One of them was how to detect fear in a person’s body language.

Do they swallow or clear their throat? Do they start blinking more than normal? What’s their breathing like? Is it louder? Or even slower like they are trying to control it? Do they suddenly start sweating? Where are the hands? Do they try to hide them to prevent you from seeing them shake?

Darren’s standing expression didn’t change much, but I did notice two pretty common tells. He started blinking pretty rapidly as he placed his beer down and he also put his hands under the bar.

My question had made Darren anxious.

Good, I thought.

“You serious?” he said.

I nodded.

“Here we go again,” he said, shaking his head.

“There’s money in this, man,” I said. “I’ve got a book deal lined up and an agent hooked in to all the true-crime shows to market it, Darren. We’ve got people in Hollywood chomping at the bit.”

He squinted at me hard.

“I’ve already spoken to Jailene Mercado,” I said, leaning in as I lowered my voice. “But every new detail is money. I could cut you in on a point or maybe even two or three if you have something good.”

He swallowed as he looked down at the bar and very deliberately took a sip of his beer. In the gap between classic rock songs, you could hear the pinball machine in the back ring out the electronic bars of “Over the Rainbow.”

I could tell Darren’s brain was going a million miles a second. He definitely knew something and was considering it, weighing his options.

“They fired you a few months after the trial, Darren. What was up with that?” I asked.

That’s when it happened. Something in his eyes suddenly shut like a window.

Dammit, I thought as I saw it. I could have kicked myself. I’d pushed him. Too much too soon.

“No comment with all that stuff, friend,” he said with a laugh.

“But you were there at the house the night Noah was murdered. Don’t you care?”

“Get lost,” he said without even so much as another glance in my direction. “I’m watching the game.”



53

I’m not sure exactly when it was that me and all my brothers had first heard “Tubthumping,” Chumbawamba’s timeless ode to getting back up again.

But I do know from that second on, it had become our family anthem.

That’s why the next day at around noon after my Connecticut strikeout, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and wired on my third cup of coffee, I was on the other side of the Sound again in North Salem, New York, an upscale rural town in Westchester about thirty miles north of Manhattan.

Even following my GPS, I got lost twice before I found the right curving back road I was looking for. The address I slowed in front of two minutes later was a small and sort of 1970s-era spacey and flat modern house on a rise above the twisting unpaved road. It was probably expensive because of the moneyed location, I thought as I sat staring at it, but it definitely needed some work. The grass needed mowing and the faded yellow paint on the house was peeling in places.

The residence belonged to the second target on my interview list, a man named Jeff MacBay.

Jeff’s file said he had been the live-in tutor for Julian Sutton, Noah’s son from his first marriage. I actually remembered seeing the teenage Julian at the trial. It was hard not to. He had definitely inherited his father’s good looks and fit right in with Noah’s photogenic siblings sitting behind Hailey in the courtroom.

What was also positive was that I was able to call Jeff and con him into believing I was a journalist working on Kelsey’s true-crime book about Noah’s murder. Turned out Jeff was a big fan of Xavier Kelsey and was very receptive to speaking with me. Unlike Darren, the grump, Jeff actually sounded pumped and a little giddy about it.

Originally, we were going to meet at the Starbucks over the Connecticut state line in Ridgefield. But when I was on my way, he told me he was working from home today, and if it wouldn’t be a bother for me, I could come to his house.

“No problem at all,” I said to myself as I parked.

I sat for a moment in the car game planning. I didn’t want to blow it like I’d blown my chance with Darren Ross. I decided I needed to be as relaxed as I could so I didn’t spook him like I’d spooked Darren.

I really needed to pump Jeff for what he knew because he was one of my majorly important targets. Like Darren Ross, Jeff had actually been at the house on the night of Noah’s murder.

It was really muggy as I got out of the car. My new writerly sport coat was sticking to my back by the time I came around the rear of the house and rang the bell to Jeff’s basement office as instructed.

When the door beside the bell opened, I was surprised to see how big Jeff was. The soft voice on the phone didn’t seem to fit with the six-five kind-of-overweight headbanger whose long hair was now going to gray. The metal hair went with a turquoise medallion on a black choker-like necklace that he wore. But for all that, in his khakis and button-down blue business shirt, he seemed gentle enough. He had a composed quality about himself.