The Couple Next Door(79)

Marco looks back at his wife, her father and mother on either side of her. He cannot read her expression.

Marco thinks, She will never come home to me again. I’m all alone.

? ? ?

Rasbach is uneasy on the drive back from the Drieses’ mansion. He has a lot of unanswered questions. The most important one being this: Where is the missing baby? He seems no closer to a solution.

He thinks about Marco. The haunted look on his face. Marco was exhausted, spent. Not that Rasbach feels any particular sympathy for him. But he knows there’s more to this than meets the eye. And he wants to find out what it is.

Rasbach has been suspicious of Richard Dries almost from the start. To his mind—perhaps it’s a prejudice, stemming from Rasbach’s own working-class background—nobody makes that much money without taking advantage of somebody. It’s much easier to make money if you don’t care who you hurt. If you have scruples, it’s much harder to get rich.

As far as Rasbach’s concerned, Marco doesn’t fit the profile of a kidnapper. To Rasbach, Marco has always seemed like a desperate man thrown up against the wall. Someone who might do the wrong thing if pushed to it. Richard Dries, however, is a savvy businessman, a man of considerable wealth, which, rightly or wrongly, raises all sorts of red flags for Rasbach. Sometimes these people have a kind of arrogance that makes them think they’re above the law.

Richard Dries is a man who bears watching.

Which is why Rasbach has put a wiretap on his phones.

He knows that the kidnappers have not phoned him. Richard is lying.

He decides to also have a couple of officers quietly watch the house.





THIRTY-FIVE


In her own bedroom—she and Richard have had separate bedrooms for years now—Alice paces back and forth on the plush carpet. She has been married to Richard for a very long time. She wouldn’t have believed this of him only a couple of years ago. But now he is a man with all kinds of secrets. Horrible, unforgivable secrets, if what she’s just heard is true.

She has known for some time that Richard has been seeing another woman. It wasn’t the first time he’d cheated on her. But this time she knew it was different. She felt him slipping away from her, as if he already had one foot out the door. As if he were coming up with an exit plan. She’d never thought before that he would actually leave her; she didn’t think he had the guts.

Because he knew that if he left her, he wouldn’t get a cent. That was the beauty of the prenup. If he left her, he wouldn’t get half her fortune—he wouldn’t get anything. And he needed her money, because he didn’t have much left of his own. Like Marco’s, Richard’s business had not been doing well in recent years. He kept the unprofitable business going so people wouldn’t know that he’d failed, so he could pretend to be the big businessman. She’d been pouring her own money into the company just to help him save face. She hadn’t minded at first, because she loved him.

She doesn’t love him anymore. Not after this.

She’s known for months that this affair was more serious than the others. In the beginning she’d turned a blind eye, waiting for it to end, as the others had. After all, the physical part of their marriage had been over long ago. But as the affair continued, she became obsessed with finding out who this other woman was.

Richard was good at hiding his tracks. She couldn’t trip him up. Finally she’d overcome her distaste and hired a private detective. She’d hired the most expensive one she could find, assuming, rightly, that he would be the most discreet. They met on a Friday afternoon to go over his report. She thought she’d been prepared, but what the detective had found shocked her.

The woman her husband was seeing was that woman living next door to her daughter—Cynthia Stillwell. A woman almost half his age. A friend of his daughter’s. A woman he’d met at a party at his daughter’s house. It was disgraceful.

Alice sat in Starbucks, staring at her veined hands clutching her purse, as the high-priced private detective with the Rolex reviewed his findings. She looked at the photos—and quickly looked away. He went over the timelines—places and dates. She paid him in cash. She felt ill.

Then she went home and decided to bide her time. She would wait for Richard to tell her he was leaving her. She didn’t know what he was going to do for money, and she didn’t care. She only knew that if he asked her for any, she would say no. She’d asked the private detective to keep an eye on her bank accounts, to see if Richard was siphoning money off her. She’d decided to keep the detective on retainer. But they wouldn’t meet at the same Starbucks again; she’d find someplace more private. The whole experience had left her feeling dirty.

Then Cora had been taken that very night—the same day she’d met with the private investigator—and Richard’s sordid affair had been thrust aside by the horror of the kidnapping. Alice had feared at first that perhaps her daughter had harmed her baby, and that she and Marco might have hidden the body to keep from being discovered. Anne had that illness, after all, and she was struggling with motherhood. She was under a lot of stress, and Alice knew that stress was a trigger for someone like Anne. Then—it had been such a relief—the onesie and the note from the kidnappers had arrived.

What a roller coaster it’s been. Believing they would get Cora back that day, then losing her again. Through it all, the grief and fear for her baby granddaughter and the concern about her daughter’s fragile emotional state.