Page 86 of Stay Awake
“Stay down, Liv.” He glances back at me. “I’ll explain everything at the safe house.”
Chapter
Forty-Eight
Wednesday 7:21P.M.
Streetlights cast a warm glow as Jack Lavelle parked his car opposite the Brooklyn building where Liv Reese and Amy Decker used to live.
Lavelle and Halliday leaned back in their car seats and watched the backlit silhouettes of the couple who now lived in the apartment move across the drawn window shades like shadow puppets as they cooked dinner. Below the kitchen windows, the street door to the building was shut and still in the evening gloom.
Liv Reese had arrived at that entrance in the early hours of the morning, firmly believing she still lived there. There was a good chance she’d return again if she fell asleep and woke without any memory of what had transpired over the past two years.
“It’s as if she’s living the same day over and over again,” said Halliday. “She wakes every morning thinking her life is the way it was two years ago, before she was almost murdered.”
“I’d feel bad for her if I didn’t think she killed Ted Cole,” Lavelle commented.
“Despite what Joe Chalmers told us?”
“I thought about it on the drive over,” Lavelle said. “We’re not investigating the Decker-Reggio murders. We’re investigating the Ted Cole murder. We can’t ignore that the evidence points to Liv Reese as Cole’s killer.”
“Maybe it only looks that way because we still know so little,” Halliday said. Outside, a bearded hipster carrying a guitar case scrambled into a van that had stopped for him in the narrow car-lined street.
“It more than looks that way,” said Lavelle. “Liv Reese’s prints were found at the murder scene. TheWAKE UP!sign on the window is exactly the type of message she writes to herself, according to the British social worker who taught her to write reminders on her hands as memory aids. Let’s not forget the victim was Liv Reese’s former fiancé. And he was about to get married.”
“Not everyone murders their ex-fiancé just because they’re getting married,” said Halliday. “I didn’t kill mine. In fact, I went to his wedding, danced with him and his bride. I even gave one of the speeches. The groom was blushing more than the bride by the time I was done!”
“You’re not erratic, sleep deprived to the point of being psychotic, and your fingerprints aren’t all over a murder scene,” Lavelle pointed out.
After a tense moment of silence, he turned toward Halliday. “You don’t really think that someone else murdered Ted Cole, do you?”
“All I’m saying is this case is like an iceberg. The more we find out, the more I realize that we’re only seeing a fraction of what’s there,” she answered. “I’d like to know a heck of a lot more before I slap cuffs on anyone.”
Time dragged on. Lavelle tapped his fingers restlessly on the steering wheel as they watched Liv Reese’s old apartment building.
“It’s the waiting that kills me,” Halliday muttered, stifling a yawn.
“It comes with the job. Along with the two P’s.”
“What’s the two P’s?” Halliday asked.
“Patience and persistence.”
“It was the same when I was in the military. We’d wait for days, even weeks, for a Taliban cell to break cover. When they did, half the time another unit would get the action, or everything would be over in minutes.”
“Sounds like you miss it?”
“We all hated it while we were there. Couldn’t wait to get home. We literally counted the days. But once we were home, we all felt a loss. We missed being around each other. I guess we missed the military life as well. I even missed the damn reveille. Imagine missing being woken by a bugle at dawn each morning!” She laughed dryly.
“It must have been tough to return to civilian life.”
“Others had it worse.”
“Like your friend. The one who died?” Lavelle asked.
“Him among others. Veterans have a suicide rate more than twice that of civilians.”
“How did you get yourself on track?”
