“The joys of technology,” he told Adam. “No more need for that messy ink. You got lucky, no?”
Adam couldn’t tell if the man was trying to be kind or sarcastic so he didn’t say anything.
When they’d finished, the officer had Adam stand, and he patted him down again, just as the officers who’d brought him in had done. Only this guy was slower and more thorough. Adam gritted his teeth to keep from reacting.
Then the officer picked up a camera and shot two pictures of Adam, straight on and from the side.
“Okay, you can have a seat again,” he said.
“How long?” Adam was cold and hungry and he had to pee.
“How long, what?”
“How long do I have to stay here?”
The officer chuckled and packed up his fingerprint kit.
Adam counted on his father to show up and do something. Had he made it clear over the phone that the cops had pulled up behind him on the road? He had been so scared—
“Is my dad here yet?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Don’t I get a phone call?”
“This isn’t camp, kid.”
The door shut and once again Adam was alone.
It’s going to be okay, he thought. His dad would get here and clear everything up.
But what if it wasn’t okay? What if he went to jail? Stood trial? Was convicted? He started shaking.
After what seemed like an eternity, the two detectives who’d talked to him Friday afternoon showed up. The guy was with the FBI, Adam remembered. He remained standing by the door whereas Detective Godwin moved closer.
“Hello, Adam.” She took a chair and smiled at him as though they were old friends. “I guess you can tell things have changed a bit in the last couple of days.”
No kidding. Friday he’d been a high school senior on the honor roll whose biggest complaint was that he had no friends. Today he was handcuffed in a police station. “Am I under arrest?”
She looked pained. “I’m afraid so, Adam.”
“Why?” He could feel the threat of tears.
“I have to do the small print stuff first,” she said, pulling a card from her pocket. Again she smiled at him as if to say what a pain this legalese is. In a bored monotone, she read him his rights from the card. “You’ve probably seen that on television enough to know what it all means, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” She put the card away. “What was your question again?”
“Why did you arrest me?”
“Because we have reason to believe you did something to harm Caitlin.”
Adam shook his head. He didn’t trust his voice.
FBI Man spoke up. “Did you rape her, Adam? Did you take her prisoner somewhere? What did you do to her?”
“No, I’d never—”
“Is she still alive?” Detective Godwin asked, leaning closer to Adam.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know if she’s alive? Tell us where she is and maybe we can help you.”
“I don’t know where she is. I didn’t do anything. I swear.”
Detective Godwin leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms. She sounded disappointed in him. “You had pictures on your computer, Adam. Pictures of Caitlin naked. Pictures of her in the shower and in front of the mirror. We found them.”
“You can’t have,” Adam blurted without thinking. “I deleted them.”
FBI Man sauntered over to where Adam was sitting. “I thought you were supposed to be smart, Adam. You must know deleting files doesn’t get rid of them.”
The tears no longer merely threatened. Adam could feel them spill from his eyes and down his cheek. “It’s not what you think. I’d never hurt her.”
“Why not tell us what it is, then,” Detective Godwin encouraged.
“It’s just that . . . I mean . . .”
“We’re waiting, Adam.”
“You wouldn’t understand. I liked Caitlin, she was a friend. A special kind of friend.”
“Sneaking those photos of her was pretty clever,” FBI Man said. “How’d you do it?”
The door opened. A uniformed officer and a short man with a large belly and a mustard stain on his shirt plowed through.
“Sorry, detective,” said the officer. “This man is the boy’s attorney.”
“Your father called me,” the attorney said to Adam. “He’s outside now.” He turned to the detectives. “No more conversations with my client unless I am present, is that clear?”
FBI Man grunted in disgust. “There goes your chance for us to work this out cooperatively, kid. Once the lawyers get involved, it’s hardball.”
“We have some questions for your client,” Detective Godwin said.
“I need to talk to him first. Alone.”
The detective gave Adam a long, hard look before she and the FBI agent left the room.
“My name’s Sandman,” the attorney said. “And I hope I don’t put you to sleep.”
Chapter 28
Rayna closed her eyes and slipped lower into the tub. The piping hot water eased the tension. She’d scented the bath with rose oil, and now the fragrance carried her far away to those lazy summer mornings when she’d worked in the garden, Kimberly at her side, chattering away like a little bird.
Mommy, why don’t we like weeds? Look, a butterfly. Why can’t people fly, too? Why do roses have thorns? Oh, here comes Daddy. He’s bringing us lemonade!
Marc used to joke that he couldn’t tell a daffodil from a dandelion, but that watching his wife and daughter putter in the garden was one of his greatest pleasures. At which point Rayna would gently remind him she wasn’t puttering, she was gardening, and he would brush a dusting of dirt from her cheek or a leaf from her hair and hug her, and Kimberly, in one of his playful family hugs.
Rayna felt a tear track down her cheek. Maybe the rose oil hadn’t been such a good idea, after all. The vivid memories the scent stirred were not as easily ignored as the steady dull pain that had become her unfailing companion in recent years.
She opened her eyes and splashed clear, cold water from the spigot on her face. She wasn’t going to allow herself to sink into maudlin despair. She’d worked too hard to get past that, desperately afraid that any crack in her resolve would open the floodgates to more than she’d be able to withstand.
Instead, Rayna forced herself to focus on the events that had culminated in the arrest of Adam Peterson this afternoon. Two deputies had spotted Adam’s car in a seasonal forest service campground, and taken him into custody. He’d gone with them peacefully, thank goodness. Unfortunately, the kid’s lawyer had showed up before she and Cody had a chance to finish questioning him.
But at least they’d made an arrest. They had a suspect in custody. A killer off the streets. The citizens of Paradise Falls would rest easier, the captain would stop breathing down her neck, and the media would turn their spotlights elsewhere. So why this nagging sense that something was missing?
Was she unwilling to accept the fact that these crimes had been cleared while Kimberly’s killer remained at large? Had Seth Robbins been onto something when he wrote that she allowed her personal history and emotions to get in the way of doing her job?
Her phone rang in the other room and Rayna let the answering machine answer. She wouldn’t climb out of a hot bath for anyone. She dipped deeper into the water so that it came up to her chin, wetting the ends of her hair. They would curl the wrong way unless she spent time with the blower, but the luxury of enveloping herself in warmth was too enticing to pass up.
She wondered how Grace Whittington was holding up. For reasons she didn’t understand, Rayna felt a kinship with Grace that she hadn’t with Beth Holiday. Perhaps because she could envision that, under other circumstances, the two of them might have been friends. Or maybe Caitlin seemed a lot like a girl Kimberly might have grown to resemble in spirit, if not appearance. Adam’s arrest wouldn’t be easy for Grace, even though, or m
aybe especially because, Grace had brought Adam to their attention.
Stepfamilies were an intricate web of relationships Rayna couldn’t begin to understand. One she’d been determined to avoid. After Marc had been diagnosed, when it became clear his time was limited, he’d told Rayna he wanted her to feel free to remarry. He wanted Kimberly to have a family, maybe even a brother or sister. The idea of being with anyone but Marc had been far from Rayna’s mind, but she’d known even then that a second marriage would be in no way like her first.
She’d started dating Marc for all the wrong reasons—because he was sexy and fun and drove a BMW. But she’d fallen in love with him for all the right reasons. He was honest and direct and caring. He made her laugh. He made her feel special. She knew he was a man she could trust with her life and her heart. They were—although the term made her cringe—soul mates. Marc was her best friend as well as her husband, and when he died, a part of her died. She’d not even looked at another man until Neal Cody.
And what a mistake that had been.
The water began to cool. Rayna lingered until it was almost tepid, then stepped out of the tub and dried her body and hair with a towel. She put on sweatpants and an old T-shirt, and poured herself a glass of brandy. She was debating whether to curl up on the couch with a DVD or crawl into bed with a book when the doorbell rang.
She rarely had unannounced visitors. Her little house was secluded at the end of a sparsely traveled road, and the few people in town she knew, including Paul Nesbitt, weren’t the type to drop in unexpectedly.
Peeking through window, she saw Cody standing under the porch light.
He had never played by her rules.
She didn’t have to answer the door. Just because someone rang didn’t mean you were obligated to open up. But it would be obvious to him that she was home, and there was no real reason not to answer it. She looked down at her faded and misshapen clothing, ran a hand through her damp, unruly hair, and after a moment’s hesitation, opened the door.
“You’re the last person I expected,” she said.
“You’re expecting someone else?”
“No, I meant you surprised me. What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to say goodbye. I’m leaving in the morning.”
“Leaving?” A blast of cold, damp air blew into the house. She stepped back. “Come inside so I can shut the door.”
Cody stamped his feet on the mat to clear his boots of mud, then stepped inside. “There’s no real reason for me to be here anymore, and they need agents in Las Vegas for a big fraud case.”
“I didn’t know you worked white collar crimes.”
“These days I work whatever they give me.” He didn’t sound happy, but he didn’t explain, so Rayna let it go.
“I just poured myself a little brandy,” she said. “Would you like some?”
Leaving. The word hadn’t registered right away. She hadn’t wanted him here in the first place—not the FBI and especially not Neal Cody—but now that he was leaving she felt inexplicably sad.
“As long as I’m not disturbing anything . . .”
Rayna looked down at her clothes and laughed. “Hardly. But shouldn’t you have thought of that before knocking on my door at this hour?”
He smiled. “Maybe I wanted to find out if I was.”
Same old cocky, self-serving attitude. She remembered again why she’d tried to forget him. She handed him a glass and the bottle of brandy, and let him pour his own.
“Good stuff,” he said, serving up an ample snifter.
Rayna’s living room was a mess: papers and magazines and a half-finished quilting project she’d begun months ago. Without a fire in the fireplace, it was also gloomy on early spring evenings. So they sat at the table in the kitchen, which despite its 70s decor was Rayna’s favorite room.
“I guess,” she said, taking in a whiff of brandy from her glass, “you must be happy to be onto something better than this ‘nothing assignment in some podunk, nowhere town.’ ”
He looked surprised, then chagrined. “I’m sorry I said that. I didn’t really mean it.”
“Then why say it?”
He ignored the question. “What’s coming is no better, even if it is Vegas.” He paused to sip his drink. “I’m not exactly a popular guy with the higher-ups right now.”
“What did you do?”
“I called my boss a jerk in front of his boss, for starters.”
“I can see how that might not have endeared you to him.” She couldn’t help but smile. Cody didn’t suffer fools lightly.
“During my divorce, I kind of lost patience with everything and everybody. I did some stupid stuff and it’s only right I be held accountable. But the thing that really got me in trouble was not following procedure to the letter. Never mind that the case had a good outcome, that a sick pervert is in prison and two little boys have the chance to grow up in good homes.”
“The end justifies the means?”
“Sometimes it does. Petty rules should never get in the way of doing what’s right.”
“So why stay with the Bureau?” She knew he’d chafed under their regulations in the past.
He looked into his glass, as if expecting to find an answer there, before turning his gaze back to her. “What else would I do? Besides, I’m working my way back into their good graces. And bottom line, I love what I do. Feeling sorry for myself and taking it out on everyone else was dumb. Not following procedure wasn’t smart, either, but publicizing the fact was what got me in trouble.”
“It’s always good to learn from our mistakes,” she said mildly. She would have liked to know more but thought better of asking.
“Thanks, Mom.” Cody met her eyes for a moment and then looked back down at the glass in his hand. “I really didn’t want this assignment, but not because I thought it was unimportant. Truth is, I was nervous about seeing you.”
“How so?”
“I figure sometimes it’s better to let bygones by bygones. Easier, anyway. Less painful. These past four years have been . . . well, there are things I regret.”
He stood up and crossed to the open shelves by the small kitchen desk. Rayna kept her small collection of cookbooks there, as well as a glass salad bowl that was too large to fit anywhere else, various bills and letters and flyers that needed her attention, and other odds and ends that hadn’t found a permanent place yet in her house.
“I was going to say it’s good to see you doing so well, but I know that’s not the whole truth, even though you jumped on me a couple of days ago for suggesting otherwise.”
She’d jumped on him because of his presumption that he understood her. And because she was angry at him for the way he’d treated her. Tonight, whether it was the brandy or the hot bath, or the fact that he was leaving, she felt less inclined to take offense.
“I’m doing okay,” she said. “All things considered.”
He ran his fingers along the spines of the cookbooks. “Thai, Indian, Italian—you must be quite a cook.”
“Mostly I just think about cooking.” At one time, she had been a decent cook. An adventurous one, at any rate. Now she favored quick and easy.
“Cute little bunny,” Cody said, picking up the stuffed toy on top of the stack of bills.
“That’s the stuffed animal I told you about. The one I found in my mailbox the day after we discovered Karen Holiday’s body. Forensics found nothing. They don’t even think it’s tied to the case.”
Cody set the little rabbit back down. “Are you looking at Adam for Karen Holiday’s murder?”
“Looking, yes. But there’s no solid evidence that says he did it.”
“You think the two disappearances are unrelated then?”
“I don’t know what to think. In some ways, I worry that Adam’s arrest this afternoon was premature.”
“The chief must be pleased, though. Despite his ‘proceed carefully’ lecture the other day, he seems to have a bee in his britches about demonstrating
that the department’s on top of things.”
“That’s pretty much his style, but you’re right that he pushed for the arrest.” Rayna had argued for treating Adam as a person of interest rather than a suspect, but she’d been overruled. And maybe it was just as well. Rayna wasn’t sure she trusted her own judgment anymore.
Cody came back to the table and sat down. “At least the arrest ought to get that Seth Robbins guy off your back. What’s his agenda, anyway?”
“I don’t know.” Rayna’s eyelids were feeling the exhaustion of the day. She yawned. “I’ve only met him once, at a civic function. He’s a scrawny little guy, and a bit pompous. An oddball who delights in being odd and getting a rise out of people.”
“Someone who enjoys power, from the sound of it.”
“He seems to take pride in the fact that he calls it like it is, but in truth, he’s all over the map. He got on his high horse about Karen Holiday’s murder and hasn’t let up. Why didn’t we have a suspect right away? How come we weren’t doing more to find her? I was a total fuckup who only got where I was because I was female. That sort of thing. I think he can’t tell the difference between reality and a one-hour television crime show.” But he had managed to dig up information about Rayna’s past.
“Everyone’s an expert these days.”
Rayna agreed. Pointing out the mistakes and discrepancies in crime shows was a favorite cop pastime when she’d worked in San Jose. Thankfully Hank’s viewing habits tended more toward sports.
She eyed Cody’s empty glass. “You want more brandy?”
“I should be going.” He made no move to leave.
She could persuade him to stay, Rayna realized. It would take only a word or a look. She hated herself for being tempted. The chair scraped the linoleum as she pushed it back and rose.
Cody followed suit, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Despite everything, it was good to see you again.”
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