“I wasn’t trying to prove anything. I’m concerned, is all.”
“The nerve of you,” Mimi said, full of venom.
“I called Grace,” Lucy said. “I asked her to come.”
“Why?” Mimi’s tone had softened some, but not much. She, too, took a seat at the table, yanking the chair with such fury that several people turned to look.
“You two hurried off to be with Adam. You left me all alone. I was scared.”
Mimi’s mouth thinned. “Lucy, your brother is in intensive care, and all you can think about is yourself?”
Tears filled Lucy’s eyes. “I was scared because I’m worried about Adam.”
Carl put an arm around Lucy. “She’s right, Mimi. We did abandon her. Lucy is as shaken up by what Adam did as we are.”
Lucy leaned against her dad and brushed away a tear with the back of her hand. “I didn’t mean to cause trouble, it’s just that—”
“Surely you could have amused yourself for a couple of hours,” Mimi said. “No matter how worried you were. You knew we’d come get you.”
“Leave her alone, Mimi.” Carl turned to Lucy. “Sorry, honey. We weren’t thinking clearly.” And then to Grace, “Thank you for comforting her.”
“I was happy to help,” she muttered.
“How is Adam?” Lucy asked.
“He’s still in a coma,” Carl said. “But his vital signs are good.”
“The big worry now,” Mimi added with a pointed look in Grace’s direction, “is liver and brain damage.”
“What does that mean?” Lucy looked from one parent to the other with a stricken expression.
Mimi ignored the question and addressed Grace in a scathing tone. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done, Grace? Adam is a child. If he lives, if he can function normally again, if he’s not imprisoned, even then his life will never be the same. You’ve destroyed my son. You’ve destroyed my family.”
And what about my daughter? Grace wanted to lob back. Have you forgotten the role your son played in that? And what about Adam’s decision to take an overdose of pills? No one forced him to try to kill himself. But while she was thinking how best to respond, Mimi’s cell rang and she reached for it with an efficiency Grace found astounding.
“The hospital is a no cell phone zone, Mom.”
“Not in the cafeteria, Lucy.” Mimi’s tone was dismissive. She flipped open the phone despite a few nasty looks from those seated nearby. “What? Didn’t Sandman tell you? Yes, yes, he’s in the hospital. We’re here now.”
She looked at Carl and rolled her eyes. “Look, this is really a bad—okay, yeah, a minute.” Mimi listened in silence for several moments. “A stuffed animal? What? No, of course not. He’s a seventeen-year-old boy!” She sighed and turned to Carl. “Have you seen Adam with any stuffed animals lately?”
Carl looked at Lucy and they both shook their heads.
“No,” Mimi said into the phone, more loudly than necessary, then quickly slammed the phone shut. “That was the detective. Why in God’s name is she asking about stuffed animals?”
“I told you,” Lucy said. “She doesn’t know up from down. She should forget about Adam and find that serial killer.”
“And we all know who’s responsible for her looking at Adam in the first place.” Mimi shot Grace a nasty look.
Not without reason, Grace protested silently with a glance in Carl’s direction. He was looking down at the table, studiously avoiding her gaze. Grace stood up. “Well, I’d better be going.”
“Good idea,” Mimi said.
Carl walked her to the cafeteria door. “Thank you again for helping with Lucy.”
“I’m glad she felt comfortable calling me, Carl. Lucy is a lovely girl. I care about her. Just as I care about you.”
“Things are complicated, Grace. I can’t begin to sort them out yet.”
“You think I can? You think they aren’t complicated for me, too?”
“No, of course not.” Carl kissed Grace’s cheek and pushed her gently into the main hallway. “I apologize for Mimi. She’s not handling this well.”
Of the three, Grace thought as she headed for the elevator, only Lucy seemed to have remembered that Caitlin was dead.
Chapter 42
At ten o’clock on a gloomy Monday morning Rayna was already on her third cup of coffee. She’d finished off her stash of trail mix before eight, and now prowled around the break room, looking for something more to nibble on.
Her stomach burned and her eyes were gritty with lack of sleep. It had been a hellish couple of days. Adam Peterson—who was to have turned himself in to authorities Saturday morning—was in a coma. The DA’s office had decided to hold off charging him, and Seth Robbins was having a field day at the expense of all involved, and most especially her.
But it was the tiny stuffed tiger that bothered Rayna most.
For probably the hundredth time, she tried to sort it out. She’d found a tiny stuffed dog in her mailbox when Karen Holiday disappeared, but she’d dismissed it as a child’s lost toy placed there by some neighborly passerby who’d mistakenly assumed it belonged to someone in Rayna’s household. When she’d found a stuffed bunny in the mailbox after Karen’s body was discovered, she’d logged it into evidence, even though she wasn’t convinced it was related to the crime. No one in the department was convinced, either. In fact, she’d taken a bit of teasing over the incident.
There’d been no animal when Caitlin Whittington disappeared. And although that wasn’t the only factor that led her to think the two crimes might not be related, the absence of a stuffed animal offered support of that theory. But now, with the discovery of Caitlin’s body, a tiny stuffed tiger had shown up on her patio table.
It couldn’t be coincidence. It had to be the killer playing with her.
Not necessarily the killer, she reminded herself. But if it wasn’t the killer, who was it? And why hadn’t she found an animal when Caitlin disappeared? Could she have somehow overlooked it?
The more immediate concern, though, was Adam. The animals didn’t exonerate him. He could have left the tiger on her table before he tried to take his own life. And he was every bit as capable of taunting her as any other killer. But it didn’t feel right. A seventeen-year-old boy fixated on girls who rejected him—again, just a theory—didn’t leave gifts for the detective on the case.
Or bait her by leaving an untraceable message on her answering machine.
By all accounts, Adam was not a typical seventeen-year-old boy.
Rayna gritted her teeth. She slid a dollar into the vending machine and punched the button. A pack of peanut butter crackers clattered into the tray at the bottom.
“You must really be desperate,” Hank said, coming into the break room with an empty cup. “Those things are awful.”
“I am desperate.”
“No time for breakfast?”
“More like nervous eating.” She opened the cellophane package and bit into one of the crackers. It tasted like sawdust. “But not as nervous as I thought. These things must have been sitting around for ages.” She tossed the remainder of the package into the trash.
“Jessup says we ought to have the final autopsy report by noon,” Hank said, filling his cup from the communal pot. “Not that it will do us much good, I imagine. Any change in Adam Peterson’s condition?”
“I checked with the hospital this morning. He’s stable but unresponsive.”
“That buys us time. When he comes around, assuming he does, maybe we’ll have a better handle on the case.”
“Let’s hope so. We were ready to arrest him based on what we had before.”
“My bet is he’s still good for it. Forensics find anything on that stuffed tiger?”
“No, but it’s got to be connected to the murders. Just like the other two.” She didn’t bother to point out that the ribbing she’d taken earlier had been misguided. She’d been right to be suspicious of the toys.
“The whole thing is
weird,” Hank said. “Why little stuffed animals? I mean, why not a horse’s head or dead roses or whatever they do in the movies? Wouldn’t that be more fitting for a maniac killer?”
Rayna had asked Cody that same question when he’d finally returned her call yesterday afternoon, full of apology for not getting back to her sooner. “It probably means something to the maniac killer,” she said, parroting what Cody had told her. “Maybe his sister got all the stuffed animals when he was a kid, or his mother tossed his away in a fit of anger.”
“Maybe he’s a sales rep for a company that makes them,” Hank offered, pouring coffee into his cup. “He hates his job and he gets the creatures for free.”
Rayna couldn’t tell if the comment was meant as a joke or not. With Hank, it was hard to know.
“Whatever his reasons,” she said, “they aren’t going to help us figure this out. Maybe we were too hasty in going after Adam, maybe not.”
Hank ran a hand under the collar of his shirt. “Like I said, he looks good for it to me.”
“I want to interview Ty Cross again. And Rob Hardy, too. Their stories have never matched.”
“You think one’s covering for the other?”
“Possibly. Or they’re both involved. A couple of weeks before Karen disappeared, Ty and Karen were at the same party.”
“How do you propose to get past the senior Mr. Cross?”
“I don’t. Let’s get Ty down here this afternoon, along with his parents and attorney.”
Hank laughed. “I guess now I understand the nervous eating.” He headed back to his desk. “By the way, Earl is on our side regarding the news coverage. He said not to let it get to you.”
“So your friend has taken it upon himself to offer me advice?”
“Don’t get your knickers in a twist, Rayna. We were just shooting the breeze. He said he’d run into you over coffee. It wouldn’t hurt you to be nice to the guy.”
Rayna sighed. You could hit Hank over the head with a two by four and he still wouldn’t get it. She wasn’t interested in Earl.
~~~~
“I don’t understand why you want to talk to my son again,” Mr. Cross huffed when he appeared with Ty and his lawyer late that afternoon. “Word has it you were ready to arrest Adam Peterson.”
Rayna skirted the implied questions. She set the recorder on the table and identified those present, including Mr. Bishop, Ty’s attorney. “How well did you know Karen Holiday?” Rayna asked Ty.
Ty glanced at Bishop who gave a nod. Rayna had the distinct feeling the attorney was more used to corporate negotiations than criminal interrogation.
“We were classmates,” Ty said.
“That’s all?”
“We didn’t hang with the same crowd, if that’s what you mean.”
“Yet you were at a party she was at not long before she disappeared.”
Ty rubbed his palms on his pant legs. “Yeah. Last fall, before I started going with Caitlin.”
“Was Karen one of those girls you were telling me about? The ones who made sexual conquests into a contest.”
Ty reddened. He studiously avoided looking at his father.
“Was she?” Rayna asked again.
“Yeah.” The word was little more than a puff of air.
“And did you help her out?”
Ty looked sick. “Do I have to answer that?” he asked Bishop.
“No, you don’t,” Mr. Cross said before the attorney could speak. “You don’t have to answer anything.” He turned to Rayna. “This whole line of questioning is preposterous.”
Rayna doubted Mr. Cross even knew about the contest, but she didn’t want to antagonize him further. She could always ask Ty again another time, although she figured she’d gotten her answer.
“How well did Rob know Karen Holiday?”
Ty laughed. “She wasn’t his type, either.”
“So nothing happened between them?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“How can you be sure?”
The attorney cleared his throat. “I think these are questions you should ask Rob, not my client.”
“Tell me again when you last saw Caitlin,” Rayna said.
“At school, the Friday she disappeared. She was at volleyball practice. But we didn’t talk.”
“What time was that?”
“A little after five, I guess. I’d stayed late to make up a lab I missed earlier in the week.”
Rayna noted the time in her notebook. “What time did you leave the school grounds?”
“I don’t know. Probably around five-thirty.”
“Did you go straight home?”
“I stopped to get a burrito and pick up a few things first.”
“How’d you pay for them?”
“I get an allowance,” Ty said, sounding a bit defensive.
“I meant, did you pay with cash or by credit card?”
“Oh. Cash.”
No paper trail to verify his movements. “What time did you get home?”
“About seven.”
“Was anyone one else there?”
“My mom. She was making dinner.”
Rayna sat back in her chair. “How do you account for the fact that Rob Hardy says the two of you were playing an on-line video game during the time when you were out?”
Ty appeared uncomfortable, but he shrugged in what he undoubtedly intended to be an offhand manner. To Rayna it looked forced. “He must be mistaken.”
“Something of an interesting coincidence that his story offers you an alibi for the time of Caitlin’s disappearance. You sure you don’t want to take it?”
Ty’s left leg bounced up and down. He rubbed his palms on his thighs. “You’ve talked to him, right?”
“Of course.”
Ty’s father did a better job of picking up on Ty’s nervousness than the attorney. “What exactly is this about?” Mr. Cross asked.
Rayna ignored the question and again addressed Ty. “How did Rob and Caitlin get along?”
“Okay.”
“ ‘Okay’ as in they were friendly, or ‘okay’ as in they barely knew one another?”
Bishop leaned forward. “I don’t see what this has to do with my client.”
Rayna ignored the interruption. “They had a big . . . I don’t know what to call it exactly. An argument, a scene, whatever, about the time you and Caitlin broke up. What was that about?”
Ty looked at his feet then raised his eyes to meet Rayna’s. “You think Rob killed Caitlin?” Ty’s breathing had become shallow and quick.
“What do you think?”
Ty again wiped his palms on his legs. His face was flushed, his expression wary. “I don’t . . . it’s not . . . no. No way! I don’t believe it.”
Rayna found his reaction more interesting than his answer. She read his doubt loud and clear.
Mr. Cross spoke up with more conviction than his son. “Rob’s family and ours have been friends for years. There’s no way either boy is involved in this and I am sick and tired of your suggesting otherwise. We’ve tried to cooperate, but enough is enough.” He started to rise.
“Rob had some interesting things to tell us,” Rayna said, fishing for a reaction from Ty. If she could play the two boys off against each other, maybe she’d get to the bottom of what was bothering her.
Ty swallowed hard. “What about?”
“What do you think it was about?”
“Don’t answer that, Ty,” Mr. Cross said. “We’re through here.”
Clearly torn, Ty hesitated before rising. His gaze was fixed on Rayna and she had the distinct impression he wanted to hear if she would say more.
Mr. Cross paused at the door, impatient. “Ty, I said let’s go.”
Somewhat reluctantly, Ty followed his father and the attorney out of the room.
Rayna flicked off the recorder. She hadn’t learned anything substantive, but she had an even stronger sense than before that Ty was hiding something. Maybe when she pressed Rob H
ardy, she’d get somewhere.
Hank grabbed her in the hallway as she was leaving the interrogation room. “I was just coming to get you. We got a call. A missing person’s report.”
Rayna’s skin prickled. God, no, not another one!”
“A sixteen-year-old girl named Terri Lowe. Last seen this morning when her mom dropped her off at the mall to do some shopping.”
Chapter 43
Rayna took the glass of tepid tap water Mrs. Lowe handed her and drained it quickly. It was now evening and she hadn’t eaten since morning. She could have used a bite of food, but she understood that the gnawing ache in her stomach was a small matter compared to a missing child.
Earlier in the day she’d talked to Terri Lowe’s parents long enough to learn that Terri was home-schooled, which allowed her the flexibility to go to the mall that Monday with her mother and ten-year-old sister. They’d all had lunch, and then while the mother and younger daughter did their errands, Terri did hers. They were to have met up at the car an hour later. Terri never showed.
While this wasn’t the first time Terri had pushed the boundaries of her freedom, it was unusual for her to simply ignore the plans they’d all agreed on. And Terri wasn’t answering her cell phone, which was also not unheard of, but troubling under the circumstances. Still, Mrs. Lowe had initially been more angry than worried. She’d hung around for another hour, waiting for her daughter, before heading home. After she and her husband had contacted Terri’s few friends and learned that none of them had heard from Terri, they called the police.
Armed with a snapshot and description of the girl, officers had blanketed the shops and restaurants in the area throughout the afternoon and into the evening. There were some possible sightings, but nothing concrete.
It was eight o’clock now and Rayna was once again seated in the Lowe’s drafty living room, digging deeper into their daughter’s life.
“No,” Mrs. Lowe said. “I already told you. No arguments, no fights, it was just a normal Monday, following a normal weekend. There was nothing to indicate that Terri was upset.”
“What about boys?” Rayna asked.
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