Love You More: A Novel

  They were closing in now. Bobby could feel the case building momentum, rolling them toward an inevitable conclusion: Tessa Leoni had murdered her husband and child.

  All that remained was putting a few last pieces of the case in place—including locating Sophie’s body.

  The other taskforce officers were already seated by the time D.D. and Bobby walked through the door. Phil looked as jazzed as D.D., and sure enough, he went first.

  “You were right,” he burst out as D.D. strode to the front of the room. “They don’t have fifty grand in savings—the entire sum was withdrawn Saturday morning. The transaction hadn’t been posted when I got the initial report. And get this—the money had also been withdrawn twelve days prior, then returned six days after that. That’s a lot of activity on fifty grand.”

  “How was it finally taken out?” D.D. asked.

  “Bank check, made out to cash.”

  Bobby whistled low. “Couple of pennies, available as hard currency.”

  “Male or female closed the account?” D.D. asked.

  “Tessa Leoni,” Phil supplied. “Teller recognized her. She was still in uniform when she made the transaction.”

  “Setting up her new life,” D.D. said immediately. “If she ends up under investigation for killing her husband, joint assets might be frozen. So she got out the big money first, squirreled it away. Now, how much do you want to bet that if we find that fifty grand, there will be another quarter million sitting with it?”

  Phil was intrigued, so Bobby related the state police’s current investigation into embezzled funds. Best lead—the account had been closed out by a female wearing a red baseball cap and dark sunglasses.

  “They needed the money,” Phil stated. “Did a little more digging, and while Brian Darby and Tessa Leoni look good on paper, you won’t believe the credit card debt six-year-old Sophie has run up.”

  “What?” D.D. asked.

  “Exactly. It would appear Brian Darby opened half a dozen credit cards in Sophie’s name, using a separate PO box. I found over forty-two grand in consumer debt, run up over the past nine months. Some evidence of lump sum payments, but inevitably followed by significant cash advances, most of which were at Foxwoods.”

  “So Brian Darby does have a gambling problem. Putz.”

  Phil grinned. “Just to amuse myself, I correlated the dates of the cash advances with Brian’s work schedule, and sure enough, Sophie only withdrew large sums of money when Brian was in port. So yeah, I’m guessing Brian Darby was gambling away his stepdaughter’s future.”

  “Last transaction?” Bobby asked.

  “Six days ago. He made a payment before that—maybe the first time the fifty grand was taken out of savings. He paid off the credit cards, then he returned to the tables and either won big, or borrowed big, because he was able to replace the entire fifty grand to savings in six days. Wait a minute …” Phil frowned.

  “No,” the detective corrected himself. “He borrowed big, because the latest credit card statements show significant cash advances, meaning in the past six days, Brian went deeper into debt, yet was able to replace fifty grand to his savings. Gotta be he took out a personal loan. Maybe to cover his tracks with his wife.”

  Bobby looked at D.D. “You know, if Darby was into it big with loan sharks, it’s possible an enforcer might have been sent to the house.”

  D.D. shrugged. She filled the taskforce in on Trooper Lyons’s revised statement—that Tessa Leoni had called him Sunday morning, claiming a mysterious hit man had kidnapped her child and killed her husband. She was to take the blame in order to get her child back. Shane Lyons had then agreed to assist her efforts by beating her to a pulp.

  When she finished, most of her fellow investigators wore similar frowns.

  “Wait a minute,” Neil spoke up. “She called Lyons on Sunday? But Brian was dead at least twenty-four hours before then.”

  “Something she neglected to tell him, and yet more evidence she’s a compulsive liar.”

  “I traced Darby’s Friday night call,” Detective Jake Owens spoke up. “Unfortunately, it went to a prepaid cellphone. No way to determine the caller, though a prepaid cellphone suggests someone who doesn’t want his calls monitored—such as a loan shark.”

  “And it turns out Brian suffered two recent ‘accidents,’ ” Neil offered. “In August, he received treatment for multiple contusions to his face, which he attributed to a hiking mishap. Let’s see …” Neil flipped through his notes. “Worked with Phil on this one—yep, Brian shipped out September through October. Returned November three and November sixteen was in the ER again, this time with cracked ribs, which he said he received after falling from a ladder while patching a leak on his roof.”

  “For the record,” Phil spoke up, “Sophie Leoni’s credit cards were all maxed out in November, meaning if Brian had accrued debt, he couldn’t use her lines of credit to pay it off.”

  “Any withdrawals from the personal accounts?” D.D. asked.

  “I found a major one in July—forty-two grand. But that money was replaced right before Brian shipped out in September, and after that, I don’t see any more significant lump sum transactions until the past two weeks.”

  “The intervention,” Bobby commented. “Six months ago, Tessa and Shane confronted Brian about his gambling, which Tessa had figured out due to the sudden loss of thirty grand. He replaced the money—”

  “Winning big, or borrowing large?” D.D. muttered.

  Bobby shrugged. “Then he moved his habit underground, using a bunch of phony credit cards, with the statements mailed to a separate PO box, so Tessa would never see them. Until two weeks ago, when apparently Brian Darby fell off the wagon, this time withdrawing fifty grand. Which maybe Tessa found out about, which would explain its rapid replacement six days later.”

  “And why she might have withdrawn it Saturday morning,” Phil pointed out. “Forget starting a new life; seems to me Tessa Leoni was working pretty hard to save the old one.”

  “All the more reason to kill her spouse,” D.D. declared. She moved to the whiteboard. “All right. Who thinks Brian Darby had a gambling problem?”

  Her entire taskforce raised their hands. She agreed, added the detail to their murder board.

  “Okay. Brian Darby gambled. Apparently, not successfully. He was in deep enough to run up debt, commit credit card fraud, and perhaps receive some poundings from the local goons. Then what?”

  Her investigators stared at her. She stared back at them.

  “Hey, don’t let me have all the fun. We assumed Tessa Leoni’s lover beat the crap out of her. Instead, it turns out it was a fellow police officer, who felt he was doing her a favor. Now we can corroborate half that story—Brian Darby did gamble. Brian Darby may have had debt worth an enforcer paying him a visit. So where does that leave us?”

  D.D. wrote a fresh header: Motive.

  “If I were Tessa Leoni,” she stated, “and I discovered my husband was not only still gambling, but that the sorry son of a bitch had run up tens of thousands in credit card debt in my daughter’s name, I’d kill him for that alone. Interestingly enough, my-husband-is-a-worthless-asshole is not an affirmative defense, meaning Tessa’s still better off arguing battery and getting Lyons to beat the shit out of her.”

  Several officers nodded agreeably. Bobby, of course, poked the first hole in the argument.

  “So she loves her daughter enough to be offended by the credit card scam, but then kills her anyway?”

  D.D. pursed her lips. “Point taken.” She looked at the room. “Anyone?”

  “Maybe she didn’t kill Sophie on purpose,” Phil suggested. “Maybe, it was an accident. She and Brian were having a fight, Sophie got in the way. Maybe, Sophie’s death became one more reason to kill Brian. Except now her family’s dead, her husband shot by her service weapon—automatic investigation right there,” Phil added, “so Tessa panics. Gotta figure out a plausible scenario—”

  “Self-defense wor
ked for her once before,” Bobby commented. “The Tommy Howe shooting.”

  “She freezes her husband’s body to buy her time, takes Sophie’s body for a drive, and the next morning concocts a story to manipulate both Shane Lyons and us into believing what she needs us to believe,” D.D. finished. “Sunday morning becomes showtime.”

  “What if she withdrew the fifty grand Saturday morning because she discovered Brian was gambling again?” another officer spoke up. “Brian found out, or she confronted him. Events escalated from there.”

  D.D. nodded, wrote a new note on the board: Where’s the $$$?

  “Gonna be hard to trace,” Phil warned. “Check’s made out to cash, meaning it can be deposited at any bank under any name, or taken to a dealer and cashed.”

  “Big check for most dealers,” Bobby said.

  “Guaranteed percentage,” Phil countered. “Especially if she called ahead, there are several check cashers who’d make that deal. Bank checks are good as gold and it’s a tight financial market out there.”

  “What if Tessa needed the money?” D.D. asked abruptly. “What if she had a payment to make?”

  Thirty pairs of eyes looked at her.

  “It’s another possibility,” she thought out loud. “Brian Darby had a gambling problem. He couldn’t control it, and like a sinking ship was taking Tessa and Sophie down with him. Now, Tessa is a woman who’s already hit bottom once before. She knows better. In fact, she’s worked doubly hard to rebuild a life, particularly for her daughter’s sake. So what can she do? Divorce takes time, and God knows how much Brian will destroy their financials until it goes through.

  “Maybe,” D.D. mused, “maybe there was an enforcer. Maybe, Tessa Leoni hired him—a hit man to finally put her husband out of his misery. Except the man in black took out his own insurance policy—Sophie Leoni—so Tessa couldn’t turn around and arrest him.”

  Bobby looked at her. “I thought you were convinced she’d killed her own daughter?”

  D.D.’s hand was resting unconsciously across her stomach. “What can I tell you? I’m getting soft in my old age. Besides, a jury will buy a wife killing her gambling-addicted husband. A mother killing her child, however, is a tougher sell.”

  She glanced at Phil. “We need to follow the money. Nail down that Tessa definitely took it out. See what else you can find in the financials. And tomorrow, we’ll give Tessa’s lawyer a call, see if we can arrange for a fresh chat. Twenty-four hours in jail has a tendency to make most people more talkative.

  “Any other news from the hotline?” she asked.

  Nothing, her taskforce agreed.

  “Final drive of the white Denali?” she tried hopefully.

  “Based on fuel mileage, it remained within a hundred miles of Boston,” the lead detective reported.

  “Excellent. So we’ve narrowed it to, what, a quarter of the state?”

  “Pretty much.”

  D.D. rolled her eyes, set down the marker. “Anything else we should know?”

  “Gun,” spoke up a voice from the back of the room. Detective John Little.

  “What about it?” D.D. asked. “Last I knew, the firearms discharge investigation team had turned it over for processing.”

  “Not Tessa’s gun,” Little said. “Brian’s gun.”

  “Brian had a gun?” D.D. asked in surprise.

  “Took out a permit two weeks ago. Glock forty. I couldn’t find it on the evidence logs as seized from either the house or his car.”

  The detective gazed at her expectantly. D.D. returned his stare.

  “You’re telling me Brian Darby had a gun,” she said.

  “Yes. Applied for the permit two weeks ago.”

  “Maybe bulking up wasn’t getting the job done anymore,” Bobby murmured.

  D.D. waved her hand at him. “Hello. Bigger picture here. Brian Darby had a Glock forty, and we have no idea where it is. Detective, that’s not a small thing.”

  “Gun permit just went through,” Detective Little countered defensively. “We’re a little backed up these days. Haven’t you been reading the papers? Armageddon is coming and, apparently, half the city intends to be armed for it.”

  “We need that gun,” D.D. said in a clipped voice. “For starters, what if that’s the weapon that killed Sophie Leoni?”

  The room went silent.

  “Yeah,” she said. “No more talk. No more theories. We have a dead husband of a state police officer, and a missing six-year-old. I want Sophie Leoni. I want Brian Darby’s gun. And if that evidence leads us where we think it’s probably going to lead us, then I want us to build a case so fucking airtight, Tessa Leoni goes away for the rest of her miserable life. Get out. Get it done.”

  Eleven o’clock Monday night, the detectives scrambled.

  26

  Every woman has a moment in her life when she realizes she genuinely loves a guy, and he’s just not worth it. It took me nearly three years to reach that point with Brian. Maybe there were signs along the way. Maybe, in the beginning, I was just so happy to have a man love me and my daughter as much as Brian seemed to love me and Sophie, I ignored them. Yes, he could be moody. After the initial six-month honeymoon, the house became his anal-retentive domain, Sophie and I receiving daily lectures if we left a dish on the counter, a toothbrush out of its holder, a crayon on the table.

  Brian liked precision, needed it.

  “I’m an engineer,” he’d remind me. “Trust me, you don’t want a dam built by a sloppy engineer.”

  Sophie and I did our best. Compromise, I told myself. The price of family; you gave up some of your individual preferences for the greater good. Plus, Brian would leave again and Sophie and I would spend a giddy eight weeks dumping our junk all over the place. Coats draped over the back of kitchen chairs. Art projects piled on the corner of the counter. Yes, we were regular Girls Gone Wild when Brian shipped out.

  Then, one day I went to pay the plumber and discovered our life savings was gone.

  It’s a tough moment when you have to confront the level of your own complacency. I knew Brian had been going to Foxwoods. More to the point, I knew the evenings he came home reeking of booze and cigarettes, but claimed he’d been hiking. He’d lied to me, on several occasions, and I’d let it go. To pry would involve being told an answer I didn’t want to hear. So I didn’t pry.

  While my husband, apparently, gave in to his inner demons and gambled away our savings account.

  Shane and I confronted him. He denied it. Not very plausibly. But at a certain point, there wasn’t much more I could do or say. The money magically returned, and again, I didn’t ask many questions, not wanting to know what I didn’t want to know.

  I thought of my husband as two people after that. There was Good Brian, the man I fell in love with, who picked up Sophie after school and took her sledding until they were both pink-cheeked from laughter. Good Brian fixed me pancakes and maple syrup when I got home from graveyard shift. He would rub my back, strained from the weight of carrying body armor. He would hold me while I slept.

  Then there was Bad Brian. Bad Brian yelled at me when I forgot to wipe down the counter after doing the dishes. Bad Brian was curt and distant, not only turning the TV to whatever testosterone-bound show he could find, but turning up the volume if Sophie or I tried to protest.

  Bad Brian smelled like cigarettes, booze, and sweat. He worked out compulsively, with the demons of a man with something to fear. Then he’d disappear for a couple of days at a time—time with the guys, Bad Brian would say, when we both knew he was going off alone, his friends having long since given up on him.

  But that was Bad Brian for you. He could look his state police officer wife in the eye, and tell a lie.

  It always made me wonder: Would he be a different kind of husband if I were a different kind of wife?

  Bad Brian broke my heart. Then Good Brian would reappear long enough to patch it back together again. And around and around we would go, plummeting through the roller coast
er ride of our lives.

  Except all rides have to end.

  Good Brian and Bad Brian’s ride ended at exactly the same moment, on our kitchen’s spotlessly clean floor.

  Bad Brian can’t hurt me or Sophie anymore.

  Good Brian is going to take me a while to let go.

  Tuesday morning, seven a.m.

  The female CO started head count and the unit officially stirred to life. My roommate, Erica, had already been awake for an hour, curled up in the fetal position, rocking back and forth, eyes pinned on something only she could see, while muttering beneath her breath.

  I would guess she’d retired to her bunk shortly after midnight. No watch on my wrist, no clock in the cell, so I had to gauge the time in my head. It gave me something to do all night long—I think it’s … two a.m., three a.m., four twenty-one a.m.

  I fell asleep once. I dreamt of Sophie. She and I were in a vast, churning ocean, paddling for all we were worth against steadily climbing waves.

  “Stay with me,” I screamed at her. “Stay with me, I’ll keep you safe!”

  But her head disappeared beneath the black water, and I dove and I dove and I dove, but I couldn’t find my daughter again.

  I woke up, tasting salt on my lips. I didn’t sleep again.

  The tower made noises in the night. Nameless women, goading nameless groaning men. The rattle of pipes. The hum of a huge facility, trying to settle its bones. It felt as if I were inside some giant beast, swallowed up whole. I kept touching the walls, as if the rough feel of cinder blocks would keep me grounded. Then I would get up and pee, as the cover of night was the closest to privacy I could get.

  The female CO had reached our cell. She glanced at rocking Erica, then at me, and our eyes met, a flicker of recognition, before she turned away.

  Kim Watters. Dated one of the guys in the barracks, had attended a couple of the group dinners. ’Course. CO at the Suffolk County Jail. Now I remembered.

  She moved to the next cell. Erica rocked harder. I peered out the barred window and tried to convince myself that personally knowing my own prison guard didn’t make things worse.