by Lisa Gardner
“What did you do?”
“I picked up the shotgun. It was on the floor in front of me. I picked it up. I don’t know why. To get it out of the way. Then I saw him. He was half hidden behind the island. But turning the corner I saw . . . all of him.”
Another glance toward the foyer. Footsteps, did we hear them in the distance? A tinkle of laughter. My mother flirting with Detective Phil.
“What did your mother do?”
“She screamed.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing. He didn’t look real. Not like himself. I kept waiting for him to get up.”
“Who called the cops?”
I look at her. “We didn’t. I checked the shotgun. Made sure the chamber was empty—”
“You knew how to work it.”
“I always knew how to work it. My father wouldn’t bring a firearm into the home without teaching us basic safety.”
“What did you do, Evie?”
“Whatever my mother told me.”
“And she told you to confess to killing him? Not, ‘let’s call nine-one-one,’ ‘good God our loved one has just been shot’?”
I know how crazy it sounds. Back then. Today. All the hours in between. I don’t have the words.
The sergeant’s eyes narrow. “Are you covering for your mom, Evie? She and your father got in a fight. She shot him. You, being a minor with no criminal record, took the blame to save the parent you had left.”
“She was with me. She couldn’t have killed him.”
“Then why such a crazy story? Why not call the police?”
“There would be an investigation. So many questions. The potential for . . .” I couldn’t articulate the words back then, but I understand them now. “Scandal. I don’t think my mom knows who or why my father was shot. But she didn’t want to risk the answer to those questions. Not if they might tarnish his legacy. You have to realize, my father is more than just a man to her. He is . . . everything.”
The sergeant eyes me skeptically. “So she threw her sixteen-year-old daughter under the bus rather than seek justice in her husband’s murder?” A pause. “Or rather than a risk an investigation into his possible suicide?”
I don’t have to answer that question. The sergeant is finally starting to understand. My mother’s true fear. The real reason I did what I did. Sometimes, the danger isn’t from outside, but from inside ourselves.
“Gonna blame your mom for your husband’s death, too,” the sergeant asks at last, “or this time did you finally get it right?”
I hesitate. I don’t want to. I think of my mother as crazy and manipulative, sure, but not homicidal. And yet the closet bursting with maternity wear, the fully stocked nursery . . . It’s almost as if she knew about today. Has been waiting all along.
“What did you think back then?” I ask the sergeant now.
“I thought you were scared. I thought you were in shock. And I thought, based on the physical evidence alone, that you did shoot him, but you were sorry about it.”
“And now?”
The detective shrugs. “Looking at your husband’s crime scene? I think you’re the shooter again. Except this time around, you’re not sorry about it.”
“It would be stupid math,” I say.
She gives me that look.
“Having been involved in a shooting before, to repeat the same equation . . . Stupid math.”
“Except the equation worked for you the first time.”
“You think so? Sixteen years of murmurs and whispers and innuendos. Sixteen years of loss, and I’m not even allowed to grieve because, supposedly, I’m the one who killed him?”
The sergeant doesn’t answer that right away, just continues to study me.
“Besides.” I speak more briskly. “I wouldn’t burn down my own house. I’ve now lost everything. My baby has lost everything. No mother would do that.”
The sergeant merely shrugs, gestures to our luxurious surroundings.
She leaves me no choice but to play the only card I have left. “I’ve lied for my mother. Made excuses, enabled her bad behavior, curtailed my own hopes and dreams just to make her happy. But I would never willingly move back in with her. And I would never happily grant her this much access to her first grandchild.”
“What are you trying to say?”
I shake my head. This time, I’m the one eyeing the doorway nervously. “I don’t know. But don’t you think it’s curious, a mere twenty-four hours later, how few choices I have left?”
CHAPTER 11
D.D.
“GET ANYTHING OUT OF HER?” Phil asked as they headed back to the car. They’d parked on the family’s driveway to get some distance from the reporters yammering on the sidewalk.
“She didn’t magically confess to killing her husband,” D.D. said as she slid into the passenger side. “But just to make things interesting, she changed her story about shooting her father sixteen years ago.”
Phil, firing the engine to life, stared at her. “What would be the point to that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe just to muddy the waters? Evie has to know one of the reasons she looks guilty in her husband’s death is that she already confessed to accidentally shooting her father. So rather than address her husband’s murder now, she’s recanting sixteen years ago.”
“No statute of limitations on murder,” Phil murmured. He twisted around, got to the business of backing down the driveway into the street without taking out any overly aggressive newspeople.
The days were short this time of year; the sun had set while they were inside the house, interviewing the family. Fortunately, the huge spotlights and the blaze of flashing media cameras helped light their way.
“So who shot her father?” Phil asked.
“Evie claims she doesn’t know. She and her mother walked into the scene. Her mother convinced her to take the blame, rather than risk an investigation that might tarnish the man’s ‘legacy.’ Still sounds fishy to me. Who discovers their loved one’s body and doesn’t immediately call nine-one-one? Opts for let’s play make-believe instead?”
“The mother’s scary,” Phil stated. He shuddered slightly.
“Really? Because she seemed quite taken with you. A wealthy widow, and a rather well-preserved model at that.”
Phil gave her a look. D.D. already knew the score. Phil was madly in love with his childhood sweetheart and longtime wife, Betsy. Their marriage was one of the few things in life that gave D.D. hope.
“She’s scary,” Phil said again.
D.D. smiled, turned to studying the view out the window. They’d cleared the reporters now and were cruising through Cambridge, past row after row of gorgeous Victorians and historic Colonials, all decked out for the holidays with shimmering icicle lights, garland-wrapped bannisters, impeccably decorated shrubs. In an enclave this wealthy, D.D. had no doubt the inside matched the outside, towering Christmas trees covered in delicate antique ornaments, decked-out staircases, pots of overflowing greenery. She and Alex were still working on a Christmas tree. Given the modest size of their home compared to the staggering amount of Jack and Kiko’s energy, they’d probably have to put up their tree the night before to have any hope for it to still be standing on Christmas morning.
“How much money can one dead math professor be worth?” D.D. muttered. She hadn’t really thought about it at the time. Everyone said Earl Hopkins had been a genius, he was also a tenured Harvard professor. That had seemed worthy of the grand home. But all these years later, he was gone, and to judge by the kitchen renovations alone, the family’s lifestyle hadn’t suffered. Half a million in life insurance didn’t go that far. Did that mean there were other sources of income, more tangible benefits of Hopkins’s brilliance his wife hadn’t wanted to risk to a murder investigation? Phil was right: There was no statute of limitations
on homicide, which meant Evie’s changing story line raised all sorts of interesting questions. Though despite what she might have intended, they still centered mostly on her and her mom.
“My partner and I were the first to interview Evie and her mother,” D.D. said now, gazing out the window. “At the time, she had blood spatter in her hair and tested positive for GSR on her hands. That kind of physical evidence has gotta mean something.”
“Did you ask her?”
“Sure. In her new and improved memory, she walked in when the blood was still fresh. It dripped down on her from the ceiling. Then she picked up the shotgun and checked the chamber, which would contaminate her hands with GSR. The GSR can go either way. But the blood evidence, I’m less convinced.”
“I worked a scene once,” Phil provided. “Kid was arrested standing in his best friend’s apartment, covered in blood, holding a shotgun. His friend’s body was slumped in a chair, missing most of its head. Kid was arrested for murder, of course. His story: He’d gotten a call from his friend, claiming he was about to commit suicide. The kid had run right over, heard the shotgun blast, and raced inside just in time to find his friend’s body. The blood was from all the spatter dripping down from the ceiling.”
“The verdict?” D.D. asked.
“Forensic experts proved the friend was telling the truth. The directionality of the spatter on the ceiling indicated the shotgun blast had blown up, while the directionality of the spatter on the friend revealed the blood had dripped down. Friend was exonerated. And I believe they still cover the case at the academy. You should ask Alex about it.”
D.D. nodded. Given that her husband Alex’s specialty was blood evidence, she’d definitely run Evie’s new and improved story by him. And while suicides by long guns weren’t as common as suicides by pistols, they did happen, meaning Evie and her mom might have been right to worry about the results of a full-on death investigation.
“Here’s the problem,” D.D. said now. “I can pull the file, but my memory of the Hopkins case is that we didn’t exactly work it to the letter. We had a body. We had a confession. We had a witness, and we lacked any evidence of motive. Everyone said Evie loved her father, et cetera, et cetera. At the time, all the elements matched the given story line of a terrible family tragedy, versus any whiff of something criminal. Let’s just say the senior detective, Speirs, took a more efficiency-based approach to his case management. Close the ones you can, so you have the hours to work the ones you can’t.”
“Versus your own obsessive, take-no-prisoners approach?” Phil asked.
“How Speirs and I ever survived five years of working together, I’ll never know,” D.D. agreed. “Except I was the rookie, and in the beginning, everyone gets to do as they’re told.”
“Did you have doubts about Evie’s confession back then?”
“Honestly, no. The way she presented. The physical evidence at the scene. There are cases I still wonder about. But Earl Hopkins’s shooting death wasn’t one of them.”
“And now?”
“I don’t like it.” D.D. turned away from the window. “I don’t like any of it. Evie’s husband’s death. A fire at their house and our crime scene. Evie’s new statement, which frankly makes less sense than her old statement. I mean, who confesses to a shooting just to appease her mom?”
“Scary woman,” Phil provided again.
“Questions. I have lots and lots of questions. And you know how I feel about questions.”
“I’m never going to see my wife again, am I?”
“I think we have our work cut out for us.”
“Making our next stop?”
“Where all confused detectives should go: back to the crime scene. Arson fire and all.”
* * *
—
THEY COULD SMELL the charred remains of the scene before they arrived. Phil navigated the narrow street, made tighter by the rows of parked cars on both sides. This time of night, people were home for the evening. The small, boxy homes glowed with cozy kitchen scenes or flashing flat-screens. D.D. thought it interesting that as the homes grew smaller, the outdoor Christmas displays grew larger. Entire rooftops covered in Santa and his sleigh. Blow-up snowmen that ballooned across entire yards. Miles of twinkling lights.
Alex had trimmed their front porch with icicle lights, then wrapped the lone tree in their front yard. Not quite keeping up with the neighbors, but certainly more effort than D.D. had ever made. Then again, they had a kid now, and Jack was obsessed with anything related to Santa.
Phil turned the corner, and the Carters’ former home became immediately visible as a black void in the midst of a sea of festivity. Not to mention, the smell of burnt wood and melted plastic grew significantly stronger.
They’d left Evie’s school and gone straight to the Carters’ residence after receiving news of the blaze. The scene had been too hot to approach, however, with the fire crews still working. In the end, it had made more sense to head directly to the source of their problems—Evie Carter—than wait around.
Now Phil turned in enough to park at the end of the driveway, just beyond the crime scene tape. His headlights illuminated a gutted shell. Collapsed roof. Blown-out windows. While a fair amount of the single-car garage appeared intact, only the front wall of the two-story residence remained, and even that was barely standing.
“All right, this is what we know.” Phil pulled out his notebook. Many cops now worked off tablets, or even their smartphones. Phil, however, was a traditionalist. D.D. appreciated that about him.
“According to the arson investigator, Patricia Di Lucca, fire most likely started in the kitchen in the rear of the home. Definitely arson. Looks like a pot was left on the kitchen cooktop, filled with highly flammable materials. Then an accelerant was doused liberally around the house—most likely gasoline—with the largest concentration dumped in the upstairs bedrooms. Range was turned on. Arsonist exited stage right, and once burner achieved proper temperature, poof. Initial spark caught and fire was off and running. These old structures don’t take much to burn, but the extensive nature of the damage, particularly given the fire department was here in under six minutes, meant someone really wanted to get the job done.”
“Whole house was intended to be a loss,” D.D. provided.
“Yep, except the garage, which, as you can see, is relatively intact.”
“The arsonist didn’t care about the garage.”
“Apparently not.”
She tilted her head to the side, contemplating. “Seems like a fairly blatant attempt to eliminate the crime scene. Except, if you really wanted to be precise, why not start the fire in the office where Conrad was shot?”
Phil shrugged. “This stove-top system allowed the perpetrator adequate time to get out of the house. Safer than having to outrun a fire, down a flight of stairs you’ve already covered in gasoline. Di Lucca should have more information on the accelerant and fire-starting device by tomorrow. She’ll also run the details through the arson database to see if it matches any established MOs.”
D.D. nodded. True arsonists were a lot like serial killers. They didn’t—couldn’t—deviate from form.
“For now, she’d say it was nothing too sophisticated. Maybe even a single-Google-search-away sort of thing. But Di Lucca is excellent. She’ll figure it out.”
“Witnesses?”
“Nada. Fire started shortly after two. Not that many people around. Those that were . . . no one saw a car parked in the driveway or anyone dashing from a smoking home. Then again, given the time delay, the person may have exited more like one thirty and simply strolled down the street. This isn’t one of those neighborhoods where everyone knows everything and everyone. Too big for that.”
“What about cameras?” D.D. asked. Because Evie’s lawyer had been right; Boston was a city lousy with surveillance systems, and a good detective knew how to us
e them.
“Couple of home security systems in the area, but none that capture the Carters’ residence. As for traffic cameras, closest one is at the major intersection a mile back, where you make a left onto these side streets. Not terrible, if we knew who we’re looking for. But without a target, too many subjects. Plus, there are side roads leading into this neighborhood as well; that traffic cam covers only the main drag.”
“Meaning anyone, including Evie and her mom, could’ve arrived using one of the lesser-known byways?”
“True. Except Dick Delaney came up with quite the alibi for those two.”
“When?”
“When you were talking to Evie. It’s Joyce Hopkins’s custom to park on the driveway.”
“I know. We parked behind her.”
“Exactly. Meaning her car was in plain sight most of the afternoon. As Delaney pointed out, there are about two dozen rabid reporters who can vouch for it.”
“The meddling media as alibis?”
“Told you it was interesting.”
“They could’ve taken an Uber, or a taxi, or whatever.”
“Again, without the hordes noticing?”
D.D. scowled. Evie’s attorney made a good argument. The media had had the house under constant surveillance pretty much since this morning. The chances of Evie or her mother doing anything without some cameraman or reporter noticing were slim to none.
“I have to admit,” she said at last, “I see Evie’s point. Why would she burn down her own home, especially without having picked up some personal belongings first?”
“Women are that sentimental about their favorite sweater?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of her baby. Five months along, Evie’s probably bought at least one item or two, let alone ultrasound photos, personal snapshots of before and after. I can’t see any soon-to-be mom willingly destroying such items. Unless, of course, she removed them before she ever shot Conrad. During the initial crime scene walk-through, did you notice any baby items?”
