It's One of Us(29)
Park manages to get through the remainder of the interview with the detectives, giving them everything he can about the donation process he’d undertaken, the names of the doctors, assuming they were still there, of course, all these years later. The names of the friends who talked him into it, the interviews he went through, every single detail he can spit out.
Now, an hour later, Osley finally stands and stretches like a cat, complete with yawn. The ballerina cuts her eyes at her partner and sets a card and a piece of notebook paper down on the table. “We’ll do what we can to keep this quiet, Mr. Bender,” she promises, and the two leave.
They will be back. He knows they will. They are on the scent; they sense a bigger story here.
Olivia, the baby, lost again. Their lives upended. The dwindling bank account, and now this.
A son who is a murderer. Twenty-eight children. Nineteen boys and nine girls.
Nineteen suspects.
That they know of.
To think this will stay quiet...there’s no way.
Park’s head spins, worse than before. Now that the news has had time to settle in his bones, in his soul, and the elation he feels at the thought—twenty-eight children!—is drowned by the knowledge that one of them is a murderer, and his child with Olivia is dead.
What hath he wrought?
He picks up the piece of paper and looks at the handwritten note. They live in Belmont. His daughter lives in Belmont. She is less than fifteen minutes away. Has he ever seen her before, at a grocery store, or a park? He and Olivia love the restaurants around 12th South. The chances that he has seen her are off the charts. Nashville is not that big of a town; even with the influx of tourists, it isn’t uncommon to run into friends everywhere you go.
His daughter.
The joy at that moniker almost outweighs the gravity of this situation. His daughter—and his son. His son, who might have killed a woman.
He wants to call the girl right now, but he must respect Olivia here. He needs to get her permission—this feels very important to him. He can’t stomach upsetting her more. As upset as he is that she bailed on him this morning, he understands.
The doorbell rings, a stab of annoyance. The cops back, forgetting something?
He opens the door to find a woman he vaguely recognizes standing on the porch.
“Hi, Mr. Bender? I’m Erica Pearl from Channel Four. I’m so sorry to come by unexpectedly, but I tried to call and couldn’t get through. Would you have a few moments to talk to me? We could go inside and chat? Off the record, if that’s more comfortable for you.”
“This isn’t a good time,” he says, wary.
“I understand this might be awkward. I know that you’ve been talking with the homicide detectives—”
“I don’t know anything about the Cooke case.”
A small smile on her perfect rosebud lips. “Would you be more comfortable talking out here?” She gestures toward the two chairs across from their porch swing.
“I don’t have anything to add.”
“Mr. Bender, I think once you hear what I have to say, you’ll want to talk to me. I know that you’re tangentially tied to the Cooke case through a DNA match. I want to give you the opportunity to tell all of us how you feel about this.”
“How do you know that?” Park feels the rage begin to bubble, and steps outside, shutting the house door behind him. “You need to leave, right now. I’m not kidding. I have no comment about this.”
“Why don’t we sit down and talk this through?”
He is tempted. Set the record straight. He knows nothing about the case, nothing about the suspect—his supposed son. Nothing has been proven, nothing.
But just as he opens his mouth, he spies the van down the street, and the flash of what looks like a camera.
“Are you taping this?”
“It’s just my photojournalist,” Pearl says, smooth as silk. “For my safety. I can signal him, and he can come—”
“Your safety? What, do you think I’m going to hurt you? That because I’m the biological father of a suspect in a murder case, I’ll suddenly attack you? That I passed on some sort of murder gene to a stranger I don’t even know?”
Shut up, shut up, shut up.
Pearl, softer now, “Of course I don’t think that. But you raise so many interesting points. I’d love to talk to you further. Get your side of the story. Let me just get my photojournalist and you can go on the record and—”
Park steps inside and slams the door in Erica Pearl’s perfectly lovely face.
In the kitchen, Park is mildly alarmed to see his hands are shaking. His mind is racing, and he shuts his eyes and takes three deep breaths to calm himself. Fix this, Bender. Fix it now.
Part of him wants to talk to the reporter, to deny knowing anything about Beverly Cooke and his son, the suspect in her murder. But he’s not stupid. He’s seen enough true crime shows—Olivia is obsessed, he can’t avoid them—to know you never talk to the media. Never. Besides, the last time he talked to a reporter, at a vigil for Melanie, he’d gotten himself in seriously hot water. Granted, he was a kid, and the situation was fraught, but he’d handled it badly. A friend brought the reporter over and introduced Park as Melanie’s boyfriend. Candle wax spilling down his hand, burning the crap out of his thumb, Park was quick to point out they’d not only broken up, but he was the one who’d dumped Melanie, and it happened well before she went missing, and that unsolicited admission brought the police straight to his door. All he needed to say was they were no longer dating, that he was devastated and hoped she was found alive and unharmed, and instead, he’d painted a target on his back as an insensitive creep.