“She was fat?” I am seriously stunned. “She runs like four miles a day! She eats nothing but lettuce. With no dressing!”
“Well,” Chris says, with another shrug. “Maybe now. Not back then. She told me she’d been heavy her whole life, and that’s why she’d never…you know. Had a guy before.”
Whoa. Rachel had still been a virgin post–grad school? Hadn’t she met anyone in high school? In college, even?
Apparently not.
“So how long did this go on? This affair,” Cooper asks, apparently in an effort to get me off the Rachel was fat? thing.
Chris sinks down onto one of the black leather couches, not seeming to care whether he got the cushions wet. When you’re as rich as he is, I guess things like that don’t matter.
“Till midway through my senior year. That’s when I realized I had to start really studying, you know, to get decent scores on my LSATs. After letting me goof off through most of my twenties, my parents were riding me, you know, to get into law school. I told her—Rachel—that I was going to hafta play it cool for a while. It seemed like a good time to break it off. I mean, it wasn’t like it could go anywhere, her and me, after I graduated. No way was I sticking around Richmond.”
“Did you tell her that?” Cooper asks.
“Tell her what?”
I see a muscle in Cooper’s jaw twitch. “Did you tell Rachel that it couldn’t go anywhere?” he elaborates, with forced patience.
“Oh.” Chris doesn’t meet either of our gazes. “Yeah.”
“And?”
“And she flipped on me, man. I mean, really flipped. Started screaming, tearing stuff up. She picked up my computer monitor and threw it across the quad, no joke. I was so scared, I moved in with some buddies of mine off-campus for the rest of the year.”
“And you never saw her again?” A part of me can’t believe Chris’s story. Another part of me believes it all too well. Not that I can picture Rachel throwing a computer monitor across the room.
But I can’t picture her killing two girls—and almost killing three other people—either.
“No,” Chris says. “Not till a couple weeks ago, when I got back from Richmond. I spent the summer there, doing volunteer stuff, as part of the deal I had with my dad about law school. Then I walked into Fischer Hall, and the first thing I see is Rachel, up at the reception desk, bawling some kid out for something or other. Only, you know, she’s all…skinny. I nearly passed out, let me tell you. But she just smiled, cool as can be, and asked how I’d been. No hard feelings, and all that.”
“And you believed her.” Cooper’s voice is toneless.
“Yeah.” Chris sighs. “She seemed cool with it. I thought—you know, the weight loss, her new hairstyle, the clothes…I thought it was a good sign, you know. That she was moving on.”
“And the fact that she had purposefully set out to get a job managing the building your parents live in,” Cooper says. “That didn’t raise a red flag that she might not be as ‘cool with it’ as you thought?”
“Obviously not,” Chris says. “Until…well, what I found out last night.”
A bell-like voice cries out, “Oh, there you are! I looked all over outside. I didn’t know you’d come in.”
Hope comes traipsing down the stairs, holding a tray of what looks—and smells—like spinach pastry puffs in one hand, and the hem of a floor-length, leopard print robe in the other.
“The canapés are ready,” she says. “Do you want them in here, or out by the pool?”
“Out by the pool, okay, honey?” Chris smiles weakly at her. “We’ll join you in a minute.”
Hope smiles good-naturedly and detours toward the sliding glass doors.
“Don’t be long,” she warns us. “They’ll get cold.”
As soon as she’s gone, Chris says, “I’ve gone over it and over it—since talking to you the other night, I mean—trying to figure out if Rachel could have done it. Killed those girls, I mean. Because I’m good, you know…but not exactly anybody worth killing over.”
He smiles weakly at his own little joke. Cooper doesn’t smile back. I guess we are still playing good cop/bad cop. Since I’m apparently the good cop, I smile back. It isn’t even hard. I mean, in spite of everything, I still sort of like Chris. I can’t help it. He’s just…Chris.
“I mean, when she and I broke up,” Chris goes on, as if there’d been no interruption, “I told you she was—well, violent. She threw my computer across the quad. That’s like a hundred and fifty feet. She’s pretty strong. A girl—a small girl, like Beth or Bobby. Well, that’d be nothing for Rachel. If she was mad enough.”
“And you believe that’s what happened to those girls?” Cooper seems to be making sure. “Not that they died accidentally, but that Rachel killed them?”
Chris is sinking deeper and deeper into his parents’ leather couch. You can tell he totally wants to disappear.
“Yes,” he says, in a small voice. “I mean…that’s the only explanation, isn’t it? Because that whole elevator surfing thing…Girls don’t elevator surf.”
I throw Cooper an I told you so look. But he doesn’t see it. He is too busy staring stonily at Chris.
In the silence that falls after this, I can hear a cricket start to chirp loudly outside. I have to admit, I’m kind of…well, moved by Chris’s speech. Oh, I still think he’s a pig and all of that. But at least he freely admits it. That’s something, anyway.
Cooper doesn’t look nearly as impressed as I am, however.
“Chris,” he says. “You’re coming back to the city with us now, and tomorrow morning, we’re going to the police.”
It isn’t a request. It’s a command.
Chris grimaces. “Why? What good will it do? They’ll just arrest me. They’ll never believe it was Rachel. Never.”
“Not if you’ve got alibis for the times of the murders,” Cooper says.
“I do,” Chris says, brightening suddenly. “I was in class when the second girl—Bobby, I mean—died. I know, ’cause we all heard the sirens and looked out the windows. Fischer Hall is right down the street from the law building…”