I caught up with Derrow around three, when he cleared a security-system call near the center of town and then radioed in for a meal break. I followed him in Andrew’s car to a Lowe’s near the mall. He went inside and emerged eight minutes later, carrying two plastic bags that appeared heavy. He put them in the cruiser and pulled out of the lot, heading west.
I kept after him. In the middle of the day, traffic was heavy enough to make tailing him easy. Plus, he wasn’t looking for me in a nondescript beige sport utility vehicle. That helped too. But eventually he made his way to 665 and we went west for six miles, and he turned in to a tangle of narrow country roads. I had no choice but to fall back. But the black-and-white cruiser was hard to miss, and eventually I was able to spot it through the almost-bare November trees, parked in the gravel driveway of a white clapboard Victorian with a SOLD! sign out front.
It was a little eerie out here, foggy and quiet, the sky the color of wet concrete. And this wasn’t his house, or at least not his regular address, which was back in Belmont proper. I slowed down as I passed the road the house sat on. I couldn’t see Derrow or anything else. So I kept going, pulled a U-turn, and parked on the shoulder. I dug through the bag I’d brought—gun, computer, notebook, flashlight, camera, binoculars, flask—and got out the binocs and checked out the house. It was pretty rough, the white paint worn off around the eaves, roof tiles missing or flapping loose like errant buttons. The windows had no curtains, but they were too dirty to see through at this distance.
He came out of the house five minutes later, the blue Lowe’s bags crumpled and empty in his hand. This time when he drove away, I didn’t follow. I got out my revolver and a flashlight and walked up to the house and rapped on the front door. I heard nothing but hollow silence. Then I lapped the perimeter and peered in all the windows. Clearly no one lived here, not yet. From what I could see, the wood floors were dirty and littered with tacks and flaps of glue from stripped-out carpet. The kitchen, though newly linoleumed, was missing a part of a countertop and all the appliances.
I stood in the sloping backyard and looked around. Everything was brown and grey and hopeless here. There weren’t any neighbors within eyeshot. If he’d brought Veronica here, no one would have seen. No one would have heard. No one even knew this house existed, except for whoever had owned it last. What had been in the blue bags, and why was it so important he bring it here, during his lunch break? My pulse was racing. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something for me to find here. The way I had in the woods. This was concerning, since that feeling had ended with a discovery that I couldn’t get out of my head.
I didn’t want to find Veronica that way.
But I had to find her.
Although I had vowed I wasn’t going to do anything else stupid, I considered the cheap knob on the back door—loose in the strike plate, its finish worn off from age. I looked at the hinges next, to determine if the door swung inward. It did. Otherwise, it would be next to impossible to kick in. I took a step back, steadied myself, and kicked hard, driving my heel of my boot into the door just above the lock. It splintered without giving way, so I kicked it again, the shock of it vibrating up through my leg.
That took care of it.
There was no turning back now.
I stepped into the house. The air was cold and dusty and smelled like adhesive and cigar smoke. “Veronica?” I said.
I heard nothing in return.
I walked slowly through the house. Floorboards creaked and my boots crunched over the renovation-related debris that was scattered everywhere. But I didn’t hear anything else. I flipped a light switch but nothing happened; no power. So I covered the lower level in fading afternoon light: empty living room, empty dining room, bathroom with an army of dead bugs in the sink and a stack of tools arranged on the lid of the toilet. Without even the faint hum of electricity, the house seemed isolated, sealed off from the world entirely.
It wasn’t a good feeling.
Second floor: patchy blue carpet, browning wallpaper peeling off in strips. There were visible rectangles at eye level where picture frames had hung, protecting the wallpaper from the cigar smoke that had discolored the rest of the house. The bathroom up here held a shower with a mildewed white liner. The sight of it made me suddenly, acutely afraid.
And then it twitched.
I froze where I was.
Every horror movie I’d ever seen flashed through my head. It was easy enough to write those off most of the time, but not when you were standing in a creepy house like this and not when you’d discovered human remains only days before. One sweaty palm on my revolver, I lunged forward and yanked the shower curtain back, barely suppressing a shriek when I saw two pale grey mice book it down the rusty mouth of the drain.
“Jesus,” I said, shoving the curtain away in disgust.
I checked the rest of the house, including a search via flashlight of a horrifying basement with concrete walls and floor painted reddish-brown, but I found nothing except more rodents and a random collection of old Atlas mason jars in a cabinet.
No one was here.
It was five thirty and the sun had set. Outside, I shined my light on the splintered door and pulled it closed as much as possible, not wanting my fruitless little visit to be any more noticeable than it already was. Then I went back to my brother’s car and turned the heat on high. I was freezing and unsettled, but more importantly I was no closer to figuring anything out.
There was no way I was wrong this time.
Derrow was personally acquainted with Mallory, Colleen, Veronica, and the Cooks.
There was no way.
Or was there?
It would all fit together perfectly, except I still had no idea what had happened with Sarah and her parents. Mallory Evans had been sexually assaulted and stabbed to death. I didn’t know exactly what had happened to Colleen, but she obviously hadn’t wrapped herself in a tarp before dying in her sleep. There was a cold calculation involved in burying those women in the woods. By contrast, there was passion behind Garrett and Elaine Cook’s death. Not planned, not well-thought-out. Derrow knew them, which made it simultaneously harder to fathom but easier to understand. What had happened? Did the Cooks walk into their house and find Jack Derrow attacking their daughter? Was she already dead? Was she buried in the woods too?
Maybe with enough evidence, the police would rip up all of Clover Point to find Sarah’s body.
Maybe I could convince Kenny Brayfield to ask them to.
It wasn’t funny, but that made me laugh out loud, a strained, demented laugh that probably would have made anyone worry about me if they’d heard it. My heart rate still hadn’t returned to normal, even though I’d been out of that house for ten minutes now.
I put the car in gear and drove back to Belmont. A lot of things could happen with enough evidence. But I had to find it first.