Snapped

by Laura Griffin

  “And did you get a good look at the driver?”

  “I didn’t see much,” she said. “It was only a glimpse.”

  “Okay, what about the car? Any other details you didn’t mention?”

  Sophie’s gaze moved up and to the right, which according to body language experts meant the subject was recalling a fact, not constructing a lie—assuming Sophie was right-handed, which Allison knew from watching her sign for the delivery a few minutes ago. Of course, it also assumed the shrinks who wrote those textbooks weren’t full of crap. Allison had her suspicions.

  “Like I said, a dark green VW. An old-model Beetle.”

  “What about body damage?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?” Allison asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t notice a crumpled bumper?” Allison flipped to the front of her notepad. “Left side, if you’re facing the front of the car?”

  “No.”

  “And you’re certain?”

  She paused. “Yes.”

  Allison made a few notes. “And once again, you noticed the time when this happened and it was—”

  “Twelve-thirty. I’m sure. I’ve even got my parking ticket for you, just to confirm what time I pulled into the garage. Would you like to see it?”

  “I would.”

  “It’s in my purse.” She looked at her watch. “I’m sorry, but speaking of time, we’re running over, which means my post is empty. Is there anything else you need to ask me?”

  Allison pushed her chair back and stood up. “That about does it.”

  Sophie led her out of the room and back to the lobby, where her desk was indeed empty, as she’d predicted. She pulled her purse from the drawer and handed over a yellow parking ticket with the date and time stamped on it. It said 12:36.

  “You know, eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable,” Sophie said.

  Allison watched her warily as she handed back her visitor’s badge.

  “I assume that’s why you’re here?” Sophie asked.

  “You assumed right.”

  Something sparked in her eyes. “That and the fact that I could be just some hysterical woman who doesn’t know what she saw?”

  “Listen, Ms. Barrett—”

  “If you really want to know what happened, why don’t you send that Volkswagen up to our lab here? We’re already running all the rest of your evidence, and we’ve got the world’s top DNA experts. They can get a profile off a single hair follicle. It’s really amazing. If someone besides James Himmel was in that car, our tracers will find evidence of it.”

  Allison couldn’t help but smile. “Sounds like you’re already trying out the PR job.”

  “I believe in the mission here.”

  “Mission?” She made it sound like a religious quest.

  “The lab’s main goal is to process the enormous backlog of evidence so that DNA can be used to solve cases, not just prosecute cases that have already been solved.” She paused. “It’s important work. It saves lives.”

  “I’m sure it does.”

  Some hammering started up down the hall, and Allison studied the woman’s face. The pleasant hostess was gone, replaced by a razor-sharp woman with a glint in her eyes. Far from the ditzy blonde Allison had expected, Sophie Barrett was smart. And she knew exactly how much credibility the task force had given her story.

  The banging ceased, and the phone sang out from the reception desk.

  “Is there anything else?” Sophie asked pleasantly.

  “Not for now.”

  She reached for her headset and gave another perfect smile. “Thanks for coming, Detective Doyle. Let me know if there’s anything more I can do to help.”

  Gretchen’s heart ached as she watched her daughters silently playing on the living-room floor.

  “I appreciate the offer, Marianne. I really do. I just… I don’t know.”

  “What don’t you know?” her sister demanded over the phone. “How could it be any worse than what you’re dealing with now?”

  Her sister had a point. Between the reporters camped out in front of their apartment complex, the dirty looks from neighbors, and the incessant phone calls, she was on the verge of a meltdown.

  “Gretch?”

  “You don’t have room for us,” she said, navigating a minefield of toys so she could peek out the window. “And if anyone finds out we’re there … Trust me, you don’t want these vultures discovering where you live.” Gretchen parted the curtains and surveyed the vultures in question. Some of them had given up since she’d come home from work and given another round of “No comment.” But there were still a few stragglers, and she wouldn’t be surprised if they came pounding on her door with one last request for an interview before the ten o’clock news.

  “Gretch? Did you hear what I said?”

  “Sorry, what?”

  “Just come, okay? You need to get out of there. It isn’t good for the girls.”

  Gretchen looked at Amy and Angela amid the sea of Legos—a ridiculously belated birthday gift from the father they hardly knew. When the package had come in the mail last week, Gretchen had been annoyed. Angry, even. But now she saw it for what it was—some sort of pathetic last effort by a desperate man.

  God, Jim, how could you do this to us?

  “Gretch?”

  “I just … I can’t afford to leave my job, Mar. What on earth could I do in Houston?”

  “We’ll figure that out when you get here.”

  “Marianne—”

  “Just think about it, okay? Promise me.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Gretchen got off the phone and sank onto the rug. Angela looked up from her Legos.

  “Do you like my house, Mommy?”

  “I do.”

  Angela’s house had a bright red roof and yellow shutters and looked nothing like any of the low-rent apartments where she’d lived during her six years.

  Gretchen studied her daughter’s face, looking for signs of grief. She hadn’t cried yet. Neither had Amy. She wondered if they ever would. Gretchen wasn’t sure how much they remembered about the man who’d come in and out of their lives so sporadically. Did they remember him in uniform, when he’d looked so handsome? Did they remember him taking them to the zoo when they were three or playing airplane with them on the living-room floor?

  Or did they remember him yelling and breaking things and reeking of gin?

  “You want to play, Mommy?” Amy looked up at her somberly.

  Gretchen realized she was crying. She wiped her tears away and forced a smile. “Sure, honey.”

  “You can be whites.” Amy pushed a pile of plastic bricks across the carpet. “I’m yellows and Angie’s blues.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Gretchen said, dragging the bin closer to cull through it.

  A plan. For the twins’ sake, she needed to pull herself together and come up with a plan. She couldn’t take another day of clutching her daughters’ little hands in hers as they dodged the mob of reporters.

  Did you know your ex-husband was homicidal?

  Had you seen any warning signs?

  Did you know he was about to snap?

  Gretchen poked through the Legos. Maybe Houston would be the best thing for all of them. Gretchen’s job was nothing special, and she no longer had a reason to live near the base. Maybe it was time to start over.

  Something white peeked out from beneath the sea of color. She cleared away the Legos. An envelope, taped to the bottom of the bin. Her stomach tightened with dread.

  Scrawled across it, in Jim’s familiar handwriting, was her name.

  Jonah spotted Sophie Saturday afternoon at the Squeaky Clean Car Wash on Riverview, and he almost kept driving. But a glimpse in his rearview mirror changed his mind. He had some questions for Sophie related to the investigation, and the sooner he got answers, the sooner he could move forward.

  Yeah. That was the reason he was pulling an illegal U-tur
n and whipping into a steamy car wash while dressed in a suit and tie.

  She was up on tiptoes spraying down her Tahoe, singing along to whatever music was playing on her iPod. Cutoff shorts again, a Cowboys T-shirt, and for once she was wearing flip-flops instead of heels.

  He got out and shrugged off of his jacket, then tossed it over the passenger seat. As he rolled up his sleeves, Sophie stopped what she was doing and gazed at him over the tops of her trendy sunglasses.

  “Well, look at you.” She plucked out her earbuds as he approached. “You clean up nicely, Detective Macon.”

  He took the hose from her, annoyed to be reminded that he was the detective and she was the witness here, a fact that made the wet-T-shirt-and-soapsuds fantasies swirling through his head pretty inappropriate.

  “Careful,” she warned, “you’ll ruin your good shoes.”

  He didn’t comment as he doused the roof with water. She picked up another hose and started spraying the foam.

  “Ric saw you at the funeral,” he said.

  “I saw him, too.”

  Jonah was surprised she’d been there. Walter Graham and Jodi Kincaid’s funerals had overlapped, and he would have figured she’d go to the woman’s, especially after bonding with her kid the way she had.

  She stopped the soap spray and wiped her forehead with the back of her arm. Her skin was damp and locks of hair clung to her neck. “You were at the other one, I guess?”

  “Yep.”

  She looked away, at the passing cars. “I wanted to be there, but—” She shook her head. “Anyway, it’s probably for the best.”

  “It was nice of you to go to the professor’s.”

  She scoffed at him. “It wasn’t nice, it was selfish. I didn’t even know the man.”

  “Still, you paid your respects.”

  “I was trapped next to his bloody corpse for thirty minutes. I needed a different image of him to replace the one in my mind.” Her gray eyes gazed up at him tentatively. “I guess that sounds kind of sick, doesn’t it?”

  Jonah traded the water hose for the soap one she was holding. “Makes sense to me.”

  After witnessing Jodi Kincaid’s autopsy, he could relate completely. He was still trying to make the portrait he’d seen at the front of the church replace his mental picture of her being dissected on that steel table. But it was probably forever lodged in his brain.

  Jonah crouched down to do Sophie’s wheel wells.

  “So, was it civic duty or professional obligation?” she asked.

  He glanced up at her. “A little of both, I guess.”

  Despite the developments in the case this morning, Jonah couldn’t let it go. He felt compelled to investigate the victims, even though everyone but Ric seemed to think it was a waste of time. So he’d gone to one funeral, Ric to another. Eric Emrick was being buried in Oklahoma, so it wasn’t going to be possible to attend that one, but Jonah still planned to do some basic investigating. These were murder victims in his jurisdiction, and he owed them that much.

  He finished the front two tires and moved to the back. When he looked up, Sophie was watching him, the corner of her mouth lifted in a half-smile.

  “What?”

  “I’ve got a guy in a black suit washing my car. People are going to think you’re my chauffeur.”

  She smiled fully now, and Jonah felt a warm pull. This one was the real deal. She smiled all the time, but mostly it was for show.

  He stood up and moved to the back bumper. She retrieved a rag and some Windex from her backseat and started polishing the side mirror. She’d come prepared.

  “So, how was your date?” he asked.

  She glanced at him. “Fine.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  She hesitated a moment, which answered his question.

  “Mark Royers.”

  He frowned.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I’m trying to place the name.”

  “He works at Delphi. He did some of the DNA work for your case last winter.”

  “Mark Royers? The DNA guy?”

  “That’s what I said.” She stopped polishing. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  She fisted her hand on her hip. “What is it?”

  “I just wouldn’t think you two would have much in common.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. Forget it.”

  “You mean because he’s a doctor? I don’t have enough letters after my name to date someone who’s smart?”

  Jonah didn’t much feel like getting beamed in the nuts with a high-power hose, so he took that as a rhetorical question.

  She shook her head and stalked around to the other mirror.

  When he finished her tires, she was still fuming.

  “That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

  She muttered something he didn’t catch.

  He hung up the nozzles and snagged the towel out of her hand. “Thank you, Jonah, for helping me wash my car in this hundred-degree heat,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she parroted. Then she reached into her backseat again and pulled a diet soft drink from a cooler. She popped it open, took a gulp, then passed it to him. He hated diet sodas, but it was a furnace out here, so he downed half of it.

  “I meant he doesn’t look like your type,” he said. “Physically. He’s kind of skinny, isn’t he?”

  She didn’t like that, either. The genuine smile from a few minutes ago had been replaced by a genuine scowl. Time for a new subject.

  “Listen, I stopped by to tell you something.” He tossed the towel on the floor of her car and shut the door.

  “Hmm, let me guess. I passed the test?”

  “What test?”

  “Detective Doyle. She was sent out to vet me, right?” Sophie drained the last of the soda and pitched the can in a trash bin. “That thing about the crumpled bumper was good. I almost fell for it. She had me doubting my own story.”

  Jonah pretended not to know what she was talking about.

  “So, when we took Himmel’s car into evidence,” he said, “you know what we found in the trunk?”

  “What?”

  “A box containing an eight-inch hunting knife, a twenty-two-caliber pistol, and five grenades.”

  “Grenades?” She looked alarmed. “What was he planning to do with those?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. Here’s what we didn’t find in that car: prints belonging to anyone besides Himmel. We went over it three times.”

  She sighed and looked away. “I know what I saw.”

  “What you think you saw. We haven’t found one witness who can corroborate seeing a green VW on campus that day.”

  Her eyes flashed with anger. “Are you saying—”

  “Just hear me out. We ran every vehicle registered on that campus, and there’re four VW Beetles. One of them happens to be dark blue.” He watched her face as she figured out what he was getting at. “Allison interviewed the vehicle owner this morning, and turns out he parked on University Avenue just a block north of Meadowlark sometime after twelve o’clock the day of the shooting.”

  She stared up at him. Her mouth dropped open. “But—”

  “Is there any possibility that could be the car you saw?”

  “The car I saw was green.”

  “You’re sure?” He held his breath, waiting for her answer. The entire case hinged on this one witness account, and Jonah needed to be certain.

  “It was green.”

  He blew out a sigh. She was convinced of what she saw. Or thought she saw. And meanwhile, news of the dark blue VW had all but annihilated any chance he’d had of convincing the rest of the task force to take him seriously with this.

  Or take Sophie seriously, which was really the problem. They didn’t.

  “So, what does this mean?”

  She knew exactly what it meant because she was looking up at him with disappointment in her eyes. She thought
he didn’t believe her.

  And honestly, he wasn’t sure he did. Every shred of physical evidence pointed to a lone perpetrator. And the one eyewitness account that might indicate otherwise could be explained now by a coincidence.

  “It means we’re back to the original case theory,” he said.

  “In other words, that’s it? It’s over? You guys have your man, and we don’t need to ask any more questions?”

  Jonah didn’t feel that way, but she’d described Reynolds and Noonan to a T.

  “Sophie—”

  “Forget it.” She jerked open her door. “Believe what you want, Jonah. But I know what I saw.”

  Wyatt Macon lived in an area that had once been considered the boondocks but was quickly becoming the outskirts of town. Jonah passed yet another brand-new subdivision before turning up the narrow gravel drive to the one-story clapboard house where he’d grown up.

  He parked his pickup under an oak tree and pushed open the door. A golden retriever instantly poked her head in and pawed his thigh.

  “Hey, girl.” He scratched Duchess between the ears, and she gleefully followed him across the lawn to where his dad was pushing his Toro mower. His face was red as a tomato, and he stopped as Jonah approached.

  “You should do that in the morning,” Jonah said.

  In truth, he shouldn’t do it at all anymore, but you couldn’t tell his father a damn thing.

  “I had company this morning.” He pulled a bandanna out of his pocket and wiped the sweat off his face, and Jonah turned to look back toward the house, shaking his head. In one of life’s bigger surprises, his parents had just last summer ended thirty-nine years of marriage. Apparently, they’d “grown apart.” Now his dad had sleepovers on weekends and his mom had an account at eHarmony.

  “Thought you’d be by today.” His dad trudged across the lawn and hiked up the steps to the front porch, where a pitcher of lemonade was waiting with slices of lemon floating on top. Jonah’s dad didn’t make anything that couldn’t be thrown on a Weber.

  He poured a glass and downed half of it in one sip, then looked at Jonah. “Want some?”

  “No.” Jonah leaned back against the wooden porch railing.

  “Macey makes good lemonade.”

  “I’m fine.”

  Jonah liked Macey well enough, but he couldn’t drink another woman’s lemonade in a house he still thought of as his mom’s, and it didn’t matter who had asked for the divorce.