Page 7 of Kill For Me Kill For You
Amanda recalled Jess’s eyes. They were large and intensely blue, lit by her bedside lamp and locked on every word from Luis.
‘Then, suddenly, she saw a light. Someone had lit a fire on the beach. The little girl rowed and rowed and rowed, with all her might. She battled over waves as big as mountains, and eventually she got back to her little island and there, standing on the beach by the fire, were her mother and father. The little girl never went out to sea ever again.’
‘Wow,’ said Amanda. ‘That’s a pretty scary story. You okay, Jess?’
‘I’m fine,’ said Jess. ‘Sparkles got a little scared, but I knew the girl would be okay.’
‘Goodnight, Jess. Goodnight, Sparkles,’ said Amanda, and she kissed Jess goodnight then followed Luis to the kitchen.
‘You’re a pretty good storyteller,’ said Amanda.
‘I’ve had practice,’ said Luis as he uncorked a cheap bottle of red.
‘You two are quite the artists,’ he said, and nodded towards the two canvases drying on her easel. One was Amanda’s latest work. Almost finished. An impressionist landscape of the East River. The other was by Jess. Amanda loved to paint, but more than that she loved to watch Jess paint. From a young age she loved getting her little chubby fingers into the oils, and spreading them on an old canvas, giggling with delight at the bright colors.
‘Another day or two that picture will be finished. Just a few more pieces and I’ll have enough for another showing,’ said Amanda.
She had a real talent and had even sold some pieces at her debut exhibition in a little gallery in Soho.
‘I still prefer Jess’s,’ said Luis with a smile. ‘Say, I’ll take Jess to the park in the morning. I had a meeting with a new client set up, but they pulled it last minute. It will give you time to work.’
That night stood out in Amanda’s mind because it was fun and warm and filled with love for her husband and her daughter. But she didn’t know at the time it would be the last night.
Luis had woken her with a kiss that morning. A kiss she’d had a thousand times. Luis always rose early and had an orange for breakfast. Without fail. She could smell the citrus from his hands, and it made his lips even sweeter. Luis had grown up in rural Mexico. When he was a kid, he’d picked a fresh Navelina orange off the trees on the way to school. The habit had stuck with him, even after his parents moved to Juarez. Amanda’s in-laws didn’t care for her. She wasn’t Catholic, and they had not come to the wedding. Luis was planning on taking Jess to meet them in California once his digital recruitment business calmed down in the summer.
He gave her a tray with eggs, toast and coffee, kissed her once more and said he and Jess were hitting the park and would be back later.
The last kiss.
Three hours later, her hands covered in paint, she got the call from Luis. Frantic. Only snatches of sentences were audible. He was breathing so hard he couldn’t speak.
At the lake . . . Jess ran on ahead . . . ice cream . . . saw her . . . talking to a man with dark hair . . . He took Jess’s hand . . . I ran . . . ran . . . ran . . . police . . .
The amber alert went up fast. NYPD were quick too. The detectives, Andrew Farrow and Karen Hernandez, held her hand, calmed Luis down from blind panic. Farrow did most of the talking. He was a tall, thin man. He didn’t reallyweara suit; it was more like he haunted it. Still, he had a deep voice and something in his eyes that let Amanda know he understood what she was going through. Farrow had sat in rooms like this before, with parents going through the same or worse, and told them so. Their little apartment was filled with police officers, but those detectives were the only thing that stopped Amanda from going insane. Farrow told her he would bring Jess home. He told Luis he would bring Jess home.
And he did.
Three days later.
In a little white coffin.
Jess was six years old when she was murdered. Her body was found naked, discarded in a dumpster in Queens. That was the twenty-fifth of April. The day Amanda’s life changed. When they told Amanda and Luis that they’d found their daughter, Amanda couldn’t speak. She wailed, and Luis just sat there – numb. Saying nothing. He didn’t try to comfort her. Didn’t put an arm round her. He blamed himself. He’d had his daughter in sight, then turned his back for two seconds.
Luis took his own life a week later. He’d found Amanda’s sleeping pills, left the apartment and bought a bottle of vodka. He checked into a motel, and never checked out.
They were buried together. Amanda didn’t make the funeral – she’d been admitted and sedated in Gracie Square Hospital. While she was under sedation, Luis’s parents flew in from Juarez, buried their son and granddaughter and flew home.
Three weeks later, Amanda was discharged to a program. The first of many that she quit. She had tried. Two different grief counselors, a psychologist and a psychiatrist. The drugs made her sleepy, and the talking made it all worse. Amanda didn’t think of losing her daughter and husband as a traumatic lifechange– it was her lifeending.
Her parents were both deceased, and she had no other family, so it fell on others to try to comfort her. Friends from work, fellow burgeoning artists, old school pals – they all came to see her. Some took it in shifts. But it always ended the same. They sat on her couch and tried to talk, and held her as she cried, and then fell silent.
They didn’t know what to say. They began to doubt every word, wondering if they here helping their friend or making her worse. Some came with food parcels, lasagnes and casseroles she could reheat, but never did. Amanda stopped taking their calls, for their sake. Still the food deliveries came – brown bags from Wholefoods, or fruit baskets. Amanda hated the fruit baskets. When they arrived, she threw out the oranges immediately – the smell of them made a painful hole in her chest. The only thing that did occasionally lift her spirits were letters from long-term residents of the care home – men and women Amanda had cared for, and who’d watched her rise through the ranks to manager. Those letters, in old spidery handwriting, lifted her heart – but only for a few moments. Letters were okay, because she could be alone to read them. Calls from worried friends were too hard.
Now, the only calls Amanda took were from Farrow, updating her on the investigation.
Farrow and Hernandez had found a man on security-camera footage that was taken outside the park. He had walked along Park Avenue holding a little girl’s hand just minutes after Jess went missing. From time to time, the girl would seem to struggle against the man’s grip. The cops believed the girl was Jess. Same blue shorts, white sneakers and unicorn tee. They got into a black SUV, with stolen plates, but NYPD lost track of it on security footage once it left the island and drove into Brooklyn.
The man looked like someone on their books. A man with a past. His name was Wallace Crone, thirty years old. A stockbroker for a large firm on Wall Street, who at the age of twenty-one was arrested for the sexual assault of a girl aged thirteen. He had a great attorney, paid for by his wealthy parents, and he got off with a fine and probation on a plea deal that reduced the charge to supplying alcohol to a minor. At twenty-five he’d been found in possession of indecent images of children. Another fine, more probation, but this time he had to become a registered sex offender. In any other world that meant he would lose his job – but not when his father owned the company.
