I knew that Tom checked in on her from time to time, which was sweet of him. My brothers didn’t like it though, probably because it made them both look bad. Neither of them had brought birthday flowers. And my brothers would have liked Tom even less if they knew I was sleeping with him. “Pretty,” I said.
My mother set the flowers down in the center of the table and went back into the kitchen.
“Now we have to do the sink,” Matt muttered, turning his glare on the flowers. “You know she’ll love it once it’s done.”
Andrew leaned around the corner, brushing water off his shirt, another victim of the sink in question. He shot the double finger at the flowers. “I’m in,” he said. “Rox?”
“Oh, whatever,” I said.
The street was quiet and cloaked in fog when I left around ten thirty. As I slid the key into my car door lock, I could tell something was up: I felt no resistance when I turned it. I squinted at it in the dark for a second, confused. The door was unlocked, and I knew I’d locked it when I went into the house. I spun around and looked at the street, but it was still empty and silent. Then I opened the door and peered in.
“Great,” I muttered.
At least nothing appeared to be damaged or missing, but the loose change, hair ties, and pens in the console were moved to one side and the whiskey bottle I’d purchased earlier was resting on the gear shift instead of on the passenger seat where I’d left it. A hoodie that had been on the floor of the backseat was now partially draped over the armrest. I checked the latch on the glove box but it was still locked up tight—good news, because my gun was in there.
This was the sort of thing you might expect in my own neighborhood, although usually accompanied by the glitter of safety glass on the curb and, if you were lucky, a complimentary brick left on the seat for your trouble. But my mother’s block was usually exempt from petty crime, and nothing had been taken anyway.
Someone who didn’t belong here had been in my space, and I didn’t like it.
I straightened up and surveyed the street again. Then I walked down the block and checked out the cars that were parked behind me. Nicer and certainly newer than mine, they nonetheless appeared un-rifled-through. I paused next to an Audi that had what looked like an iPad blatantly sitting on the passenger seat. Seriously? Even around here, that was just asking for trouble. I leaned in closer for a better look and bumped the side mirror with my elbow. A blast of sound made me jump a foot into the air as the car’s alarm began to bleat into the night. I staggered backward a few steps, one hand over my chest. I had to laugh. Jumpy much? I hurried up the block before anyone came out of their houses to ask me what the hell I was doing, because I certainly didn’t have an answer.
EIGHT
In the light of day, I could see that whoever had gotten into my car last night must have used a slim jim or a coat hanger. The weather stripping at the bottom of the window was ripped and the blue paint on my door was faintly scratched. Better than a brick through the glass, but it still pissed me off.
On top of that, I didn’t quite know what my next move should be on Brad Stockton. So far there were three votes for Brad Stockton’s innocence, two maybes on the unnamed dog owner, one strange encounter with the Belmont cops, but zero corroboration for Danielle’s claim that the woman she saw was Sarah. And anyway, locating that woman based on the no information I had about her felt impossible. After all, beyond a credit-card trail and the unlikely event another motorist remembered me, there’d be no trace of me at the last gas station I visited either. But that was still all I had, and I wasn’t quite ready to cry uncle.
After I got a cup of tea and a muffin at the gas station, I showed my sketch to the morning clerk with no success, and then holed up in the car in the parking lot. I was hoping to spot the Sarah look-alike, but I’d settle for a brown curly dog, a red sedan, or a green pickup. Something to corroborate even a piece of Danielle’s story. But all I found was rain, a thin, icy drizzle that made everyone tuck their chins to their collars and dash in and out of their vehicles. Ordinarily I didn’t mind spending a lot of time in the car, even in shitty weather, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that someone had been pawing around in here last night, and it made my skin crawl.
By two o’clock, I’d been watching for a few hours—minus a break for lunch of melitzanosalata and pita at Taverna Athena—and I was restless and very cold. Optimistically I had brought my Nikon D750, but so far there was nothing remotely worthy of photographing. I turned it on and clicked through the images saved on the memory card. The last time I had used it was last January, when I had taken pictures of a real-estate broker suspected—correctly—of stepping out on his wife. The good old days, when my cases were straightforward.
Between Novotny, Kenny, Brad, and Cass, I had four votes for the likelihood of Sarah being dead. So far, that constituted an overwhelming majority. But unfortunately none of those four were paying me.
Danielle’s endgame was to find evidence that could help her brother, though, not just to locate the woman she saw, and I was starting to wonder if there might be another way I could go about it. The murder of Sarah’s parents didn’t seem like one of chance. It wasn’t a robbery, a random home invasion, or a serial crime—or was it? With one eye still on the scene in front of me, I put away the camera and opened my laptop. Tom said the police had closed the Cook case fast, which made sense, since there would have been a lot of pressure. And regardless of how they made the leap to getting a warrant for Brad Stockton’s car, they hit pay dirt with that search. They wouldn’t have had to look any further after that, wouldn’t have bothered to look at past cases or anywhere else. And if a similar modus operandi had been used since then, I doubted that anyone would have volunteered to revisit the investigation.
I tapped my fingers lightly on my keyboard without typing anything for a minute, thinking. Then I turned my attention to my network of databases and started a clunky search for stabbing deaths in Franklin County. There were roughly one hundred homicides in the county each year. Of them, ten percent had used knives or cutting instruments as murder weapons. I went back as far as 1990, which meant two hundred and fifty stabbings to consider.
It might be easier just to wait for the dog lady.