I went into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. Cold medicine, aspirin, a prescription ointment of some kind. I slammed it closed and stared at my own reflection. Either the mirror was filthy, or I was physically turning as blurry as I felt.
I tried Andrew next, but he didn’t answer. So I went back to the kitchen and handed the plumber my Visa and tried to give him a withering look. He didn’t notice, or didn’t care. Then I headed upstairs, telling myself that I was not going to page through all of my father’s notebooks before resuming work on my case, or that it wouldn’t just be a stalling tactic if I did.
TEN
“Evans, Mallory Lynn,” Tom read to me from a thin stack of printouts that evening. We were sitting on the sofa in the front room of my apartment, a barely touched pizza from Yellow Brick on the table in front of us. I was rolling the rubber-band ball from my father’s office between my palms. “Age eighteen. Cause of death, severe blood loss due to multiple lacerations from a single-edged blade. Evidence of sexual assault, fingernails torn like she had put up a fight, but no DNA. She was wrapped in a blue tarp, which was secured around her body with bungee cords. She was buried approximately ten inches below ground and covered with rocks and leaves.”
He fanned the pages, summarizing. “According to her husband, she left home after an argument and she never came back.”
“Husband?” I said. “Even though she was only eighteen?”
“He was older,” Tom said, “twenty-three. Joshua Evans. They had a six-month-old daughter. Mallory dropped out of high school when she got pregnant.”
“Oh man.” I leaned back against the cushions and pulled my knees to my chest. The story of Mallory Evans was a bleak one all around.
“Yeah.” He had come to my apartment straight from his shift and still wore a white dress shirt and tie, his service weapon and gold shield still clipped to his belt. “This was obviously before my time, but Frank talked about it sometimes. This case. It was the tarp, that’s what stuck out to him. That’s the work of someone cold as hell.”
“For being a bland little suburb, a lot goes on down there,” I said.
“Yeah, they’ve got their share,” Tom said. “Pretty heavy drug use going on in the public high school back then, maybe now too. Plus the Brad Stockton case.”
“You couldn’t have mentioned Mallory Evans to me the other night?”
“Well,” he said, lightly tapping the papers against my shoulder. “The only connection between them is you.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “A single-edged blade? That’s what killed Garrett and Elaine Cook. Feels like that means something.”
“You sound like Frank.”
I said nothing. Thinking about Frank not as my father but as Detective Weary gave me a sharp little zap, like touching the tip of your tongue to the coil on a nine-volt battery. I didn’t like it, but it was also hard to stop. The pulse of anxiety I’d had in the pit of my stomach since talking to my mother that afternoon was only getting worse.
“What about where she was found, any clues there?”
“Nope,” Tom said after a second. “Looks like it was a party spot for people in the area—bottles, condoms, vials, the whole spread. So forensics back there was pretty hopeless. And the area itself, it’s ten or so acres of woods right on the Columbus city limits, but no specific connection to Mallory.”
“So what then? No witnesses, no trace evidence, no obvious link to anyone she knew, so it’s just hopelessly unsolvable?” I said.
“Well, no, I’m sure he threw a lot of time at it,” Tom said. “But when nothing shakes loose right away, it does get a lot harder, it gets buried under other cases that are easier to close—triage, I mean, that’s the only way you can get anywhere. But Frank would revisit old cases from time to time, ask around, call the victim’s family to see if anything new happened.”
“Which in this case, nothing did.”
“Correct.”
I sighed. “Frustrating,” I said, “not knowing.”
“Yeah.”
“Why do you do it?”
“Why do you?”
We looked at each other.
“What I do,” I said, “is nothing like this. Dead girls left in the woods? Christ.” I stood up and grabbed the pizza box. “Want any more of this?”
Tom shook his head. “So how did you land here? I thought you were looking for the missing daughter.”
“I was, but that’s a dead end,” I called on my way to the kitchen. “So I started thinking that the Cook murders might have been part of a pattern.” I opened the fridge and tried to make space for the pizza box. In the hallway, the floorboards creaked as Tom walked toward me. “And I found this, which might look unrelated on the surface, but the Belmont cop I talked to said there had always been rumors about a student from the high school being involved. Then, less than a year later, there’s another murder and a student is involved in that too? It just feels like it means something.”
“Like what?”
Tom leaned against the doorway and watched me.
“I don’t know,” I said. The pizza box was too big to fit and I abandoned it on the stove. “The crimes are very different, but it just makes me wonder. If they’re connected, it opens up a whole bunch of possibilities.” I rubbed the bottom of my foot against the ankle of my jeans. The linoleum floor was cold, thanks to the partly open window. The overactive radiator was currently silent. I reached over to close the window and caught a flash of something through the curtain.
Then I froze.
“What’s wrong?” Tom said.
“Shh,” I said.
I snatched the curtain aside and jumped away from what I saw: behind the ghost of my own reflection, there was a man on the other side of the glass, looking in at me.
Knit hat, pierced eyebrow. Our eyes locked for a second, a ringing sound building in my head.
Then he ducked and started running, his footsteps in the alley audible through the open window.
I darted down the hall and grabbed my gun from the desk in my office. On the other side of the wall, I could hear my neighbor’s dog yapping furiously. I ran outside, shoeless, but once I hit the street I saw nothing but a pair of taillights disappear around the corner on Ohio Avenue.
“Dammit,” I said to the empty street. I wondered how long the guy had been lurking outside, if he could hear our conversation through the open window. The thought made me shudder. I made a mental note to call my landlord about the heat for the ten thousandth time.
“Roxane, what’s going on?” Tom said behind me.
I turned around and looked at him. His hand rested on the grip of his holstered gun and his expression had gone all-business. “I don’t know,” I said. “I saw someone in the alley, right outside the window.”
“So you just thought you’d come charging out here in your socks with a gun?”
“What, you think I don’t know how to use it?”
He looked at me flatly. “I know you know how to use it,” he said. “But maybe don’t tell me to shh the next time you think you might get a chance to, okay?”
I sighed. He had a point. “I’ve been getting some strange phone calls. And someone went to my mother’s house, looking for me.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Some guy in a hunting jacket with a pierced tongue.”
“A hunting jacket?”