Page 120 of Born to Sin

“A note pad,” she said. “A legal pad. Probably not. OK, I’m driving home and grabbing a few things. Make coffee while I’m gone, and we’ll get started.”

46

THE SENSE IT MAKES

The first thing Quinn did was find an attorney. That took her about eight hours, during most of which she was in court. When she called him at lunch and he asked how she’d done it, she said, “Stanford Law, that’s how. Never mind that. We have a video call with her—Megan McConnell—at six. I hear good things, but you can decide once you meet her. Can you be home?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But the kids—”

“My parents will take the kids for the night. Mom will pick them up at your place about five. If that’s OK with you,” she hurried to add. “I thought—this is going to take some focus, and you surely don’t want them to hear what’s happening, at least not until we know more.”

“Oh,” he said, and shoved a hand into his hair. “OK. Fine, then.”

“See you at six tonight,” she said. “Your house, obviously.”

Did he feel like he’d been run over by a truck? Yes, but partly in a good way. She’d definitely taken charge, but he wouldn’t have known what to do.

By the next morning, though, there was no “good way” about any of it. The truck had run him over, full stop.

Quinn’s parents still had the kids. He did his best to explain when he popped by to see them before school, but the best he could come up with was, “Extra-busy time at work before Christmas.”

Janey looked at him narrowly and asked, “Do you have to work allnight?”

“Maybe,” he said.”

“Why can’t Quinn come stay with us, then?” she asked.

“That would be good,” Troy said. “I want Quinn to come.”

Beckett could think of precisely no answer to that, so he just said, “I thought you didn’t want her at our house, Janey. Make up your mind.”

She said, “Oh. It’s because you want to bewithQuinn. That’s what Alexis said. I said, no, Dad wouldn’t do that. He knows we’re vulnerable children.”

“And Dad wouldn’t,” he said. Time to put a stop to this. “But now I need to go.” He had his second phone appointment with Megan McCallister—and Quinn—in half an hour.

“It’s almost Christmas, though,” Troy said. “Quinn is going to do all these special American things with us for Christmas. Cut down our own Christmas tree in the snow, and make special cookies that are in shapes of Christmas things, and put popcorn on strings, and—”

“And we’ll do those things,” Beckett said. “But right now, I need to go.” He kissed them both, and he went.

This was all rubbish. It would be a mistake. They’d get it sorted, he’d collect the kids again, and it would be behind him. Whatever Quinn said, nightmares didn’t happen over and over again. You woke up.

Twenty minutes later, he was sitting at the breakfast bar with Quinn, his phone between them and Quinn taking notes on a yellow legal pad, and he was discovering he was wrong.

Megan said, “Here’s the size of it. A witness came forward—a witness who didn’t realize at the time what he’d seen. He was at a party where somebody was talking about the case as a sort of cautionary tale about driving in the wet, and he started asking questions. He’d been a uni student at the time, back on that night from a roaring evening out. He was chucking up all the drink in the bushes. In the bucketing rain. Barely made it out of the taxi, one assumes. Saw somebody wading out of the river and thought it was more than odd, but said, ‘I was pissed as a fart,’ and forgot about it. Next day, he was off on some sort of field-camp program—reason for the pub crawl, apparently—for over a month, so he didn’t hear all the hoorah about it or realize what had happened. When I pressed, the police admitted that he was still hazy about what he’d seen but had come along ‘just in case.’”

“Is he sure that was the place?” Quinn asked. “And the date? After two years?”

“He lived there,” Megan said. “In the block of flats there on the water. And he flew out the next morning. The cops checked that. ‘Hung over as fuck,’ were his exact words.”

“Could he identify the person?” Quinn asked next.

“No. He looked up after finishing his business, and there they were. Some distance away, and the person was in a raincoat, or something shiny and wet. Likely a raincoat. It was, obviously, rainy and dark. The person was under a streetlamp when they came out of the water, ‘up the boat ramp like a bloody sea creature,’ which is why the witness caught sight of them at all. Unfortunately, ‘shiny and wet’ was all he had.”

“So he couldn’t even say if it was a man or a woman?” Quinn asked. “Race? Height? Length of hair?”

“Correct,” Megan said. “None of that.”

“If the hair had been long,” Quinn said, “presumably he’d have had an impression of ‘woman,’ or maybe ‘mermaid.’ Not ‘sea creature.’”

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