Beneath Devil's Bridge(29)

“Darsh?” I call out as we approach.

He stills, turns. Emotions scurry across his face as he realizes it’s me, the cop who found his dead cousin. He shoots a glance at Luke, and I introduce him.

“Are you here about Leena?” Darsh appears anxious. “Have you got results from the postmortem?”

“Is there somewhere we can talk out of the rain?” I ask.

He hesitates.

“How about over there?” Luke points to a picnic table under a wooden gazebo near the ferry café. I buy coffees, and we sit under the cover, listening to the rain as workers get into their vehicles and start for home. The nearby roar of the falls is loud out here.

“Do you have the cause of death?” Darsh asks.

“We don’t have the official report yet,” I say, “but Leena was drowned. I’m sorry, Darsh.”

“Drowned.” He repeats the word softly. His eyes glisten in the reflected light. “Why would someone drown my little cousin?” His features harden. “Was she sexually assaulted?”

“There is trauma consistent with sexual assault,” I say. “We’re waiting on lab results to ascertain whether there was semen present.”

His hands fist upon the picnic table. His mouth flattens. He looks away. I can see his pulse beating in his neck. His muscles are tight. He’s an image of bottled rage and pain. A powerful, passionate powder keg of a young man. His volatility is almost tangible in the damp air.

“Darsh,” Luke says, leaning forward, his arms on the picnic table, “we need to ask you some questions. Is that okay?”

“Yeah. Go ahead.”

“You were close to your younger cousin?”

He nods and looks away again, clearly struggling to compose himself. Slowly he turns back to face us. “People misunderstood Leena.”

“How so?” Luke asks.

“All she wanted was to be liked, to be respected. Maybe admired a little.”

“Leena told you that?” Luke asks.

What Darsh is saying echoes what Pratima said about her daughter. I let Luke run with the questions. It’s giving him a read on Darsh Rai.

“She never said it in so many words,” Darsh says. “But it was obvious. You could see.”

“Because she wanted brand-name shoes?”

His eyes narrow. “The Nike sneakers? The ones I bought for her? The ones you found on the bank with Leena’s bloody socks in them?” His voice gets louder. “You think I had something to do with her death? Is that what you’re getting at?”

“I’m just trying to learn more about who your younger cousin was, Darsh,” says Luke. “The more we can learn about a victim, the more we understand her movements, her thoughts, her friends—it can help us figure out what happened to her. For example, it could tell us why she was staggering along that bridge alone in the first place. And why Amy Chan didn’t tell you that she’d just seen your cousin in trouble on Devil’s Bridge when she and Jepp Sullivan ran into you at Ari’s Greek Takeout. What was it that made Leena a target that night? Who might have singled her out? Or was it a crime of opportunity that presented itself, because she was—”

“Stop!” He slams his hands down on the table. “Please. Just . . . stop.” He inhales deeply and rakes a hand through his damp, thick hair. “I’ll tell you about Leena. My cousin wanted the Nike shoes because she wanted to wear what the other girls wore. Same brands. Same styles. She thought it would help her fit in. But her parents couldn’t afford the brand-name clothes, so she had to wear the cheap stuff. She wanted to listen to the same music as the popular kids. Watch the same movies . . . On summer evenings, when the weather was nice, she would wait for me here at the ferry dock, and she’d beg me to take her for a drive in my yellow Porsche convertible—which I basically rebuilt myself. She loved that car. She’d want me to put the top down, and she’d ask me to drive us past the Dairy Queen on the main road where all the cool kids hang out on some afternoons. She’d plead with me to drive by three or four times in a row. With the music blaring, bass thumping.” His voice hitches. He rubs his jaw, struggling to compose himself.

“So I did it. Drove her up and down past the Dairy Queen, even though it was so obviously pathetic. Everyone could see what she was trying to do—I mean, who drives up and down past Dairy Queen four or five times in a row? Leena just wanted to be one hundred percent certain that the popular girls saw her with me. And that boys like Darren and Johnny and Jepp saw her in the Porsche.” He pauses. “I’m sure everyone has told you by now that Leena did stupid, stupid things, and that she had no idea how desperate it made her look. Sometimes . . . she just had trouble reading people.”

“Yet you indulged her,” Luke says. “You gave her shelter when she ran away last year. You bought her nice stuff.”

“It’s the least I could do. Her father . . . he’s very strict. And I mean very. Her mother . . . Pratima just does what Jaswinder wants. Like I said, they don’t have much money. Jaswinder drives a bus and Pratima doesn’t work.”

“And you have money?”

He makes a scoffing sound. “Would I do this job if I had money to burn? Would I go to that stinking pulp mill, breathe in those fumes, feed those logs into stripping machines day after day, if I didn’t need the income? I get some nice extra cash on the side for my hobby repairing and remodeling cars, though. I have dreams, like Leena had dreams, of getting out of here one day. We share—shared—a cultural heritage steeped in traditions that don’t always fit this place we’re in now. So it’s not easy, you know, in a town like this. Just look around you. Me? I understood Leena’s loneliness. Maybe I needed her friendship, because she understood me in the context of my background. We’re family. We stand by each other.”