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“Well, that and not drinking it.”
“How’s this for an idea?” he asked. Her food came out then, though, and she started shelling and eating prawns, fast as any Aussie.
“Go,” she said. “I’m listening, but I’m also eating. These aregood.”
“Taste of home,” he said absently. “He slips something into Abby’s drink, so she’s out of it. An anesthesiologist? He’d have access at the hospital. That’s where the Xanax came from. He tells Sam, no worries, he’ll take Abby home and Uber back. Drives off with her, but it’s raining hard and he’s had a few himself.”
“Maybe he was trying to take her someplace,” she suggested. “I should’ve said I’d go home with him, but I’d drive my own car there. Then he’d have had to give me his address. I’m lousy at this temptress thing. So he’s making a turn, but instead of pulling into the … the apartment driveway—there were apartment buildings all around there—he ends up on the path to the boat ramp. It’s so wet, he somehow doesn’t notice he’s driving over grass. Hey!” She sat up straighter. “Maybe he doesn’t live there, which is why he isn’t as familiar, or maybe is trusting the GPS when he shouldn’t, but he rents a place where he takes women. Someplace where people don’t know him. If a university student lived there, it can’t be expensive, and he’s a specialist. Do specialists make good money in Australia? I don’t even know.”
“Good money, yeah,” he said. “Probably not as much as in the States, but he won’t be short of a dollar.”
“So he realizes at the last minute that he’s going into the water,” she said. “And since he’s got hold of the steering wheel andhasn’thad a Xanax, he isn’t as thrown when that happens. He also probably has fast reactions. He seemed like that kind of guy. He punches the door lock and maybe even opens the door. Was the door open when they found her?”
“Cracked,” Beckett said. “They said the weight of the water might have kept it from opening. Or she was … too impaired. With the Xanax.”
“Was she in her seatbelt?” Quinn asked. “And in which seat?”
“Not in her seatbelt.” All at once, the weight of it was on him again. He had to put his hands on the table to keep it from crushing him. “Couldn’t tell which seat she’d been in. She was floating.” He swallowed to keep the sick down.
“Beckett.” Her hands were on his, squeezing them. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be talking about this like it’s some detective game. Maybe we should leave it. Let the police try. We can even tell them what we found out. They didn’t know about Abby going back. They didn’t—” She stopped. “Oh.”
“What?” he asked.
“First,” she said, “do you want me to go on at all? I can shut up. We can go to sleep and get up tomorrow and fly back early to Montana and know we tried.”
“How will we have tried,” he said, “if we drop it just when we’ve learned something? How do you imagine it can be worse than what I’ve lived through for two years?” He had to stop. His chest was heating. His chest washurting.
He’d been surprised, at the time. He hadn’t known that grief actually hurt. That your chest and throat would ache like you were having a heart attack, because you were. An attack on your heart. Now, he knew. He swallowed and took a breath, and Quinn kept hold of his hands. He said, finally, “I’m OK. I want you to go on.” He wanted to saySorry,but he didn’t. Sorry wasn’t the point. He tried to smile. “Drink your wine. Eat your prawns. Brain food.”
She let go of his hands. Reluctantly. “If you’re sure.”
“I’m sure. Tell me. You thought of something.”
“It’s this. Staring me in the face. How do we know Abby went back to Samantha’s apartment at all? We’re thinking she went in, and that Victor went in, too. They all—what—had another drink? Why?That’swhat makes no sense. Why would Abbyhavegone back? It was raining. The party probably wasn’t the biggest fun of her life. Or was it?”
“No,” he said. “She wasn’t much of a party person. Supporting her sister, that’s all. She worried about her, even though Sam wouldn’t thank her for it. There’d been something, some incident where Sam was with a trainee. A crash. Not her fault, not the trainee’s fault, but Abby thought it would’ve shaken Sam, not that I ever saw any sign of it. Pretty cold-blooded, I’d have said. I’d have much rather seen Abby walk away from her, to be honest. I wasn’t Sam’s favorite person, and she wasn’t mine. I thought she took advantage of Abby’s good nature. Always the little cutting remarks. The digs.”
“Jealous,” Quinn said.
“Yeah.” Beckett took another sip of his fizzy water. He knew one thing for sure—he shouldn’t be drinking right now.
“So she left at eleven,” Quinn said. “Samantha said so, and Victor said so. I assume lots of people saw her leave then, if it was early, as they both said. That’s something the police would definitely ask. What didtheysay about the gap between when she left and when she went into the water?”
“Not much,” Beckett said. “That she’d been trying to wait out the storm, maybe. That she’d been thinking it over, if she drove in on purpose. Screwing up her courage. Which is rubbish. Nobody saw her anywhere, so …”
“But therewasthat gap,” Quinn said. “Three possible scenarios I can think of that involve Victor. One, he was lying the whole way. He and Abby left at about the same time, and hedidn’tgo off with some other woman, like he said. He persuaded Abby somehow to leave with him, and they were … somewhere, and then the rest of it happened.”
Beckett said, “No. She’d never have gone off with some bloke like that. In a car with him? No. And not just because I don’t want that to have happened.”
“If she was impaired?”
“She wasn’t impaired,” he said. “Not when she left. Nobody said so. Not the party guests, not Sam. But not the other party guests, mainly. She was cheerful, she said she needed to go, she left.”
“OK, then,” Quinn said. “Shedidcome back, but she didn’t go inside. Victor saw her, and persuaded her, somehow, to let him drive her home. Gave her a … a water bottle, with the Xanax in it. You’d think it would be something stronger, though. Rohypnol. A tranquilizer. Something like that.”
“Thin,” Beckett said. “For the same reason. She’d have rung me, not asked some random person to drive her. Especially not a man.”
“Are you sure? He was a good friend of her sister, and you would’ve had to pack up the kids and everything. She might have—”
