by Lis Wiehl
So he was finally getting to the heart of the matter, or at least circling around it.
“No.” She amended it to, “I guess it’s possible. Cassidy liked men, and men liked Cassidy. But as far as I know, she hasn’t dated anyone new for months.” Nic took a deep breath. “Look. You and I both know that you have to look at Rick McEwan. It doesn’t matter that he’s a cop. They dated, and it became an abusive relationship.”
Jensen blew air out of pursed lips. “Whatever was between him and Cassidy is long over.”
“So? She dragged his name through the mud. After that special on domestic violence aired, people figured out who he was. It was an open secret. And I heard that the chief ordered him into counseling. Knowing Rick, all of that must have been humiliating. And I still remember the way he treated her. We were over there once and found all her bras and panties in the garbage. Rick had made her cut them up in front of him, because he thought they were too sexy. And whenever they were out with other people, he would accuse her of flirting with other men. He pushed her around. I saw the bruises he left. Are you telling me that someone like Rick just forgave and forgot and moved on? I don’t think so. That’s not the Rick McEwan I remember.”
“If you’re saying whoever did this had a long memory, what about any of the people she covered? It seems like they were all rapists and murderers and molesters.” Jensen pointed his pen at her. “Maybe one of them wanted to get back at her. It wouldn’t be hard to figure out where she lived. And then all he would need to do is pretend to have a delivery that needed a signature. Show up in any kind of uniform, and people will let you in.”
It was true that Cassidy had never kept her guard up as much as she should have. Nic tried to picture it. Cassidy stopping by her condo on her way over to the restaurant, a knock at the door, and then—
“But whoever did it hid her body. Like he was ashamed. I don’t think whoever killed her was a stranger. You need to at least take a look at Rick.”
His face reddened. “Look, I want to remind you again that when it comes to this case, you are a civilian. We already have investigators. We don’t need you muddying the waters. We don’t need you running your mouth about Rick.”
Nic’s spine stiffened. “You’re supposed to be listening to my answers, not challenging them. If you have personal feelings about this, maybe you shouldn’t be the one asking the questions.”
Jensen shook his head. “You’re a piece of work, do you know that? You don’t remember the other time we worked together, do you?”
Nic was so tired. Suddenly it was as if she could lay her head right down on the pale laminate of the table and fall asleep. “To be honest, no. No, I don’t. But don’t let whatever happened in the past between us affect what you do here.”
He slapped his hands on his knees. Hard. “Look. You are going to have to trust me, Agent Hedges. Trust me that I will get this right. Because it’s not about you. It’s not even about Cassidy Shaw. It’s about justice.”
They both jumped when the door opened. Leif Larson walked in. He was well over six feet, with the muscled body of a warrior. The interview room suddenly seemed very small.
“I think we’re done for tonight,” Leif said. “Okay, Detective Jensen? If you need to talk to Agent Hedges again, you can do it in the morning. After everyone’s gotten some sleep.”
Nic stood up on legs that were suddenly almost too weak to hold her. Head high, she followed Leif onto the elevator.
It was only when they were safely in a shadowy corner of the parking lot that she let herself crumble.
Leif caught her in his arms.
CHAPTER 8
It was after midnight when Allison finally tried to put her key in the lock of her front door. Tried and failed.
Two hours earlier, after she and Halstead had left Cassidy’s parents’ house, she had called Marshall from the Shaws’ driveway to let him know what was happening. She’d thought nothing could be worse than breaking the news to Cassidy’s parents, but telling her husband had nearly breached her defenses.
She had wanted to go home immediately, but first Halstead took her to the police station to formally interview her. Afterward she looked around the station for Nicole, but all she found was Detective Jensen, who said Nic had already left. Judging by the way he said it, things hadn’t gone well.
Allison hitched a ride with a patrol officer to retrieve her car from Puerto Marquez’s otherwise empty parking lot. The meal she and Nicole had eaten there seemed like it had taken place in another year. Another century. She drove home in a blur, too beaten down to offer more than an inarticulate prayer.
Help us. Help them get through this, help them find who did it, help Cassidy get the justice she deserves.
Now Allison’s hand shook so badly that the key danced over the lock, making a scratching sound. Suddenly the door swung open, and she started back, her hand over her mouth.
“It’s just me, Allison.” Marshall’s blue eyes were full of sadness.
She opened her mouth, but no words came out.
Cassidy was dead. Cassidy was dead, and the world didn’t make any sense.
Marshall held out his arms. Allison stepped forward, and he wrapped them around her. She tucked her head under his chin. With a jangle the keys fell from her hand and landed on the mat. The veneer of professionalism that had been the only thing holding her together for the past few hours crumbled. Tears choked her throat, clouded her eyes. Marshall tightened his grip until he bore most of her weight, and she pressed against him, skin on skin, heartbeat to heartbeat.
“Oh, Marshall, it was so awful,” she muttered, her mouth against his damp, salty shoulder.
Even close to midnight, it was still too hot to touch, but she needed it too much to care. Marshall was wearing shorts and a tank top. If Lindsay, Allison’s sister, hadn’t been living with them, it probably would have been only shorts. For the past year Allison and Marshall had been living a slightly artificial version of their life, one that was braced for a third party at any time.
“I just can’t believe it, Marshall,” she finally said. “Who would do that to Cassidy?”
It was the same question she had explored with Halstead, both in the car and in the interview room. Cassidy had such a strong personality that it was pretty much guaranteed no one could ever feel neutral about her. But who in the world could possibly hate her enough to drive a knife into her body?
Marshall sighed and shook his head. “I don’t know, babe. I don’t know. It just doesn’t make sense.”
Finally Allison unpeeled herself from him, stepped back, and wiped her eyes on her forearm. Her head ached. The door to the living room was still open, and she stepped inside after picking up her keys. Lindsay had been stretched out on the couch. Now she sat up. The TV was turned to the news with the sound on low. On the screen were pictures of some war on the other side of the world—civilian men being rounded up at gunpoint, the bodies of men and women and even children sprawled in a dusty street. Allison grabbed the clicker from the arm of the couch and turned it off.
Lindsay got up and ran her hands through her pink-streaked hair, her expression tentative. “Ally, I’m so sorry about Cassidy. What a terrible thing.”
“Yeah. Thanks.” Allison had no idea what to say back. The future was sure to be filled with many such conversations. Thanks wasn’t right, but what was?
Looking at her sister, dressed in orange-and-white shortie pajamas that had once been Allison’s, just made her even more tired. It was selfish, she knew, but for a minute she wished she and Marshall were alone in the house. She didn’t have the energy for a third person, not tonight. Sometimes Lindsay felt more like an observer than a sister, an anthropologist sent to study the upper middle class.
“Why are you still up?” Allison asked.
Lindsay gestured toward an open notebook on the couch. “I was working on plans for my cart.”
Lindsay’s dream was to open a coffee and cookie cart in one of Portland’s f
ood pods. The pods were former parking lots now filled with food carts. They attracted everyone from businessmen to hard-partying hipsters to foodies looking for something a little different and eminently affordable.
Allison nodded numbly, incapable of small talk or of any talk at all. “I’m going to take a shower.” Moving like a robot, she went upstairs. With each step, the heat seemed to rise a degree. Upstairs, all the windows were wide open, but there wasn’t even the hint of a breeze, and the air was close and still. In the shower she let the cool water wash away the grime, sweat, and tears of the day. And then she wept, thinking of how she would never see Cassidy again, never hear her voice or her laugh.
Afterward, Allison toweled herself off. She left her hair wet in the hopes it would keep her cool. When she opened the door, she saw that Marshall was already in bed, a long dark shadow on top of the sheets. She tiptoed across the room and lay down beside him. She had imagined sliding between crisp and cool sheets, but instead the very mattress seemed to radiate warmth.
“It must have been terrible for you,” Marshall said in the darkness, “finding her like that.”
“Nicole knew right away that something was wrong, but I was in denial. Before she saw the blood on the floor, I was trying to tell myself that everything was okay. And even after we saw the blood, I kept trying to think of reasons that would explain it all away.”
“It’s pretty unbelievable. Cassidy was one of the most alive people I knew,” Marshall said. “Do you think it had something to do with a story she’s covering?”
“It could be. She texted us that she was going to be late because she was following a lead. But we don’t know what that story was. Or maybe it had nothing to do with Channel Four. The cops were wondering if she could have surprised a burglar.” Allison sighed, thinking of Halstead’s questions. “But things at her condo were actually neater than they usually are. Nothing was really out of place.”
She scooted closer to the edge of the bed, then rolled on her back and spread out her arms and legs so that nothing touched anything else. “One of the homicide detectives told me they found a knife under her body. If we’re very lucky, maybe there are prints. If not, it’s going to take a lot of work to figure it out. It could be Cassidy’s personal life, her professional life, or just something random.”
She felt Marshall turn on his side to face her.
“But it’s not your job to figure it out, is it?”
“No.” Hearing him echo Jensen’s argument, she made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “That was already explained to us by the lead homicide detective. This is a case for the Portland police.”
“He’s right. Let them work the case, see what they come up with. They’re responsible, Allison. Not you. Don’t take this on too.”
In the dark, her eyes opened. “What do you mean, too?”
“You can’t fix everything, Allison. Or everyone.”
She knew he meant her sister. “But I owe it to Cassidy, Marshall.” She thought of the promise Nicole had made to Jensen, and that she herself had made to Cassidy’s parents.
“You may owe it to her to see that justice is done, Allison, but you don’t have to be the one to bring it about. Try to let go and put this in God’s hands.”
She closed her eyes again and tried to center herself. Marshall was right.
“What do you want?” Marshall asked, and for a second the question seemed global. What did Allison want? Justice? Revenge? To simply forget? But then he added, “Air-conditioning on or off?”
Maybe the rattling would drown out her thoughts, cover her memories. “On.”
But it didn’t work. Every time she was about to drift off, she would suddenly picture Cassidy’s slack face and staring eyes.
Allison tried counting backward from three hundred but made it all the way down to one without relaxing a single muscle. She focused on her breathing, the air flowing into her mouth, filling her lungs and then being pushed back out, but all that did was remind her that Cassidy would never draw another breath. An hour passed, two, and Allison was no closer to sleep. Finally she slipped out of bed and padded downstairs into the living room.
She sat on the couch and picked up her phone.
At 3:13 a.m. Nicole had sent her a text. Rick was best man at Jensen’s wedding. How hard is Jensen really going to look at him?
CHAPTER 9
Hey, Nicole—what are you doing here?”
Tony Sardella, Multnomah County’s medical examiner, looked up at the viewing gallery in surprise. Dressed in blue surgical scrubs, his mask dangling around his neck, Tony had just walked into the autopsy suite carrying a stack of files.
Nic was standing in the special observation room that let law enforcement view an autopsy through a long window set in one wall. A color monitor also offered a bird’s-eye view from a camera positioned over the autopsy table. The distance, the window, and even the monitor helped you pretend that what was happening was a movie. Something you could tell yourself wasn’t real if it got too difficult to watch.
It was a little past eight in the morning, and Nic and Tony were completely alone. The waist-high, stainless steel autopsy table was still empty.
“I want to observe Cassidy Shaw’s autopsy.” Nic had put that on the sign-in form and had been lucky that no one questioned it.
Tony looked through the files in his hands, pulled one out, and opened it. Then he looked back up at Nic, his high forehead creased in confusion. “But that’s a PPB case, right?”
Nic chose her words carefully. “It does belong to the police, but I have a special interest.”
She didn’t say more. Let him think it was a professional interest. She was pretty sure that Tony had no idea that she and Cassidy were friends. Had been friends. She kept forgetting to use the correct tense.
She didn’t know if she could carry this off, but she wanted to try. She wanted to know how Cassidy had been killed, because the how might tell her the why. And with luck, Jensen would be relying on Tony’s report, not watching the autopsy himself.
“Shaw’s not our first case. She’s second.”
“Oops.” Nic shrugged. “I’ll just wait. I have some paperwork I can do.” She had a notepad and pen, but it wasn’t for anything to do with the FBI.
Before driving here, she had argued with Allison on the phone. Rick could have done it, Allison had reminded her, but he was just one possibility. Nic decided to heed her words, or at least that one sentence, while ignoring her next one, which was a reminder that this wasn’t their case at all.
She started a list:
Rape
Burglary
Serial killer
Rick
Another old boyfriend
New boyfriend??
Someone mad about a story
The story that made her late to dinner
When the assistant wheeled in the first body, Nic was still the only person in the observation suite. It was a woman in her late sixties, with lank graying hair and a swollen face. For the microphone overhead capturing everything for the official record, Tony noted aloud that she had been found in the Willamette River and reeled off some particulars about her eye and hair color. Then he and the pathology assistant began to remove the woman’s clothes. They tugged off her T-shirt, rolling her from side to side. Next the assistant lifted up the woman’s legs while Tony pulled off her pants. After they finished wrestling off her clothes, Nic looked away from the poor woman’s pale, bloated body. She closed her eyes when Tony made the Y-incision in her chest and bit her lip when she heard the sound of the circular saw.
Nic heard rather than saw Tony noting no signs of violence, just heart disease. The older woman had died by drowning, but a death investigator would have to look at the circumstances of her life to decide if it was a suicide or an accident. Possibly it would never be clear.
They were still sewing the older woman back up when Nic’s luck ran out. Jensen walked into the viewing room. He didn’t look much different fro
m twelve hours before—rumpled short-sleeved shirt, loosened tie, eye sockets smudged with fatigue.
But his face was red with anger. “I couldn’t believe it when I saw your name on the sign-in list. You have got to be kidding me, showing up like this.”
Nic reminded herself of what she had found last night when she couldn’t sleep. Rick McEwan wasn’t on Facebook, but his sister was. And her photos included some of a wedding three years earlier, a wedding in which her brother had acted as the best man. The wedding of Derrick Jensen. The man who had warned her against running her mouth about Rick.
In the autopsy room below them, a Portland police criminalist Nic knew by face but not name had walked in. Alerted by the sound of Jensen’s raised voice, he and Tony were looking up at the viewing room curiously.
“Hello, Detective Jensen,” Nic said, playing it cool. She looked past him to the two other men who were entering the viewing room. “Sol.” She nodded at Sol Greenburg, the deputy district attorney, then held out her hand for the third man, whose large, light brown eyes were made more prominent by his thin face. “Nicole Hedges, FBI.”
“Sean Halstead,” he said. “Homicide.”
Jensen took a step toward her. “Who told you when this autopsy was scheduled?”
“Is there a problem?” Tony asked from below.
Out of the corner of her eye, Nic could see Cassidy’s body being wheeled in. She was still dressed in the coral-colored suit they had found her in the night before. The blood on the front of the jacket was dried to rust. Her hands and feet were covered with paper bags and her eyes were half open. Only a few hours ago she had been moving, eating, laughing, talking, typing. Probably all at once.
Jensen walked to the window of the observation room. “This isn’t Hedges’s case, Tony. The decedent is a personal friend of hers.”
Tony’s gaze swung to her. “Is that true, Nicole?”