“Here! I clocked in at nine, like always.”
Quick as a flash, Ainsley slaps Sambino across the face with an open palm. Sambino draws back, his eyes darting for a way out of the room when Davis pulls rank.
“Detective! Outside.” He stands and waits for Ainsley to leave. “Now.”
Ainsley leaves after kicking the table and the door shut behind him, his anger lingering in the room long after he’s left. Davis rejoins me at the table. Unfortunately, Ainsley’s boorish behavior has left me nowhere else to go. I have to use the information I have. “We know you brought Emma back to your place to meet a woman you both encountered at a club in Columbus.”
There’s a quick flicker of panic in his eyes.
“Here’s what I think. You tricked Emma into thinking the woman was in your apartment. You brought her home and once you had her inside, you killed her.”
“No! I was at work.”
I shrug. “You clocked in at nine. You picked up Emma at eight. She was dead before you got here. Then you went back a few hours later to take her to the quarry and do your fancy knife work.”
“No!”
“Yes. You have a boss who sleeps while you work. You have a job where no one else is present. You have a work vehicle available to you at all hours. Nick, you could have easily left for a few hours and your boss would never know. The same way you did with Vivian and Chandler.”
“No.” Sambino unhitches a thick lock of dyed-black hair from behind his other ear, letting it all fall across his pale face to mask both his eyes as though behind a curtain. “Check my time card.”
“You and I both know how unreliable time cards are.”
“I didn’t do anything to Emma. Or Chandler. Or Vivian.”
“Tell me this,” Davis says. “Why should we believe you?”
“Because I didn’t have anything to do with these crimes. Nothing!”
“Then how about you let us look around your apartment?”
“Not without a warrant and a lawyer.” Sambino stands up, his face flushed from Ainsley’s hard slap.
I shake my head but say nothing. Ainsley’s strike ended any chance of Sambino’s cooperation. Davis can look forward to a happy lawsuit from Sambino, and if we do build a case against him, it can be used in court.
“Think about it, Mr. Sambino. Think real hard,” Davis says. “Confessions are always so much better for everyone involved.”
Sambino stands in the doorway leading to the basement, his hand still on the doorknob, unsure of whether or not to leave. He looks much smaller than when he came in, hunched and deflated. He cannot hide the subtle shudder of fear in his shoulders. We’ve rattled him or, more specifically, Ainsley has. Our killer wouldn’t fall so easily to a cop’s bravado and piss-poor interview antics.
*
Davis and I find Ainsley in the parking lot, a hulking shadow leaning on his car. The red glow of a cigarette lights up his face. “That little fucker is guilty,” he grumbles at us.
Sambino may be the best lead so far, but my gut tells me he’s not a fit. It isn’t his age or even Ainsley’s push to include Marci’s murder, but Sambino’s image. His get-up is a Halloween costume, a ploy to scare others and most likely keep people away from him. He doesn’t strike me as the murdering type. Angry? Yes. Attention whore? Yes, but nothing more. If we stripped Sambino of his black clothing and makeup and fangs, he’d be nothing more than a cowering little boy who’d been bullied throughout his school years. He’s been emotionally hurt, so much so that he decided to develop an alter-ego of Tristan.
“Whatever that was in there is not going to help us nail him,” Davis says.
Ainsley scoffs, “That little shit won’t say anything.”
“That’s not the point, Ainsley, and you know it. One more move like that and you’re off the case. No questions asked.”
We huddle around the car while Ainsley sulks and smokes.
I ignore him. Nothing irritates me more than a bully cop. “We don’t have enough for a search warrant.”
Davis nods.
I hug myself against the cold. The air surrounding the lot’s bright lights looks like crystals. “Sambino now knows that someone told us about his connection to Emma that night and that he drove her. Let’s see what a long night of simmering on that information does for him.” I look at Davis. “If Sambino hasn’t already, he’ll be in the hearse cleaning it tonight.”
Davis says, “Eldridge owns that hearse. If we can get his permission to search it, we don’t need a warrant.” Davis rubs his eyes. It’s been a long night. “But we just assaulted his employee, and he might not be in a generous mood. Let’s call it a night. I’ll put an officer on the hearse until the morning.”
Sambino’s anxiety and refusal to talk tell me he knows something. Seeing a cop car out in his work parking lot all night will put the pressure on and turn up the heat.
Chapter Seven
Ainsley and I drive what would be Emma’s route from the photography store to Sambino’s apartment on the way back to my hotel. Questions plague us and I choose to focus on these rather than confronting Ainsley about his brutish behavior with Sambino. That will be for another time. For now I cannot stop thinking about this: What if Nick Sambino didn’t drive Emma Parks home from his apartment in the hearse? We have no proof of that. No one actually saw her. It could have been any vehicle that sidled up to her as she walked away from the photography store.
My mind runs wild with the possibilities. It’s late, I’m tired, and that makes me prone to imaginings. Tonight, I can see it—Parks, lost in her thoughts, as her steps crunched down the frozen leaves and snow on the sidewalk. She was excited to meet the hottie, a vampire wannabe. Even though she was mystified over her feelings for this other girl, Parks swooned over the way hottie might use those new fangs to trace the outlines of the veins in her neck, steal quick, playful bites to her skin. She had only told her best friends about her feelings for other women. She struggled with herself about whether or not she should just go home. She didn’t even hear the vehicle roll up beside her.
The school photographs in Parks’s file tell me she was a good girl. Her grades tell me she was a thinker, not the type to get inside a car with a stranger. But what if that stranger was a beautiful woman who she recognized as the hottie from the club in Columbus? Could I be looking at a version of the classic story of good girl attracted to bad girl? I’ve seen so many scenarios of this trope played out over the course of my short career. There really is an undeniable force that pulls these opposites together. Any question of danger and cautionary tales go out the window. Warnings are forgotten and the good girl falls hard.
I’m certain of two things. One, Emma Parks knew the driver who pulled up beside her. Two, it wasn’t Sambino. I keep these thoughts to myself. Ainsley has already demonstrated his loose tongue. Mix that with the high anxiety inside any questioning room, and any sort of edge we might gain could be lost.
*
My ritual for setting up my hotel room work space: push the old, brick-heavy desk away from the hotel wall; turn that wall into a makeshift whiteboard—a murder board—and post everything I have about the case with pushpins (once I leave, the hotel will hate me and send the bill to Sanders); examine the spread from as many angles as possible, including sleep.
My dad taught me how to make a murder board. We always had two set up in the basement of our house, tucked away in the far corner where my father worked on his cases until the early morning hours. The constant was filled with information on a serial killer my dad had been tracking most of his career. The other board held his most recent cases. Every crime-scene photograph, tip, and bit of gathered information found its way into the column titled either Victim or Suspect. I was never allowed to touch the murder boards. When my father was at work, though, I’d sneak into his corner and slip off the white sheets he used to cover them, taking in the crimes that perplexed my father. I was fascinated by the way the murder board grew, how each piece of i
nformation had a vital place in the solving of the crime. He never kept his murder board at the station, he said, because he wanted full control over it. He didn’t want someone to be able to take something down or add to it without his knowledge. Many times, the ones in our house were full of photocopies and the originals were on a board at the station.
Like my dad, I need to see the evidence spread out before me and have control of it. Maybe it’s a superstition, but I swear it works on my subconscious. So now, I slowly build my murder board, pinning up bloody photos and police reports in three deliberate sections: Vivian Hannerting, Chandler Jones, and Emma Parks. I leave Marci’s case file on the desk chair with only the report peeking out along the edges of the worn folder. With the lampshade removed from the large desk light, the crime-scene spread is illuminated with ghoulish flair.
Once the rearrangement is done, I sit on top of the cleared desk, cross-legged, in worn boxers and an old Ani DiFranco T-shirt. I had a bath as soon as I returned to the hotel and my hair has dried around my shoulders. I’ve left my boots on because I’m terrified to touch my bare feet to the carpet. I do not want to solve the mystery of what could be growing inside that nest of fibers.
Up on the wall, the three victims’ similarities are clear—age, location, gender, race. I scribble lesbian on a Post-it Note and tack it into Parks’s column—this is the wild card. It has been nagging at me all evening. There has been no mention of a serious boyfriend or husband for Hannerting or Jones. In fact, Hannerting had been a student sharing a rental house with another woman. And then there’d been that staunch denial of homosexuality from Kaitlin at the photography store. Is it possible all these young women were lesbians, or at the very least, girl-curious?
When I was sixteen years old, my father and I drove every Saturday afternoon to Willow’s Ridge. Once he was certain I had the hang of it, I drove myself. I’d been driving my dad’s truck for years before I got my license that spring—one of the perks of being the police chief’s daughter in a small town. It was quite a weekly trek, three-hour round-trip commutes from Chesterton. My father called it church, a time for fellowship and growth with Christ. The rest of the world referred to it as One True Path, a strong ex-gay ministry built on the belief that a person can pray the gay away and heal from homosexual addiction. Historically, Willow’s Ridge has been associated with ex-gay ministries because one of the largest groups in the Midwest was based there. Many people, like me, drove great distances to attend the weekly meetings. Could hate crimes against homosexuals in this area be seen as some sort of homage to this group? Although Willow’s Ridge and the surrounding communities are very small, it has always been an area where creative people live. Art stores line Main Street and the artists all live with nature to inspire them. A higher percentage of LGBTQ people live in Willow’s Ridge than in surrounding small towns.
Suddenly, Dad is here, his large body spilled into the hotel’s lime-green velvet armchair. “Lucy-girl, trust your gut.”
I drop my head into my hands. “Christ, Dad. I need to get some sleep.”
“Sleep when the case is over. It’s too early to rule anything out.” He points to a photo of the backseat lined with food for delivery.
“Jones?”
He nods. “Who was she delivering food for?”
“Her church.” I scour every line of the Chandler Jones’s file. She had been delivering to the shut-ins of her church when she disappeared. A noble deed. Finally I find it, and the name of the church shoots a bolt of adrenaline to my heart: Heartsong Southern Baptist.
“I’ve heard that name. Heartsong was directly linked to One True Path, right?”
He grins at me over the laptop.
A simple Google search finds it. One True Path is listed as one of the primary ministries at Heartsong Southern Baptist.
“If all of the victims have had same-sex relationships, then Ainsley’s right. Marci Tucker’s murder is related.”
My father agrees. He observes me closely over his steepled fingertips. “Can you connect this church with all the victims?” His eyes trail me as I pace back and forth, my brow furrowed with thought.
“Well, Marci, certainly.” I stop suddenly and face him. “Dad, come on. One True Path is an ex-gay ministry, not a cult designed to go out and kill people who go against their teachings.”
“You used a key word there: designed. Anyway, who said the entire group?”
A swell of defensiveness bubbles up inside me. I’d been a part of this group for a short time with Marci.
“Hate can drive people to do unimaginable things,” my dad says. “I’m just saying, don’t rule anything out.”
I stop a second, struck by this thought. If it was relatively easy for me to find this connection, then why hadn’t Ainsley? After all, Tucker had been his case. He knew it inside out. Why wouldn’t he connect the sexuality element and find the church?
My cell phone rings its tinny jingle in the near-silent hotel. With a start, I realize it’s well after one a.m. I was supposed to have called Rowan no later than eleven. I watch the phone light up with the call, then turn back to the murder board. My father has already vanished from the armchair.
“Ro, this is a bad time.”
She does what I hate the most: nags me. Finally, I blame not calling on a run and bath.
“Run?” she asks. “When was the last time you ran?”
“There’s no pool here.” I groan.
“I didn’t hear from you. I was worried.”
“Everything’s fine, love.”
“I need to know for sure when you’re coming home. My mom’s invited us to Sunday dinner and needs an answer.”
“God, Rowan!” She knows how much I hate these dinners with her mom. Mention of her always brings out a fiery hot reaction from me. “Can’t you tell her I’m working and don’t know when I’ll be back in town?”
“I thought this case would take two days. Three, tops.”
I look up at the makeshift murder board. “Things have gotten more complicated.”
“What do I tell my mom? Yes or no?”
I feel my frustration ratcheting up. “Christ, Rowan, she’s your mom. Can’t she be flexible? If we’re there then we’re there.”
“She needs to know, Luce. You can’t leave people hanging.”
I take a deep breath. “Let’s not do this, okay? Not now.”
Rowan doesn’t say anything for a moment. For a second I think she might hang up on me, but then she also pulls in a deep breath. “The kids miss you.”
I imagine the dogs sidled up to Rowan in bed, their warm bodies smashed together in a blur that makes it difficult to see where one body ends and the next begins.
“Talk,” Rowan demands, and I hear their friendly howls and playful barks.
When we’d first moved to Dublin, Rowan talked me into adopting a puppy. I worried that my older cat, Hadley, might feel slighted by a new pet, particularly a slobbery young pooch who demanded all the attention. Dogs are a layer of safety, though, and with my job, I finally relented to a friendly, but big, dog. Two days later, Rowan saw a sign at the local farmers’ market advertising a neighbor’s litter of Lab mixes. For reasons I can’t even begin to explain, in the midst of all Rowan’s coos and pleas, we came home with two puppies: Toto and Daisy. The battle with Hadley was on; he had the Labs’ ears pinned back in seconds. The dogs, unfortunately, are nothing more than oversized lap kitties; it’s my Hadley who’s the guard dog.
Looking at the stiff hotel bed, I suddenly want to be home more than anything with Rowan and to feel the soft, warm fur of my pets. I want to sleep against the comfort of their warm spines.
The whisper of our morning argument filters through the phone connection. “How’s it really going out there in Willow’s Ridge?”
I rub my tired eyes. “We’ve got a strong lead.”
“Come on, Luce. You know what I mean.”
The heater below the window whines as it constantly blows—just not always warm
air. “I really haven’t let myself think about it.”
The it hangs in the space between us, both of us hyperaware that my past is never far.
“Hmm. Does Willow’s Ridge make you think of your dad?”
Rowan has this way of calling my BS every time. A smile crosses my lips. Of all the women I’ve known in my life, Rowan knows me best and still loves me. That’s a rare feat. “I’m glad he’s not alive to see this. God, I miss him, but he’d want to drive up here and get together with the Jamesons again. That’s all I need, a One True Path reunion.”
Even after all these years, I still cringe at the thought of Pastor Charles Jameson. He’d been my biggest nightmare as a teenager. My dad found the Bible-touting Baptist and his One True Path group when he learned that I had a crush on one of my best girlfriends in high school and assumed the two of us were doing more on our sleepovers than talking about boys. If only Dad had known that I spent long hours throughout high school wishing my best friend wanted more than to talk about boys. I prayed night after night just to feel her touch, to kiss her lips.
My dad had certainly been wrong about the activities with my best friend, but he knew me well enough to be dead-on in his assessment of my feelings for other girls. Years after Marci’s death, we never spoke of my relationship with her, though there was an unspoken understanding of what went on between Marci and me. When I eventually brought home another woman for him to meet, he handled it with a grace I hadn’t expected. We’d made peace long before his death after he’d finally given up his attempts to change me.
Even though the police station was my dad’s family and, by way of that, mine, we were the only blood we had. His parents were gone, he’d been an only child, and my mother packed up and left me crying on his hip when I was only two. She said she was leaving for a life in front of the camera in California and we never heard from her since. Dad always said it was me that kept him alive after he watched my mother’s red taillights wink out down the road that day. Then he’d looked into my watery baby-brown eyes and said, “Blood takes care of blood.” He’d repeated that phrase to me my whole life, but it wasn’t until after he was gone that I realized he continued to say it as a reminder to himself. He simply wouldn’t endure risking my red taillights slowly vanishing the same way his wife’s had so many years ago, no matter what sort of sin I might commit.
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