He was babbling now. She’d turned inward, wasn’t present anymore, not in this room, though her body was standing next to the stove, methodically stirring the contents of the wok.
He’d seen it happen when she was thinking hard about a book idea, assumed his face did the same thing when he came up with a line and turned it over and over in his brain. He stepped closer to force her mind back to him, to the present. To the truth.
“Darling, forgive me. I promised myself I’d never mention it, but clearly, that wasn’t the right thing to do. You have a right to know what I did. It was wrong. So wrong. But look at our son.”
The words were low, broken. “You bastard.”
“Please, please forgive me, Sutton. Because I want us to try again. I want to have another child.”
He tried to take her in his arms again, but she turned and fled, splashing him with vegetables and hot oil as she rushed away, into the garage. She slapped the button as she went out, and the door began to rise. The house door slammed, her car turned over. She peeled out of the garage and was gone before he’d made it to the door.
She didn’t come back for several hours. When she did, she was drunk.
And the next day, Dashiell was dead.
A VIDEO IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS
Before she went to Jones’s place, Holly checked her email in the car, looking for the missing persons report Sergeant Moreno had promised. It was there, black and white: no signs of bank account use, Montclair’s passport and license unflagged at any port of call, email untouched, social media dark. Sutton Montclair had simply disappeared.
The lack of activity wasn’t good news. All they had to go on now were witness statements, which were already contradictory, and the internet, which was a cesspool of possibilities.
She glanced through the rest of her email, saw one from an address she didn’t recognize. It was halfway down the page. The subject line was KENTUCKY.
Thinking about the random call she’d received, she clicked it open. A video began to play.
Holly watched as a woman, who she immediately identified as Sutton Montclair, appeared on a small porch. She was wearing a trench coat and sunglasses, carrying a small brown bag. She placed the bag squarely on the mat, bent down. A few seconds later, a small fire began, tiny flames shooting up. She waited a second to make sure the bag was well aflame, flipped the bird toward the front door, then rang the doorbell and scurried out of the frame.
The video ended with someone from the house opening the door.
Holly sat back and shook her head. What the heck was this?
She played it back a few times, looking for a date stamp, any identifying information. The video looked like it had been shot from a home security camera. But who had sent it? The email address was a jumble of letters and numbers; how it had slipped past her spam filter was rather a miracle.
It didn’t take a genius to figure things out. She went back through her notes, looked for the name of the reviewer. Rosemary George. She found her information, address, and phone, and placed the call.
“Hello?”
“Is Ms. George available? My name is Holly Graham. I’m with the Franklin Police in Tennessee.”
“Is this about that awful woman who’s gone missing?”
“Sutton Montclair? Yes, ma’am.”
“I have no comment.”
And the phone went dead.
Holly rolled her eyes. She didn’t relish a drive to Kentucky to dig out this woman’s story. She called back. The phone rang off the hook.
She called a friend she had in the tech division. “Holly Golightly, what’s up?”
“Hey, Jim. If I forward you an email, can you take it apart for me? It was sent anonymously, but I want to know where it came from.”
“Sure. I can trace the IP address. Shouldn’t be a big deal. Send away.”
“On its way. How long will it take?”
“Hang tight, I can tell you in a second.” She heard typing and clicking. “It’s local, a Franklin IP. Huh. That’s weird.”
“What?”
“Well, I’ve been running all the stuff from the Montclair case, right? This IP address matches their router.”
“But the email, it’s all sorts of gibberish. Who owns the email account?”
“You ready for this?”
“Let me guess. Ethan Montclair.”
“Yep.”
“But why in the world would he send me an anonymous video of his wife on some woman’s doorstep?”
“No idea. But here’s one more weird thing. The password Montclair gave us wasn’t accurate.”
“No?”
“No. It was written on a Post-it on the laptop lid—I love Ethan Montclair.”
“How sweet.”
“Barf. Regardless, that’s not the right password. I had to mess around with it, but I was able to crack it. I hooked in my UFED, knocked it out in ten seconds flat.”
“’Cause you’re a regular crackerjack IT dude, Jim. What the hell is a UFED?”
“Universal Forensic Extraction Device. Mine’s called Sally. I can pull information from any encrypted device you give me. I don’t need a password or fingerprint to get into a phone when Sally gets her way.”
“Um, thank you, Sally?”
“Yes, thank you, Sally. Don’t you want to know what the right password was?”
“Enlighten me.”
“Ethan killed our baby.”
GOOD TIMING, OFFICER
Now
A car pulled up outside. Ethan glanced out the window, saw it was Officer Graham. He also saw the bevy of news vans and microphones part before the blue-and-white car.
“Bloody hell.”
Graham looked neither right nor left, ignoring the shouts and cries from the media. She came onto the porch and he sensed movement from the crowd, a surge toward the house, but she turned and said something, and the movement ceased. They stayed on alert, like hunting dogs on point, but the groundswell was sufficiently halted.
He made sure to turn his head away and stand behind the door when he opened it, just in case. Graham came inside briskly, and Ethan heard the clatter of cameras snapping.
“You’re suddenly a very popular man,” she said.
“Thanks to you.”
A sharp look. “Hey, I come in peace. And I didn’t call the media. They were already on your house when Sergeant Moreno and I left, after you reported your wife missing.”
“Who told them, then?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Montclair, but I have no idea. They do monitor our dispatch calls. Perhaps someone recognized your address and put it all together.”
“Have you found something? Is that why you’re here?”
“Nothing yet. I had some more questions.”
“All right. Can I offer you a cup of tea?”
“Sure. Milk and sugar.”
For some reason he didn’t want to tell her they didn’t use real milk and sugar; it seemed silly, trivial. He’d put the stevia and almond milk in the cup and let her deal with it.
He prepped the tea while she stood at the counter, eyeing the stain.
“What happened there?”
“Blueberries.”