by Cari Hunter
He was going to do so no matter how she reacted, so she said nothing. He pulled his chair close to the table again.
“I think you and Lyssa were involved,” he said, his deep voice unpleasantly intimate. “You met with her frequently, and at first it was probably only to study, but one thing led to another, as it often does.” He made it sound so reasonable, just something that had happened, something for which no one was to blame. “That afternoon, you take advantage of Alex being away, phoning her at frequent intervals to ensure that you and Lyssa won’t be interrupted unexpectedly. You spend the day with Lyssa. Afterward, she showers and gets ready to leave for work. Maybe you’re already arguing, maybe she wants to tell Alex and you don’t, maybe she’s making threats, but you’re still arguing when you go down to the gate with her, and you need to shut her up.”
Sarah shook her head, half in denial, half in confusion, but he gave her no opportunity to interrupt.
“You already have the knife on you, but Lyssa manages to get ahold of it. There’s a struggle, during which you sustain your injuries, but you get the knife back and lash out with it.” He closed his fist around an imaginary weapon, driving it upward to mimic the abdominal wound and then stabbing down in an arc onto the table. “The handle breaks off, but the blade is stuck. You try to free it, leaving your prints on the metal, but then you start to panic. So you step away and think. You’re medically trained; you know how this should go. You concoct a story about finding Lyssa and attempting to revive her, and I have to admit it’s a good one.” He nodded in exaggerated admiration, before his expression darkened again. “It’s also complete and utter horseshit. Your delay in phoning for help gave you the opportunity to get rid of the blade’s handle, time to get your story straight. Meanwhile, Lyssa is bleeding out. Did you walk away from her while you hid the evidence, Sarah? Did you leave her to die while you tried to save your own hide?”
“No,” she said vehemently. “No, it didn’t happen like that. You’ve got it wrong.”
“How?” he asked. “How have I gotten it wrong?”
“Lyssa had her own key.”
Uncertainty flitted across his face. “What?”
“For the gate.” She put a hand to her aching head. It had taken her far too long to identify the fundamental flaw in his theory. “We had one cut for her. Jenny’s store on Main Street might still have an invoice.”
Quinn and Kryger ignored this latter point, but she saw Emerson jot down a note.
“There was no key found on Lyssa’s person or in her SUV,” Kryger said.
That, unfortunately, made perfect sense to Sarah. “Then whoever killed her took it to let himself out.”
“Then how did he let himself in?” Kryger retorted. “Officer Tobin had to cut the padlock when he arrived. It showed no sign of having been tampered with prior to that.”
“I don’t know,” Sarah admitted. “The killer must have picked the lock in the first place. Then I suppose he took Lyssa’s key with him because it made it easier for him to escape.”
“So we’re back to that.” Kryger gave a long-suffering sigh. “Your mystery assailant, who leaves no trace of himself or his vehicle, kills the wrong woman, and disappears into the night.”
“Have you even explored that as a possibility?” The contempt in Bridie’s tone was withering. “It seems to me you have a lot of unsubstantiated supposition, backed up by testimony gleaned from every homophobe in town. What you are lacking is anything for which my client cannot provide a logical explanation. Do you really think she’s capable of stabbing a young woman so violently that the medical examiner has to cut the blade free from the victim’s sternum?”
Kryger gave Quinn a thin smile, as if Bridie had given them the ideal opening for their trump card. The photographs he threw down this time spun repeatedly before coming to rest at odd angles. For a moment, Sarah couldn’t work out what she was seeing. Then she shoved her chair back with a gasp, trying to get as far away from them as she could. Bridie picked them up and looked at each of them in turn before laying them facedown on the table.
“I think your client is capable of quite a lot of things,” Kryger said. “She shot a man and left him to die. I think a jury would be very interested to hear all about that.”
Sarah barely heard Quinn state the time and stop the tape recorder. Nicholas Deakin’s river-battered corpse had loomed large in one of the photographs. In the other, Tanner, the man she had shot in a desperate bid to save herself and Alex, lay unconscious in a hospital bed, his leg in traction and a ventilator breathing for him.
“Her arraignment is scheduled for three thirty tomorrow,” Quinn reminded Bridie as he stood. “We’ll see you there.”
Uncertain what was supposed to happen next, Sarah sat and watched Quinn politely gesture Kryger in front of him as they left the room. She could hear Bridie’s pen still scratching urgently across her notepad.
Emerson’s voice broke the tension. “Do you want something to eat?” Like Bridie, he looked troubled.
“No.” The thought of food tied Sarah’s stomach into a knot. She was coming to realize for the first time how likely it was that a jury would convict her of the murder; how easily, given the evidence as Quinn had just presented it, any regular person—let alone one with ingrained prejudices—would be persuaded of her guilt. She would never be able to go home, never be with Alex again. The room seemed to tilt and she had to put her head into her hands to steady herself.
“It’ll be okay, Sarah.” Bridie’s voice sounded distant and uncertain.
Looking up, Sarah gave her a wan smile. “Thanks,” she said, not wanting her to feel responsible.
Emerson’s chair scuffed the floor as he stood. “I should get you back to your cell.”
“I’ll see you in the morning, to prepare for the arraignment,” Bridie told her. “Try not to worry.”
Sarah knew she meant well, but the reassurance rang hollow. There was only one thing on her mind as she looked at Bridie and Emerson in turn.
“When do I get to make a phone call?”
*
The call was snatched up on the first ring.
“Hello?”
Even suffused with anxiety, Alex’s voice brought a smile to Sarah’s lips.
“Hey, it’s me,” was all she could think to say. She heard Alex laugh brokenly and knew she was crying, even as tears dripped off her own nose and splattered against the dirty plastic of the phone. For the first few seconds, all they did was listen to each other breathe.
“How you doin’?” Alex asked finally.
“I’m okay. Better now.”
“Yeah, yeah, me too.” Another pause as Alex blew her nose. When she spoke again, she sounded stronger, more composed. “How did it go with Quinn?”
“Not too well.” Sarah rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand, knowing Alex would be able to tell if she lied and needing her to have an idea of what was coming. “Alex—”
“Don’t. Don’t say it. Don’t even fucking think it, Sarah.”
“I have to. We both have to.” Her voice caught. “And I need to know you’ll be all right, that you won’t do anything stupid.”
“I’m not going to let you go to jail,” Alex countered. “We’ll find something that proves it couldn’t have been you.”
Sarah shook her head. “Whoever did this is still out there. He knows where we live. You need to be getting yourself to someplace safe, not worrying about me.”
Her words prompted a lengthy silence, broken only when Alex started to laugh despairingly. “Well, aren’t we just a pair of self-sacrificing idiots?” she said, and Sarah could practically see the derisive roll of her eyes.
“We do have a distinct tendency.” The photographs of Deakin and Tanner had once again brought the Cascades and everything she and Alex had had to do to survive there to the forefront of her thoughts. She reminded herself that, in times of crisis, food was a reliable subject on which to fall back. “Are you eating okay? Did you have so
mething for your tea?”
“Cake,” Alex said. “I think, given the circumstances, cake is acceptable as a meal.”
“Yeah.” Sarah smiled. “Should’ve baked a fucking file into it.” From the corner of her eye, she saw Emerson tap his watch. “I think I have to go,” she said. “My arraignment is at three thirty tomorrow.”
“I’ll be there.”
Something in Alex’s voice destroyed Sarah’s ability to be brave. “I miss you,” she whispered.
“I miss you too.” Alex sounded as if she was walking the same tightrope Sarah had just lost her grip on.
“I’ll see you tomorrow.” Unable to bear a protracted good-bye, Sarah hung up the phone. She stared blankly at the receiver until Emerson came across to the desk. Then, without saying a word, she followed him back to her cell.
*
The guard on the night shift made it easy for Sarah to gauge the passing time. At what she guessed were hourly intervals, his boots would clomp across the tiled floor. Then he would open the observation hatch in the cell door, usually whistling or humming tunelessly as he did so. As soon as he was satisfied that she was behaving herself, he would slam the hatch so hard that the metal door shook, making the noise reverberate around the cell. He never opened the door, never stepped across the threshold, or threatened her with violence. He just left the light glaring overhead and ensured that once an hour she was startled from what little sleep she had managed to snatch.
As the metal rang for the seventh time, she pushed herself up to lean against the wall, in the hope that it might lessen his enthusiasm with the hatch. It didn’t, and she heard his cackle of laughter when he noted the success of his efforts. She drew her knees to her chest, pressed her eyes against her knees to try to block out the light, and started to count down the hour.
*
As the first hints of light began to creep between the shutters and the birds welcomed the dawn with enthusiasm, Alex gave up trying to sleep, abandoning the bed to Tilly and the cats. She had woken frequently in the night, only managing an hour here and there as nightmares tormented her and every little noise made her reach for the Glock on her bedside table. At two o’clock, Tilly had inched her way onto Sarah’s side of the bed, and Alex—hating the emptiness there—had let her stay. The cats, sensing an easy mark, had joined them shortly afterward.
Alex showered quickly and threw on the clothes closest to hand. She collected a flashlight and Sarah’s camera, clipped her Glock to her belt, and whistled for Tilly.
“Stay close, girl,” she said, and Tilly, somewhat less boisterous since Lyssa’s death, obediently walked to heel.
It was quiet and cool outside, but the cloudless, pale blue sky promised another day of unrelenting heat. Alex tried not to think about Sarah being held in a cellblock where fixing the air conditioning was always way down on the station priorities and fixing the drains didn’t even make the list.
She walked slowly, noting the tire impressions left on the driveway by the patrol units the previous day and snapping a photograph of a particularly clear example for potential use as a comparison. The more she thought about it, the less convincing she found her initial theory that Lyssa had been forced to stop by a vehicle blocking the path. Alex was pretty sure that she or Sarah had been the intended victims, not Lyssa, but Lyssa had at least been driving away from the house and might at a fleeting glimpse have been mistaken for one of them. If the murderer had jumped to the wrong conclusion and stopped her at gunpoint, he might have killed her in a panic when he realized she would be able to identify him. But what if the first person down the track had happened to be a deliveryman? The killer would have had to wait somewhere to watch him go by.
Alex kept walking, scouring the edges of the track for anything the fingertip searches might have missed and shining her flashlight into the denser patches of undergrowth. Tilly sidled closer to her as they neared the site of the murder. They were completely alone; there was no one guarding the area, and she wondered whether the search had finally been called off.
“S’okay, we’re okay,” she murmured, as much to reassure herself as Tilly.
All the CSI markers had been removed, furthering her suspicion that the police wouldn’t be returning, but still it was obvious where Lyssa’s body had lain. Four holes remained where a forensics tent had been staked, and the ground between them bore a deep black stain. Alex imagined Sarah kneeling in the blood, trying to help, knowing it was useless but refusing to let Lyssa go without doing everything possible to save her. The price Sarah was now paying for that made Alex want to punch her fist into the trunk of the nearest tree.
She knelt to comfort Tilly, giving them both a minute to settle. The area of forest surrounding her was largely unfamiliar; she and Sarah usually walked or jogged toward the lake instead and only crossed this stretch by car. The track wasn’t easy for drivers to negotiate, forcing them to focus straight ahead, so when she set off again she started to pay attention to what lay on either side.
Ten minutes later, she reached the gate.
“Shit.”
She had been working on the assumption that Lyssa’s assailant had driven beyond the gate. She had no idea what his original plans had entailed—she was pointedly trying not to contemplate that—but he would surely have known that leaving in his own vehicle would be less dangerous than stealing one of theirs. They lived in a small town; the wrong face behind the wheel of a familiar car would have drawn attention. Now, having seen no place he could have concealed a vehicle, she wondered if he had risked parking on the public road and continuing on foot, perhaps planning to use one of their cars to return quickly to his.
It took her another fruitless hour to reach the access road. Shielding her eyes from the glare of the sun, she surveyed the deserted stretch of pothole-strewn asphalt and acknowledged the impossibility of the task she had set herself. The perpetrator could have approached from either direction and he could have parked anywhere. Completely disheartened, she turned around and began to retrace her steps.
Instead of unlocking the gate when she reached it, she chased Tilly through the trees until they were past the barrier and back onto the path. The quick burst of exercise brightened her spirits and she threw a stick for Tilly to fetch, wondering whether she would have time to drive out to Emerson’s apartment before Sarah’s arraignment. It was only as she stooped to wrestle the stick from Tilly’s mouth that she noticed the gap in the trees. Just large enough to drive through, the opening was well concealed by a line of saplings and half-grown spruce that rendered it undetectable from the direction of the house, but it was more apparent now that she was heading back. Anyone driving at low speed and keeping a lookout for just such a hiding place might have spotted it.
“Tilly, sit.” Alex didn’t want anything to disturb the area or distract her. She lowered her hand, adding emphasis to the command, and Tilly immediately obeyed. “Good girl, stay.”
Her pulse quickening, Alex walked off the track and down a slight incline, keeping to the margins to avoid trampling on any possible evidence. The early morning sunshine was barely penetrating the thick canopy overhead. She panned her flashlight across the ground, picking out nothing but leaf litter, pine needles, and fallen cones. Unwilling to admit defeat, she walked farther, and found a small clearing surrounded by trees sturdy enough to prevent any vehicle’s progress. She shone her light around the area. It was perfect: close enough to the track that the killer would hear anything approaching, but concealed enough to provide him with complete cover. She focused her flashlight downward, crouched low, and put her hand to the layer of debris covering the forest floor.
“What the hell?”
She pulled her hand back and looked around, staring first at the natural patterns where leaves had blown and drifted and then at the quite unnatural pattern she had just found. Someone had tried hard—too hard—to make the ground appear undisturbed. The area had a swept-over, churned look to it, old leaves commingling with new, and partly ro
tted cones lying above fresh ones. Angling her light, she took a series of photographs before carefully beginning to excavate the layer. It was deep; whoever had done this had taken their time. Sweat began to darken her tank top as she tried to fit that fact into a possible sequence of events. Her fingers touched a hard ridge and she started to dig more frantically, scrabbling and cursing at the muck that fell back into the hole. She knew it was the tread of a car tire even before it was fully exposed. Someone had kicked at it, obliterating large sections, but at some stage they must have realized that that wouldn’t be enough and covered it with debris instead.
Exertion and anger blurred Alex’s first attempt to photograph it. She forced herself to breathe slowly and take several more pictures. When she was satisfied, she stood back a little way and waited for the logical part of her brain to kick the emotional part into touch. Instinct and training told her that the killer probably hadn’t covered the treads immediately. No one involved in such a frenzy of violence was likely to be thinking rationally enough to stop and rake leaf mold over evidence, especially if he knew he had murdered the wrong person. He would flee and regroup, work out a strategy. Then—and this time Alex did slam her fist into a tree—he would return at the earliest opportunity to conceal the tracks.
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
The urge to drive straight over to the station, slap the photographs in Quinn’s face, and demand he send CSI techs out to cast the treads was so potent that she had to dig her heels into the dirt to keep herself stationary. Quinn had been out here. Emerson had been out here. Half the fucking police force had been out here, not to mention a number of civilians. If it was someone on the force who had had the wherewithal to tamper with evidence and perhaps steer other search members from the area, whom could she trust with what she had just discovered? In a worst-case scenario, if Quinn were involved, it would be simple for him to spin everything around and insist that she had made the tracks herself. No one was with her to corroborate her find, and his good buddy Judge Buchanan certainly wouldn’t take much convincing of her complicity. She knew she hadn’t found enough to change anything.
