“They’re not damaged because Finn wasn’t wearing them,” Jo said and rubbed her forehead, knowing that Jenny had stumbled onto evidence that she hadn’t known how to deal with. “He wasn’t wearing the T-shirt either.”
“Maybe the boy didn’t have a stitch on,” Hank kicked in. “Maybe the kid was in the bathroom, not outside. That would explain the presence of talc.”
“Although talc can come from a lot of places,” Dr. Morgan reminded them. “Baby powder, chalk, cosmetics, even paper.”
“Okay, forget the talc,” Jo said. “How can we prove that Finn didn’t die by a fall?” She sensed that question was at the crux of Jenny’s murder. “We need more evidence than this.”
Dr. Morgan gestured at Adam. “That’s one for the medical examiner. Now if y’all will excuse me, I’ve got a couple months of backlogged cases calling my name, and they ain’t sounding any too happy.”
He pulled the door closed behind him as he walked out.
“So what’s next, Doc?” Hank asked Adam.
But Adam was looking at Jo as he said, “You’ll need to get a court order to exhume the remains.”
“Exhume? Christ, this is crazy,” Hank said, shaking his head. He touched Jo’s arm. “You think the son of a bitch killed his ex-wife because she knew about this?”
“I’m not sure it was him.” She didn’t take her eyes off Adam. “But I think someone was involved who felt equally threatened.”
“Harrison’s wife?”
“We all make mistakes, Detective Larsen. Surely you’ve done things that you regret.”
Like commit murder?
Alana was practically a Stepford Wife. She was a trophy wife, for sure, and a big-time daddy’s girl. But was she a killer? If Alana was involved, someone else had pulled the trigger. Jo wasn’t sure that Harrison’s pregnant wife had the spine for it.
But Lisa Barton did.
Jo saw in her mind’s eye the flash of sun glinting off a beige car, a glimpse of black boots before the shovel came down. She gripped the table edge tighter and squeezed her eyes shut until a wave of vertigo passed.
“Larsen?” Hank said.
“Hey, Jo.” Adam had a firm hold of her arm by the time she opened her eyes again. “You should be in the hospital.” He nodded toward Hank. “You should have made her stay.”
“Me and what army?” Hank snorted.
“Stop, okay?” Jo gritted her teeth. “I need to think.”
She righted herself and gingerly moved out of Adam’s grasp. She went over to a board where the photos she’d given Adam had been enlarged and tacked up with pushpins.
There was Finn with his gap-toothed grin and the tiny gold rims perched on his freckled nose. There was the tree house that had been destroyed.
“I’m not claiming to be the most patient man in the world, but . . . you have no idea what it was like to live with a hyperactive son and a woman who was never happy.”
What if Kevin Harrison had shaken or grabbed his son hard enough to snap Finn’s neck? What if, out of anger or impatience, he’d killed his son accidentally?
What if he’d panicked and made up a story to cover his ass, never letting on to his wife what had really happened? Telling only one other person, someone he trusted and loved, the woman he’d been having an affair with?
What if, three years later, Jenny had put all the pieces together and threatened him? Maybe she’d even suggested having their son’s remains dug up and examined.
A buzzing noise cut through her thoughts, and she turned slightly as Hank flipped open his phone and uttered a terse, “What have you got?” Then he went into a maddening series of “Uh-huhs” that made Jo hold her breath until he was done.
He had a grim smile on his face when he slapped the cell shut. “We got the Harrisons’ phone records,” he said, “landline and cell. And guess what?”
“What?” she ground out.
“There’s a direct link between Harrison and Lisa Barton,” Hank said. “More than a couple calls a day from the Harrisons’ account in the past few weeks.”
Jo swallowed down a bitter taste, knowing what he would say but asking, anyway. “Kevin Harrison called Lisa?”
“No.” Hank shook his head. “But Alana Harrison did.”
Alana and Lisa.
So the two women weren’t strangers, though neither had mentioned knowing the other, because they couldn’t. Wouldn’t. It would have cast suspicion on them from the start.
What was it Lisa Barton had said?
“Patrick wouldn’t break his vows, not so long as Jenny was around. He’s a decent man. He believes in that whole till-death-do-us-part thing.”
But what if Jenny were dead?
Then Patrick would be a free man.
What if Alana Harrison and Lisa Barton had plotted together to get rid of the one woman who was a thorn in both of their sides?
“Can we go to the Harrisons’ house?” she asked her partner. “I want to see Alana. I think she’s close to cracking.”
Why else had Alana shown up at the funeral unless she was feeling guilty?
“We can break her down. I know we can.” She was pregnant, and not half as tough as Lisa Barton. Jo wanted to attack the weakest link. “They can’t get away with it, Hank. They couldn’t have done this without making mistakes.”
“We’ve got warrants in the works, Jo, and patrols are out looking for Lisa Barton. Be patient; we’ll get ’em.”
Patient? Not her strongest virtue. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Her partner stripped off his latex gloves and tossed them in a biohazard container. He opened the door that Jonathan Morgan had closed, leaving it wide, allowing bright fluorescent light to spill in from the hallway.
Jo got rid of her gloves, too, but didn’t move. She felt Adam come up behind her.
“Don’t forget Emma,” he reminded her, and she faced him, not saying a word, thinking more was forthcoming. But he said only, “You should go.”
“Right.” She started off, her steps slower than usual, her gait still not as steady as it should be.
“Jo?”
She caught the doorframe. “I know,” she said. “Be careful.”
“No,” he replied, adding so softly she had to strain to hear. “I don’t want to lose you, but you scare me, baby.”
“You won’t lose me, Adam,” she promised. All she could do.
He shook his head, and she left him, heading down the hallway to Emma Slater’s office. She knocked on the door and pushed in when a voice called out, “Enter.”
The tiny woman perched behind her big desk, its surface neatly arranged with folders, photographs, and papers. So different from the chaos that filled Adam’s work space.
“So you got my message?” Emma surveyed her with narrowed eyes as Jo settled into the opposite chair, but she made no comment about the scrapes and bruises.
“Did the blood on the cat’s bed belong to Jenny Dielman?” Jo asked, not wanting to beat around the bush. There wasn’t time.
“No, it was animal blood. One hundred percent feline.”
Jo sucked in a breath, tried again. “You said the silk scarf had been used to gag Jenny, that it was consistent with DNA from her saliva. What about the brick? Anything there?”
“I studied the photographs your boys took at the scene, and there was an awful lot of backsplash of glass outside, on the sill and on the bushes below. If that brick had hit the window with enough force to shatter the pane, it wouldn’t have landed in the sink.” Emma rocked forward in her chair. “I’d bet someone used a hammer, to be sure the job was good and done, then staged things to make it appear like vandalism.”
Staged things?
The way Jenny’s murder had been staged to look like a suicide?
Jo nodded, digesting it all.
“That glove you said belonged to the vic’s husband?” Emma shook her head. “Not a match to the prints. The grain’s different.”
“Thanks, Emma,” Jo
said, getting ready to rise.
But the other woman raised a hand. “There’s something else.” Emma pushed up from her desk, picking up something from her desk as she came around toward Jo. “The cat bed. It unzipped so the cushion inside could be removed and the exterior cleaned in the washing machine. Only it looks like it was used as a hiding place.” She held out a black-and-white-speckled composition book.
“Oh, God, it can’t be.” Jo reached for it, hoping it was what she thought it was.
“I do believe that we found your girl’s journal.”
Jo leaned back in the chair and stared at the cover of the book.
“We checked for prints but only found Jenny Dielman’s. We also made copies for your department. You want a light on that?” A swing-armed desk lamp soon illuminated the notebook in Jo’s lap. “I’ll leave you alone for a few minutes if you want to take a peek.”
Emma smiled and left the room, but Jo barely paid attention. How her fingers trembled! How fast her heart beat.
She opened the journal, flipping through the handwritten pages until Jenny’s familiar script blurred in her vision, and she had to squeeze her eyes shut to clear them.
When the words finally stayed still, she began to read and didn’t stop till she was done.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
En route to the Harrisons’ house in Dallas, Jo phoned Terry Fitzhugh, catching her between sessions.
“Did you dig up something on Lisa Barton?” she asked, her adrenaline rushing.
“I got ahold of Nell Hertel. She’s retired, but she ran Child Protective Services for years, back when your Elizabeth Ann Barton had a few close encounters with social welfare. Nell confirmed that the mother was a crackhead and neglected the kid. Social workers stepped in, and they took the girl away and dumped her into foster care. She had a brief stint in juvie after beating up another foster.”
“We couldn’t find any record,” Jo said.
“No, you wouldn’t have,” Terry told her matter-of-factly, “because her records were sealed tight.”
“And Lisa knew it,” Jo muttered. She’d known that if the police ran a background check, she’d look clean. She hadn’t counted on them digging deeper.
Hank glanced over, hands on the wheel, mouthing, “What?”
Jo waved him off, not needing the distraction. The pounding in her brain was distraction enough.
“You asked about tats, and Nell remembered the girl having FEAR etched above her knuckles. Nell didn’t mention a gang but did say she was a mean girl, a real bully. They had her tested, and she was diagnosed as having antisocial personality disorder. No empathy, a misplaced sense of entitlement, lots of anger issues, and a liar. But her IQ was sky-high.”
“Anything else?”
“Just that she was bounced from foster care and moved in with an aunt who cleaned houses. One of her aunt’s clients was Jacob Davis. He’d just founded a program called KickStart for troubled kids with smarts, kind of like boot camp and summer school combined. The aunt got Davis to let Lisa take part, and she did a one-eighty. She shaped up and got her GED. Davis even paved the way for her to go to UT–Austin on a scholarship he sponsored.”
“Thank you so much, Terry,” Jo said, because that was more than she’d needed. It was a clear link between Lisa Barton and Alana Harrison.
“You think she killed that woman from the quarry?” Terry asked.
“Yes,” Jo said aloud, firmly believing it.
She believed as well that Lisa Barton had roped Alana Harrison into being her accomplice. Maybe Lisa had suggested they scare Jenny into splitting town. Maybe she hadn’t mentioned killing Jenny at first. It could be that Jenny hadn’t cooperated, or Lisa’s rage had escalated and there was no turning back. Unless Lisa had always intended for it to end the way it had, with Jenny dead, the victim’s own .22 the murder weapon, all signs pointing to suicide.
Jo felt dizzy, and not just from the concussion—from her own anger and disgust that she’d ever bought a single word that Lisa Barton had said.
“Please, be careful,” Terry said, like Jo hadn’t heard that a hundred times already.
She hung up and gazed out the windshield.
They’d arrived at the Harrisons’ house.
Hank pulled into the long driveway, parking beside a bright-red Maserati with vanity plates that read REALST8.
That had to be Alana’s.
It wasn’t the vehicle Jo had glimpsed before getting her head bashed in with a shovel.
“You need a hand?” her partner asked as he shut off the ignition, but she assured him she was fine.
Jo pushed open the door and got out, steadying herself against the hood of the car before heading to the front door, her partner hovering at her elbow like she was an old lady who couldn’t cross the street without assistance.
Hank knocked with a heavy hand, not bothering with the bell, doing a good impression of beating the door to death.
The frightened voice that addressed them through the intercom didn’t wait long to let them in after Jo leaned on the button and said, “Police, ma’am, open up.”
A housekeeper in black slacks and white blouse flung open the door and stood on the threshold, wringing her hands. “I’m glad you’re here!” her voice rushed on breathlessly. “Come, please, she’s upstairs, and she won’t let me in. That horrible woman left a good while ago, but there was so much screaming and yelling! I stayed in the kitchen until she was gone.”
Jo looked at Hank, and he seemed as confused as she was.
“What woman?” she asked. “Do you know her name?”
“I heard Mrs. Harrison call her Lizzie.”
“Elizabeth . . . Lizzie,” Jo said, looking at Hank. “That’s Lisa.”
Hank frowned. “Dropped by to threaten Alana to keep her trap shut, or risk ending up like Jenny, did she?”
She hoped Alana was all right, that Lisa hadn’t hurt her.
“Where’s Dr. Harrison?” Hank asked the woman as they quickly walked toward the stairs.
“He was at the hospital, but he’s coming home. I called him and said, ‘The missus is in trouble!’” she told them, scurrying across the tiled foyer. “She’s up in the baby’s room. She wouldn’t let me in, even when I begged her.”
Jo eyed the curving stairwell that seemed to go up endlessly and wondered if she’d be able to make it, even clutching at the banister.
Her partner must have read her face and touched her shoulder. “I’ll go up, Larsen. You wait here. I’ll bring her down.”
The frightened housekeeper led the way, and Hank followed on her heels.
Jo walked deliberately into the den, bypassing the photographs of Kevin Harrison on his hunting trips and heading straight to the spot where Alana’s mementoes hung. She ran her bleary gaze over the beauty-queen shots and the cheerleading poses, stopping when she found the thing she’d ignored on her last visit.
A sorority composite from the University of Texas.
She leaned in, squinting at the tiny names beneath the black-and-white photos, each no bigger than a thumbprint, mostly blonde girls with monikers like Bunny, Honey, and Sissy.
It wasn’t long before she saw what she was looking for: stuck between Emily Delaney Barstow and Courtney Shea Beatty was a long-haired, apple-cheeked girl, deceptively innocent-looking. No one would have guessed she’d served time in juvie and beat the crap out of a fellow foster kid.
Elizabeth Ann Barton.
“I learned that fear can be a great motivator.”
Was that why Lisa had tattooed FEAR on her knuckles? Had fear really motivated her, or had she used fear to intimidate others?
“I might have screwed up a time or two, but I made it to college on scholarships. I even survived sorority rush. I never gave in.”
No, she didn’t give in. She used whatever means it took to get exactly what she wanted.
Jo skipped a few rows down the faces to the Ds, running a fingertip over the picture of a dewy-eyed Alana Davis.
The debutante and the scholarship girl.
Sisters in the bond.
Cold-blooded killers.
Jo wondered how it had all come up. Had Lisa and Alana kept in touch, or had they only reconnected when Lisa realized they each had a tie to the troubled and troublesome Jenny? Had they joked about getting rid of her before the conversation turned into actual plans to get Jenny out of the picture?
She realized suddenly that Alana showing up at the church made sense. Did Harrison’s wife regret her participation in Jenny’s death? Was she not a monster, like Lisa?
Jo was halfway to the foyer when she heard a loud pop and crack from upstairs.
What the hell was that?
The hairs rose on the back of her neck, and she rushed toward the foyer as fast as she was able, reaching the stairs just as the housekeeper descended, red-faced and frantic.
“The detective—he had to break the door down.” The words came out in gasps. “The missus—she’s bad off. She swallowed too many pills.”
Jo took the woman by the arm. “Call 911 and have them send an ambulance. Then wait at the door for them, okay?”
The woman nodded, pulled away, and click-clacked toward the kitchen.
Despite the fog in her head, Jo grabbed the banister and took the steps up two by two, gritting her teeth to dull the pain. When she hit the landing, she held still, willing the dizziness away as she put one foot in front of the other and walked toward the door with the splintered frame. She heard Hank’s voice saying, “C’mon, ma’am, wake up. Open your eyes . . . can you hear me?”
Jo entered the room to find her partner bending over Alana Harrison, who lay still upon a daybed, an arm’s length away from a whitewashed crib. A mobile of the stars and moon hung above, equally motionless.
On the nightstand nearby was a brown vial spilling white pills, along with a half-drunk glass of water.
“She took a boatload of Valium,” Hank said as Jo approached. “She’s still breathing, but it’s shallow. Christ Almighty, what a stupid trick.”
He tried to sit Alana up, but it was like moving a rag doll. Jo thought she heard the woman groan, imagined the pale eyelids flickered.
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