"I didn't hide anything. I found it there." Diane folded her arms. "And
frankly, detectives, if you're looking for suspicious behavior, you should be
investigating Tom Beckett's cameras. He films the entire street. He has
filmed me — me — on multiple occasions. I've filed complaints. He's been
hostile for months, ever since I cited him for—"
"What did you find, Mrs. Holloway?" Marsh interrupted. "Exactly. In your
words."
Diane hesitated for half a beat too long. "A syringe. Near the pool. I was
concerned about the children in the neighborhood."
"Did you call the police when you found it?"
"I was handling it. As association president—"
"Did you photograph it? Log it? Tell Mr. Beckett you'd found it on his
property?"
"I was about to—"
"You left it under his towel and climbed back over his fence," Marsh said.
"That's what you're telling us."
Paul Holloway appeared in the hallway behind his wife then — a thin man in
golf clothes with the vague, permanent expression of someone who had
agreed not to notice things years ago. "Diane? What's going on?"
"Nothing, Paul. These detectives are harassing me because Tom Beckett
doesn't like being told to follow the rules."
Marsh let that sit. Then: "Mrs. Holloway, we're going to need you to come
down to the station tomorrow to give a formal statement. Bring your attorney
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if you like."
"I haven't done anything wrong."
"Then the statement will be quick." Marsh handed her a card. "Oh — and one
more thing. The waterproof pouch you were wearing this afternoon. We'd
like to see it."
Diane's face did something complicated. "I don't know what you're talking
about."
Okafor finally looked up. "The blue one. Around your waist. It's on video,
ma'am."
After they left, Diane stood in her doorway for a long time, the card still in
her hand, and Paul said, "What did you do?" and she said, "Nothing," in a
voice that didn't convince either of them. That night, after Paul had gone to
bed, Diane sat in her darkened kitchen and called her brother. The call lasted
forty minutes. Doug Raines did most of the talking — low, urgent, the voice
of a man doing arithmetic out loud. "They can't prove anything," he kept
saying. "The pouch, the pharmacy — they can't tie it together." But Diane
could hear the doubt underneath, and when she hung up, she deleted the call
from her phone's recents — a gesture so automatic it frightened her, because
it meant some part of her had known, all along, exactly what she was. She sat
in the dark kitchen for another hour, listening to the refrigerator hum, and for
the first time in twenty years of running things, Diane Holloway had no plan.
Only a card with a detective's number on it, sitting on the counter like an
unexploded shell.
The lab took nine days.
Tom knew because he counted them, the way he counted everything — pool
chemical readings, camera uptime percentages, the days since Chloe's last
34
dentist appointment. Nine days of checking his phone for the detective's
number. Nine days of his work suffering — he was supposed to be auditing a
client's access logs and instead he kept replaying the fence climb in his head,
frame by frame, looking for the moment it would turn out to be a
misunderstanding. It never did.
Chloe had it worse. At school, the story had mutated the way middle-school
stories do: by Wednesday, half the seventh grade believed her dad had been
arrested; by Friday, a boy named Tyler told her his mom said the cameras
were "pervy," and Chloe — who had never been in a fight in her life — told
him his mom could come say it to her dad's face, and got detention, and came
home furious and tearful in equal measure.
"I'm sorry," Tom said, holding her while she cried into his shirt the way she
hadn't since she was nine. "This is my fight and it's landing on you."
"It's our house," Chloe said fiercely. "It's my fight too."
The waiting had a texture Tom would remember later with distaste — the
specific anxiety of a man who secured networks for a living and couldn't
secure his own life. He kept his phone on loud at work, jumping at every
vibration. He stopped floating in the pool. He started checking the camera
feeds the way other men checked the weather, and once, at 2 a.m., he caught
himself watching the rear-fence camera's empty night-vision yard and had to
turn the tablet face-down and sit in the dark until his heart slowed.
At the grocery store on Thursday, he turned down the cereal aisle and found
himself face to face with Diane Holloway. She was holding a carton of eggs,
and for a second they just stared at each other — two people who knew
exactly what the other had done and couldn't say it in public. Then Diane
lifted her chin, put the eggs in her cart, and walked past him without a word,
35
and Tom stood there among the cornflakes with his hands shaking and
understood, with a clarity that surprised him, that he was afraid of her. Not of
what she'd done. Of what she might do next, now that she knew he knew.
On the tenth day, Detective Marsh called and asked Tom to come to the
station. Not the house. The station. Tom's stomach dropped through the floor,
and Chloe, reading his face from across the kitchen, said, "It's fine, Dad. If it
was bad they'd come here."
She was twelve and already better at this than he was.
Marsh met them in a small interview room with a water cooler humming in
the corner and a file folder on the table between them. She shook Chloe's
hand like she was an adult, which Chloe clearly stored away as a core
memory, and then she opened the folder.
"The syringe contained residue of a veterinary sedative," Marsh said.
"Medetomidine — it's used in large-animal practice, mostly horses. In