to our party.
I slide in beside him. “I know what the message on the shovel on Odette’s porch meant,” I say abruptly. “Jesus to Peter: Forgive not seven times but seventy times seven.”
“Did Odette tell you that from heaven? Or did you discover it’s the No. 2 result on a Google search?”
“I remembered it on my own, actually. A preacher had a route through the trailer park where I used to live. I was dragged to plenty of tent revivals as a kid. My soul is exhausted from being saved. But you’ve known what it means for years. You have to think Odette was killed by someone she knew. That the killer followed Odette out to the field and took both her and whatever she was digging up. I think it had something to do with Trumanell.”
“That’s a lot of thinking from a little Bible verse.”
“Odette mentioned to me that Trumanell’s father screwed his way around town.”
“You could have read that rumor in any tabloid. On Twitter. A blog.”
“I’m trying to have a conversation, not prove anything.”
“Fire away.”
“Lizzie Raymond looked so eerily like Trumanell that everyone was sure she was Frank Branson’s daughter,” I continue determinedly. “She wasn’t. That’s proven. But Odette knew about someone else. A girl named Martina McBride, the kid whose father owns the big car dealership here.”
“For the sake of moving things along, Martina’s father is a friend of mine. He’s paying full freight on child support because a DNA test revealed she’s one hundred percent his.”
“So his wife was lying when she told Odette that?” Or you’re lying now? “Why would she do that if it meant she’d get less child support?”
“Gretchen liked to mess with her husband as much as she liked money. Husbands, plural, I should say.”
“Did you find out who put the shovel on Odette’s porch?” I demand. “Or who made the call to her earlier that day, sobbing? She said she told you about that.”
“I’ve pursued every fucking angle. I’m not here to listen to how much I fucked up this case. There are seven Twitter accounts dedicated to that. I’m a cop and you’re a kid who is putting herself up as bait and about to get herself killed. You need to tell me where you are getting this stuff. Now.”
“Is that a threat?” I breathe out.
“Jesus.” His hands are tightening up on the wheel. Knuckles, white.
I’m taking one more shot before I jump out of the car. “Odette visited her childhood therapist right before she died. She thought the therapist was secretly taping her. Odette gave me an address. And a name. Dr. Andrea Greco. Her house is about three hours west.”
My memorization skills became remarkable after losing my eye, like some kind of consolation prize. They are why I was able to deliver excellent grand jury testimony about my father at age ten, why I scored a perfect 800 on the math portion of the SAT, and why I remember Dr. Andrea Greco’s name and address when there is no longer any reference material on the cookbook shelf to refresh me.
“Odette came to me last night,” I persist. “She said she thought she told her therapist too much. Like maybe she remembered something. She’s worried about what’s on that tape. She didn’t exactly say she was hypnotized but …” All those sentences construct a super shaky bridge, because I made them up.
Rusty slowly removes his sunglasses and lays them on the dash. “Angelica Odette Dunn, I’m going to tell you a story.”
My name. The real one. He knows it. My heart starts to thud.
“When I was in my twenties,” he begins, “I got my fortune told on Venice Beach with my buddies, right before I went to war. I wanted to know if I was going to die. It didn’t matter that this woman looked like she drew a dot in the middle of her forehead with a black Sharpie marker or that her eyes fake-rolled around like they were chasing flies. She peered in my palm for about a minute and said she was sorry, but she just couldn’t tell. If I wanted to know if I was going to die in battle, I’d need to give her another fifty bucks so she could read the other hand, too. I was drunk and scared and fifty bucks seemed a small price to pay to have someone assure me I was going to live. I gave her the other fifty bucks. And she told me I was going