‘But she thinks we murdered him,’ Jill says. ‘Shebelieveswe did. Do you think she planted the cameras?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I don’t know either. But sheknows, Ted.’
Nadya is panicking. She’s been panicking all day. Now, she swills the toilet bowl with cleaner in one of her clients’ houses.
On her way to the subway that morning, she’d scrolled the news on her phone and seen the shocking story about a home invasion and death in Brooklyn Heights the night before. She had a number of clients in the Brooklyn Heights area. No names were released.
Wanting more information, she’d stopped in at the corner store before she got to the subway, to pick up a newspaper. The shopkeeper, who knew her, wished her good morning as she paid for the paper. ‘Haven’t seen you in a while,’ he said. ‘Did that key work out all right?’
She froze. Managed to ask, ‘What key?’
‘The key that I copied for your son a while back. It was a bit tricky. Did it work okay?’
She stared at the signKEYS COPIED HERE, a sickening feeling in her stomach. Then she held up her bulky key chain and said, ‘Which one was it again?’
He took the key chain from her, fingered through them and singled one out. ‘Yeah, this one.’
It was very distinct, the Westcotts’ key, and he clearly had no difficulty recognizing it. Despite her distress, she’d managed to nod, and made her way out the door, the bell tinkling behind her.
Now, she flushes the toilet and bends over the client’s bathtub with cleanser and sponge, her back aching, her mind racing. Peter had stopped asking her questions about the Westcotts ages ago. Now it seems obvious why– he’d stopped asking becausehe’dplanted the cameras in their house and was watching them. Peter took the Westcotts’ key, copied it while she slept. And she keeps the security codes on her phone, because there are far too many of them, for all the houses she cleans. She has them in her phone, under names and addresses, for convenience, and the keys are labelled. Which is stupid of her. So stupid! He must have looked in her phone for the security code. And then hemusthave planted those cameras. Why else would he copy the Westcotts’ key?
He’d denied it when she asked him. He’d lied to her.
She will talk to him again. Peter is always talking about that buddy of his, Konstantin. Now she wonders ifhehad something to do with this. Because they’d wanted to know, hadn’t they, what happened on that boat. They’d been so interested. And now Peter never mentions it any more,because maybe he already knows that nothing happened on that boat.That Konstantin who Peter seemed so in thrall to, he was probably behind it. And her son might have been his way in.
It frightens her to think of her son as a potential blackmailer, as ending up in prison, which he surely will some day.
Chapter Forty-Eight
JOHN RETURNS TOthe home of Nadya Sokolov, the Westcotts’ cleaning lady. He watches it from outside for a short while and determines that probably no one is home. She must be out cleaning houses, and there are no signs of life inside, no sign of the son. It’s midafternoon. He wants to get inside. Nadya Sokolov has access to the Westcotts’; he wonders about the son.
He checks his surroundings, but the street is deserted. He walks confidently between her house and the house next door as if he’s got a reason to be there. There is no one around to see him. No dog barks. He takes a quick look and doesn’t see anyone watching out of a window. He opens the unlocked gate into the backyard, then walks up some cement steps to the back door and opens the screen door. The inner door is locked, but he expected that, and he brought his lockpicking tools with him. This one is no trouble at all. He keeps glancing over his shoulder, to make sure no one is watching, but he feels completely alone.
The lock gives, and he opens the door with a squeak of its hinges. He tries to be quiet, in case the son is at home sleeping. Maybe he works nights. John pauses inside the door, then closes it quietly behind him. The silence is complete. He doesn’t think there’s anyone else here. Not even a cat. The back door opens into a small kitchen. It’s seen better days, but it’s quite well kept and clean. He pokes quietly around, curious. There’s a photograph on the refrigerator. That’s unusual. Hardly anyone bothers printing out photos any more. He moves closer and realizes the photograph is quite old and shows a couple with a young child on the square in front of the onion domes of the Kremlin. He wonders what happened to the husband and whether the photo is there because she misses him, or because she misses her homeland.
He leaves the kitchen and walks quietly down the hall toward the front door. There’s a small table with a pile of mail on it. He stops and glances through it. Bills. Flyers, the usual crap.
He goes next into the living room at the front of the house. The curtains are drawn and it’s dingy, the furniture worn and sagging. The television is old. A cracked remote is sitting on the scratched coffee table. The painting above the brick fireplace is a cheap reproduction of one of Monet’s Giverny paintings. He wonders how this woman feels, cleaning the homes of rich people every day, polishing their expensive furniture, their porcelain, their fine art, to come home to this drab and ugly place. Did it make her greedy? Resentful? He wouldn’t blame her if it had.
He carries on upstairs. He looks through the bedrooms, hers first. He finds an old laptop, but nothing else of interest. Hesnatches it up and slips it into his backpack. In the son’s messy bedroom down the hall, there’s nothing on the desk. There are clothes all over the floor. He sees the corner of a laptop under a dirty T-shirt on the floor. He picks up the T-shirt and tosses it aside. He reaches down and picks up the laptop from the floor beside the bed.
‘That fucking bitch,’ Jill seethes. They are back home, in the kitchen, having driven back from Min’s.Min knows.The way she looked at them, the way she spoke. But did she actually catch them admitting to murder on camera? ‘How dare she be so judgemental,’ Jill says waspishly. ‘She probably would have pushed him off the boat herself if she was in our shoes.’ She takes a breath and says, ‘If she planted the cameras, I’d love to see her go to jail.’
‘She couldn’t have done it alone,’ Ted says. ‘She wouldn’t know how to plant hidden cameras, would she?’
‘I don’t know. There’s probably a YouTube video.’
‘But to get in, past our security, how would she do that?’
‘Maybe she hired someone.’
‘That’s risky, though. If she was found out, it would leave her open to a felony charge.’
‘Maybe it’s her boyfriend,’ Jill suggests. ‘She’s been with him for about a year and we don’t know anything about him.’
‘No, but we know his name,’ Ted says. ‘She introduced us at the memorial, remember? It’s Robert Carrera.’ He grabs his laptop on the kitchen island and pulls it toward him and googles Min’s boyfriend.
