No Offense: A Novel (Little Bridge Island Book 2)

John sat down at the table in Interview Room 3 and studied the individual sitting across from him. He always forgot, except when he was in his presence, how small Larry Beckwith III, aka Dylan Dakota, was. Small but wiry, of course, and able to slip in and out of tight spaces undetected . . . undetected except for the destruction he left behind.

“So, Larry,” John said, conversationally. “Can I get you anything? I understand you’ve already had your morning coffee, but how about some soda? Juice? Water?”

Larry smiled at him. He looked perfectly at ease in the stiff-backed wooden chair. And why wouldn’t he? John had removed his handcuffs—Beckwith wasn’t going anywhere.

“There’s only one thing I want,” Larry Beckwith said. “And that’s my lawyer.”

“Oh, right.” John nodded. “You said that before, when Martinez was bringing you in. I understand your lawyer is on his way. But it’s a long drive from Miami. I thought maybe you and I could pass the time while we wait having a little chat.”

Beckwith sneered. “My lawyer doesn’t drive anywhere. He’s taking his private jet.”

John frowned. “Well, it will be a while before the jet is fueled up, the pilots get the flight plan, and all of that. Just out of curiosity, doesn’t it bother you, employing a law firm that leaves such a huge carbon footprint, flying everywhere to meet their clients? That’s something that would worry my daughter—she’s just a few years younger than you. She’s all about trying to save the planet, the polar bears, the melting glaciers. That doesn’t upset you?”

Beckwith only smirked at him some more and said, “Lawyer.”

“Yeah.” John nodded again. “I get it. You don’t want to talk. And that’s your right—as you know, because you’ve been read your rights. But I’m just curious, since you have a daughter now, too. Believe me, if she ends up anything like mine, she’ll read you the riot act when she’s older about wasting fossil fuels.”

This caused the smirk on Beckwith’s face to turn into a slightly suspicious frown.

“I never waste fossil fuels. I’m as eco-conscious as can be. I can’t help what my lawyers do. And I don’t have a daughter.”

“Oh, yes, you do,” John said. “We got the results of the blood test on that baby we found last week in the ladies’ room of the library. And not to go all Jerry Springer on you, Larry, but . . . you are the father.”

All the blood drained from Beckwith’s face, causing his dark goatee and neck tattoos to stand out starkly against his pale skin.

John assumed he wasn’t going to say anything—except “Lawyer”—and was about to go on when Beckwith surprised him by suddenly leaping from his chair, knocking it over behind him, and bringing both fists down, hard, on the tabletop in front of him.

“No!” he bellowed. “That isn’t true!”

John stayed calmly in his seat, knowing there were several people watching from behind the two-way mirror who would come rushing in to restrain Beckwith if he needed them to.

But John wouldn’t need them to. He could handle this little twerp all by himself.

“Struck a chord there, did I, Larry?” he asked mildly. “Frankly, I don’t get why you’re so surprised. You haven’t exactly been discreet about any of this. You confessed to Dorothy Tifton at the Coffee Cubano that you’re the one who robbed her house and destroyed the media room in her new library. We found the items you stole from her in your locker at the gym. We have your prints and hair on everything that you touched, practically. It’s almost like you wanted to get caught this time. It’s so unlike you. What’s going on?”

His shoulders drooping, Beckwith turned around, picked up the chair, and sat back down in it. Then he folded his arms across the table and buried his face in them.

John expected to hear the word “lawyer” come out from beneath those folded arms. But what he heard instead surprised him:

A sigh. A sigh that sounded—if he wasn’t mistaken—like defeat.

And, though John found it hard to believe, he realized he was actually making headway with Larry Beckwith III, aka Dylan Dakota.

“What happened with the girl, Larry?” he asked in his most sympathetic tone. “Why did you leave her to die?”

This caused Beckwith to lift his head. He shot John a look of astonishment. “What? I didn’t!”

“You most certainly did, Larry. If that librarian hadn’t walked in at the exact moment she did, Tabitha Brighton would have bled to death.”

“That’s . . . that’s impossible!” Larry Beckwith was sitting up straight in his seat now. His face was still white as paper. “When we left her, she was fine. I mean, yes, she had just had the baby, and she was a little out of it, but . . . women have babies all the time and they’re fine. Historically, women have been having babies for millions of years and gotten up afterward and gone out to work in the fields. How was I supposed to know she wasn’t fine?”

John had to physically restrain himself from walking over, picking Beckwith up, and hurling him through the two-way mirror. He wanted to hurt him that badly.

The repercussions if he did so wouldn’t be that severe. Yes, he’d probably lose his job, but so what? He’d always be rehired back in Miami. Katie wouldn’t want to leave because of the Snappettes, but she could always go live with her cousin.

But Molly. Molly would probably never forgive him, even though Beckwith was a scumbag who deserved to suffer. He couldn’t hurt Beckwith, because Molly would be mad.

So instead of throwing Beckwith through the two-way mirror, John said, with all the patience he could summon, “First of all, Larry, women throughout history have done no such thing. Without proper postnatal care, they die, even in this day and age. You aren’t stupid, Larry, you know this. Even people without a college education, which you have, know this. You can’t sit there and tell me with a straight face that you thought that woman was going to be fine. You took her child and left her, but that’s not all. You took her cell phone. You left her there with no means to call for help.”

“But I knew—” Beckwith looked almost tearful. “I knew someone would be coming into the building the next day. I’d overheard the construction workers talking, so I knew there was going to be an inspection, and that someone was going to find her.”

“So rather than call nine-one-one for her yourself, you just decided to risk letting her die?”

“I was drunk, all right?” Beckwith wasn’t just tearful now. He was actually crying. He reached up and angrily swiped at the tears in his eyes. “I wasn’t thinking properly. I’ll regret it for the rest of my life, but—that’s what happened.”

John felt a sudden jolt of clarity.

No. It couldn’t be. And yet the proof was right in front of him.

Larry Beckwith had feelings. He had actual feelings. And for Tabitha Brighton, of all people.

“You love her,” John said, in a tone of disbelief.

“What?” Beckwith looked up from his damp fingers.

“You love her. You love that girl. That’s why you stuck around after the rest of your band of merry muck-making men left. To make sure Tabitha and the baby were all right.”

To John’s surprise, Larry Beckwith III began to blush scarlet. “No!” he said, sullenly. “Absolutely not. I don’t care what happens to them.”

“Yes, you do,” John said. “That’s why you stayed, and that’s why you got caught. You care about her. You love her.”

Beckwith’s face had gone crimson—whether with rage or embarrassment, it didn’t matter. John knew the truth.

“I don’t!” the boy cried. “I mean, obviously, I don’t want her or the baby to die, especially if it’s my baby. She told me she couldn’t get pregnant—she swore to me. And by the time I figured out what was going on, it was too late. She insisted we keep it.”

“That scheming hussy.” John shook his head with mock sympathy.

Beckwith glared at him, but his red-rimmed eyes gave away his true feelings.

“I didn’t even know if it was mine! How could I be sure? I hardly knew this girl. She just showed up out of nowhere, claiming she’d read about me on Facebook, wanting to join the group. But really it was me she wanted.”

John, still feigning sympathy, shook his head. “That must have been terrible for you.”

“I’m serious!” Tears streamed down Beckwith’s face. “Do you know what my dad is going to do to me when he finds out about this? Cut me off. He didn’t mind the other stuff, but getting a girl pregnant?”

“Absolutely,” John said with a straight face. “She deserved to be left like that.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.” Beckwith shook his head with enough force that tears streamed back toward his ears. “We made sure, you know, the baby got born all right and left it in a safe place, where someone decent would find it—people who go to libraries are all smart, you know—civic-minded? People who read books are found to be more empathetic than those who don’t. They have some idea, at least, of how to raise a kid. And then we ran.”

“It was the least you could do,” John said, and meant it. It was the very least the kid could do.

“Right? But somehow . . . I don’t know. I couldn’t—I couldn’t leave.”

“When you say ‘we,’ who do you mean?”

“Aw, those idiots from last year.” Beckwith rocked back in his chair, thoroughly disgusted with his own choice in friends. “You remember.”

“From the MTV house?”

“Yeah, same group, more or less.” Beckwith, having once claimed he wouldn’t say a word until his lawyer showed up, now couldn’t shut up. He seemed to be finding catharsis in spilling his guts to the sheriff. John wondered if he knew every word he said was being recorded, observed by the state’s attorney as well as numerous other individuals, and jotted down by John himself in his notebook. “Bunch of followers. Not an original idea or spark of imagination in a single one of them. At least Tabby really believed in the movement, though, you know? And in me.” Beckwith’s voice caught on a sob. “She always believed in me.”

John nodded, jotted the words Is this guy for real? in his notebook, and underlined them. “Maybe that’s why you couldn’t leave.”

“What?” Beckwith looked up from the pity party he was having for himself. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m just circling back to my original question. After you so generously abandoned your own baby in a place where she would be found by someone more civic-minded than yourself, and then left your girlfriend to die—”

“Hey, I told you, I didn’t leave her to die!”

“I’m sorry, let me rephrase that. When you left her bleeding to death in an empty building and took her cell phone so she couldn’t call for help—”

“God, would you stop ragging on me?” Beckwith pleaded. “I’ve already got a father to do that, okay? I don’t need you doing it, too. I know I screwed up, all right? And guess what, I never wanted to be a father myself, but I guess if I have to, I want to be a good father, not like mine, who’s never done anything but tell me what a loser I am, practically from the day I was born. Nothing I’ve ever done was good enough. Not like he was ever there for me—”

“Well, fortunately you’re going to be there for your child,” John said, closing his notebook with a snap and rising to his feet. “You’re going to be doing it from jail, but you’re going to be there for her. She and her mother can come see you every Sunday during visiting hours. I’m pretty sure you know that, though. That’s probably the real reason why you let yourself get caught. So you wouldn’t have to take any more parental responsibility toward her than that.”

“No!” Now Beckwith, who’d been completely unresisting up until then, took a lunge at him. “That isn’t true!”

John pushed the much smaller man back down into his seat.

“Oh, pipe down, Larry,” he said irritably. “It’s true and you know it. Your days of living off Daddy’s money, not to mention other people’s property and hard work, are over, and you knew it the minute you heard you yourself were a father. That got you so scared you decided you’d rather go to jail than face up to life as a parent. So suck it up. You got what you wanted. And no lawyer in the world is going to be able to bail you out of this one.”

With that, John turned and left the interview room, only to run into Pete Abramowitz in the hallway.

“How was that?” he asked the attorney.

“Magnificent.” Pete was grinning. “He’s in there sobbing like a toddler right now.”

“Because I said he likes a girl.” John felt disgusted with himself and the world in general.

“Well, hearing that kind of thing has to be hard on a sociopath.”

“Good,” John said. “Don’t accept a plea.”

“No worries. I’ll make sure he gets the max. You do realize he won’t be in your jail for long though, right? Once he’s convicted, he’ll probably get sent to prison upstate.”

John thought with relish of all the seaweed that needed removing on Little Bridge’s beaches, and how unhappy Beckwith was going to look in an orange jumpsuit, raking it.

“I know,” he said. “But I’ll enjoy his stay while it lasts.”

Pete winked. “Okay, then.”

It was at that moment that Marguerite came up to them and said, “Excuse me, Chief? There’s someone waiting to see you in your office.”

John tried not to make a face. It wasn’t the sergeant’s fault. “Marguerite, I thought I told you, no interviews with the press until—”

“It’s not press, Chief.” Marguerite was having a hard time suppressing a grin. “It’s Molly Montgomery, the librarian and, uh . . . she’s holding a pie.”