by Darby Kane
“But murder?” Jared asked.
That’s exactly what she was talking about. “Especially murder.”
Chapter Fifty-Six
THE NEXT DAY LILA STEPPED INTO GINNY’S OFFICE ON HER WAY back from a meeting with the sheriff and the prosecutor. Tobias was still with Charles, doing his schmooze thing in the hope of pulling a bit more information out of the guy. She took the opportunity to peek in on Ginny.
Before she got to the office door, she saw the board through the glass wall. Photos and newspaper headlines. Cards with notes about evidence. Her face. Aaron’s. It was disconcerting to have her life splayed open and put on display. But the more she stood there, her gaze scanning every inch of information, the more she realized this wasn’t her life. This was an exhibit. She played a role. A bit player in Aaron’s horrible opera.
She stood in the doorway and waited until Ginny hung up the phone to announce her presence. “I’ve seen those boards on television and in defense attorneys’ offices. Never been the subject of one, though.”
Ginny’s head shot up. Her gaze went from Lila to the board to the open office behind Lila. “You shouldn’t be in here.”
Story of her life.
She stopped just inside the door and stood there. She hoped the casual entrance would ease some of the rushing panic thrumming off Ginny. “I got a call from the prosecutor’s office.”
Ginny stopped looking around and shifting in her seat and frowned. “About what?”
“A courtesy call about the additional bodies that had been found in and around the cabin. Julie and Yara. Yara had been on the news, but Julie . . . I guess it was inevitable they’d find her, too.”
“Really?”
“They also wanted Tobias to know the FBI was all over this case now.” The initial panic at hearing that news had worn off the second the FBI made it clear Aaron’s crimes, not her potential ones, were the focal point.
“That’s not necessarily true.”
Ginny didn’t disappoint. She fought the good jurisdictional fight to the end.
The fact she’d read someone right for a change made Lila smile. She came fully into the room and sat down in the chair across from Ginny. “What is true, then?”
The tension wrapping around Ginny seemed to vanish. She leaned back in her chair as if she were no longer ready to usher Lila out of the room and away from her precious board. “I would love for you to answer that question. Honest answers, without any zigzagging, would be a nice change.”
“I keep seeing their photos in the press.” She nodded at the photo of the pretty woman on the far right side of the board. Brunette with blue eyes. “Julie.”
Sighing in what sounded like resignation, Ginny stood up. She went to the board and pointed to photos as she spoke. “Here’s Karen, and this one is Yara.”
Both brunettes with long hair. Pretty and alive with energy. Smiling in the photos. So young, with so much ahead of them, and Aaron had snuffed it out. He thought he was entitled. That even their breath belonged to him.
Lila’s gaze fell on a photo in the middle of the board. “That is the bracelet you asked me about before.”
She hadn’t been able to get it out of her head since the first time she saw it. The idea of Aaron keeping his mother’s bracelet ticked off a suffocating sensation in her throat. Was it love or loss . . . or something far more sinister?
“Any more information on that?” Lila asked when Ginny didn’t offer any explanation.
“No.”
The firm response grabbed Lila’s attention. “Is it possible Aaron put his trophies in with jewelry his mother owned? Is that a thing killers do? Like, he lost his mother and this is all somehow wrapped up with that abandonment?”
Ginny shrugged. “Possible.”
That tone. Ginny had a theory, and Lila thought she wanted to say it. “But you don’t think so.”
“The killings might relate back to his mother in some way, but no, I don’t think this was a storage issue.” Ginny leaned against the far end of the board. “I also think he killed more than the three women you see on the board.”
Lila had the same fear. A man like Aaron didn’t just start killing in his midthirties. His personality hadn’t changed during their marriage. Maybe he’d become more settled, but so had she. She couldn’t pinpoint any sort of break, which meant he hadn’t changed and his violent behavior likely extended well into the past.
She heard voices behind her. Men talking and phones ringing. There were only a few people in the main offices at those desks, but the noise never stopped. Activity buzzed around them.
She got up and moved closer to the board. To the one photo that kept calling her. “What’s this bracelet?”
“It was Karen Blue’s.”
Lila looked at the photo. Saw the round charm. It ticked off a memory in her head . . . one she couldn’t quite grab. “Seventeen.”
“Have you seen it before?”
“No.” Lila’s gaze moved to the next photo as she tried to connect the pieces, but her mind wouldn’t cooperate. “This is the cabin? I thought it would look different.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know. More rundown, maybe. Abandoned, like he rarely went there and never just to hang out.” The wood was in good shape. A sturdy front porch and solid roof. Falling leaves had been removed from the steps leading to the front door. The cabin looked lived-in, not like women died there.
“It’s a one-bedroom with a storm cellar.”
Cellar. Lila had seen enough movies to know that sounded bad. “Is that where Karen was?”
“No. She was . . .” Ginny stopped herself. Her hesitation ticked on for a few seconds. “Tied to the bed.”
The words slammed into Lila with the force of a bat to her midsection. Every muscle stretched and shook.
“Aaron, you piece of shit.” She meant to think the words, not say them, but they came out in a low whisper.
Ginny didn’t say anything, but Lila could feel her gaze. She watched and assessed, as she’d done from the beginning.
Lila was about to turn around and go find Tobias when a detail caught her eye. She pointed to the photograph. “This chair.”
“Yes?”
A rocking chair, probably handmade. Thin spindles and large armrests. A place where someone could sit and rest their hands. “Was it in the house?”
“On the front porch.” Ginny stepped closer. “Does it look familiar?”
“Maybe.” Definitely. “It was on the porch, out in the middle of nowhere?”
Ginny nodded toward the other cabin photos. The long rocky driveway. The green lawn made of low shrubs at the bottom of the porch steps.
“The house sits in a clearing, but yes.” Her eyes narrowed. “What are you thinking?”
That the matching chair was in her attic. It looked just like this one. Same age and same details. It meant something, but she didn’t know what. “It just seems weird for a serial killer to have a rocking chair.”
“Handmade. We think it’s a family heirloom.”
She knew that to be true. “What does Jared say?”
“No more than you do.”
Lila filed the photo in the back of her mind. She’d venture into the attic again and look at the chair. With the information tucked away, she flipped into defensive mode. She’d come too far to backslide now. “You can’t believe I had anything to do with the Karen or Julie—”
“No, but I think you knew more about your husband’s extracurricular activities than you admit to.”
Lila wasn’t sure what that meant, but the serious, unblinking stare told her Ginny was not done. FBI or not. “I told you I’d found the videos with the students. I handed them over to you.”
“I remember.” Ginny folded her arms across her chest. “My point is that I think you found out a lot earlier than you’re admitting and then killed him because of it.”
Very good, except for one thing.
“I didn’t stab him.” Lila cou
ld make the claim without one ounce of worry about giving herself away. She still didn’t know who had, but with the arrest and whispers about Brent, she guessed him. He’d tried to spook her, threatened her. If he was an accomplice, she hoped he never knew another minute of peace.
“That’s not what killed Aaron.”
Lila was sure she’d missed something. “What?”
“Forensics confirmed that he was dead before being stabbed.” Ginny watched her. Her gaze dipped up and down Lila’s body, as if waiting for her to blow it.
Lila forced her body to stay still. Her expression froze, and she did a countdown in her head until she could shift even an inch. She refused to give away her surprise.
She fought to swallow over the dryness in her mouth. “Who would stab a dead man?”
“No idea.” Ginny practically glowed with satisfaction. She’d stumped Lila, and she knew it. “There were high levels of gas in his blood and liver.”
“I don’t get it.” But she did understand that part. She’d put the gas there. The setup of the car as a suicide was supposed to do the rest to explain any adverse toxicology results.
“Murder often isn’t a rational act. It can be messy. Emotional. Spur-of-the-moment or planned.”
An alarm sounded in the back of her brain. Ginny could be lying or playing with the facts. Nothing she said made sense except the reasons for killing someone, and a few of those hit too close to the truth. “I feel like I’m back in law school.”
“My point is that you may not have stabbed Aaron, but I still think you killed him.”
Lila needed to know if that stemmed from common sense and good instincts or from a new and so far undisclosed piece of evidence. She could only fight one of those options. “Why?”
Ginny shrugged. “You tell me.”
“It’s your job, not mine.”
This time Ginny smiled. “I’d think you’d want to know who killed your husband.”
“You’d be wrong.” Because now she knew.
She killed him.
ABOUT FIVE MINUTES after Lila left her office, Pete wandered in. Ginny wasn’t ready for a conversation about protocol or arguments about how she’d handled the case. She kept mentally running through Lila’s reactions to the photos and the news about Aaron’s actual cause of death.
Lila finally had flinched. Subtle, but Ginny saw it. Some part of the news and a few of those photos shocked her. Threw her off her usual steady game. Ginny needed to know why.
Pete lounged in the doorway. “I saw Lila in here. Is it okay for her to see the board?”
She knew he wasn’t seeking the advice from a more experienced officer. This was Pete’s way of letting her know he thought she’d screwed up. She wasn’t interested in playing the game. “No.”
“So . . . why invite her in? I don’t get it.”
“Look at this.” Ginny grabbed the photographs of Karen’s bracelet and the older one they thought might have belonged to Aaron’s mother off the board.
“I ran a check. There are no photos of Aaron’s mother and no relatives to ask, so I couldn’t track it at all. The newer bracelet is from a company that services jewelry stores, clothing stores. They’re not expensive and can be found almost everywhere. It was a dead end.”
But it wasn’t. The pieces started coming together in the most horrible way.
“That’s not my point. Do we have other bracelet photos?” She could get the bags out of the evidence locker, but the photos might be enough.
Pete slipped out of the room and was back in a few minutes with an envelope in hand. He opened it and spilled the photos on the desk, shifting through until he found alternative angles of the bracelets. “What are we looking for?”
She saw it now. Had no idea how she missed it before. “Seventeen.”
“Right, but Karen’s parents said they’d never seen the bracelet before. I’ve asked two friends, and they say the same thing. She never wore it, and no one remembers her having it.”
“Right.” Ginny picked up the clearer photos of the older bracelet. The one with the “A” charm on it. “What if the long scratch on the back of this charm isn’t actually a scratch?”
“I want to be excited, but you’ve lost me.”
She put the photos of the bracelets side by side and the truth jumped out. “What if that scratch is a number one? As in, number one and number seventeen.”
“You mean victims?”
“Yes.” The more she studied the two, the more convinced she became. The first would have been scratched into the back of the metal decades ago, when the Payne brothers were young, and probably with a knife. The engraving in the more recent one was done by a steadier hand. Possibly an older hand, one more comfortable with killing.
That meant there should be bracelets out there for Yara and Julie, too.
“Seventeen victims?” Pete shook his head.
“Possibly.”
“Holy shit. Are we really going to stop working on this case and just turn it over?” He looked appalled by the idea.
So was she, but she hid the excitement that came with unraveling a case better, thanks to years of practice. “There’s a chain of command and—”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Let me finish.” She gestured for Pete to come farther inside her office, then shut the door behind him. “There’s a chain of command, and we’re going to ignore it.”
A smile slowly crossed his lips. “I’m listening.”
“Good, because we’re not done with Lila Ridgefield or her dead husband.”
Chapter Fifty-Seven
THE NEXT MORNING, LILA MADE THE DRIVE SHE’D TRIED TO avoid. She borrowed Tobias’s rental car while he was in the shower and left a note about running errands. With Ginny and her crew officially off the case, that meant she didn’t have to worry about being followed. She was on her own. No matter how painful this trip might be, she was doing it. She had to.
That bracelet. It sent her mind spinning.
The drive took almost three hours, just like everyone said. She’d planned out the trip, looking for side roads and workarounds. When she got to the point where she would have turned right onto the final dirt road before hitting the driveway to the cabin, she kept driving.
She could see the yellow caution tape flapping in the breeze. Of course today was the day the cooler, wetter weather had moved into this part of New York. A steady drizzle slowed her down. The woods would be muddy, but she was prepared with boots. Her backpack had supplies, some she hoped she wouldn’t need.
As she whizzed by the entrance, she saw two local police officers standing by their cruiser, drinking coffee. Their presence wasn’t a surprise. The tiny town and the cabin had gotten a lot of attention on the news. While the interviewees didn’t give an exact address, she knew where the cabin was. The map and aerial view on Ginny’s board confirmed the location and the thick wooded area around it.
She drove for another quarter mile and took a right. She could only drive in a few feet, enough to hide her car from the road. That’s all she needed.
With the car locked and her raincoat hood up, she grabbed her backpack and headed toward the cabin. She knew the bulk of the forensics at the cabin had been done. There was talk of digging up the land and looking for more bodies, but that required special equipment, and the latest podcast said that would arrive tomorrow. That gave her a window of one day. One shitty, rainy day.
Her boots slid in the mud as she walked. Sticks cracked beneath her feet, and fallen leaves and broken branches made the walking slick. She didn’t follow a trail because there wasn’t one. She walked until she hit the fence. Six feet and made of wood. Hard to climb but, she hoped, easy to break through. But not yet. She followed the fence deeper into the woods, blocking branches with her arm as she forged a path.
The mist clouded her vision and dampened her cheeks. The jacket she wore repelled the rain, but her hair slipped out and now-wet curls slipped over her forehead. The longer she wal
ked, the more moss she saw. Over the ground and downed trees.
The tree crowns provided an umbrella of protection, keeping the light from seeping in. It wasn’t even eleven in the morning, and the entire area was blanketed in a sort of dingy gray. It looked and felt more like late afternoon. The scent of pine and dirt filled her senses.
She kept her focus on the fence, trying to catch a glimpse of the cabin from this side. After she trudged and slipped for what felt like forever, she spied the roofline. A few more feet and she reached what would be the equivalent of the back of the cabin. Breaking through the fence here seemed smarter. Police could be roaming, and she didn’t want to run into them.
The rain switched to a steady drizzle. No more mist. It came down now, the tiny pings echoing as the drops hit the ground.
She scanned the fence, looking for weakness. The damn thing had faded with the years, but the wood hadn’t rotted. That meant breaking through the hard way. Of course.
She picked two boards and slammed the heavy heel of her hiking boot against what she thought looked like the most vulnerable spot. The wood bowed under the onslaught of kicks, cracking and moaning but not breaking. The repeated motion rubbed a spot clear on the ground. With the grass completely gone, she slipped in the mud, unable to get the traction she needed for more shots.
A scream of frustration rumbled up her throat, but she bit it back. Swearing, she opened the zipper of the backpack and grabbed a screwdriver and hammer. One look at the job, and she pocketed the screwdriver. This required hitting.
She smacked the vulnerable wood, putting her weight behind it, and watched it splinter. Clawing at it, kicking it some more, let her break off a long piece and make an opening.
One more board and she’d be through.
She repeated the process, this time holding on to the fence to keep from falling. She could not get injured. Not out here, where no one would hear her or find her.
With both boards gone and sweat rolling down her back, she slipped through the open slot and stepped into the small cleared area behind the cabin. Her gaze shot to the back of the building then over to the shed. A gnawing sensation started in her stomach. The smells and sounds of the woods on the other side of the fence reminded her of hikes around Cayuga Lake, of walking around the preserve with Ryan.