The Prettiest One: A Thriller

by James Hankins

  “We going out the back?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am,” the uniform replied.

  Just before he reached the door, he aimed the beam of his flashlight into a small opening in the wall, a few feet to the right of the exit. It had been a closet once, with double doors, but the doors were long gone. The closet wasn’t empty, though. Several blankets were piled in one corner with a depression in the middle. It reminded Hunnsaker of a big bird’s nest.

  “May I?” she asked, taking the flashlight from the uniform. She shone the light into the closet. Crumpled fast-food wrappers. Cigarette butts. A skin magazine, its pages wrinkled and worn. A few empty beer bottles, one lying on its side.

  “Think someone’s been living here?” Padilla asked.

  “Or just comes to get drunk now and then,” Hunnsaker said. “Someplace he can be alone with the girls of his dreams. But whoever he is, it’s not our victim. At least I don’t think so. We’ll dust in here for prints, but the vic looked too healthy to be living like this.”

  “So if it wasn’t our vic using this hangout, it was somebody else,” Padilla said. “And that somebody could be a witness, or even our shooter.”

  Hunnsaker knew that the squatter, if that’s what he was, might not even have been at the warehouse when the killing took place. And if he was, he might have been dead drunk. Or sound asleep. Or busy focusing on Miss July’s naughty parts. But then again, if they were lucky, maybe he was in the building and did see something . . . or someone.

  She pointed the flashlight at the open bottle lying on its side. There was still some beer in it. A few inches away was an irregular shape in the grime on the floor that looked like a dried puddle of something in the dust and dirt around it. Hunnsaker stepped closer without entering the closet and squatted down.

  “That look like spilled beer to you?” she asked Padilla. “From the bottle right there, before it rolled a few inches away?”

  “Looks like it,” Padilla said.

  “A guy who hangs out here, drinking cheap beer, he’s not the kind of guy to leave beer in a bottle, is he? I mean, even if he knocked over the bottle by accident, there’s still beer inside. See that?”

  Padilla picked up the thread. “So maybe he got startled by something and knocked it over, and was too distracted by whatever it was to pick it up and finish it off. Maybe he got up and shot our vic.”

  “Or maybe he heard the shots and realized he had to get the hell out of here fast. Either way, if he was here, we want to talk to this guy.” She turned to the uniform and said, “Good job.” The man nodded smartly and professionally in return, but Hunnsaker knew he’d be telling his wife or girlfriend tonight all about the big part he’d played in a murder investigation today. To Padilla, she said, “Let’s hope we pull some good prints from in there, because I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that the kind of guy who spends his time in that closet is in our system.”

  She turned toward the uniform, who stood waiting nearby, practically at attention. “You were one of the first on the scene, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “My partner and me.”

  “Did you interview the kids who found the body?”

  The victim was found by two grade-schoolers who had planned to spend that morning exploring an abandoned warehouse instead of learning geometry. Surprisingly, rather than flee the scene and avoid exposing their morning of playing hooky, they actually called 911 on a cell phone that Hunnsaker thought the kids were probably too young to have. Then again, she wasn’t a parent, so what did she know about it?

  “I did, ma’am,” the uniform replied, “but not too much. Just enough to make sure there were no threats that they were aware of. We left anything more to you guys, ma’am.”

  Hunnsaker and Padilla would be talking to the kids in a little while. “And they didn’t mention seeing anyone other than the victim?” Hunnsaker asked. “Like our closet dweller, maybe?”

  The uniform shook his head. “They said they didn’t see anyone else.”

  “Did you believe them?”

  “Seemed like they were telling the truth, but I couldn’t swear to it.”

  Hunnsaker turned to Padilla. “If there’s any chance they saw this guy, we need to know about it. Either way, somehow, we’ll find him. And when we do, if we’re lucky, we find our killer.”

  “And if he didn’t pull the trigger himself . . .” Padilla added.

  “Then maybe he saw who did,” Hunnsaker finished for him.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CAITLIN INSISTED ON DRIVING. She knew that Josh hadn’t slept a wink after she’d come home, while she’d stolen a few hours of admittedly fitful sleep. Sure, she’d tossed and turned and sweated her way through yet another nightmare encounter with the Bogeyman, but still, she’d slept a bit while Josh hadn’t. Besides, she hoped that driving the same route she’d driven the night before—even though it was in reverse, and it was day now rather than night—might act as a mental Heimlich maneuver to make her mind cough up a little nugget of memory.

  Caitlin had wanted to take separate cars on this trip. It made sense to her. She’d drive the Skylark she had—hopefully—borrowed from Katherine Southard, and Josh would follow in his Subaru. That way, they’d be able to drive his car home again after . . . well, after whatever they were going to do in Smithfield. But Josh had insisted on riding with her, saying they could rent a car when they were ready to return to New Hampshire. Caitlin almost stood her ground, arguing that it would be far more efficient to bring two vehicles, but then realized that Josh was probably nervous to let her out of his sight for long so soon after finally getting her back from her mysterious seven-month absence.

  So Caitlin drove and Josh rode shotgun, using a GPS application on his tablet to guide them to Katherine Southard’s address. Before they had left home, she thought about making a few calls to the people to whom she felt she owed them, those few she couldn’t bear to keep in the dark any longer about the fact that she was alive and—at least physically—well. Then she realized, with no small amount of sadness, that other than Josh, there were no such people. Her wonderful parents, who had taken an orphan girl into their home and adopted her when she was five years old, had passed away years ago. Caitlin had no brothers, no sisters. Her father had been an only child himself, and it had been years since Caitlin had heard from Aunt Sophie, her mother’s sister in San Antonio, despite the Christmas and birthday cards Caitlin sent her every year. And as for her friends, there didn’t seem to be any left. She’d had some at the time she disappeared, some good ones, she’d thought, but they ceased being friends to her the moment they turned their backs on Josh after she went missing. So no, there was no one she needed to call.

  Caitlin and Josh spent the first part of the drive just catching up, which was strange for her. Josh needed to bring her up to date on what he had been doing for seven months, but to her, it was as if no time had passed. She had no memory of what she had been doing all that time. The last thing she remembered apparently took place the day before she disappeared. Then she was in that warehouse parking lot. So it was a fairly lopsided conversation, with Josh filling her in on various things. At first, Caitlin wanted to keep things light, so she asked about movies that had come out in theaters while she was . . . away. And about which celebrities were dating each other now. She asked whether the president had become embroiled in any interesting scandals and whether any of the various dictators around the world had invaded one of his country’s neighbors. So for a while, Josh caught her up on current events that weren’t all that current several months after they’d taken place.

  Finally, shortly after they crossed the border into Massachusetts, Caitlin asked Josh how he was, how he had fared while she was gone. He was silent for a few moments. Caitlin let her gaze drift from the road and stole a glance at him. His eyes were closed. He looked as though he were steeling himself for this part of the conversation. Finally, he looked over and said, “One day, everything was fine. We were happ
ily living our happy life together. The next, you were just . . . gone. In a blink, everything changed. I didn’t know that right away, but soon enough . . .”

  He paused and took a deep breath.

  “At first, of course,” he said, “I thought it was because of our argument that night. That you needed some space. After a few hours, though, I tried calling your cell. You didn’t pick up.”

  It was only then that Caitlin remembered that she no longer had a cell phone. She suddenly felt naked without it, like she’d left home without her pants. She made a mental note to buy a new phone when she got the chance.

  “By three in the morning,” Josh continued, “I figured you’d gone to stay at a friend’s house. I called Lucy first, then Michelle.”

  “You woke them up?”

  “I did. You weren’t there. And you weren’t at Bethany and Carl’s place, either.” He paused, then added, “I even tried Rick.”

  “Rick?” She looked over at him again. “You thought I went to stay at my old boyfriend’s house?”

  He shrugged sheepishly. “I didn’t know how mad you were about . . . whatever we were fighting about.”

  Wow. She looked back through the windshield at the highway stretching up and over a rise in front of them. “I bet you were relieved I wasn’t at Rick’s,” she added in a weak attempt to lighten the mood.

  “Honey, I just wanted to know where you were. I didn’t care where that was as long as you were safe.”

  She felt another pang of guilt for what she’d put him through, even though she hadn’t meant to put him through it . . . or could even remember doing so.

  “When six in the morning rolled around, I got really worried. I called the cops. They listened, but like on TV, they don’t get too worked up about someone who’s been missing for only eight hours. Especially when I admitted that you’d walked out after a fight. They said you’d probably come home after you cooled off. They didn’t care that that behavior wasn’t like you, that you’d never done anything like that before. They told me to call them back if you hadn’t returned by dinnertime. Hell, dinnertime. Another twelve hours.”

  He fell quiet for a moment. She let him have his mental space and just focused on the road. Finally, he spoke again. “By the next day, everyone was looking for you. And everyone was looking at me. In the first few hours—very few hours—people were sympathetic. But the longer you were gone, the less innocent I began to seem, I guess. The police started asking me questions that anyone who has watched even a few hours of cop shows knows meant that I had become a suspect. They asked about our relationship, whether you might have been seeing anyone, whether that made me angry—”

  “They thought I might have been cheating on you?”

  “It was a theory.”

  “And then you found out and killed me?”

  He shrugged. “Like I said, it was a theory. Or if you were still alive, maybe you ran off with the guy. That was a possibility, too.”

  “Well, none of that happened.”

  “I know that.”

  “Did they also consider the possibility that you cheated on me, or was I the only suspected adulterer?”

  “Of course they did, Caitlin. Don’t they always suspect the husband is having an affair when a wife disappears?”

  “With anyone in particular?”

  “First it was Eve, down the hall from me at work. When they got nowhere with that, they moved on to Gretchen, if you can believe it.”

  “Your boss’s secretary? The trashy one who came on to you at the company picnic? How stupid would that have been?”

  “That’s the one, and she actually supports Mr. Rollins, my boss’s boss, which would have been even stupider. Anyway, they poked and prodded and made everything I ever did—hell, everything we both ever did—seem suspicious. That was bad enough, but then the media started in on me. Again, at first I was the innocent husband, as much a victim in this as you were. Then when the police started eyeing me, the media began to circle. I swear to God, I could almost see their fins sticking out of the waves. I assume the cops leaked something about my being a suspect, because the reporters went into a frenzy like blood had hit the water. All of a sudden, I was a monster. I’d been having an affair, or I found out you’d been having an affair, so I killed you. For a while, I had drowned you. A few days later, they were saying I stabbed you to death. At some point there was talk of me stuffing you in a wood chipper.”

  “My God, Josh . . .”

  “They scratched the word murderer on the hood of my car.”

  “Who did?”

  “Neighborhood kids, I think. And they painted it on our garage door.”

  “No.”

  “After two months, they started throwing rocks through our windows. I had to replace nine of them. They smashed two mailboxes, too.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “Sure, but you might not be surprised to learn that they weren’t terribly sympathetic. Said they’d send a patrol car by the house every now and then, but I never saw one. Hell, for all I knew, the cops were the ones throwing the rocks in the first place.”

  She kept one hand on the wheel while she reached out and took one of his with her other.

  “For the first two months,” Josh said, “the phone rang off the hook. Concerned friends, reporters, cops with more questions. Three different psychics called to say they’d heard from you.”

  “Psychics?”

  He nodded. “Two of them offered to connect me to you for a small fee. The third one told me, free of charge, that you had run off to Barcelona with a Spaniard named Raul.”

  “I don’t know where I was or what I did, but I know I didn’t do that.”

  “Yeah, I wasn’t buying that one. Anyway, I was getting calls like crazy for maybe two months. After another month or two, though, the cops called less, the media seemed to have lost interest, and only a few friends were left.”

  “Who?” Caitlin asked. “Who was left?”

  “Bethany and Carl. Jessica. Andy and Karen.”

  “Good for them.”

  “A few weeks later, though, they seemed to have lost my number, too. Along with their access to voice mail.”

  She squeezed his hand. He squeezed back.

  “God,” he said. “Listen to me complain. I’m acting like I’m the only one in this car who went through an ordeal. I can’t even imagine what you went through.”

  “Unfortunately,” she said, “I can’t, either. Anything else, Josh?”

  After a brief hesitation, he shrugged, which she took to mean that there was something he wasn’t saying. For the briefest of moments, she wondered if he’d met someone. She’d been gone for more than half a year. She had walked out of the house and simply hadn’t come home. She’d never called. What was Josh supposed to think? Was it possible that after some time had passed, enough time for him to wonder if she had actually left him for good, he decided to try to move on with his life? Would it even have been wrong of him if he had? How long could she have expected him to wait in such circumstances?

  Ridiculous, she knew. They were married. They were in love. He couldn’t have gotten over her that fast, even if he had thought she had left him. Her disappearance had forced him to consider the possibility that something terrible had happened to her. He would have been devastated. He wasn’t about to start hitting the singles bars. Still, there was something he wasn’t telling her.

  “Josh? What is it? What aren’t you saying?”

  He opened his mouth to speak, then stopped and shook his head, as if to himself.

  “What?” she asked.

  After a moment, he said, “I didn’t want to worry you, not so soon after you got home, but . . . well, keeping the house has been a bit of a struggle on just my income. We have almost nothing left in the bank.”

  It wasn’t good news, but given the universe of bad things he could have revealed, it could have been far worse. And she wasn’t surprised. She had been gone a long time, and th
ey had always needed both their earnings to save even a little every month after paying their bills.

  “When we get home after all this,” he added, “even once we’re both working again, we’re going to have to watch our spending for a while. At least until we build up a little cushion.”

  She nodded, though she wondered if she’d even be free to find employment after all this. Her next job might be serving runny mac and cheese to the other prisoners.

  Then, in a case of exquisitely irritating timing, Caitlin heard the unmistakable whoop of a police siren behind them. Several thoughts elbowed one another for her attention. She was really, really glad they had left the gun back at their house. And the fake hands, too, which would have been tough to explain. Also, she had no idea how they were going to get around the fact that they were driving a car registered to a Katherine Southard. She prayed Josh was right that Ms. Southard had not reported the car stolen, or that she indeed had not been found somewhere with a bullet in her, both of which would have made things very difficult for them.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR, CAITLIN watched the silhouette of the state trooper behind the wheel of the cruiser parked on the shoulder of the highway not far behind them. Though he’d pulled them over a minute ago, he had yet to leave his vehicle.

  “Why do you think he stopped us?” she asked Josh.

  “I’m not sure. Were you speeding?”

  “I don’t know. Probably. Doesn’t everyone? But I don’t think I was speeding speeding.”

  “Speeding speeding?” Josh repeated. “Well, it certainly didn’t seem like you were going too fast to me.”

  “You realize he’s going to ask for my license and registration . . . the registration that’s in Katherine Southard’s name.”

  “Yeah, he will.”