After Image, page 10
Which isn’t much. A few neighbors pass by on their way to the elevator. Abby. Mrs. Singh. No one stops or even turns their head in the direction of my apartment door. It’s tempting to keep sitting here and watching, convincing myself that any minute, the person who left the key chain will show up. But that’s ridiculous. The camera will send an alert to my phone if it detects activity, and I can play back the video then. There’s no point in sitting here, glued to my phone.
I stuff the directions for the doorbell camera back into the box and walk to the hall closet to stash it there. When I slide the box onto the top shelf, my fingers graze against another, larger cardboard box, with the word Photography scrawled across the side in my mother’s handwriting. Mom was the one who helped me pack up the college apartment Allie and I shared, after I decided to move out.
Gently, I pull the box off the shelf and carry it into my bedroom. Then I set it down on the bed and pry back the flaps. A familiar, dusty smell wafts out, and I have a sudden flash of our college apartment’s warped hardwood floors and chintzy pink bathroom tiles. My first home away from home. On some nights, Greg came over to cook and Allie blasted music on the stereo, and the three of us would dance around the kitchen, the wine and the music smoothing out the tension between Greg and me. At those times, we almost felt like our own little family. Dysfunctional, sure, but a family nonetheless.
Methodically, I begin sifting through the contents of the box. I haven’t touched any of this stuff since Allie’s disappearance. At the top of the box are two SLRs—a newer Nikon and a vintage Olympus—as well as a Polaroid that Allie gave me for my twentieth birthday. Underneath those, I find plastic sleeves of negatives and stacks of prints, which have begun to warp and stick together.
Tucked up against one side of the box is an eight-by-ten manila envelope with PL STUDIOS stamped on the front. I know what’s inside it, but I can’t bring myself to look at those, not today. Setting the envelope to one side, I start sorting through the loose prints, wincing at the ones that rip slightly as I peel them apart.
They’re mostly shots I took at LACSA. Many are of Allie, my most convenient model, my most willing subject. In some, she poses theatrically, playing to the camera. But in others, I’ve caught her unawares, staring out a window or absorbed in her sewing. In those moments, she looks so different from the camera-ready Allie that it’s jarring. Her expression is preoccupied, her forehead furrowed as if she’s worried about something just outside the camera’s frame. I examine one image of her sitting in the armchair by the living room window. She’s not wearing any makeup, and her face looks drawn, solemn.
I remember Detective Golanski asking me, in what must have been our third interview, “Had Allie been depressed recently?”
I’d shifted in my chair. “No,” I said. “She’s been doing really great. She hasn’t been drinking. She’s started going to her classes. She’s even doing well in some of them.”
Golanski frowned. “Yes, I see she got an A. In Professor Macnamara’s class.”
I flushed. “She earned it,” I said, hearing the defensiveness in my voice. “She worked really hard in that class.”
The detectives didn’t understand. Allie had vowed to turn her life around a million times before. I knew, better than anyone, how empty those promises could turn out to be. But this time felt different. This time, she hadn’t made any big announcement; she hadn’t started some fad diet that consisted primarily of eating kale. I hadn’t even noticed she wasn’t drinking anymore until one night, at a party at Greg’s, I reached over and took a sip of her drink. What I’d thought was her usual G&T turned out to be sparkling water with lime.
“She was doing really well,” I insisted, my voice cracking on the last word.
Ruiz looked up from the folder he’d been leafing through. “But just a few months before that, she’d been in a pretty bad place, hadn’t she? Failing her classes, partying hard.”
“Well . . . yes.” September had been a shit show—Allie and Greg had gone to Luxe constantly that month. They’d disappear into the bathroom together, and when they came out, Allie would be floating on air, her pupils dilated. Don’t leave, Tash. We have to dance! “But that was months ago.”
Fluorescent light reflected off Golanski’s bald head. “Look, here’s what I see. Allie had a bad year last year. She was on academic probation. Those TMZ photos caused quite a stir, and after that, her parents cut off her allowance and took away her car. Then, the week she goes missing, she has a fight with her best friend.”
He meant Greg.
“Plus, her boyfriend—this Macnamara guy—breaks up with her. Finally, she leaves her phone and belongings behind and disappears.” He looked at me, waiting for me to put the pieces together.
“It wasn’t a good time for her,” I said stubbornly. “I know that.”
He sighed. “Look, given her history, Ms. Rossi, we do have to consider the strong possibility of suicide.”
My stomach felt hollow. “‘Given her history’?”
Ruiz found a piece of paper in his folder and slid it across the table to me. Some kind of hospital form. My eyes ran over the paper, taking in names, dates, signatures. Seabrook. Emergency Admittance.
“It isn’t what you think,” I said.
“How’s that, exactly?” Golanski asked.
“Isabel told me . . . ,” I said, but my words trailed off.
“Told you what?” Ruiz asked.
“She said it was a stunt,” I said softly. “A way for Allie to get attention.” In my head, that was how I’d filed Isabel’s story away. More of Allie’s dramatics. Now, though, I wondered why—how—I’d allowed myself to dismiss the event so casually.
My eyes strayed to the doctor’s notes at the bottom of the page. Continued suicidal ideation. Keep under observation. The staff at the hospital hadn’t thought the overdose was a stunt. They’d thought it was serious enough that they needed to stop her from trying again.
I closed my eyes, small details from our teenage years clicking into place in my head. Giles’s need to keep tabs on Allie’s movements at all times. My mother’s unfailing gentleness with Allie, as if she were some kind of injured animal. All the times Allie had to go see the school counselor for no apparent reason.
They’d known. They’d all known about the suicide attempt, recognized it was serious, worried that it could happen again. But nobody had told me.
Now, in my bedroom, I spread the photographs out around me on the bed, seeing Allie in all her different modes: dramatic, silly, pissed off, sad. Was Golanski right? Suicide is the narrative that accounts for nearly all of Allie’s actions the week she went missing. But still, I can’t quite believe it. Not Allie. Not at that specific time.
I walk into the living room, where I find my laptop and sit down on the couch before pulling up the Barclay’s footage that I have saved in a folder. Whenever I start to feel wobbly about the suicide theory, I play this video again. To reassure myself.
In the footage from the doughnut shop, Allie sits at the far table near the window, her fingers tapping against her coffee cup. She looks relaxed, but there’s an underlying tension running through her that I recognize. This is the same look she used to have when we were at a party, whenever a guy she was interested in had arrived, but she was pretending not to notice him. She’d be laughing and talking as if everything was normal, but I could feel the change in her, a kind of electric energy coming off her body.
It’s that intensity I see in the Barclay’s video. The set of her shoulders, the look on her face. That’s how I know. In this video, Allie isn’t despairing. She isn’t contemplating the end of her life.
She’s waiting for something to happen.
CHAPTER 19
On my lunch break at work, I check my phone messages. It’s been only a few days since I gave Ruiz the key chain: too soon, I know, for him to have found out anything. Still, I can’t stop myself from texting him: Any news?
Two hours later, I get a response.
Can you meet at Gina’s? 5:30?
Gina’s is the diner where we used to go to talk about the case. I feel a prickle of surprise on the back of my neck. I’d been expecting him to advise me to be patient, to not expect instant results.
Sure, I type back. What could he have found out so quickly? Or does he simply want to meet to talk? I spend the rest of the afternoon jittery and distracted, and my boss has to remind me twice to locate the file he requested.
At the end of the workday, I grab my coat and bag and rush out the door. The subway ride to Gina’s feels painfully slow, and I jog the short walk from the station to the diner.
Gina’s is a tiny little place with orange vinyl booths and waitresses dressed in old-fashioned uniforms. It’s the kind of spot with regulars, people who’ve been coming here for decades and have a preferred stool at the counter. The air smells of fryer grease and reverberates with a constant, low clamor.
I arrive before Ruiz and slide into the nearest empty booth as I wait for him to show. A TV mounted on the wall is tuned to a news station, and I see flashes of some celebrity news show—the latest Hollywood divorce, an actress’s botched plastic surgery.
The waitress, an older woman with a limp, approaches and hands me a big plastic menu. Then she squints at me through her glasses. “Hey, I know you,” she says. “Didn’t you used to come in here with Adam?”
It takes a split second for me to remember that Adam is Ruiz’s first name. “Um, yeah.” This is the waitress who used to top up our coffees back then.
“Yeah, you’ve done something different with your hair,” she says. “But I never forget a face.” For a moment, she studies me, and I’m afraid she’s about to connect me with the Allie Andersen investigation. But then she’s distracted by Ruiz’s arrival. “Well, hello, stranger,” she says to him.
“Hey, Diane.” He gives her shoulder a quick squeeze before sitting down in the booth across from me.
“Pecan pie?” Diane asks him.
He nods and tells her to add a decaf coffee. He’s dressed more formally today. Suit and tie. As he settles into the booth, he loosens the top button at his neck.
When Diane turns to me, I say, “Just tea, please.”
As she walks away, Ruiz blows on his hands, which have reddened from the cold.
“What is it?” I ask, too anxious to begin with niceties. “What have you found out?”
He shifts the napkin and utensils in front of him on the table. “So, the lab techs say there’s no way we can pull fingerprints off the key chain—the surface is too uneven.”
I close my eyes. Another dead end.
“But we’ve done some research, and that brand of flash drive—they only manufactured that particular design in 2012. It was a short run, so that style is actually pretty rare.”
My eyelids fly open. “So it could really be hers.”
“It could be,” he says cautiously.
We both fall silent as Diane returns with our order, sliding mugs and a slice of pie onto the table.
After she moves away, Ruiz shrugs off his coat and resumes: “But the ink, where Allie’s name is written—the lab says that’s fresh. So whoever wrote that did it recently.”
I straighten in my seat, picturing Allie leaning over the flash drive, painstakingly etching the letters into the plastic. “So what do you think that means?”
Ruiz cuts into his pie with the edge of his fork. “Well. The key chain could still be someone trying to mess with you. If someone was really familiar with that key chain style, it’s not impossible they could’ve gotten a matching one on eBay. Or . . .”
“What?”
He takes a bite of the pie, chews. “Or it’s genuine. And someone’s trying to point us toward some information.”
I think of Allie typing on her computer late at night, slapping the laptop closed before I could see what was on the screen. “What kind of information?”
Ruiz shakes his head. “I don’t know. But it does suggest there’s some significance to her laptop being drenched in water like it was. Maybe someone didn’t want us to see what was on it.”
Someone opens the diner door, letting a gust of cold air blow into the room, and I shiver. That’s not right, I want to tell him. But I know his theory feels plausible. Was Allie killed for whatever was on her laptop, or her flash drive?
“Of course, the laptop damage could’ve been accidental,” he says. “But it also could’ve been someone destroying evidence, getting rid of files they didn’t want anyone else to see.”
Something sour rises up in the back of my throat. “Maybe.” I pause. “Files . . . like what?”
He shrugs. “My best guess? Something to do with Greg. With the drugs.”
I frown, picking at the edges of my paper napkin. “But why would Allie keep anything like that on her computer? She took pills; she didn’t sell them.”
Ruiz rolls up his sleeves, and I glimpse the edge of the tattoo on his right forearm. A twining vine, underneath which is written: Carmen, 8-11-99. “Look,” he says, “in those last few months, Allie didn’t have access to money, right? Her parents had cut her off. But during the investigation, what we noticed is—that didn’t seem to stop her from spending. She was still going shopping, still going to fancy restaurants, no change in her habits at all.”
“Well, yeah,” I say. “She was borrowing cash from Greg.” Greg had a trust fund too. What did he care if Allie spent some of that money?
“That’s the thing,” Ruiz says. “Greg told us he’d been loaning Allie money for weeks that fall, but then suddenly she stopped asking. But she still had money on hand. He wanted her to tell him where it was coming from.” He takes another bite of his pie. After a moment, he says, “That’s why they argued, the night she disappeared.”
“Oh.” I feel like I’ve been hit in the chest. “You never told me that.” I always thought the fight had been just some typical spat between the two of them—Greg bristling at some perceived slight, Allie flying off the handle.
Ruiz looks discomfited, as if he’s regretting telling me about it. “It was something Greg said when we interviewed him. You know I can’t share every detail of the case.”
Yes. I know that. But somehow I’ve convinced myself, over the years, that Ruiz made exceptions when it came to me.
There’s an awkward pause before he continues. “Anyway, Greg wanted to know where she was getting her money,” he says. “And she wouldn’t say. He had some idea that she was going behind his back, poaching his clients.”
I laugh. “You can’t be serious. You think Allie was selling drugs?”
Ruiz doesn’t smile. “Greg thought she was.”
“I mean, how would she even do that? If she wanted to sell drugs, she’d need a supplier.”
He hesitates, then takes a sip of his coffee. Finally, he says, “Greg thought she’d found one.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Jairo Ocampo,” he says.
A face flickers in my memory. At one of Greg’s parties: a stocky Hispanic guy with a shaved head lingering in a doorway. “Jairo?”
“You knew him?”
“I mean, I didn’t know him. I saw him around, at parties. He wasn’t a dealer. He bought from Greg. He didn’t sell.”
Ruiz rubs a hand across his face. “Yeah, that’s what we heard too. Greg was adamant, though—he thought Jairo and Allie had teamed up and had gone into business together.”
“That’s crazy,” I say.
But even as I say it, I’m remembering.
CHAPTER 20
April 2012
Allie and I stood on the balcony at Greg’s apartment, next to a tabletop crowded with liquor bottles. It was some kind of theater after-party—a few people were still in costume, and the energy was high. Tequila shots had been taken. Everyone there was from LACSA—at first. Then, around one a.m., strangers started trickling in off the street. That was when I saw a group of Hispanic guys moving through the crowd. They were looking around the room, sizing up the people dancing to the pounding music. Eventually the guys gravitated toward the table on the balcony, where they started sorting through the liquor bottles and pouring themselves drinks.
Greg was nowhere to be seen, but I could hear his voice from somewhere inside, shouting at someone to change the music. The Hispanic guys were laughing and talking to each other in Spanish. Every once in a while, they’d point at someone and laugh.
The shortest one among them was also the loudest. He had a wide smile and a laugh that sounded like a machine gun. When he caught sight of Allie, who was wearing a dress that barely covered her ass, he sized her up from head to toe and then turned to his friends and made a comment under his breath.
Allie’s back was to him, but suddenly she spun around and took a step in his direction, her nose level with his nose. “Say that again.”
He grinned. “Hey, girlie. I’ll say it to you all night long if you want.”
Allie swayed a little on her feet. She’d been drinking steadily all night, and she was a little worse for wear. All of a sudden, she let loose a volley of Spanish. I couldn’t make out what she was saying, but by the guy’s reaction, I knew it wasn’t complimentary.
I tugged at her elbow. This guy didn’t look like the kind of person you wanted to mess with. But Allie didn’t stop. She got more and more in his face, and as she did, his scowl deepened and his friends tightened their circle around him.
Finally, Allie ran out of breath, and the guy stared her down, his eyes narrow and fierce.
“Jairo,” one of his friends said. “You gonna let her talk to you like that?”
There was a long pause; then Jairo burst out laughing. “What the fuck, man!” He turned to his friends. “I mean, what in the actual fuck? You hear that filthy mouth?” He turned and grabbed Allie by the shoulder, giving her a friendly squeeze. “Damn, chica. You sure as shit didn’t learn that in Spanish 101.”
For a moment, Allie looked furious, still hungry for a fight, and I worried she was going to hit him. Then Jairo leaned over and murmured something in her ear. Whatever he said made her start to laugh. “Oh, fuck off,” she said, giving him a friendly punch in the chest.
I stuff the directions for the doorbell camera back into the box and walk to the hall closet to stash it there. When I slide the box onto the top shelf, my fingers graze against another, larger cardboard box, with the word Photography scrawled across the side in my mother’s handwriting. Mom was the one who helped me pack up the college apartment Allie and I shared, after I decided to move out.
Gently, I pull the box off the shelf and carry it into my bedroom. Then I set it down on the bed and pry back the flaps. A familiar, dusty smell wafts out, and I have a sudden flash of our college apartment’s warped hardwood floors and chintzy pink bathroom tiles. My first home away from home. On some nights, Greg came over to cook and Allie blasted music on the stereo, and the three of us would dance around the kitchen, the wine and the music smoothing out the tension between Greg and me. At those times, we almost felt like our own little family. Dysfunctional, sure, but a family nonetheless.
Methodically, I begin sifting through the contents of the box. I haven’t touched any of this stuff since Allie’s disappearance. At the top of the box are two SLRs—a newer Nikon and a vintage Olympus—as well as a Polaroid that Allie gave me for my twentieth birthday. Underneath those, I find plastic sleeves of negatives and stacks of prints, which have begun to warp and stick together.
Tucked up against one side of the box is an eight-by-ten manila envelope with PL STUDIOS stamped on the front. I know what’s inside it, but I can’t bring myself to look at those, not today. Setting the envelope to one side, I start sorting through the loose prints, wincing at the ones that rip slightly as I peel them apart.
They’re mostly shots I took at LACSA. Many are of Allie, my most convenient model, my most willing subject. In some, she poses theatrically, playing to the camera. But in others, I’ve caught her unawares, staring out a window or absorbed in her sewing. In those moments, she looks so different from the camera-ready Allie that it’s jarring. Her expression is preoccupied, her forehead furrowed as if she’s worried about something just outside the camera’s frame. I examine one image of her sitting in the armchair by the living room window. She’s not wearing any makeup, and her face looks drawn, solemn.
I remember Detective Golanski asking me, in what must have been our third interview, “Had Allie been depressed recently?”
I’d shifted in my chair. “No,” I said. “She’s been doing really great. She hasn’t been drinking. She’s started going to her classes. She’s even doing well in some of them.”
Golanski frowned. “Yes, I see she got an A. In Professor Macnamara’s class.”
I flushed. “She earned it,” I said, hearing the defensiveness in my voice. “She worked really hard in that class.”
The detectives didn’t understand. Allie had vowed to turn her life around a million times before. I knew, better than anyone, how empty those promises could turn out to be. But this time felt different. This time, she hadn’t made any big announcement; she hadn’t started some fad diet that consisted primarily of eating kale. I hadn’t even noticed she wasn’t drinking anymore until one night, at a party at Greg’s, I reached over and took a sip of her drink. What I’d thought was her usual G&T turned out to be sparkling water with lime.
“She was doing really well,” I insisted, my voice cracking on the last word.
Ruiz looked up from the folder he’d been leafing through. “But just a few months before that, she’d been in a pretty bad place, hadn’t she? Failing her classes, partying hard.”
“Well . . . yes.” September had been a shit show—Allie and Greg had gone to Luxe constantly that month. They’d disappear into the bathroom together, and when they came out, Allie would be floating on air, her pupils dilated. Don’t leave, Tash. We have to dance! “But that was months ago.”
Fluorescent light reflected off Golanski’s bald head. “Look, here’s what I see. Allie had a bad year last year. She was on academic probation. Those TMZ photos caused quite a stir, and after that, her parents cut off her allowance and took away her car. Then, the week she goes missing, she has a fight with her best friend.”
He meant Greg.
“Plus, her boyfriend—this Macnamara guy—breaks up with her. Finally, she leaves her phone and belongings behind and disappears.” He looked at me, waiting for me to put the pieces together.
“It wasn’t a good time for her,” I said stubbornly. “I know that.”
He sighed. “Look, given her history, Ms. Rossi, we do have to consider the strong possibility of suicide.”
My stomach felt hollow. “‘Given her history’?”
Ruiz found a piece of paper in his folder and slid it across the table to me. Some kind of hospital form. My eyes ran over the paper, taking in names, dates, signatures. Seabrook. Emergency Admittance.
“It isn’t what you think,” I said.
“How’s that, exactly?” Golanski asked.
“Isabel told me . . . ,” I said, but my words trailed off.
“Told you what?” Ruiz asked.
“She said it was a stunt,” I said softly. “A way for Allie to get attention.” In my head, that was how I’d filed Isabel’s story away. More of Allie’s dramatics. Now, though, I wondered why—how—I’d allowed myself to dismiss the event so casually.
My eyes strayed to the doctor’s notes at the bottom of the page. Continued suicidal ideation. Keep under observation. The staff at the hospital hadn’t thought the overdose was a stunt. They’d thought it was serious enough that they needed to stop her from trying again.
I closed my eyes, small details from our teenage years clicking into place in my head. Giles’s need to keep tabs on Allie’s movements at all times. My mother’s unfailing gentleness with Allie, as if she were some kind of injured animal. All the times Allie had to go see the school counselor for no apparent reason.
They’d known. They’d all known about the suicide attempt, recognized it was serious, worried that it could happen again. But nobody had told me.
Now, in my bedroom, I spread the photographs out around me on the bed, seeing Allie in all her different modes: dramatic, silly, pissed off, sad. Was Golanski right? Suicide is the narrative that accounts for nearly all of Allie’s actions the week she went missing. But still, I can’t quite believe it. Not Allie. Not at that specific time.
I walk into the living room, where I find my laptop and sit down on the couch before pulling up the Barclay’s footage that I have saved in a folder. Whenever I start to feel wobbly about the suicide theory, I play this video again. To reassure myself.
In the footage from the doughnut shop, Allie sits at the far table near the window, her fingers tapping against her coffee cup. She looks relaxed, but there’s an underlying tension running through her that I recognize. This is the same look she used to have when we were at a party, whenever a guy she was interested in had arrived, but she was pretending not to notice him. She’d be laughing and talking as if everything was normal, but I could feel the change in her, a kind of electric energy coming off her body.
It’s that intensity I see in the Barclay’s video. The set of her shoulders, the look on her face. That’s how I know. In this video, Allie isn’t despairing. She isn’t contemplating the end of her life.
She’s waiting for something to happen.
CHAPTER 19
On my lunch break at work, I check my phone messages. It’s been only a few days since I gave Ruiz the key chain: too soon, I know, for him to have found out anything. Still, I can’t stop myself from texting him: Any news?
Two hours later, I get a response.
Can you meet at Gina’s? 5:30?
Gina’s is the diner where we used to go to talk about the case. I feel a prickle of surprise on the back of my neck. I’d been expecting him to advise me to be patient, to not expect instant results.
Sure, I type back. What could he have found out so quickly? Or does he simply want to meet to talk? I spend the rest of the afternoon jittery and distracted, and my boss has to remind me twice to locate the file he requested.
At the end of the workday, I grab my coat and bag and rush out the door. The subway ride to Gina’s feels painfully slow, and I jog the short walk from the station to the diner.
Gina’s is a tiny little place with orange vinyl booths and waitresses dressed in old-fashioned uniforms. It’s the kind of spot with regulars, people who’ve been coming here for decades and have a preferred stool at the counter. The air smells of fryer grease and reverberates with a constant, low clamor.
I arrive before Ruiz and slide into the nearest empty booth as I wait for him to show. A TV mounted on the wall is tuned to a news station, and I see flashes of some celebrity news show—the latest Hollywood divorce, an actress’s botched plastic surgery.
The waitress, an older woman with a limp, approaches and hands me a big plastic menu. Then she squints at me through her glasses. “Hey, I know you,” she says. “Didn’t you used to come in here with Adam?”
It takes a split second for me to remember that Adam is Ruiz’s first name. “Um, yeah.” This is the waitress who used to top up our coffees back then.
“Yeah, you’ve done something different with your hair,” she says. “But I never forget a face.” For a moment, she studies me, and I’m afraid she’s about to connect me with the Allie Andersen investigation. But then she’s distracted by Ruiz’s arrival. “Well, hello, stranger,” she says to him.
“Hey, Diane.” He gives her shoulder a quick squeeze before sitting down in the booth across from me.
“Pecan pie?” Diane asks him.
He nods and tells her to add a decaf coffee. He’s dressed more formally today. Suit and tie. As he settles into the booth, he loosens the top button at his neck.
When Diane turns to me, I say, “Just tea, please.”
As she walks away, Ruiz blows on his hands, which have reddened from the cold.
“What is it?” I ask, too anxious to begin with niceties. “What have you found out?”
He shifts the napkin and utensils in front of him on the table. “So, the lab techs say there’s no way we can pull fingerprints off the key chain—the surface is too uneven.”
I close my eyes. Another dead end.
“But we’ve done some research, and that brand of flash drive—they only manufactured that particular design in 2012. It was a short run, so that style is actually pretty rare.”
My eyelids fly open. “So it could really be hers.”
“It could be,” he says cautiously.
We both fall silent as Diane returns with our order, sliding mugs and a slice of pie onto the table.
After she moves away, Ruiz shrugs off his coat and resumes: “But the ink, where Allie’s name is written—the lab says that’s fresh. So whoever wrote that did it recently.”
I straighten in my seat, picturing Allie leaning over the flash drive, painstakingly etching the letters into the plastic. “So what do you think that means?”
Ruiz cuts into his pie with the edge of his fork. “Well. The key chain could still be someone trying to mess with you. If someone was really familiar with that key chain style, it’s not impossible they could’ve gotten a matching one on eBay. Or . . .”
“What?”
He takes a bite of the pie, chews. “Or it’s genuine. And someone’s trying to point us toward some information.”
I think of Allie typing on her computer late at night, slapping the laptop closed before I could see what was on the screen. “What kind of information?”
Ruiz shakes his head. “I don’t know. But it does suggest there’s some significance to her laptop being drenched in water like it was. Maybe someone didn’t want us to see what was on it.”
Someone opens the diner door, letting a gust of cold air blow into the room, and I shiver. That’s not right, I want to tell him. But I know his theory feels plausible. Was Allie killed for whatever was on her laptop, or her flash drive?
“Of course, the laptop damage could’ve been accidental,” he says. “But it also could’ve been someone destroying evidence, getting rid of files they didn’t want anyone else to see.”
Something sour rises up in the back of my throat. “Maybe.” I pause. “Files . . . like what?”
He shrugs. “My best guess? Something to do with Greg. With the drugs.”
I frown, picking at the edges of my paper napkin. “But why would Allie keep anything like that on her computer? She took pills; she didn’t sell them.”
Ruiz rolls up his sleeves, and I glimpse the edge of the tattoo on his right forearm. A twining vine, underneath which is written: Carmen, 8-11-99. “Look,” he says, “in those last few months, Allie didn’t have access to money, right? Her parents had cut her off. But during the investigation, what we noticed is—that didn’t seem to stop her from spending. She was still going shopping, still going to fancy restaurants, no change in her habits at all.”
“Well, yeah,” I say. “She was borrowing cash from Greg.” Greg had a trust fund too. What did he care if Allie spent some of that money?
“That’s the thing,” Ruiz says. “Greg told us he’d been loaning Allie money for weeks that fall, but then suddenly she stopped asking. But she still had money on hand. He wanted her to tell him where it was coming from.” He takes another bite of his pie. After a moment, he says, “That’s why they argued, the night she disappeared.”
“Oh.” I feel like I’ve been hit in the chest. “You never told me that.” I always thought the fight had been just some typical spat between the two of them—Greg bristling at some perceived slight, Allie flying off the handle.
Ruiz looks discomfited, as if he’s regretting telling me about it. “It was something Greg said when we interviewed him. You know I can’t share every detail of the case.”
Yes. I know that. But somehow I’ve convinced myself, over the years, that Ruiz made exceptions when it came to me.
There’s an awkward pause before he continues. “Anyway, Greg wanted to know where she was getting her money,” he says. “And she wouldn’t say. He had some idea that she was going behind his back, poaching his clients.”
I laugh. “You can’t be serious. You think Allie was selling drugs?”
Ruiz doesn’t smile. “Greg thought she was.”
“I mean, how would she even do that? If she wanted to sell drugs, she’d need a supplier.”
He hesitates, then takes a sip of his coffee. Finally, he says, “Greg thought she’d found one.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Jairo Ocampo,” he says.
A face flickers in my memory. At one of Greg’s parties: a stocky Hispanic guy with a shaved head lingering in a doorway. “Jairo?”
“You knew him?”
“I mean, I didn’t know him. I saw him around, at parties. He wasn’t a dealer. He bought from Greg. He didn’t sell.”
Ruiz rubs a hand across his face. “Yeah, that’s what we heard too. Greg was adamant, though—he thought Jairo and Allie had teamed up and had gone into business together.”
“That’s crazy,” I say.
But even as I say it, I’m remembering.
CHAPTER 20
April 2012
Allie and I stood on the balcony at Greg’s apartment, next to a tabletop crowded with liquor bottles. It was some kind of theater after-party—a few people were still in costume, and the energy was high. Tequila shots had been taken. Everyone there was from LACSA—at first. Then, around one a.m., strangers started trickling in off the street. That was when I saw a group of Hispanic guys moving through the crowd. They were looking around the room, sizing up the people dancing to the pounding music. Eventually the guys gravitated toward the table on the balcony, where they started sorting through the liquor bottles and pouring themselves drinks.
Greg was nowhere to be seen, but I could hear his voice from somewhere inside, shouting at someone to change the music. The Hispanic guys were laughing and talking to each other in Spanish. Every once in a while, they’d point at someone and laugh.
The shortest one among them was also the loudest. He had a wide smile and a laugh that sounded like a machine gun. When he caught sight of Allie, who was wearing a dress that barely covered her ass, he sized her up from head to toe and then turned to his friends and made a comment under his breath.
Allie’s back was to him, but suddenly she spun around and took a step in his direction, her nose level with his nose. “Say that again.”
He grinned. “Hey, girlie. I’ll say it to you all night long if you want.”
Allie swayed a little on her feet. She’d been drinking steadily all night, and she was a little worse for wear. All of a sudden, she let loose a volley of Spanish. I couldn’t make out what she was saying, but by the guy’s reaction, I knew it wasn’t complimentary.
I tugged at her elbow. This guy didn’t look like the kind of person you wanted to mess with. But Allie didn’t stop. She got more and more in his face, and as she did, his scowl deepened and his friends tightened their circle around him.
Finally, Allie ran out of breath, and the guy stared her down, his eyes narrow and fierce.
“Jairo,” one of his friends said. “You gonna let her talk to you like that?”
There was a long pause; then Jairo burst out laughing. “What the fuck, man!” He turned to his friends. “I mean, what in the actual fuck? You hear that filthy mouth?” He turned and grabbed Allie by the shoulder, giving her a friendly squeeze. “Damn, chica. You sure as shit didn’t learn that in Spanish 101.”
For a moment, Allie looked furious, still hungry for a fight, and I worried she was going to hit him. Then Jairo leaned over and murmured something in her ear. Whatever he said made her start to laugh. “Oh, fuck off,” she said, giving him a friendly punch in the chest.
