“Yes, I remember that. What he meant was that the only thing he liked about the beach was the girls in bathing suits.”
We laughed together, then my mother shivered from the cold, and we got back into our respective cars to drive to Winslow. I was tempted to drive north along Micmac Road a little ways to see if there was any activity at Ted and Miranda’s house but decided not to risk it. I would find out soon enough how long it took the police to discover Miranda’s body. I turned south instead, taking the fastest route to I-95. At a little before six, I pulled into the driveway in Winslow, my mother still behind me. There were no police officers waiting for me, no SWAT team emerging from the woods. I was home, and I had gotten away with it. A surge of elation went through me, a feeling similar to what I’d felt in the meadow fifteen hours earlier. I had changed the world, and no one would ever know it. And even if they found Brad’s truck in New York City, they would assume that he had simply left it there. They would never find him, and they would never connect me to any of this. Miranda would be found dead, all evidence pointing to Brad Daggett as the killer. And Brad would disappear forever. The police would assume he went on the run, but they would never find him. Case closed.
I remembered telling Ted that there were two ways to hide a body. One was literal, but the other way to hide a body was to hide the truth of it, to make it appear as though something else had happened to it. We did it, I whispered as I got out of the car, allowing myself a moment to believe that there was someone out there to share this with me. My mother followed me into my house. I flipped on the foyer light, and took her overnight bag from her.
“Oh, so quaint,” she said, as she always did when she came to my house.
CHAPTER 29
KIMBALL
By the time Detective James and I reached the Severson house in Kennewick, there was barely room to park our car along the driveway. It was already a jurisdictional mess, as we knew it would be. The entire Kennewick Police Department had turned out, but because of the limited resources of their detective department, the state police detectives had been called in as well. The chief medical examiner was there, and I heard that the U.S. Marshals Service had been advised that a possible murder suspect had most likely crossed state lines. We did manage to work our way into the house, getting past the miles of yellow police tape and about seven uniformed officers, all determined to protect the scene.
I’d seen the gigantic house from the outside the day before, when we’d been looking for Brad Daggett, but hadn’t been inside yet. The foyer was the size of my apartment. Miranda Severson was facedown on the unfinished floor. She wore an expensive-looking dark green coat over jeans and boots. One of her gloved hands was up near her destroyed head. Her hat—gray tweed with a short brim—had come off. Her black hair was loose, spilling around her head. It was hard to tell where the hair stopped, and where the blood, dark and congealed, began. Together, the hair and the blood formed a black halo around her head.
“Weapon?” I asked Chief Ireland, who had come up to stand next to me. He hadn’t said anything yet—he was giving me a chance to look at the body.
“It just got bagged. Twenty-four-inch adjustable wrench. Laid out right next to her.” He gestured vaguely toward one of the many portions of the dusty floor that had been marked with tape.
“What else they find?”
“Plenty, from the looks of it. Footprints, fibers, hairs. You missed the bagging party.”
“Anything unusual?” I asked.
“You mean more unusual than a girl with her head beat in?”
“I mean anything that doesn’t make it look like what it probably is. I mean, anything that doesn’t make it look like Brad Daggett panicked, brought her here, and beat her to death.”
“Well, no. We didn’t find the dropped wallet of the mayor of Kennewick, if that’s what you mean. There were some pretty fresh tire tracks out front that didn’t get run over by the dog and pony show. They looked like truck tracks to me, and they probably belong to Daggett’s F-150. So nothing really strange. I mean, if you ask me, it’s all strange. She put her hand up to block the blow”—Chief Ireland raised his own wide hand to the side of his head to demonstrate—“but that was all the fight she put up. So, yeah, that’s a little strange. He marches her in here holding a giant wrench and she just stands there and lets him beat on her head.”
“That is strange,” I agreed. “No sign of there being anyone else in here besides the two of them?”
“Well, they photographed everything, so we’ll wait and see, but just eyeballing it, I’d say no. What was odd was that it looked like she probably came in through the front door, and Daggett came in through the sliding glass doors—these ones right here. See those big prints? Those are his.”