Lovegame(38)
Chapter 11
She isn’t coming.
The thought circles my brain, beats in my blood, pours through me like battery acid as I glance at the clock for the tenth time in as many minutes.
Veronica isn’t coming.
It’s ten-thirty and I told her to be here at eight. Not that I thought for one second that she would actually follow my directions and show up on time. She’s way too rebellious for that. But I did think she’d show—if for no other reason than to tell me to go to hell.
Shows how little I know…
I cross to the bar in the corner, pour myself a tequila. I drain it in a couple of long swallows, then pour myself another one. If I don’t have an interview to do tonight, I might as well drink. Maybe it will distract me from how totally disgusted I am. With the situation. With the way I handled the situation. With myself in general.
I’m supposed to be good at this. I’ve interviewed serial killers, for Christ’s sake. Interviewed victims and family members, police and district attorneys, people wrongly accused and people who literally got away with murder. Very few of them actually wanted to talk to me. Nearly all of them had something to hide. And still I got inside their heads. Still I got every single one of them to talk, got every single one of them to tell me something they’d never told anyone else.
Compared to that, interviewing a Hollywood actress on her accomplishments should be a piece of cake—even with my less than forthright agenda. And yet here I am, alone and totally f*cked because I sent the woman I want to talk to more than anyone else—the woman I want more than I’ve ever wanted anyone else—running for the f*cking hills.
Shit. Just…shit.
I think about texting her, about calling her. But what am I supposed to say? I already blew my wad telling her to be here tonight. And while I’m not normally one to give up when I want answers, I’m afraid that’s exactly what I’m going to have to do here. Maybe if I hadn’t slept with her, I’d be able to pursue this. I’d be able to push.
But I did sleep with her. I did blur the lines. And now everything is so f*cked that I don’t think there’s any way to fix it. Not with the way she looked at me in her trailer today, lost and confused and vulnerable. Even when she was spitting at me, even when she was telling me to get out, she looked vulnerable.
And that is why I won’t pick up the phone and call her right now, no matter how much I want to.
The interviewer in me wants to exploit that vulnerability—wants to push a little harder until she breaks wide open and her secrets start spilling out—but that’s not what the rest of me wants from her. Not after I held her and f*cked her and felt her fall apart all around me. I may be a single-minded bastard when it comes to my work, but even I have lines I won’t cross. There is no way in hell I’ll use our sexual connection against her.
Which means I really am totally, one hundred percent screwed.
Fuck.
Fuck f*ck f*ck f*ck f*ck f*ck f*ck.
Fuck.
The word is my new mantra, and I think it about a million times as I take my drink back to my computer and pull up my files on William Vargas. There isn’t much here yet—I was counting on Veronica to help fill in some of the blanks about this one of Liam Brogan’s aliases. But if she won’t talk to me, I’m going to have to find someone else who will.
Maybe her mother? I wonder as I scroll through the pages of questions I have about this time in Brogan’s life. Melanie Romero is known to have a soft spot for the press. And a definite affection for the spotlight. She is the one who hired him, after all. Even though everything I’ve dug up points to her being a hands-off kind of parent, surely she knows quite a bit about the man she entrusted her young daughter’s safety to for nearly three years. A man who left that post rather abruptly and then, weeks later, started killing girls and young women. And not just any girls and young women—ones who all bore a striking resemblance to her daughter and whose ages all coincided with Veronica’s at the time of the murders.
Admittedly, Melanie doesn’t know any of that and neither does Veronica. No one does, outside of Mitch and me. I’m the one who discovered the Vargas alias and I’m the one who has put the pieces together since. It’s precisely because I do have those pieces that I’m unwilling to push Veronica any farther than I already have.
Not when my suspicions all point to her being Liam Brogan’s first victim.
Just the thought makes me furious, another clue that blurring the lines with sex has shot my objectivity straight to hell. I take another swallow of tequila to dull the rage, then pull up the photos of Alicia Corning, the first documented victim in Brogan’s sixteen-year-long murder spree. She was twelve when she was taken from her solid middle-class neighborhood in Mesa, Arizona. A sixth grader at a local middle school, she’d disappeared when walking home one warm November day—three weeks after Brogan lost his position as bodyguard and nanny for Veronica Romero and shed the identity of William Vargas once and for all.
She was a pretty girl, with golden blond hair and bright, blue eyes. She had clear, porcelain skin, a happy smile and a small smattering of freckles on her nose. She was also—for all intents and purposes—close enough in size and build to Veronica at that time to pass for her from behind.
I look at the pictures provided to the FBI by Alicia’s family for long seconds, then flip to a second file that contains hundreds of public photographs of Veronica through the years. Not for the first time, I pick out one from when she was eleven or twelve and place it up against one of the before pictures of Alicia Corning. The resemblance isn’t perfect but it isn’t just superficial, either, especially when you consider the rest of Vargas’s fifty-four victims.