Black Rainbow (Rainbows 1)

“I’m not her teacher,” Tristan cracked.

“Odile told me that I purposely look for women who are broken and too young for me,” I told him.

And when I thought about it she was right. So what did that say about the type of man I was?

“Bullshit.”

“She has a point—”

“Sure, if you look at it from the dark and cloudy prescriptive of your psychotic ex-wife, but over here on our side of the rainbow, I can see just fine.”

What the hell?

“I think you are trying to tell me something, but you’re not speaking English.”

He rolled his eyes, and leaned towards me, sitting on the very edge of his seat as though he was about to reveal a secret. “For as long as I’ve known you Levi, you’ve been attracted to strength. Whether it was cars, homes, cases, women… You don’t look for broken people. Everyone is broken to some degree, we all got our own shit to deal with. The difference is how we handle them.

“You liked Odile because even after the death of her mother she stood with her head held high. She spent time volunteering, giving back to the community, studying. The same thing applies to Thea. With a mother like hers, there’s no doubt in my mind that she’s had one hell of a childhood. She then had to raise her sister. She’s worked her ass off in one of the best schools into the country, and upon finding out her father was wrongly accused she didn’t break down. She didn’t give up. She instead said she wanted to be a lawyer. She is by far one of the strongest people I know, and there’s no shame in being attracted to that. Why you’ve started to listen to the words of your ex-wife now, is beyond me.”

“Tristan the wise…” I didn’t know what else to say.

“You do know we are going to have to get Odile to testify. She knows something… she has too.”

“The question is why isn’t she telling us the truth?”

I’d thought about that over a thousand times, and I still didn’t have a definitive idea. All I could think of were the worst-case scenarios.

“She could have been angry at her mother for breaking up their family,” I said, throwing out the idea.

“She was what, eleven, or twelve? I can understand why she would have been angry, but now, as an adult, to allow a man to stay in prison, when she knows otherwise? She can’t possibly have hated her that much.”

“Alright, then she blocked it out. Didn’t want to remember what had really happened, so she took what was in front of her, placed it in a box and locked it away. She doesn’t want to go back to that, so she’s pretending?”

He nodded, “Okay. Let’s say it’s that. She is not the first child to find out that one of her parents is having an affair. Again, Odile is emotionally mature enough to at least know that by now. I can see her telling her father off, or not speaking to her father, but for her to have blocked it all out like that? Things like that tend to happen only when severe trauma is involved…”

I paused, and so did he; our eyes met as we both arrived to the same obvious conclusion.

“The type of trauma that comes from seeing your mother murdered?” I finished for him.

“She saw what happened, but she wasn’t killed either? If I was going to kill a socialite, and I knew that her daughter was nearby, I would either kill her child too, or use her for ransom,” he stated.

“She knew the killer!” we both said at the same time.

“Or,” Tristan paused looking me in the eye.

“Or?” I didn’t follow his thoughts.

“Here me out, but what if she did it,” he said slowly.

I had to let that sink in, but it just didn’t compute for me. “Tristan, she was preteen.”

“Exactly! Her mother was using her as a shield to have an affair. That must have set her off. We’ve seen kids much younger than her do the same thing, it is not that far-fetched. Her mother had cash on her that weekend. She could have changed her clothes, called a taxi, and headed home.”

“Tristan she would have to be a sociopath.”

He looked at me, not saying anything else.

“Either way,” I paused, sickened by the thought of it, “you’re going to have to talk to her. She won’t listen to a word that comes out of my mouth.”