The Neighbor

by Lisa Gardner

  Six forty-two A.M. Today is not going to be pretend normal after all.

  Today is going to be the real thing.

  I have a hard time breathing. My heart races, I can feel my palms start to sweat. And I think so many things at once, my head begins to hurt and I hear someone groan and it confuses me until I realize it is myself.

  Her smile, her sweet, sweet smile. The way she looks at me, as if I’m ten feet tall, as if I can hold the world in the palm of my hand.

  And then, the tears streaming down her cheeks. “No, no, no. Please, Aidan, stop. No …”

  The cops will come for me. Sooner or later. Two of them, three of them, an entire SWAT team, converging upon my doorstep. That’s why guys like me exist. Because every community has gotta have a villain, and no amount of pretend normal is ever gonna change that.

  Gotta think. Gotta plan. Gotta get the fuck out of here.

  To where? For how long? I don’t have that kind of cash….

  I try to get my breathing under control. Find some sort of comfort. Tell myself it’s gonna be all right. I’m keeping with the program. No drinking, no smoking, no Internet. I’m attending my meetings, keeping my nose clean.

  Live normal, be normal, right?

  None of that helps me. I fall back on old habits, on the one realization I know to be true.

  I’m a damn good liar, especially when it involves the police.

  D.D. started her tour in the kitchen. If she turned her head to the left and peered through the doorway, she could just make out the silhouette of a man sitting on a dark green love seat, the back of the couch covered in a rainbow-hued afghan. Jason Jones sat very still, and tucked beneath his chin was another curly-topped head, also not moving: his daughter, Ree, who appeared to have fallen sleep.

  D.D. made it a point not to stare too long. She didn’t want to call attention to herself this early in the game. Miller’s instinct had been correct: They were dealing with an intelligent person of interest, who seemed to know how to navigate the legal system. Meaning they needed to get their ducks in a row, quickly, if they were going to proceed with any kind of meaningful questioning of the husband or the four-year-old potential witness.

  So, she focused on the kitchen.

  The kitchen, like the rest of the house, retained a semblance of period charm, while definitely showing its age. Peeling black-and-white checked linoleum. Appliances that some would call retro, but D.D. considered ancient. The room was very tiny. A curved counter-top bar offered enough space for two to perch on a pair of red vinyl bar stools. A small parlor table sat in front of the windows, but held a computer versus providing any additional seating.

  That struck D.D. as interesting. A family of three that only had seating for two. Did that say something about the family dynamics right there?

  The kitchen was neat, countertops wiped down, clutter confined to appliances lined up in a row against the checkered tile backsplash, but not too neat—dirty dishes were stacked in the sink, while the drying rack held clean dishes still waiting to be returned to appropriate cupboards. An old diner’s clock with a fork and spoon serving as the hands was mounted cheerfully above the stove, while pale yellow curtains patterned with brighter yellow sunny-side up eggs adorned the tops of the windows. Old, but homey. Clearly, someone had made an effort.

  D.D. spotted a red checkered dish towel hanging up on a hook and leaned forward to give it an experimental sniff. Miller looked at her funny, but she just shrugged.

  Early in her career, she’d worked a domestic abuse case—the Daleys, that was their name—where the domineering husband, Pat, had forced his wife, Joyce, to scrub the house with military precision every single day. D.D. still remembered the overwhelming scent of ammonia that had made her eyes water as she went from room to room, until, of course, she came to the back room and the scent of ammonia was replaced with the cloying scent of drying blood. Apparently, good old Joyce hadn’t made the bed properly that morning. So Pat had punched her in the kidneys. Joyce had started peeing blood and, deciding that she was dying, she’d retrieved the shotgun from the back of her husband’s truck, and ensured that he joined her in the hereafter.

  Joyce had survived the damage to her kidneys. The husband, Pat, who lost most of his face to the shotgun blast, hadn’t.

  So far, the kitchen struck D.D. as an average kitchen. No manic compulsions—or orders—to clean and sterilize. Just a place where a mother had served dinner, with mac-n-cheese-encrusted dishes still awaiting attendance in the sink.

  D.D. turned her attention to the black leather purse perched on the kitchen counter. Miller silently handed her a pair of latex gloves. She nodded her thanks, and started sifting through the purse’s contents.

  She started with Sandra Jones’s cell phone. The husband had no expectation of privacy on his wife’s cell, so they were in the clear to study the phone to their heart’s content. She reviewed text messages and the phone log. Only one phone number jumped out at her, and that was labeled HOME. A mom calling in to check on her daughter, no doubt. Second most often called number was labeled JASON’S CELL, a wife calling in to check on her husband, D.D. would assume.

  D.D. couldn’t listen to the voice messages without the password, but didn’t sweat it. Miller would follow up with the cell phone company and have them freeze the messages as well as pull their own log. A provider retained copies of even deleted messages in its own database, handy information for inquiring minds that wanted to know. Miller would also have the provider trace Sandra’s final few phone calls, tracking the cell towers the calls pinged off, to help establish her final movements.

  The rest of the purse yielded three different tubes of lipstick-muted shades of pink—two pens, a nail file, a granola bar, a black hair-scrunchy, a pair of reading glasses, and a wallet with forty-two dollars cash, a valid MA driver’s license, two credit cards, and three grocery store and one bookstore member cards. Finally, D.D. pulled out a small spiral notebook filled with various lists: groceries to buy, errands to run, times for appointments. D.D. left the notebook out as a priority item, and Miller nodded.

  Sitting next to the purse was a large set of car keys. D.D. held them up questioningly.

  “Automatic starter belongs to gray Volvo station wagon parked in the driveway. Two keys are house keys. Four keys we don’t know, but we’re guessing at least one is her classroom. I’ll get an officer on it.”

  “You checked the back of the station wagon?” she asked sharply.

  Miller gave her a look, clearly wanting a little credit. “Yes, ma’am. No surprises there.”

  D.D. didn’t bother with an apology. She just set down the keys and picked up a stack of school papers, marked neatly in red ink. Sandra Jones had given her class a one-paragraph writing assignment, each student needing to answer “If I were starting my own village, the first rule for all the colonists would be … and why.”

  Some kids managed only a sentence or two. A couple nearly filled the page. Each paper had at least one or two comments, then a letter grade circled at the top. The writing was feminine, with some of the kids earning smiley faces. D.D. decided that was the kind of detail a forger wouldn’t think to include. So for now, she was satisfied that Sandra Jones had sat at this counter, grading these papers, an activity that according to her husband wouldn’t happen until little Ree was tucked into bed.

  So at approximately nine o’clock at night, Sandra Jones had been alive and well in her own kitchen. And then …

  D.D.’s gaze went to the computer, a relatively new-looking Dell desktop sitting on top of the little red parlor table. She sighed.

  “Turned on?” she asked with barely disguised longing.

  “Haven’t wanted to tempt myself,” Miller answered.

  The computer was tricky. They definitely wanted it, but definitely needed the husband’s permission, as he had a right to privacy. Something to negotiate, assuming they found some ammunition to negotiate with.

  D.D. turned to the tiny, narrow s
taircase ascending from the back side of the kitchen.

  “Evidence techs already up there?” she asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Where’d they park the van?”

  “Five blocks over, by a pub. I’m feeling coy.”

  “I like it. Have they processed the stairs?”

  “First thing I had them do,” Miller assured her. Then added: “Look, Sergeant, we’ve been here since six A.M. At one point, I had ten officers swarming the house, checking basements, bedrooms, closets, and shrubbery. Only thing we have to show for it is one broken lamp and one missing quilt in the master bedroom. So I sent the evidence techs upstairs to do what they gotta do, and the rest of the guys out into the broader universe to either bring me back Sandra Jones or some evidence of whatever the hell happened to her. We know the basics. They’re just not getting us anywhere.”

  D.D. sighed again, grabbed the handrail, and headed up the chocolate-painted stairs.

  Upstairs was as cozy as the downstairs. D.D. had to fight the urge to duck, as a pair of old light fixtures brushed the top of her hair. The hallway boasted hardwood floors, colored the same dark chocolate as the stairs. Over the years, dust had become trapped in the tight corners of the floorboards, with a couple tumbleweeds of fine hair and dander drifting across her footsteps. Pet, D.D. guessed, though no one had mentioned one yet.

  She paused long enough to look back the way she came, a parade of footsteps mixing and mingling in an indistinct blur against the dusty floor. Good thing the floor had already been processed, she thought. Then frowned, as another thought struck her and made her immediately, acutely concerned.

  She almost opened her mouth to say something, then at the last minute thought better of it. Better to wait. Get all the ducks in a row. Quickly.

  They passed a cramped bathroom that had been decorated in the same fifties motif as the kitchen. Across from it was a modest bedroom with a single-sized bed covered in a pink comforter, tucked under the heavily slanted eaves of the room. The ceiling and eaves had been painted a bright blue, and dotted with various clouds, birds, and butterflies. Definitely a little girl’s room, and just cute enough that D.D. felt a pang for little Clarissa Jane Jones, who had gone to bed nestled inside such a pretty sanctuary, only to wake up to a nightmarish parade of dark-suited officials traipsing through her home.

  D.D. didn’t linger in the bedroom, but continued down the hall, to the master bedroom.

  Two evidence techs were in front of the windows. They’d just pulled the shades and were now shooting the room with blue light. D.D. and Miller stayed respectfully in the hallway, as the first white-garbed figure scanned the walls, ceiling, and floor for signs of bodily fluids. As spots emerged, the second figure marked them with a placard, for further analysis. The process took about ten minutes. They didn’t do the bed. No doubt the sheets and blankets had already been rolled up to be processed at the lab.

  The first figure snapped up the blinds, turned on the surviving bedside lamp, then greeted D.D. with a cheery, “Hiya, Sergeant.”

  “How goes the battle, Marge?”

  “Winning as always.”

  D.D. stepped forward to shake Marge’s hand, then the hand of the second evidence tech, Nick Crawford. They all went way back, spending too much time at these kinds of scenes.

  “What do you think?” D.D. asked them.

  Marge shrugged. “Some hits. We’ll test them, of course, but nothing glaring. I mean, every bedroom in the United States has bodily fluids somewhere.”

  D.D. nodded. When processing a room for bodily fluids there were two red flags: one, an obvious display such as spatter lighting up across a wall or a giant puddle illuminating the floor; two, the total lack of bodily fluids, which indicated someone had used chemicals for one helluva cleanup job. Like Marge said, every bedroom had something.

  “What about the broken lamp?” D.D. asked.

  “We recovered it from the floor,” Nick spoke up, “with all the shards in the immediate vicinity. At first glance, the lamp toppled and shattered against the floor, versus being used as a weapon. Visual inspection, at least, didn’t reveal any sign of blood on the lamp’s base.”

  D.D. nodded. “Bedding?”

  “Blue-and-green top quilt is missing, but the rest of the bedding appears intact.”

  “You process the bathroom?” D.D. asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Toothbrushes?”

  “Two were still damp when we got here. One a pink Barbie electric toothbrush belonging to the child. The second a Braun Oral-B electric toothbrush, which according to the husband belonged to his wife.”

  “Pajamas?”

  “Per the husband, wife wore a long purple T-shirt, sporting the graphic of a crowned baby chick on the front. Currently unaccounted for.”

  “Other clothing? Suitcase?”

  “Husband’s initial inventory revealed nothing missing.”

  “Jewelry?”

  “Biggest items are her watch and wedding ring, both gone. Also her favorite pair of gold hoops, which according to the husband she wore habitually. All we found in the jewelry box were some necklaces, and a couple of homemade bracelets apparently gifted by the child. Husband thought that looked about right.”

  D.D. turned to Miller. “No activity on her credit card, I assume?”

  Miller went back to his I’m-not-an-idiot stare. She figured that was answer enough.

  “So,” she mused out loud, “by all accounts, Sandra Jones came home from work yesterday afternoon, fixed dinner for her child, put her child to bed, then proceeded with her nightly chore of grading papers. At some point, she brushed her teeth, put on her nightshirt, and at least made it to the bedroom, where …”

  “Some kind of struggle broke a lamp?” Marge offered up with a shrug. “Maybe someone was already here, ambushed her. That would explain the lack of blood spatter.”

  “The subject manually subdued her,” Miller supplied. “Asphyxiation.”

  “Test the pillow cases,” D.D. said. “Could have suffocated her in her sleep.”

  “Suffocated, strangled. Something quiet and not too messy,” Nick agreed.

  “Then wrapped the body in the comforter and dragged it out of the house,” Miller concluded.

  D.D. shook her head. “No, no dragging. This is where things get complicated.”

  “What do you mean, no dragging?” Miller asked in confusion.

  “Look at the dusty hallway. I can see our footprints, which is a problem, because if someone dragged a corpse wrapped in a giant quilt, what I should be seeing is a long, clean smear from this bedroom to the top of the stairs. No clean streak. Meaning, the body wasn’t dragged.”

  Miller frowned. “Okay, so the subject carried her out.”

  “One man carried the burritoed body of an adult female through that narrow hallway?” D.D. arched a brow skeptically. “First off, that would have to be one strong man. Secondly, no way he could’ve made the corner of that staircase. We’d see evidence everywhere.”

  “Two men?” Margie ventured.

  “Twice as much noise, twice as much chance of being caught.”

  “Then what the hell happened with the comforter?” Miller demanded.

  “I don’t know,” D.D. said. “Unless … Unless she wasn’t killed in this room. Maybe she made it back downstairs. Maybe she was sitting on the sofa watching TV, then the doorbell rang. Or maybe the husband came home….” She thought about it, trying out various scenarios in her mind. “He killed her elsewhere, then came up here for the comforter, knocking over the lamp as he tugged it off the bed. Quieter that way. Less chance of waking the kid.”

  “Meaning we still haven’t found the primary crime scene,” Miller muttered, but he was frowning as he said it. Because according to him, they’d done the basics, and the basics should’ve turned up signs of blood.

  They all looked at one another.

  “I vote for the basement,” D.D. said. “When bad things happen, it always seems to
be in the basement. Shall we?”

  The four of them traipsed downstairs, passing by the front room, where a uniformed officer stood in the doorway, still keeping tabs on Jason Jones and his sleeping child. Jones looked up as they crossed the foyer. D.D. had a brief glimpse of shuttered brown eyes, then Miller opened the door, revealing a flight of treacherous wooden stairs leading down to a musty cellar dimly lit by four bare bulbs. They took it slow and careful. Honest to God, officers fell down stairs and hurt their backs more often than the public ever knew. It was embarrassing for everyone concerned. You gonna get hurt on the job, you should at least have a good story to tell.

  At the bottom, D.D. made out a basement that looked an awful lot like a basement. Stone foundation. Cracked cement floor. An ivory-colored washer and dryer sat in front of them, old coffee table stacked with a plastic laundry basket and laundry detergent in front of that. Then came the ubiquitous collection of damaged lawn chairs, old moving boxes, and outgrown baby furniture. Directly beside the stairs was a set of plastic shelves that appeared to hold the overflow from the kitchen pantry. D.D. noted boxes of cereal, macaroni and cheese, crackers, dry pasta, cans of soup, the usual kitchen detritus.

  The cellar was dusty, but not messy. Items were neatly stacked against the wall, the center floor clear for laundry duties, perhaps some indoor bike riding, to judge by the purple tricycle parked next to the bulkhead stairs.

  D.D. crossed to the bulkhead, investigating the collection of cobwebs in the right-hand corner, the thick coating of dust on the dark handle. Doors obviously hadn’t been opened for a bit, and now that she was down here, she was already changing her mind. If you killed someone in the basement, would you really traipse all the way back upstairs? Why not stick the body beneath the pile of boxes, or grab an old sheet to bundle it out of the bulkhead in the dead of night?

  She poked through the collection of discarded crib parts, baby strollers, and bouncy seats. Moved on to the collection of boxes next to the wall, the decaying lawn furniture.

  Behind her Nick and Marge were surveying the floor with spotlights while Miller remained off to the side, hands in his pockets. Having already walked through the basement once, he was merely waiting for the group to arrive at the same conclusion he’d formed hours before.