Beach Wedding(53)

“Oh, it’s you,” Brody said over the departing pizza guy’s shoulder as I leapt up the flower-filled stairs.

“I need to speak to you, Mr. Brody.”

He reluctantly let me in.

“What do you want?” he said as he left the takeout on the shelf with the devil mask on it.

He had on a pair of beautiful camel-colored shorts and a black silk shirt that was open to the waist, showing off his insanely defined Wolverine-like physique. There was a spot of shaving cream on his chin. He was tanner than when I’d seen him almost two weeks ago.

He was getting ready to go out.

“You left something out,” I said angrily. “Our agreement was for all of Kelsey’s research. I didn’t get all of it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The audiotapes. Kelsey recorded his interviews. I need them.”

“My, aren’t we pushy now,” he said, giving me an arrogant look.

“The deal was for all of Kelsey’s materials. I want all of them. Now,” I said, staring at him.

“And if I tell you to get lost?”

I got almost nose to nose with Brody and stared at him hard.

I was beyond emotionally wrecked at the news about my dad’s potential murder and really ready to hurt someone at that point. He was a muscular son of a bitch, but I’d about had it. I wondered if it would actually come to blows here in his front hall.

“Fine,” he said, glaring at me. “It’s probably downstairs with the other crap. You’re the one who didn’t get all of it. Not me. So, don’t get all pissy now,” Brody said.

“I need the key to the locker,” I said, staring a hole through the back of his skull.

He opened a drawer in a front hall mail table and handed it to me.

“Get whatever the hell it is and get out of here. I never want to see you again. Leave me the hell alone, you got me?”

“With pleasure,” I said, turning as I headed downstairs into the hot, dark basement.



72

The tape recorder was an old Sony.

Probably state of the art in its day, I thought as I lifted the brick-sized device from Xavier Kelsey’s old card table desk back at the beach house in Southampton. It seemed heavy enough to bash in somebody’s skull.

It had taken me over an hour to find it in Xavier Kelsey’s basement in a shoebox along with dozens of interview tapes.

But the important thing was that I had found it, and I was back now.

Back down under the creepy old steps past the creepy old black-and-white photos where it had all begun.

The sixty-minute microcassettes in the shoebox were Sony, as well. On the table before me was a stack of them with names written in black Sharpie.

The one I’d just inserted into the recorder said Sonya Serrano on it in Kelsey’s beautiful handwriting.

I’d already looked her up and discovered on LinkedIn that she was currently a lieutenant in the Nassau County PD.

How that was significant, I didn’t know.

I hit Play.

But I was about to find out.

“So,” the voice of Xavier Kelsey said in the silence. “Let’s talk.”

“This can’t get back to me. This is just off the record,” a woman said.

“Come on now, Sonya,” I heard Xavier Kelsey say. “You called me. Tell me, why are we here?”

The hair on the back of my neck stood up as I heard Kelsey’s famous charming Southern lilt for the first time here in his creepy basement studio.

I stared at the slowly turning tape reel through the recorder’s plastic window.

A voice from the grave, I thought.

“Like you don’t know why?” Sonya said. “I already told you on the phone. Now you want me to repeat myself? If I didn’t know you better, Xavier, I’d say you were wearing a wire.”

You could hear restaurant sounds in the background, the clack of plates and the murmur of people talking, as Kelsey cracked up at that one.

“A wire? Of course I am, darling. If you could speak a little more loudly right here next to my cane? You don’t want to talk, that’s fine by me. Only we’ll have to split the check then,” Kelsey said.

“Fine. Okay,” Sonya said. “When I worked at the Southampton Village police department, like a lot of small departments, it had a pass-back locker system.”

I clicked the tape recorder off and sat up. I rewound the tape and played it again.

“The Southampton Village police department,” Sonya Serrano said again.

I was thinking of maybe slapping myself to make sure I hadn’t perhaps fallen asleep and was now dreaming.

Because they were talking about the evidence, I realized.

The damning evidence that had been stolen at the beginning of Hailey Sutton’s trial.



73

I fumbled and almost dropped the recorder as I let it run.

“A pass-back what? What does that mean?” Kelsey said.

“It means they had an evidence room that was open to the entire department but had wall lockers that could be accessed by only two people, the assignment officer and the assignment evidence tech,” Sonya said.

“On the second night of the trial, there was a power outage at the station that forced the civilian desk clerk to exit the premises for several hours. In the morning, the lock on the back door of the department was missing, and they found that several of the lockers had been broken into. Some drugs were taken and a few guns and other items, including the forensic evidence from Hailey Sutton’s trial. Both the plastic bag containing the hoodie and a small envelope containing the bullets were taken.”