“Thank you,” Dru said. “Coming from Houston, I thought maybe living in Wyatt, I was leaving this kind of crime behind. Especially having it hit this close to home,” she added.
“I hear you,” Ken said. “You know Amy and I were raised here, and I joined the force here, figuring to keep it on the quiet side, but this is shaping up to be as big an investigation as the one we dealt with last year. The car accident—?”
“I remember,” Dru said. “I had both those boys, Jordy Cline and Travis Simmons, in my sixth-grade math class. It was so awful what their families went through—what the whole town went through.”
“It’s been a difficult time, that’s for sure. The WPD is still dealing with the impact, still shorthanded.”
Dru wasn’t surprised. The accident itself had been horrible enough, but then there had been all the ensuing legal fallout, radiating damage along a network of unforeseen fault lines. Dru imagined similar consequences would rattle even a big-city police department. “I guess this sort of thing goes on everywhere,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am, especially in towns like Wyatt, where the population is growing,” Ken said.
Dru liked it, his easy courtesy and friendly manner. It reassured her. “We’re in here,” she said, leading the way into the great room.
“Hey, y’all.” Ken looked around at each of the girls.
Of course he knew them, Dru thought. Even though he was several years older, Dru imagined through his work as a police officer he probably knew almost everyone.
“Could I see the note?” Ken got down to business.
Dru picked it up from the coffee table. “We’ve all touched it,” she said. It occurred to her they shouldn’t have passed it around.
Ken took it at the corner between his thumb and forefinger and studied it.
Daryl left to get an evidence bag.
Ken said, “Looks like it’s written in lipstick.”
“It’s lip liner,” Shea said. “You use it to outline your lips, then fill them in with lipstick. Well, not you—”
“I get it.” Ken half smiled.
Daryl came back, and Ken slotted the note carefully into a clear plastic wrapper. He asked Leigh a series of questions: What time and why did she go to her car? Did she see anything out of the ordinary there other than the note? Her answers sounded unremarkable to Dru, and Ken didn’t appear overly concerned, either.
“What will you do with the note?” Kate asked.
“We’ll get it over to the lab, get it checked for fingerprints, see if we can run down the source of the lip liner. None of y’all recognize it, do you? The color, maybe?”
Leigh and Vanessa said no. Shea, looking at Kate, said, “It kind of looks like that Revlon pencil we bought right before finals. We each got one, remember?”
“Not really, no,” Kate said.
“You have a receipt?” Ken asked.
“I doubt it. It was three or four weeks ago. I don’t even remember the name of the shade. Something pink.” Shea looked at Kate. “Are you sure—?”
“No.” Kate cut Shea off. “I don’t remember, okay?”
“Okay.” Shea let it go.
They were all jittery, even short-tempered.
Ken pocketed his notepad.
Daryl said, “We’ll talk to your neighbors. Maybe one of them saw something.”
When Leigh asked if Ken and Daryl would take her home, Daryl suggested he and Ken would follow her and Vanessa. “We’ll set up a patrol, too,” he said. “We’ll monitor your neighborhoods, as often as we can, as often as the manpower we have will allow.”
Ken said, “Don’t hesitate to call if you see anything suspicious, or if anything makes you worry. Dispatch’ll send somebody. The same goes if you remember anything else, whether it’s about this note or some other aspect of this investigation. Let me know, no matter how insignificant you think it is. Sometimes it’s the smallest piece that can complete the puzzle.” His glance logged them each in turn as if he sensed that one of them was withholding something, but when no one spoke, he turned to go, Daryl behind him, Dru in their wake.
“I got a text from Becca.”
Dru recognized Kate’s voice.
Ken made a sound, “Ah,” as if to say, There it is.
He turned. Dru and Daryl did, too.
Shea, Vanessa, and Leigh were all staring at Kate in astonishment.
“Before she was killed?” Ken asked. “It’s pertinent to the investigation?”
“Yes. At least it might be.” Kate rubbed her crossed arms briskly.
A pause that seemed breathless to Dru held for a moment.
“She wanted me to meet her on Tuesday,” Kate said.
“Where?” Ken asked. “In Dallas?”
“No. She was here in Wyatt. She asked if I’d could come to her house.”
“We picked up the jars on Tuesday,” Shea said. “When did you go to her house? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t go—she texted later and canceled.”
“Wait a minute,” Ken said. “Back up. Tell me about Tuesday, everything that happened, in order.”
Kate explained their mission to pick up the mason jars, that Becca had begged off, supposedly sick to her stomach.
“You knew she was faking.” Shea was upset.
“Maybe she wasn’t,” Vanessa said. “Maybe she had morning sickness.”
Kate said, “I didn’t say anything because Becca made me promise not to.”
“But you didn’t go to Becca Westin’s house, is that right?” Ken’s brow was creased; the effect was almost comical. He was confused in the way men could be by women’s conversations.
Kate said, “No. I texted her when Shea dropped me off at home after we got back from Fredericksburg and told her I was on my way to her house, but she texted back and said she had to go to Dallas.”
“Did she indicate where in Dallas she was going, or who she was going to see?” Daryl asked.
“No. She just said she was sorry and hoped no one would hate her.”
“What did that mean?” Shea asked.
“I don’t know. It was weird.”
“Did you know Becca was pregnant, that it was morning sickness that kept her home on Tuesday?” Ken asked.
“You know I would have told you if I had known anything like that.” Kate addressed her answer to Shea.
“Are you saying you had knowledge from Becca that there was something else bothering her? Something other than her being pregnant?” Ken was persistent.
“No, only what everyone else has said. She seemed really stressed lately.”
“So, on Tuesday, when you texted back and forth—that was the last time you heard from her,” Ken said.
“Yes,” Kate said.
“Is there a reason you withheld this information?” Ken’s eyes were locked on Kate.
She stared at the floor.
“Can you give me a reason, Kate?” Ken repeated the question.
“I didn’t think it was important?” Her voice rose as if she were asking him.
“What changed your mind?” Ken wasn’t letting her off.
“It was what you said before, that you wanted to know about anything we remembered, no matter how insignificant.”