Page 35 of The Birthday Girl
“Yes, you should,” Vega cut her off. “If the information you have can get us closer to whoever killed them, you should tell me everything.”
Danielle exhaled shakily. “Mercedes caught my sister on video, smashing a champagne bottle against Tyriq Lawson’s skull.”
“Who is your sister?”
“Tahlia Banks, you know, the real estate billionaire?”
Vega nodded. “I’ve heard of her. What does she have to do with Mercedes?”
“Last time I saw Mercedes, she couldn't stop flashing her phone around, saying The Tea Room was buying her video. Thirty seconds of Tahlia Banks losing control was worth more than anything Mercedes had ever touched."
Vega’s pen stopped mid-stroke. “And you’re certain she sold it?”
“Yes,” Danielle whispered. “But I don’t believe the deal with The Tea Room went through. She told me someone from my sister’s team got to her first, and they paid her even more than what The Tea Room offered.”
Vega flipped to a fresh page in his notebook, the paper crisp beneath his fingertips. The Johnsons' grief was genuine. No parent could fake that kind of devastation. But this new detail about Tahlia Banks and the incriminating footage changed everything about his mental timeline of events.
There were two options, Vega thought: Tahlia had paid them to bury it, or someone else paid to keep it from the light. Either way, it gave motive and means. Now Mercedes, Jimmy, and Tremaine were corpses at the center of a story that someone, maybe Tahlia, maybe not, desperately wanted erased.
Danielle rocked the baby carrier at her feet, almost absentminded, and tried to swallow her grief so she could be helpful. “She called me after she left Jimmy’s place a few daysago,” she said. “Said she was scared because someone followed her home.”
“Describe,” Vega said.
“She said it was an SUV, black. Texas plates. No one she’d ever seen before. She cut through a gas station, trying to lose it. After that, she stayed at home with Tremaine. Wouldn’t even open the door for her own mother unless it was FaceTime.”
Vega jotted that down. “The black SUV, how long had Mercedes been seeing it?”
Danielle squeezed her thumb around the car seat handle, her little baby dead to the world, and gave it a little shake. “Just the once. She called me right after it happened, maybe ten that night. I have the text.”
Vega’s pen hovered midair. “Show me.”
Danielle blinked. “Now?”
“Now,” Vega said, harsher than before.
Her eyes darted to the left before meeting his, a flash of calculation replacing the tears that had been there moments before. Something in her expression hardened, then smoothed over too quickly, like a card player who'd glimpsed her winning hand. Vega had seen people like Danielle too many times before. She’d dropped Tahlia’s name too easily, almost as if she wanted him to have it, and that made him wonder why she was throwing her under the bus. Either way, it reeked of disloyalty and connivance.
Danielle fumbled for her phone, her hands trembling so hard that the screen tilted in and out of focus. Vega watched every second of her struggle, his eyes narrowing as he kept his pen unmoving.
“Give me a moment. It’s in my messages, I swear—”
Vega’s pen hovered, but his eyes stayed on her, not the page. “You gave me your sister’s name awfully fast, Danielle. Why?”
Her throat bobbed. “Because it’s the truth. Mercedes told me—”
“Maybe she did,” Vega cut in, voice sharp enough to strip her words bare. “Or maybe you just don’t mind pointing the finger at someone else to keep it off yourself. People don’t usually burn family unless they’re hiding something worse.”
Danielle’s lips parted, then snapped shut again. She looked down at the car seat, stroking the handle with her thumb like she could rub an answer out of the plastic.
Vega stepped closer, dropping his voice to that dangerous calm he saved for suspects on the edge. “So let me ask again, why your sister? Why not anybody else? You’d better think hard before you answer, because once you put her in this, there’s no pulling her out.”
Danielle’s lips trembled. “I-I just thought you should know.”
Vega snapped his notebook shut, the sound ricocheting off the narrow porch. Both parents flinched, and Danielle did too, clutching the carrier handle so tight it might break.
Vega snapped his notebook shut, the sound cracking against the porch. “You’ll bring me those texts by morning,” he said, eyes locked on hers. “If you don’t, I’ll come find you. And when I do, Danielle, I won’t be nice.”
She nodded nervously but said nothing.
