by Cari Hunter
“Ongoing for how long?”
“For about four months now. I met her on a call and we got talking afterward.”
“You volunteer as a first responder?” He made a note, swirling his pen to leave an asterisk beside the detail.
“Yes, that’s right.”
There was a smart rap on the door. Emerson announced that he was pausing the interview, and he stopped the tape as Quinn entered the room. Quinn took a seat just behind him, motioning as he did so that Emerson should restart the tape.
Emerson’s initial questions were basic, covering the time leading up to Lyssa’s death, and Sarah tried to answer them as thoroughly as possible.
“So you heard your dog barking?” he said. He had filled three pages with notes, even though the tape and a video camera were recording everything.
“I heard her howling,” she corrected him. “I was trying to call Alex and I heard Tilly howling.”
“Why were you calling Alex?”
She licked her lips uneasily. She couldn’t tell them the real reason, not without speaking to Alex and Castillo first. “To ask what time she would be home,” she said, but she couldn’t make the lie convincing, and she saw Emerson write something in capitals and underline it.
“We might need to look at your cell phone,” he told her.
She nodded helplessly.
“What happened after you heard your dog?”
“I followed the noise down the track and found Lyssa’s SUV.” She reached for the glass of water and her hand shook as she sipped from it. “I knew something was wrong. I could see her collapsed at the side of the door. I started to run.”
“Did you move her at all?”
“No,” she said, but then faltered, struggling to recall exactly what she had done. “I turned her onto her back. I knew she was dead, but I had to do some—”
“How did you know she was dead?”
“I just did,” she whispered. Tears filled her eyes. “But she was still warm when I touched her.”
“Where exactly did you touch her?”
“I tilted her chin.” She used her sleeve to wipe her eyes, but more tears trickled free.
“You didn’t check for a pulse?” Emerson placed two fingers on his own carotid to demonstrate.
She shook her head. “No, I could see she wasn’t breathing, so I started CPR.”
“Explain how you did that.”
Behind Emerson, Quinn leaned forward in his seat.
“I gave her two breaths and then I…” Her voice trailed off and she clenched her fists at her own stupidity. “I tried to move the knife.”
“You tried to move the knife?” Emerson repeated carefully, as if afraid that anyone transcribing the tape might overlook the significance of the admission.
“Yes,” Sarah said. “To do CPR, but it was stuck.” For a second, she thought she might be sick again, and something in her expression must have worried Emerson because she dimly heard him urge her to take a deep breath.
“Okay to continue now?”
She swallowed the last of her water and nodded.
“Good. Did you manage to perform CPR?”
“Yes, but not very well. There wasn’t much room and the blade was in the way.”
“How did you cut your hands?” It seemed like a stupid question, but she knew that he needed her to spell it out.
“On the blade as I did chest compressions.”
“And how long did you perform CPR for?”
“I don’t know.”
“You didn’t think to call for help?”
“I wasn’t thinking of much,” she said, trying to keep her tone civil. “I’d just found my friend stabbed to death.”
“So, do I have this right?” Quinn’s interjection startled her; it was the first time he had spoken. “You found Lyssa Mardell with the remains of a knife lodged in her chest, you attempted to resuscitate her despite being aware that it would be futile and despite the knife cutting your hands to ribbons, and you only phoned for help after all this had occurred?”
“Yes,” she replied calmly, refusing to allow him to provoke her.
“Yes, what?” he snapped.
“Yes,” she said, sitting up straighter. “You have it exactly right.”
Any reply he might have made was interrupted by someone hammering on the door. Through the reinforced glass window, Sarah could clearly hear Alex shouting and someone attempting to placate her. Emerson turned to Quinn for guidance and then stated that he was stopping the tape. The door flew open seconds later.
“Oh God.” All the anger had vanished from Alex’s voice. She knelt by Sarah’s side, taking Sarah’s hands in her own. That touch, and seeing Alex safe, almost destroyed the shred of composure Sarah was clinging to and she had to bite through her lip to stop herself from crying.
“It’s okay, sweetheart, you’re okay.” Alex ran a finger between the oozing lacerations, her face aghast. “Jesus Christ, Quinn, what the hell were you thinking?”
“I was thinking that your wife is the only witness in the murder of a young paramedic,” he said, not sounding in the least repentant.
“You were so eager to question her that you just left her to bleed?”
Emerson had the grace to look ashamed, but Quinn held Alex’s gaze and said nothing.
“Is she under arrest?”
“No,” Emerson replied quickly.
“Okay.” Sarah heard Alex take a breath and suspected she was counting to ten. “I’m going to take her to the hospital. Then I’m going to take her home.”
“Your home is a potential crime scene, Alex,” Quinn warned her, but then added in a softer tone, “Don’t make this any harder than it needs to be.”
Sarah felt the tension in the set of Alex’s body and gave her hand as tight a squeeze as she could. “Leave them to it,” she said quietly. “I can’t face going back there tonight.” She didn’t want to say that it wasn’t safe for them to go home, that someone obviously knew where they lived. The fact that Alex chose not to argue indicated she had read between the lines.
Sarah looked across at Quinn. “The chooks, the cats, and Tilly will need feeding.”
For the first time since he had entered the room, Quinn smiled at her. Remembering the way he had spoken to her not minutes ago, she didn’t smile back.
“I’ll pass word to an officer,” he said. “You go on with Alex now. We can finish this tomorrow.”
She stood and Alex put an arm around her, subtly ensuring that she stayed up.
“Let me know where you’ll be spending the night,” Quinn told them as a parting salvo.
Alex led her from the room without replying, and Sarah suspected it was only out of deference to her that she didn’t slam the door in Quinn’s face.
*
The motel on the outskirts of Cary was small but clean and, unlike the first that Alex inquired at, didn’t display a rate for renting by the hour. On the way to the hospital she had phoned the only hotel in Avery, to be told—upon giving her name—that there were no vacancies. She had hung up without comment, but she saw Sarah peer into the hotel parking lot as they passed. There were only three vehicles in it, and one of those belonged to the owner.
She unlocked their motel room and steered Sarah to sit on the bed. “I’m going to get my bag but I’ll be right back,” she said. Sarah, half-stupefied with painkillers, murmured what sounded like agreement.
The small overnight bag Alex had taken on her course didn’t hold much in the way of clean clothes, but it was better than nothing. She clicked the lock on her key fob and then paused with her hand on the truck door. The parking lot was dark and deserted, with no visible closed-circuit cameras. Crouching out of sight of the motel’s concrete balcony, she finally allowed herself to give in to the fear and sorrow she had kept bottled up while she took care of Sarah. She wept silently, covering her face and rocking with the force necessary to smother her sobs.
She knew everything now. While they were wait
ing at the hospital, Sarah had told her about the photograph in the newspaper and the repeated efforts she had made to contact Alex and warn her. Then, in stilted sentences, she had described what she found when she followed Tilly down the track.
“I didn’t kill her. I didn’t do it,” she had insisted, desperate to reassure one of the few people who would never have believed it possible in the first place.
The doctor who eventually stitched and dressed her wounds had offered her counseling and given her a pamphlet aimed at patients with a tendency to self-harm. Neither she nor Alex had attempted to explain how the injuries had actually occurred.
Using a bottle of water from her bag, Alex rinsed her face clean and dried it on a spare T-shirt. She had been out of the room for less than five minutes, but when she returned she found Sarah asleep, still wearing the scrubs the hospital had given her. Her face creased in distress as Alex covered her with a blanket, but she quickly relaxed when Alex smoothed a hand through her hair.
Too wired to sleep, Alex made a cup of coffee in the small kitchenette and carried it across to the table by the window. Adjusting her familiar routine slightly, she double-checked the locks on the door and tilted the window blind so she could see out across the parking lot. She took her Glock from its holster and placed it on the table next to her mug, and then unlocked the screen on her cell phone.
Castillo answered her call in a voice gruff with sleep. “Hello?”
“Mike, it’s Alex. Sorry to wake you.”
She heard him smack his lips and empathized with the confusion that came from being pulled suddenly from a deep sleep.
“Hey, Alex,” he said. Then, as if a switch had been flicked, his tone altered completely. “What’s wrong?”
“Everything,” she said, unable to keep the quaver from her voice. “Everything’s wrong.”
“Start at the beginning.”
He was quiet when she had finished. She sipped her lukewarm coffee, listening to him type on his computer.
“Okay,” he said, and the clicking of keys stopped. “I’ve sent an urgent e-mail to all the surveillance teams we still have working the Deakin case and asked them to check in ASAP. The way things are organizationally, though, that could take a few days.” He sighed. “This is a fucking mess, Alex.”
“I know.”
“From what you’ve said, they’re going to be looking at Sarah very hard for the murder.”
She pushed away her coffee. “I think they already are.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what to do,” she whispered, and the admission made her bow her head with shame.
“My advice would be to come clean with Quinn about everything. Pass on my details for corroboration and see if we can get him to start thinking along other lines of inquiry. He should be putting protection in place for you both, and he won’t be doing that if he’s stuck on Sarah as his prime suspect.”
“Okay.” That had been top of her priorities for the morning, but having Castillo confirm her plan made her feel better about it.
“Alex.” He sounded her name like a warning. “You could lose your job over this. Quinn will probably see it as a vote of no confidence in him that you didn’t disclose what happened in the Cascades.”
She had already considered that. She hadn’t trusted Quinn enough to tell him her history—hell, she hadn’t even told him her real name. She had always thought of him as an honorable man, but after what he had just done to Sarah, she was no longer quite so sure.
“I don’t care what happens to me, if it keeps Sarah safe,” she said.
“Just be prepared for the fallout.” Castillo sounded as sickened as she felt; he had tried so hard to manufacture a normal life for them. “Try and get some sleep now, and I’ll be in touch as soon as I have anything. I submitted a request for a background check on Emerson, too. Should hear back from that in the next forty-eight hours or so.”
“Thank you.” Somehow, the words seemed inadequate. She pushed back in her seat, calmer now that she had a strategy to work to. “I’ll call Quinn first thing.”
“Good.”
She heard a musical chime as he closed down his computer.
“So much for staying under the radar, huh?” he said.
“Yeah.” She gave a humorless laugh. “Bit fucking late for that.”
*
It was past midnight when Caleb stopped the car in front of the rental cottage. He had driven slowly, obeying the letter of the law, not wanting to be pulled over for an infraction while covered in blood and with the handle of a murder weapon in the trunk. Rain pelted down on Leah as she opened the car door. She tipped her face toward the sky, relishing the feel of the cool water against her heated skin. Caleb strode past her with two duffel bags, and she followed him into the kitchen, where he stripped naked and handed her his filthy clothes. Then he dug into the side pocket of one of the bags and set the knife handle on top of the pile.
“Burn them. Go a ways into the trees,” he said. “Then come back and clean this shit up.” He nodded at the blood and dirt his clothing had left on the floor. “We’re leaving again in an hour.”
His clothes were sodden with blood; by the time she had carried them to a clear spot in the forest, she had to add her own soiled shirt to the small bonfire she constructed. The rain and damp undergrowth made it difficult to keep the fire lit, but the newspapers she had found beneath the kitchen sink eventually caught, and a smell like rancid meat rose up from the flames.
The task took longer than she intended. Glad to leave the stench behind, she hurried back to the cottage as another heavy downpour began to beat on the trees. Far from being angry, though, Caleb smiled at her as she entered the kitchen. He had his cell phone in his hand.
“Take a shower, baby,” he said, oblivious to the way she tensed at the endearment. “News I just heard, we don’t need to rush.”
She had no idea what he was talking about, but he didn’t seem inclined to go into detail, so she remained silent.
“Soon as you’re good, we’re moving to a new place in Ruby.” He took her face in both hands and kissed her. “My man reckons we should stick around, see how all this plays out.”
The offer of a shower apparently forgotten, he pushed her urgently toward the bedroom. The door shut behind them with a soft snick of metal. She stood as motionless as a statue in the middle of the room and waited for him to tell her what he wanted.
Chapter Eight
Sarah had ordered pancakes, just to stop Alex from worrying about her, but the smell of maple syrup and buttermilk batter was too much for her to stomach. She toyed with a small piece and then dropped her fork, pushing the plate away.
“Here, try this instead,” Alex said, swapping the pancakes for her own dish of plain oatmeal. She smiled when Sarah took a tentative taste. “When I was a kid, whenever I felt like crap, our cook would make oatmeal. She told us it had restorative qualities.”
Sarah raised a skeptical eyebrow but ate another mouthful anyway. The diner was full of early morning bustle and smells: bacon sizzling on the griddle, people in suits impatiently reeling off orders for coffee that sounded as complex as neurosurgery, and the constant ping of the cash register. It seemed surreal to her that life was continuing all around her, as if the man who wanted two eggs over easy with a side of hash browns should somehow take a moment to acknowledge that a brutal murder had happened just hours before.
The spoon slipped from her bandaged fingers and she made no move to pick it up.
“Did Lyssa have a family?” she asked quietly. “I don’t think she ever mentioned her family.”
Alex retrieved the spoon for her and carefully closed her fingers around it. “I think she has a sister, somewhere on the West Coast.” She sipped her coffee, obviously trying to recollect. “San Diego, maybe? I remember her telling me that they didn’t really keep in touch.”
“She still had the brownies in the fucking car,” Sarah said. “She took some leftovers for her shift and they were right there
on the passenger seat, and I keep thinking, what if she’d set off earlier or stayed later or we’d picked another day…” She was beginning to sob, her voice struggling to break through as her chest heaved with grief. “It must have been us he wanted, Alex. It had nothing to do with her.”
A woman at the adjacent table tutted loudly as Alex gathered Sarah into her arms and kissed her hands and then her face.
“Quinn will find whoever did this,” Alex told her.
Sarah shook her head. “He’s not even looking for anyone,” she said. “He thinks it was me.”
The ring of Alex’s cell phone cut off the discussion, but she looked defeated and Sarah knew that she hadn’t been about to disagree.
Alex’s expression hardened as she saw the caller ID. She had left a message with Esther asking Quinn to contact her as a matter of urgency. For him to be returning her call at seven a.m. indicated how eager he was to hear what she had to say. Sarah watched her face as she listened to him speak. A stranger might have found her difficult to read, but Sarah knew her better than she had ever known anyone, and she could tell that Alex was furious.
“Eight thirty,” Alex said. “We’ll be there.” She disconnected the call and took a long drink of water.
“Tell me,” Sarah said as Alex set down her empty glass.
Alex shook her head, and for a moment, Sarah thought she was going to cry. Even in the Cascades, when things had been at their worst, she couldn’t remember Alex ever seeming so lost.
“Tell me,” she repeated softly.
“Judge Buchanan granted a search warrant for our house.”
“On what grounds?”
“Your prints are on the blade, and Quinn is taking issue with the timeline you provided. He and Buchanan are old hunting buddies, so he wouldn’t need anything more than that. He has officers over there now, said he was letting me know as a courtesy.” Alex ground out the last word, but then terror seemed to overwhelm her anger and she took a ragged breath.
“What else?” Sarah prompted.
“He’ll speak to us both at eight thirty, but he advised you to find a lawyer.”