Into the Fire(42)

“Moving on?” Max raised his head, the amber light catching half of his face, the other lost in eclipse. “When you love someone like that? You never move on. They get into your cells. They live inside you even when they’re not living with you.” He lowered his gaze again. “This whole mess with Grant, it took me right out of life. But that gives me a better view of it, you know? My life. Like I’m outside looking down at it. And I guess my fear is…” His lips bunched. “My fear is that maybe Grant was right.”

“If you don’t like what you see,” Evan said, “change it.”

Max’s laugh died quickly in the small room. “I wish it was that easy.”

“It is. It’s everything else that’s complicated.”

Max didn’t seem to like the sound of that.

“Maybe this will give you a chance to do something different.” Evan noticed that his enunciation was loose, slightly slurred from the concussion, and that once again he was talking to himself as much as to Max.

Max went back to picking at the take-out container. He did not look convinced.

Evan fought to speak more clearly: “You know the two best words in the English language?”

Max shook his head.

“‘Next time.’”

Max blew out a breath. He leaned on the counter, his elbow trembling.

Evan picked up Max’s disposable phone from the counter, dropped it down the disposal, and let it run until the pieces rattled vigorously. Then he took a fresh phone from the duffel bag, peeled it out of the packaging, and tossed it to Max.

“Just to be safe,” Evan said. “Use this now. Same rules. I’ll have 1-855-2-NOWHERE up and running again as soon as I get home. I’ll be in touch.”

“When?”

“When I take care of the second thing.”

Max chewed at the edge of a thumb, his shoulders curled inward. Wrecked with worry. “What should I do in the meantime?”

“In the meantime?” Evan considered for a moment. “Figure out what you want to do with your life when we get it back for you.”



* * *



Detectives Nu?ez and Brust sat on the overstuffed couches in the front room of the Beverly Hills house, sipping black coffee out of bone-china teacups. Grant Merriweather’s widow sat opposite them, a frail woman with an expensive haircut and toned rich-wife muscles.

“So Max Merriweather stopped by here on Monday,” Nu?ez said. “What did he want?”

“I don’t know.” Jill shook her head, her layered chestnut locks swaying. “He’d heard that Grant was killed. He said he wanted to offer his condolences, but it seemed like he was nosing around.”

“For what?”

She raised her head with a kind of affected dignity, the lines of her neck pronounced. “To see if Grant had left him anything.”

The detectives looked at each other.

“Like what?” Brust asked.

“In the will, I assumed. Money. Something. Max was always…” She reached over to adjust a willow branch rising from a massive vase. It scratched against the crystal. “He was always the family disappointment.”

Brust frowned. “Have you noticed any unusual people hanging around who might be dangerous? Was anyone with Max when you saw him?”

“We’ve covered all this already,” Jill said. “And besides, why all the interest now? Why not when Grant was scared for his life?”

“I’m sorry your husband wasn’t protected from this, Mrs. Merriweather,” Nu?ez said. “He was a courageous man who was working on some high-stakes cases, cases other people might not have had the balls—if you’ll excuse my language—to take on. We’re worried he struck a hornet’s nest. And we’re doing our best to make sure no one else gets hurt.”

“Like who?” She snorted. “Like Max?”

“Yes.”

“You think the people who killed Grant would want to kill Max?” Jill said. “Why? Grant was important. Prominent people make enemies. No. No. The only overlap between Max and Grant would be if Max implicated my husband in some dirty business. In which case—”

She caught herself. Resumed adjusting the willow branch.

“You’re saying you think we need to look at Max Merriweather as a suspect in this investigation?” Brust finally asked.

Jill’s face contorted with grief briefly before it hardened back into an angry mask. She glowered at the detectives.

“I’m not going to tell you how to do your job,” she said.





23



The Snack Docent





By the time the elevator opened on the twenty-first floor, Evan was dead on his feet. More precisely—he was dead on one sock and one boot.

He trudged down the hall, squinting against the painful light of the wall sconces, eager for the silent embrace of his penthouse.

He looked up to see Mia, Peter, and Lorilee standing at his front door, waiting expectantly. Peter jabbed the doorbell, and Mia hooked him back against her legs and said, “That’s enough.”

Evan walked up behind them. Cleared his throat.

They swung to face him. “Oh, thank God,” Lorilee said. “Just in time.”