The body had been in the water for six hours before anyone thought to call it a crime.
Michelle Suarez stood at the edge of the infinity pool with her hands in her coat pockets, looking down at a dead woman who was still, in death, more beautiful than most people managed to be alive. Elena Papadakis — twenty-nine, socialite, minor heiress to a shipping fortune that wasn't hers, girlfriend of a man whose name Michelle already knew before she'd read the file — floated face-down in four feet of water gone faintly pink at the edges, her white dress ballooned around her like something out of a painting nobody wanted to hang in their house.
Behind her, the party had not entirely stopped. That was the thing about money — it didn't know how to stop.
"They kept drinking," said Detective Nikos Fotis, coming to stand beside her with a paper cup of coffee he hadn't touched. "Half of them didn't even notice for two hours. Somebody's cousin found her doing laps at 4 a.m., thought she was joking around."
"Who called it in?"
"House manager. After he fished her out and realized she wasn't breathing." Fotis checked his notes, though Michelle suspected he already had the name memorized and simply liked the ritual of looking. "Last person seen with her, according to three separate witnesses, is our boy."
He didn't need to say the name. Michelle had already clocked the man standing twenty feet away, near the pool house, being spoken to by a uniformed officer with the particular deference reserved for people who had never in their lives been made to wait in a room.
Ares Nikolai did not look like a man who had just watched his date drown, or drowned her himself. He looked like a man mildly inconvenienced by the fact that his Wednesday had been interrupted. Dark hair, damp at the collar — from the pool, or a shower taken since, she couldn't tell yet — a jaw that belonged on the side of a building, and eyes that found hers across the patio with an ease that felt less like being noticed and more like being read.
"Don't," Fotis said quietly.
"Don't what?"
"Whatever that was on your face just now."
"There was nothing on my face."
"There's a hyphen where your face used to be," Fotis said. "I've known you three years, Suarez. You get a hyphen when a case is about to be a problem."
Michelle didn't dignify that with an answer, because he wasn't wrong, and she'd learned a long time ago that the fastest way to make a feeling worse was to defend it out loud.
She crossed the patio instead. The stones were still slick from cleaning — someone, she noted, had already begun scrubbing down the pool deck before the medical examiner arrived, an instinct so thoughtless and so expensive that it told her more about the household than an hour of interviews would have.
"Detective," Ares said, before she'd introduced herself. His voice had the unhurried texture of a man reciting something he'd said many times before and expected to say many times again. "I assume you're the one I should be worried about."
"Should you be worried?"
"I don't know yet. That's rather the point of you, isn't it."
Up close, the ease she'd read from across the pool resolved into something more textured — not arrogance exactly, though there was plenty of that underneath, but a kind of careful stillness, the specific quality of a man watching every word land before he let the next one go. Grief, if it was there, had been folded away somewhere she couldn't see it. Or there wasn't any to fold.
"Michelle Suarez," she said. "Special Crimes. I'll need you to account for the last six hours."
"I already gave a statement."
"You'll give me one too."
Something moved behind his eyes — not annoyance, she thought, though it wore annoyance's clothes for half a second. Interest, maybe. The specific interest of a man who had gotten used to people backing off, meeting someone who didn't.
"Elena and I left the party around one," he said. "We talked by the pool. She was upset about something — I didn't ask what, I assumed it was Yannis, her ex, he was here too, uninvited, which never goes well. I went to get her a drink. When I came back she wasn't at the table anymore. I assumed she'd gone to find someone else to be upset at. I went back inside." A pause, so brief she'd have missed it if she hadn't been watching for exactly that. "I didn't check the pool. I should have checked the pool."
It was, Michelle thought, a very good story. Clean, specific, self-incriminating in exactly the small, human way that made a story more believable, not less — a man blaming himself for not checking a pool, rather than blaming himself for what might have happened in it.
"Was anyone with you? Getting the drink."
"The bartender. Kostas. He'll remember, I tip well."
"And after you went back inside?"
"People. A dozen people. You can ask them; half of Athens was here." He tilted his head slightly, studying her the way she'd been studying him. "You don't believe me."
"I don't believe or disbelieve anyone in the first ten minutes. It's bad practice."
"That sounds exhausting."
"It's the job."
"Is it," he said, and for just a moment the practiced stillness cracked into something that might have been real — tired, maybe, or something adjacent to sorrow that he didn't want witnessed. "She wasn't a bad person, you know. Whatever they'll tell you about her. Whatever they'll tell you about me."
"I haven't asked anyone anything yet."
"You will." He said it without malice, almost gently, the way you'd tell someone the weather was about to turn. "And when you do, I'd like you to remember that I'm the one who told you not to believe them yet, either."
He walked away before she could decide whether that had been a warning, a request, or something far more dangerous — an invitation.
Fotis found her forty minutes later, staring at the pool as the last of the water was drained for evidence, black at the bottom now with whatever had settled there.
"ME says she went in already unconscious," he said. "Bruising on the back of the skull, consistent with a fall — or being put down before she went in the water. Won't know cause of death for certain till the post-mortem, but it isn't looking like an accident, and it isn't looking like she did it herself."
"Toxicology?"
"Rush order. You know how long that actually takes, no matter what they tell the commissioner." He followed her gaze toward the pool house, where Ares Nikolai's dark silhouette was visible through the glass, still being spoken to, still unbothered, or performing unbothered so well it made no difference. "So. What's your read?"
Michelle thought about the pause before I should have checked the pool. The specific, surgical honesty of a man who knew that a story too perfect was its own kind of tell, and so had built one small imperfection into it on purpose — or hadn't, and simply felt guilty about a woman he'd genuinely lost track of at a party, the ordinary guilt of ordinary people, dressed up in a two-thousand-euro shirt.
She didn't know which. That was the problem. She had spent three years learning not to want an answer badly enough to invent one, and something about the particular quality of his attention had already made her want this one more than she should.
"My read," she said, "is that we've got a body, a house full of witnesses who'll all tell slightly different stories, and one man who's very good at being the last thing anyone remembers clearly. That's not a confession. It's not an alibi either."
"That's not an answer, Suarez."
"No," she agreed, watching the water empty out black beneath them. "It isn't."
