The Next Widow: A gripping crime thriller with unputdownable suspense (Jericho and Wright Thrillers Book 1)

by CJ Lyons

  “There we go,” Jessica said, resuming her seat on the stool, her skirt swishing as she folded it around her legs. Leah still marveled at how put-together the psychiatrist looked at three in the morning. But that was Jessica, never a hair out of place or seen without her makeup. “Tomorrow I’d like to start therapy for Emily—we’ll combine it with the forensic interview the police will no doubt insist upon.”

  Leah jerked, banging her elbow on the chair arm. “She’s a witness,” she said more to herself than Jessica, trying to drill down on what that implied for her daughter. How many children had she interviewed at the Crisis Intervention Center, documenting their own abuse or preparing them to testify? Had she done more harm than good, extracting their stories? How could she trust anyone to invade Emily’s psyche that same way? Force her to re-live Ian’s murder?

  “Exactly. I’m assuming you’d prefer me, with my experience in dealing with traumatized patients, over one of your ER colleagues who usually man the CIC. I can safeguard Emily, help her to only need to go through this once while also giving the police everything they need.”

  Leah nodded, not because she was following, more because Jessica paused and seemed to expect it. Jessica reached around Emily to pat Leah’s arm again. “And after Emily, we’ll get started with you. Unless you’d like to talk tonight? Walk through what happened? It might be helpful.”

  “No.” The single syllable was dragged out along with all of Leah’s breath. She’d already spoken to the police officers, who said a detective would be coming to hear everything and she didn’t have the strength to go through it more than she needed to. Jessica leaned back as if she took Leah’s refusal personally. “No,” Leah repeated, her tone modified. “Thank you, though.”

  “Okay then. But the sooner the better, you know that.” Jessica’s gaze moved past Leah to the victims’ advocacy posters. “The one thing the victims’ groups—don’t you hate that word, victim? As if everything else you’ve accomplished in life is suddenly negated by that label?” Jessica took a breath before continuing, her tone now more clinical, as if she’d closed the doors on her own emotions, resuming her professional façade. “Anyway, the one thing they get right, is that talking helps. So, when you’re ready, call me. Anytime.” She handed Leah a business card with her private cell number and stood.

  Jessica headed to the door, then pivoted on her heel. “Take care, Leah. I truly am sorry you’re going through this. But please know, I’m here. You are never alone.”

  And yet, with Ian gone, Leah was alone.

  She pulled Emily closer, the silence enveloping them both, an insulation against the world beyond.

  Finally, a nursing assistant appeared with a wheelchair and the news that Emily’s room was ready. Leah shifted Emily’s dead weight onto her hip and, ignoring the wheelchair, followed him to the elevator.

  Once the pediatric nurses had Emily settled, they left them alone in their room, closing the door on the muffled nighttime noises of the ward beyond. Leah stank of blood—her hair was sticky with it—but she didn’t want to leave Emily’s sight, so she kept the bathroom door open while she washed her hair in the sink. Then she filled a basin with soapy water and carefully gave Emily a sponge bath, taking extra care to keep the water soothing warm and to gently comb free the tangles in Emily’s hair. She didn’t do as good a job as Ian would have. The thought ambushed her, left her gasping for breath.

  Emily was usually an active sleeper, flipping and flopping and mumbling the night away. Not now. But it was good she was sleeping, blissfully able to shut off her brain, if only for a few hours. Leah crawled into bed with her daughter and wished she could switch off as well.

  Time seemed to move in fits and starts, even occasionally spiraling backward or stopping altogether. As she lay there, watching the luminescent hands on the clock creep forward, Leah fought against the images of Ian that battered her exhausted brain. A muffled knock came on the door and it opened before she could say anything.

  She sat up, expecting the nurse. Instead, it was a man in his late thirties. “Mrs. Wright?” he said, meeting her gaze without flinching or looking away. “I’m Detective Luka Jericho from the Violent Crimes Unit. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  Five

  Hospital rooms made for less than ideal conditions to interview a witness, but tonight Luka had no choice. EMS had whisked Leah and her daughter away before Harper had arrived on the scene, so all Luka had to go on was what little information Leah had given the responding officers.

  The uniforms had come up with nothing solid during the door-to-door. The townhouse beside the Wrights’ was for sale and empty. A few people reported hearing the sound of a car engine or maybe a motorcycle going too fast down the street. Some had video doorbells that would help to determine the traffic on the block around the time of the murder once the techs downloaded and reviewed the footage. As for the rest of the neighbors, despite the fact that Ian Wright must have shouted for help, no one had heard anything above the sounds of their TVs.

  The CSU guys were as pessimistic as always and this scene had an overwhelming amount of evidence to process, but the sheer level of violent chaos had Luka hoping their actor left some trace of himself behind. Blood and DNA from where his hand had slipped against his weapon, a stray palm print or skin trapped under the victim’s fingernails. There had to be something.

  What worried him the most were the bloody footprints Maggie had found. The CSU supervisor had examined them more closely and found that they were made by shoe covers, hiding the real imprint. Which meant their actor was smart enough to arrive prepared to literally cover his tracks.

  But now, walking down the hospital’s labyrinth of hallways, Luka couldn’t help but notice how ubiquitous boxes of gloves and shoe covers were. Could the killer be tied to Leah’s work as a physician?

  He was glad he’d arranged for security to watch over Emily Wright. Good Samaritan’s administrators had insisted on using their own guards—for liability reasons, they claimed, although Luka was certain the hospital would find a way to make a profit on the arrangement—and Luka’s commander had agreed, citing his own budget concerns over the cost of assigning an uniformed officer around the clock.

  When Luka reached Emily’s room on pediatrics he knocked and looked inside. The nurse said Emily was sedated, but he knew Leah wouldn’t be asleep, might never have another good night’s sleep again, not after tonight. It’d been seventeen years since Cherise died and still, more nights than not, he woke from night terrors, trying in vain to save her.

  What made him hesitate was the girl. From what little he could see of her on the patrolman’s video he’d thought she was a toddler. Had hoped she might be young enough to never remember, no matter how compromised that might leave his case—any decent person would wish that. But now, lying still on the bed, her mother holding her, he saw she was older, five or six. Old enough to remember. Old enough to be forced to relive it again and again if—when, he promised himself—they found the killer and the case went to trial. He paused long enough to whisper a prayer before stepping inside and introducing himself.

  Leah raised her head to meet his eyes. The light spilling in from the hallway fell short of reaching her, leaving her in shadow. Luka had run a NCIC check on her as well as a Google search. He knew what she looked like, all her vital statistics: she was thirty-four years old, had brown eyes and brown hair, a clean record and three years left on her driver’s license before it expired. She was a Penn State undergrad, went to Johns Hopkins med school, and had been an emergency medicine residency at Pitt before moving to Cambria City four years ago. He’d even found a few videos, interviews she’d done with local TV stations, public service announcements, and the like.

  But nothing prepared him for the woman herself. Most victims’ families would see him and immediately start asking questions, filling the silence with anything, whether tears, protestations, denials, prayers, demands… Not Leah. She moved slowly, sliding out of the
bed, beckoning him to follow her, and he did. She wasn’t tall, the five-five on her DL a bit of wistful thinking, and moved with the posture of a dancer. As she passed him, he smelled shampoo and saw that her hair was wet, masses of dark curls resting heavy on her shoulders.

  She crossed the sliver of light escaping through the half-open hallway door, and he could see that her lips were pressed tight, as if it took every ounce of energy not to scream. Taut muscles corded her neck, and she probably didn’t realize it, but both her hands were tightened into fists.

  He closed the door to the hall behind him, softly, without a sound and she led him into the bathroom. There was a nightlight glowing above the nurse’s call button between the sink and toilet. Leah positioned herself leaning against the sink, facing the open door and through it her daughter.

  Luka hesitated, not wanting to stand between her and the girl—worse than getting between a mother bear and a cub; even a childless bachelor like him knew better than that—but it felt inappropriately intimate to sit on the toilet or crowd in beside the shower stall. Definitely not a conducive environment for an interview.

  “There’s a room down the hall,” he started, already floundering and knowing it. His voice boomed against the tile walls, ricocheting back to him. He cleared his throat and tried again, softening his tone. “Or we could—”

  All she did was move her eyes. Not her face. Only her eyes. A quick flick dismissing his suggestions before her gaze settled back on her daughter’s sleeping form. “No. I’m not leaving her.”

  He gathered a breath, stepped past her to take up a position opposite, leaning against the towel rack. “I understand.”

  Luka was used to allowing witnesses to set their own pace—he’d long ago realized that everyone had a story to tell, if you had the patience to let them tell it their way. If this was how Leah needed to tell hers, so be it. But it wasn’t often that a witness was able to unsettle him so thoroughly—and quickly.

  “Did you catch him?” she asked. “Did he say why? Why us? Why—Ian?”

  “No, ma’am. We’re still investigating.” He slid his phone free, reached across the space separating them, and set it on the small glass shelf above the sink. “I’ll be recording this, if you don’t mind.”

  She nodded. “I understand.”

  “Later, we’ll do a formal interview down at the station.” Probably more than one—new questions always arose in a case like this, new memories unveiled as shock receded. “I might also need to ask you to walk through the scene—your house.” He wasn’t at all certain about the last, in fact, he’d prefer to avoid it. Victims always underestimated the trauma of returning to the scene in the light of day. But right now he had so little to go on, it might be necessary, if only to see if anything had been taken by the killer.

  “I’ll go, but not Emily,” she replied, obviously assuming he meant some sort of reconstruction.

  “Is there anyone you want me to call for you? Family? Friends?”

  She blinked as if surprised by his question, as if it had never occurred to her to ask for help. “Ian’s parents, they’re in Seattle. I need to call them…” Her words trailed off.

  “The coroner’s office can make arrangements for someone to go to their home, tell them in person.”

  “No, no.” She was shaking her head even though her gaze never left her daughter, giving Luka only her profile. “I’ll do it. I just need—” Now she closed her eyes for a long moment. “I’ll do it.”

  He didn’t push the point, allowing her the pretense of control over at least one small portion of her life. “Anyone I can call, for you? To help with your daughter?”

  Another, longer pause. He’d been hoping for a list of family contacts—they were always good for background on the victim. But he’d made a mistake when he mentioned Emily. Leah’s expression went stony; there was no way in hell she’d trust anyone with her daughter.

  When she didn’t answer, Luka pivoted. “Tell me about yesterday. Start in the morning and walk me through your day. Anything that stood out, anything you think I should know.”

  Her hands were braced against the edge of the sink, fingers gripping it tight as if that was the only thing keeping her on her feet. But she nodded again, even though she still wasn’t making eye contact, staring past him out the door. Her chest rose as she took one breath, then another.

  As he watched the emotions roil through her, barely perceptible, Luka realized how hard she was working to compartmentalize her feelings. It made sense; she was an ER doctor, used to dealing with blood and trauma in others—of course she’d take control, distance herself from feeling anything, especially with her daughter to care for. His job was to break through those barriers, extract the information he needed to find her husband’s killer.

  “Yesterday,” she finally said, her voice low as if reading a bedtime story. Or, more likely, amazed to discover that yesterday still existed in her memory, on the other side of the crevasse that separated now from then. “Yesterday was a normal Monday. I’m working noon to midnight this week. No matter my schedule, we always try to have breakfast together. Ian got Emily ready for school, he was dressed for morning office hours and then he was off the rest of the day. I was still in my pajamas—” A ghost of a smile flitted across her face. “Emily got them for me for Christmas. Dancing hippos. And then…” Another breath. “Then they were gone. The house was quiet. A good kind of quiet. Peaceful.”

  He nodded—not that she was looking in his direction. Luka totally understood what she was describing; he enjoyed that sort of quiet too. It would explain the well-lived-in living room, truly a family room, the center of their days and nights. He had a feeling when they ran the credit cards and financials they weren’t going to find many charges for nights out on the town. Groceries, clothes for a growing girl, Netflix or the Disney channel, maybe a few trips to the local museums—three tickets, two adults, one child.

  Family like that, with a capital F—he’d had it, growing up. Hoped he might again with Cherise. Before that dream died. He’d thought he’d left those dreams behind, outgrown them. But something about Leah Wright’s voice as she described a normal day with her family, it woke a long-ago-smothered pang of envy, a desire for what could have been.

  He forced his focus back to the present. Reminded himself that the first suspects in any domestic homicide were the family. Despite her rock-solid alibi, Leah couldn’t be ruled out. If there were fractures in Leah and Ian’s marriage, she may have taken desperate measures. And given the extreme amount of violence at the scene, Ian Wright’s murder felt personal. Very personal.

  “Tell me about your finances.” He kept his tone level, knowing this was often where witnesses balked. But Leah didn’t flinch.

  “We’re doing okay,” she replied after a moment’s thought. “Had to replace the furnace duct work a few months ago, so that set us back. It’s my fault we’re not more ahead—we want to start saving for Emily’s college, but I have six figures of student loans I’m still working on. And Cambria College doesn’t pay near what Carnegie Mellon did.”

  “Why did you leave Pittsburgh?”

  “My great aunt Nellie, she had cancer. All she wanted was to die at home—took her two years. Only way to save her house with all the medical bills was for us to pay them off.” Her tone turned wistful—as if she didn’t regret helping her great aunt or saving Nellie’s home. He wondered if Ian had felt equally as charitable, mortgaging their family’s financial future to help a dying woman.

  “Your husband’s work—what can you tell me about it?”

  “Not much. This semester it’s mainly advising grad students and his government work with CERT—the cyber emergency response team. He started with them while he was at CMU before we moved here. That’s all classified, so Ian never talks about it.”

  “Any outside jobs?” He couldn’t get the image of the footprints with the shoe covers out of his mind. Maybe Ian had been targeted for his government work—but if money was a
n issue, he could have also gone over to the dark side, perhaps working for an illegal hacking ring. At this stage Luka couldn’t rule anything out. “Consulting, maybe?”

  “No, I don’t think so. At least nothing he’s been paid for.”

  “What did you do, after Ian and Emily left?” Luka steered her back to yesterday.

  Leah shook herself from her reverie. “I took my time getting ready for work, didn’t really do much of anything—read a journal on the treadmill, ran a load of laundry, grabbed a shower…” Her shrug was tight and angry. Resenting those wasted moments that she could never reclaim. “Then I went to work.”

  He gave her a moment before prompting her, “Anything unusual at work? Did you speak to your husband during your shift?”

  “Ian never calls during a shift, unless it’s an emergency. Usually I try to break away around Emily’s bedtime, at eight, to call home, say goodnight. We chatted about her day, I promised to make her a special breakfast this morning.” She frowned in the direction of her sleeping daughter, regret filling her face.

  “Was that the last time you heard from your husband?”

  Her frown deepened but she turned to aim it at him. “He said he was going to wait up for me.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I didn’t speak to Ian again, but—” She stopped, thinking. “Right before I left the ER, a bouquet of roses came.”

  “From Ian?”

  “No, yes—I mean, I thought so. Who else would send them? But Ian never sends flowers on holidays. And never roses. He knows I grow my own, so when he sends flowers it’s always a surprise, out of the blue, and something unexpected and exotic. Besides, he already got me the perfect Valentine’s gift.”

  “Something he gave you before he left yesterday morning?”

  “No. He had my car serviced while I was at work. If you need to, you can see the receipt, I left it in the car. It might help you track his movements for the day. The parking garage should also have footage of him picking up my car and then returning it.”