“Pace yourself. Stay focused. I’ll meet you there in twenty minutes.”
Her phone began to beep as the charge ran out.
“At some point you’ll come across a stream, but it will be frozen—”
“Palmer? Palmer?”
The line went dead.
She felt an adrenaline spike as she pocketed her phone. With the wind in front of her, she powered her way through the flurries. The day was dying. Hypothermia was a real threat. Her face was rubbed raw from the wind-chill. Her legs were numb— it was like walking on stilts. She couldn’t afford to mess up. Right at the fork—stone foundations—cross the road—back on the trailhead…
She trudged through the deepening drifts, sweating and swearing, before she spotted the crumbling foundations dusted with snow. She located the rusty pump and drew a mental line from the foundation toward it, then aimed herself in that direction. With great trepidation, she stepped off the trail. Her boots descended into hidden holes and ravines full of rocks. She focused on the whiteness beyond the trees—a dead space that could only mean one thing. A clearing. A road.
It seemed to take her forever, but she finally managed to burst out of the woods onto an old logging road. She cheered with relief, her breath clouds billowing eastward. Almost there.
She jogged across the road and found the trailhead back into the woods. After a dozen yards or so, she came upon a stream. It was frozen over. She tested the solid block of ice and made it to the other side without incident. Then the last bit of daylight blinkered out. Flurries pummeled her from all sides. She took out her keys and used her halogen penlight to guide her way, keeping her head down.
Five minutes later, she spotted a pair of headlights cutting through the darkness. As she drew closer she saw a cabin, then Palmer waiting for her. He aimed a heavy-duty flashlight in her eyes, blinding her momentarily before swinging it away.
“Kate?” he shouted through the wailing wind.
She laughed so hard, she nearly choked, and ran toward him.
46
PALMER HELD THE CABIN door open, and they stomped the snow off their boots. He hung his overcoat on a hook in the front hallway, and Kate hung her parka up next to it. She kicked off her boots and followed him sock-footed into the kitchen.
“Grab a seat,” he said, starting a pot of coffee.
She sat down at a square table made of rough planks and massaged her sore arches. The snow was tapering off. Dean Martin was crooning from the sound system in the living room, an old-fashioned boozy love song. She tried to calm down, but she couldn’t stop shivering.
“I’m not going to lecture you,” he said, “but that was—”
“Dumb. I know,” she completed the thought. “By the way, that qualifies as a lecture.”
He smiled. “You need dry socks. Be right back.” He disappeared upstairs.
Kate examined her feet. Her toes were swollen and painful to the touch, but she could still wiggle them, and they’d stopped throbbing. Her left calf cramped, and she massaged it until the muscles softened. Her nerves were on edge. She would have to tell him about William Stigler.
Soon Palmer was back with a pair of clean white athletic socks, and she asked him where the bathroom was. He pointed down the hallway. Inside the white-tiled bathroom, Kate peeled off her wet socks and put on the new ones. She studied her face in the mirror. Her cheeks were red and her lips were cracked. She took a deep breath. She could’ve died out there. She washed her face with warm water and ran her fingers through her hair.
Back in the kitchen, Palmer poured them two coffees, added generous helpings of milk and sugar, and Kate gulped hers down, savoring every last drop.
“I went to see Stigler today,” she confessed.
His entire demeanor changed. “Kate, no.”
“I just wanted to catch a glimpse of him, that’s all. But we ended up talking.”
He shook his head. “I never should’ve told you about him.”
“He said he was in Germany when Vicky Koffman went missing, and in Boston when Maggie Witt disappeared, so the police have ruled him out as a suspect. He said you know this.”
“Kate, listen to me. The man is an exceptional liar. Vicky Koffman disappeared eight hours before Stigler’s flight to Germany. And Maggie Witt’s mother thought she was at a friend’s house, but she never made it there—there was some confusion about the timeline. So there was a window of opportunity of about five hours when he could’ve abducted her before heading off to Boston. And yet you believed him.”
She nodded slowly. “He came across as charming and reasonable…”
“Stigler fits the profile. He’s divorced, no kids. He has a house by the lake with plenty of acreage, so he’s fairly distant from his neighbors—he’d need access to an isolated location where he can indulge his fantasies. His job puts him in touch with his victims. He’s manipulative, deceptive, and highly intelligent. He’s tenured and beyond reproach. It’s a great disguise.” Palmer pinched the bridge of his nose. “There’s something else we need to discuss.”
Kate braced herself, ignoring the twinge in her stomach.
“I think your mother was murdered and that her suicide was staged, just like Susie Gafford’s accident.”
Kate balked. She shook her head. “No. She killed herself the same way Virginia Woolf did—by filling her pockets with rocks and walking into the river. She loved reading Virginia Woolf.”
“Yes, which is something Stigler would have known. The rocks became part of the staging. He and your mother were living together at the time, and their relationship wasn’t good. Neighbors complained about the noise, loud arguments coming from the apartment in the days prior to the event.”
“Wait,” Kate sputtered. “Are you saying that the professor I met today killed my mother and made it look like a suicide? Because he reminded me of every college professor I’ve ever had. Arrogant, maybe, but nothing out of the ordinary. He came across as fairly warm and caring—my mother would’ve responded to that. She craved attention. My father can be so cold.”
“But you know even better than I do, psychopaths can fake empathy. Stigler had an alibi for most of the day your mother died, but not all of it. There’s a two-hour gap, and that’s plenty of time to kill someone, trust me. Besides, I didn’t agree with the pathologist’s time of death, which could’ve given him another couple of hours. There’s plenty of room for doubt. I just haven’t been able to prove it yet. But your mother was cremated. We can’t exhume the body and do another autopsy.”
Outside the wind rattled against the windowpanes with an erratic beat, like a child’s fists. Let me in. I’m cold. I’m hungry.
“Your mother was a strong swimmer, right?” Palmer said. It was true—Julia used to brag about the swimming trophies she’d won back in high school. She was fearless in the water. “It takes four or five minutes for a person to drown,” he continued, “and that’s a long time to be struggling for air. Even if you wanted to kill yourself, your natural instinct to survive would kick in after thirty seconds or so, no matter what your original intentions were. Now, the medical examiner argued that even if her will to survive had kicked in, the powerful currents combined with the rocks in her pockets would’ve exhausted her. He ruled that the wounds on her body were a result of the current pulling her under and smashing her against the boulders.”
Kate took a breath, feeling sick.
“But you’ve got a person who’s emotionally distraught,” Palmer went on, oblivious to her distress. “There’s proof she’d been drinking. What if your mother and Stigler had an argument that night? What if he followed her down to the river in his own vehicle? What if they continued to argue, and he took advantage of her intoxicated state and killed her? What if he struck her over the head, filled her pockets with rocks and pushed her into the river?”