Look Closer(54)

“Do you need money, Adam?” I ask, point-blank.

“Why, you offering?” That’s just like him to deflect, to joke. “We’ll get through this,” he says. “It’ll be tight for a while. Might have to whittle down the number of breweries some more. Girls, it’s getting cold! Let’s wrap up the game!”

Macy howls in protest, as her older sister seems to be getting the better of her, and she doesn’t want to be on the losing end of the final score. She says, “Just a little longer,” which Adam probably already factored in. With these girls, everything is a negotiation, every command merely an opening bid.

And he changed the subject, I note.

He exhales a heavy sigh. “Amazing how life can turn,” he says. “One minute, you think you’ve got it all figured out, all planned and secure, and then . . .” He snaps his fingers. “And then everything you believed in, every assumption you had made—poof.”

“Yeah.”

“And we—We were just getting over Monica,” he says. “That year of torture when she left, when I tried to explain to the girls that Mommy left because of the drugs, not because of them, and then she OD’d, and any hope we had that she might come back . . .”

“I know.”

“And we’re finally crawling out from under that—y’know, two of the most brutal years of our lives—and COVID hits. My breweries tank, I have half of what I used to have and will probably lose more . . .”

I grab his arm. “They might hear you.”

He looks at the girls, who aren’t paying attention, scrambling for a loose basketball on the driveway court.

“Jesus, I’m sorry.” He chuckles. “I promise, most of the time, I’m okay. Just sometimes, especially if I’ve had a couple of these,” he says, raising his glass of wine. “Sometimes it all comes tidal-waving back.”

“You have every right to all of those feelings. You’ll be okay.”

He smiles at me. “Look forward, right?”

Exactly. Just like Monica used to say. Look forward, not back.

Well, maybe you can look back a little.





50

Jane

“I don’t know if I’m supposed to talk about this, but . . . Lauren and Conrad were getting a divorce.” Shari Rowe sits back in the chair in the interview room and awaits a reaction. She is the last of a circle of Lauren’s friends, most of whom live downtown, that Jane Burke and Andy Tate have interviewed tonight.

“We’re aware,” Jane tells her. “How did Lauren feel about that?”

“I mean, it’s not happy times, but . . .” Shari is thirty-six, divorced, a schoolteacher downtown. Glamorous and confident, one of those women with whom Jane never really felt a kinship, but traits that generally matched all five of Lauren’s band of friends. Lauren’s Facebook page is full of photos of these women out at clubs, brunching on weekends, in yoga class, chill moments on “movie nights.”

“But what?”

“Lauren was ready to move on, I’d say. It had been bad with Conrad for a while. It’s not like any of us were surprised. But an affair? She never said anything about that.”

“Would you expect that she would? That she’d tell you?”

Shari thinks about that. “People have their secrets, right? But we were pretty open with each other. We talked about every other damn thing. We had each other’s backs. I’ll say this much, if she wanted to have an affair, she’d have plenty of takers.”

“Men were drawn to her?”

“Oh, yeah, when we’d go out, sure. She started going out with us again over the last year, when things got bad with Conrad. Men would swarm around her. I mean, just look at her.” She freezes on that comment, her eyes misting, realizing that nobody will be looking at Lauren again. “You think she was having an affair, and the guy . . . killed her?”

“We’re just checking every option,” says Tate, who has clearly enjoyed these interviews with Lauren Betancourt’s attractive friends.

“I think . . .” Shari inclines her head. “I think she was looking forward to getting out there again. She said she ‘missed sex.’ I know from firsthand experience that when a marriage is breaking down, sex is the first thing to go.”

“Yeah?” Jane tries to sound disinterested. “When did Lauren say she missed sex?”

“Oh, that was the last time we were out.”

“Last Thursday, October twenty-seventh?” Apparently all six of the women made it out to a dance bar in River North last Thursday.

“Right. God, just a week ago. I still can’t . . . can’t believe she’s gone.” She shakes her head, blinking away tears.

Jane sneaks a look at Andy, whose eyebrows dance.

? ? ?

“Give me the latest,” says the chief, arching his back. It’s past nine o’clock, and it seems like nobody wants to be the first one to leave tonight, after the discovery of Lauren Betancourt’s body this morning.

“Okay, first, the phones,” says Jane.

“We tracked down the telecom provider for both Lauren’s burner and the burner she was texting,” says Andy Tate. “Same carrier, as we figured. We tried real-time CSLI for the other burner, but we couldn’t locate the phone.”