by Lisa Regan
“No. Nothing major. Nothing that would make her—I mean, she has a five-month-old. Tyler has been teething. She hasn’t—hadn’t been getting enough sleep lately. Jim was no help, but that’s nothing new. We’ve both been there before. That’s motherhood.”
“You said Jim was no help,” Jade said. “Were the Holloways having marital problems?”
Rachel barked a dry laugh. “Besides him being oblivious as usual? No, they were fine. I mean, it’s the usual shit we all deal with—the mom gets stuck with the brunt of the childcare while our husbands do whatever the hell they want, but it’s always been that way. If Leah was going to leave Jim for that kind of thing, she would have left years ago.”
“Had she ever planned to leave him, or did she ever talk about leaving him, to your knowledge?” Jade asked.
Rachel shook her head. “No. Never.”
“Had they been fighting recently?” Connor asked.
“No, no. They were fine.”
“Did Leah love her husband?” Jade cut in.
Rachel made a puh sound. “Please. If she didn’t love him, no way would she put up with all his shit.” Fingering her “#1 Mom” charm, she moved down a few steps and looked in on the Holloway children. “Oh my God, he’s never going to be able to handle those kids on his own.” Her voice grew squeaky. “Oh my God. This is a mistake. Leah would never leave her kids.”
“Mrs. Irving,” Connor said, trying to bring her back from the brink of hysteria. “What kind of shit was Leah putting up with?”
“Was Jim having an affair?” Jade asked.
Rachel looked back at the two detectives and laughed harshly. “Jim? An affair? He barely landed Leah, and he didn’t even deserve her. No, Jim’s not a cheater. That would require effort.”
“Was he abusive?” Connor asked.
Another harsh laugh. “No. Jim’s not like that. He’s a softie. He always did whatever Leah said, and Leah always got whatever she wanted. Jim is … he’s inattentive, but he’s not the kind of guy who would abuse anyone. He would never lay a hand on her or the kids. That was very important to Leah.”
“How about Leah?” Connor asked. “Was she having an affair?”
She looked at the floor, shaking her head. “Oh my God, Leah? No. Never. God knows no one would blame her—I mean, Jim forgot their anniversary two years in a row. But no, Leah wasn’t like that. Her dad cheated on her mom. She despised cheaters.”
“How about her other relationships?” Connor asked. “Extended family? Friends? Work colleagues? Was there anyone she was having issues with?”
Rachel looked back up, meeting Connor’s eyes. “Nothing. Leah’s parents are dead. Her brother lives in Maryland. They’re not close. I can’t think of anyone else. Work was work. It could be stressful, but Leah never brought it home with her. She was all about her kids. That was it.”
Jade, who had been jotting things down in her notebook, moved on to the next issue. “Did Leah have a drinking problem?”
For a moment, Rachel looked stunned. A small, bewildered smile remained on her face as she looked from Jade to Connor and back again. “What?”
Connor smoothed his beard with one hand. “Did Leah drink? Did she have a drinking problem?”
Rachel burst into laughter. “You’re kidding, right?” As her laughter subsided, she stepped back toward the twins’ room, glanced at her family, then turned back at the detectives, suddenly looking very weary. “I guess I can see why you would ask that. Why else would a woman drive a bunch of kids into a river? Well, there’s no way that was Leah. She never drank.”
“Not even socially?” Connor said.
“Especially not socially. Leah was … well, she was judgy, okay? There are a few of us moms who get our kids together every week. We like to have some wine when we’re together. Not only did Leah not partake, but she walked right out on the group. She refused to join us if any one of us was going to drink with our kids around. I mean she acted like we were leaving our kids out to play on train tracks or something.”
Rachel rolled her eyes for good measure. “Look, she never talked much about it, but I think her dad drank. I think …” She trailed off, as if searching for the right words. “I think it was very ugly growing up in her household. Leah was very … strict about some things. She used to say, ‘I had all of my twenties to drink and party. Now I have kids, and I need to be responsible.’”
Jade frowned. “Sounds like she held herself to a pretty high standard.”
“An impossibly high standard—at least for the rest of us to live up to. It was … it was maddening.”
“Do you think the pressure she put on herself was too much?” Connor asked.
Rachel met his eyes. “Like what? Like she snapped? Like a mental breakdown?”
Connor nodded. “Something like that.”
Rachel shook her head. Tears welled up in her eyes. “Leah could be rigid and controlling and judgy, but she wasn’t the type of person who would have a nervous breakdown. She was … she was strong. She was happy. She loved her kids. She loved Jim. She loved her life. She was … she would never do something like this.”
“How long did you know Leah?” Jade asked.
Rachel wiped at her eyes. “Almost ten years. She and Jim moved in right after Mike and I. We were pregnant with our girls together.”
“There was some issue with her dog a few months back,” Jade said. “What was that about?”
Rachel’s brow furrowed. “Her dog? Well, yeah, it ate something toxic in the yard and died. Leah and the kids were pretty upset about it, but things happen. She wouldn’t try to kill our kids over a dog dying.”
So Leah had filed a police report about her dog being poisoned but hadn’t told her husband or her best friend the truth about how the dog had died. Connor saw Jade make another notation. He asked Rachel, “How about her finances? Did she give you any indication that she and Jim were having financial troubles?”
“They seemed fine. They’d just got his truck paid off. They were talking about putting in a pool for next year. She was happy.” She drew out the word happy, looking at them meaningfully, like she was trying to convey something in a foreign language.
Connor smiled at her. “Okay. Thank you, Mrs. Irving. Let me ask you: Have the children said anything about today?”
She hugged herself again and looked back at the twins. “Well, Maya said they left soccer. She said Hunter was crying because he wanted to go to McDonald’s and Leah said no. She said they stopped at a gas station because Peyton had to pee and couldn’t wait until they got home. They said they were at the gas station for a really long time. Leah took Peyton to the bathroom, brought her back to the car, and then went back into the bathroom for a long time. Then she got back in the car and started driving really fast.”
“What time did you expect them back?” Connor asked.
Rachel shrugged. “No time in particular. Sometimes she would take them to eat after soccer. We weren’t on any kind of strict schedule or anything.”
“We’d like to talk to the girls as soon as possible,” Connor said.
“Sure,” Rachel said. “But can you come back when they’re awake? They’re so traumatized. I’d like them to rest for a while.”
“Of course,” Connor said. He handed Rachel his business card. “We’ll be in touch.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“If I have to hear the word fine one more time, somebody is getting punched,” Jade groused as she and Connor made their way through the Office of Investigations to Captain Boggs’s office. “‘We were fine.’ ‘They were fine.’ ‘She was fine.’ People who are fine don’t take out a bunch of motorists and then try to kill themselves and five kids.”
“Maybe fine is the new crazy,” Connor remarked absently. He looked at his phone again, his heart leaping into his throat every time he read the text. It was from Claire. It had come in while they were interviewing Rachel Irving. All it said was: Thank you for today. See you soon.
It
was the “See you soon” that made him feel like a goddamn teenage girl. He’d forgotten how good she felt in his arms. Had made himself forget. Two years ago, she had shut him down, and he had no reason to believe that she might be willing to give their relationship another try. Today, she had been more vulnerable and afraid than he had seen her in years, which worried him. But she had also been more open and receptive to him than she had been since their first failed attempt at dating. Something had changed between them that morning on the riverbank.
Jade made a puh sound, drawing his attention back to the matter at hand. “Please. I bet any amount of money that when the coroner does his exam, she’ll come back drunk as fuck. No one is that perfect.”
Boggs’s door was open, but he wasn’t in the room. They went in anyway and sat in the guest chairs in front of his desk. “But she wasn’t perfect,” Connor pointed out. “Rachel Irving described her as rigid, judgy, and controlling.”
“Right,” Jade conceded. “You think that’s why she didn’t tell anyone about the dog? ’Cause she had to be in control?”
Connor shrugged. “Don’t know, but that whole dog thing raises red flags.”
“So what makes someone that controlling lose their damn mind?”
“I don’t know. But she was fine when she got into her vehicle this morning. Somewhere between then and the river, something happened to set her off. We need to get her medical records so we can definitively rule out some kind of medical condition, and then we need to piece together her day, see where things went wrong.”
Jade’s mouth twisted. “Medical? We have a witness who says she purposely drowned herself. There’s no medical event that causes that.”
“A brain tumor can make you do crazy shit. Anyway, we need the records to see if she really had a history of mental illness or not.”
Connor glanced around the room. Every time he had cause to be in the captain’s office, he marveled at the difference in the way Boggs kept it, compared with his predecessor. Their former captain could have been on an episode of hoarders. Boggs kept his office neat and orderly. Nary a stray piece of paper to be found.
“All right,” Jade said. “Let’s go through it. She took the kids to soccer.”
“Right. The Strangler task force will have surveillance of that field, I bet.”
Jade grinned at him. “Brilliant!”
“We’re going to need her phone too.”
“There is no phone,” said Danny Boggs as he breezed through the door and around to the chair behind his desk. He looked at the two of them but didn’t sit down. “Crime scene techs already faxed over the logs. No phone. Not on the overpass, not in the vehicle. No phone.”
“Which means it’s in the river,” Jade said.
Connor shrugged. “We’ll get the records. I’ll have someone pick up her PC once the husband gets home, ask someone over in Computer Crimes to take a look at it. I’ll see if they can get into her email as well. I’m sure the best friend knows her email address.”
Boggs picked up a Styrofoam cup from his desk and sipped from it. “Getting a subpoena won’t be a problem. Got the mayor breathing down my neck on this one.”
Jade leaned forward in her seat. “Cap, this lady is dead. It’s not like charges can be brought.”
“No, but there will be civil suits, believe you me. Civil suits out the wazoo. People want to know what the hell happened. How did this happen? Good God. Holy tabloid fodder. Every talk show host and crime reporter in this country just came in their pants. Perfect mom turned mass murderer? This will be on television for months.”
Jade stood. “Well, I’m gonna go ask Stryke for the soccer field footage.”
Connor nodded at her but made no effort to move. One hand was in his jacket pocket, fingering his phone. “I’ll figure out which gas stations were on her route home, and after we watch the soccer video, we’ll hit those, see what we can get.”
“You got it,” Jade called over her shoulder as she left the room.
Boggs came around to the front of his desk and perched on the edge of it. For a moment, they listened to Jade’s footsteps fade down the hallway. Then Boggs said, “How is Claire? Is she okay? Stryke told me she was, but I mean really—she okay?”
Connor smiled. Boggs had worked on Claire’s original abduction case and then, ten years later, on her cold case with Connor. He had become friends with the Fletcher family. “She’s shaken up for sure, but I think she’ll be okay.” He stood up. “I’m gonna see if Holloway’s car had GPS. That may be the quickest way to trace her route from the soccer field to the river.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
EARLIER THAT DAY
Leah smelled the alcohol right away. Like a cadaver dog scenting a decomposing body, she could smell it over and above all the other scents surrounding the soccer field: freshly cut grass, sunscreen, concession hot dogs, and cigarette smoke from the parents who had snuck away to have a quick smoke during play.
This booze smell was minty, and at first she wasn’t sure if someone had tried to cover the smell with mouthwash or if it was actually some minty-flavored drink. They made all kinds of alcoholic drinks these days: orange cream, fudge brownie, watermelon crush … the list was endless. Even under the minty mask, the alcohol stench was every bit as eye watering as gasoline. It took her back to every time her father had gotten drunk and beat the shit out of her mother. It made Leah sick to her stomach.
It was liquor, not beer. Her father had never had a problem with beer. He could pound beer down a case a night and still be the jovial guy all the neighbors knew and liked. It was liquor that turned him. Liquor that made the private man a raging, red-faced monster. And Leah could smell it now, at her six-year-old’s morning soccer game. She looked up and down her side of the field. There were two sets of bleachers grouped together near the center part of the field. Those filled early. Many parents, like Leah herself, brought their own collapsible chairs and planted themselves right at the edge of the field. Hunter was sitting in his own miniature Spider-Man chair, playing on his nabi. Blessedly, Tyler had fallen asleep in his car seat, which Leah had tucked between her and Hunter, with its canopy raised to keep the sun from his eyes. The girls ran up and down the field, their match in full swing. Leah watched Peyton make a pass and clapped, then cupped her hands over her mouth and yelled, “Go, Peyton!”
The girl threw Leah a smile over her shoulder and ran ahead into play.
That smell. Leah looked to her right this time, trying to figure out where it might be coming from. Then she saw Alan Wheeler. His daughter was on Peyton’s team. He never used to come to the games, but he and his wife were getting a divorce, so every other weekend now he was on soccer detail. Leah studied him. He sat in a fold-up lawn chair. He had on a green windbreaker and jean shorts. His gray hair had gotten long, strands of it lifting in the breeze. He wore sunglasses and a permanent smile. He was facing the green, but Leah noticed that his head never moved to follow play up and down the field. He had a soft cooler beside his chair. In his left hand was a takeout coffee cup with a plastic lid.
It had to be him.
Leah knew “drunk and passed out” when she saw it.
She had taken a step toward him, rage burning inside her, when Hunter’s voice stopped her. “Mommy, where are you going?”
She turned to see him squinting up at her, his perfect little brow furrowed. Where her daughter was strong, independent, and stoic, her son was clingy and prone to emotional outbursts, or whining, as Jim would say.
Leah pointed to Alan Wheeler. “I just need to talk to Mr. Wheeler for a minute, okay?”
Hunter’s eyes widened. “Mommy, don’t get killed by the Strangler!”
For a moment, Leah was paralyzed. It took several seconds to process what her four-year-old son had just said. Seeing her expression, he clarified: “He takes mommies from soccer.”
Aware her facial muscles were still frozen in horror, Leah tried to force a smile onto her face, but her lips felt stiff. Her ja
w ached. Slowly, as if it hurt to move, she knelt to her son, looking into his cherubic little face. A miniature Jim, he had shaggy hair and cheeks he had yet to grow into. She had kissed them thousands of times.
“Who told you about the Strangler?” she asked softly.
He kept his eyes down and shrugged. “Don’t know.”
“Was it Daddy?”
Another noncommittal shrug.
Leah leaned forward and kissed his nose. “I won’t be mad, Bug. Promise. I just want to know.”
She’d been calling him Bug since he was a month old. Unlike Peyton, Hunter had loved being swaddled. She’d carried him around tightly bundled like a little roly-poly bug for months. Hunter looked into her eyes and she forced another soft smile.
“Daddy was watching us when you went to the doctor,” Hunter began.
“Did Daddy tell you about this?” Leah asked, unable to say the word strangler to her son. She was going to strangle her husband.
“No. He didn’t tell me. I saw it on the news. Daddy wouldn’t let me watch Secret Agent Bear.” He sat up straighter and slipped into a whine. “Peyton told him we always watch Secret Agent Bear, but Daddy said it was dumb and put the news on.”
Leah sighed. Secret Agent Bear was a cartoon. Her children were obsessed with it, although Leah had to agree with her husband that it was colossally stupid. It had always bothered her that the cartoon portrayed children relying on an imaginary bear for problem-solving skills instead of going to their parents.
“The news showed the mommies that the Strangler got,” Hunter said. He scrunched his face up. “They all had hair like yours.”
Leah touched his cheek. “Oh, honey, lots of people have blonde hair.”
But the thought had already lodged itself in a corner of her mind—or maybe it had just fought its way to the front. They all looked like her. Or did they? She’d spent hours at her desk at work studying their faces. Wondering. Convincing herself she was wrong.
“The world doesn’t revolve around you, sweetheart.” Her father’s voice. The soul-crushing image of him standing over her—half smirking, half sneering.
