In Dan’s eyes Tom saw a boiling stew of rage, barely controlled, and the force of it made him wonder if he’d be able to keep the grieving father at a distance from the investigation. He pulled a clean handkerchief from the back pocket of his jeans and pressed it into Dan’s hand.
Swiping the handkerchief across his mouth and nose, Dan drew a deep breath and made an effort to calm himself. “I keep thinking we should have taught her to be more careful, not to be so friendly to everybody. She thought bad things only happened to other people, not to her.”
“You can’t raise kids to be afraid of the whole world,” Tom said. “You cripple them if you do.”
“And look what happens if you don’t.” Dan’s face contorted and fresh tears filled his eyes. “Can’t you get that plastic off of her?”
“It’ll be removed in the hospital mortuary so Dr. Lauter can take a look at her before she goes to the medical examiner in Roanoke.”
“Do they have to do an autopsy? Does she have to be cut up?”
“We can’t investigate Shelley’s death without an autopsy.”
To Tom’s relief, Dan accepted that. He pulled in a shuddering breath and said, “I want to see her before they take her off to Roanoke.”
“We’ll go to the hospital. I need you to give me a formal identification. Do you want to pick up Sarah so she can be with you?”
Dan shook his head. “She’s not in any shape to go through that. I’ll do it.”
“She’ll want to see her daughter.”
“No. Not like this.”
Tom doubted Dan was doing his wife a kindness by keeping her away, denying her the finality of seeing Shelley’s body, but he wouldn’t argue the point. Families had to live with the emotional fallout of mistakes they made at times like this. Tom had learned to recognize situations where his interference would only add to the turmoil.
The two mortuary attendants started up the slope, carrying Shelley’s body on the stretcher between them.
“I want to ride with her,” Dan choked out. “I don’t want her to be alone.”
“We’ll be following right behind all the way.” Tom laid a hand on Dan’s shoulder. “We’re going to need your help to find out who did this. I’ll want to talk to you and Sarah both, probably more than once.”
“You gonna ask us a lot of stupid questions about her boyfriend and her teachers? Like that detective from Fairfax County did when she went missing?”
“They’re reasonable questions, Dan.”
“It’s a goddamn waste of time. I can tell you exactly who killed my daughter.”
Chapter Four
Rachel paused in the hallway outside the bedroom, her hand on the doorknob, transfixed by the images that rose up in her mind. Her blond, blue-eyed sister Michelle. The blond, blue-eyed Shelley Beecher. So much alike. For one awful second she envisioned her sister staring through a plastic shroud with lifeless eyes.
“Oh my god,” she gasped, bile rising in her throat. She swallowed. Why had her mind made that crazy connection? She shook her head, banished the terrible sight, and pushed open the door to the bedroom that had belonged to Tom’s parents.
The cat and bulldog scooted past her, grabbing the chance to explore a space usually off-limits to them. Rachel had no choice but to put Michelle in here, since she and Tom occupied the only other bedroom. Their recent paper-stripping and painting binge hadn’t extended this far, and they’d had no reason to change the room’s contents either. Wallpaper splashed with red and yellow flowers. Braided rug. Early American furniture. Michelle would be appalled.
Well, that’s just too bad, Rachel thought. Welcome to my world, baby sister.
The attempt to buoy her spirits lasted a split-second before she leaned against the door frame, overcome again by the anxiety the phone call had stirred up. Michelle had sounded desperate. Terrified. She was convinced someone was stalking her, breaking into her office. Yet the police refused to help, and her own husband seemed to doubt any of it was real.
Could it be possible Michelle had imagined the stalker? She’d always been emotionally fragile. She had never squarely faced the truth about their identity, about Judith Goddard, the woman who had raised them and pretended to be their mother. Rachel was also living a lie, but at least she had confronted the reality behind the facade of their privileged childhood. For a long time she had feared the past would catch up with her sister someday and crack the pretty glass bubble she lived in. Was it happening now? Was the stalker imaginary, representing the truth Michelle wanted to deny, destroying her equilibrium?
Rachel shook her head in disgust. Psychobabble. Michelle had her flaws, but she wasn’t suffering from psychotic hallucinations. Rachel had to take her sister’s account seriously. Some nut case was tormenting Michelle, and god only knew what he might do to her if he wasn’t stopped.
Frank, the cat, leapt to the top of a small bookcase and watched the brown and white bulldog, Billy Bob, snuffle his way around the bedroom, probably taking in the lingering scents of Tom’s parents. Billy Bob had been little more than a puppy when John and Ann Bridger died in an auto accident, but Rachel doubted the dog had forgotten his former owners.
Leaving the animals to their explorations, she walked down the hall to fetch clean sheets from the linen closet.
Tom had no idea yet that Michelle was coming. Rachel hated springing it on him at the worst possible time, at the start of a time-consuming, energy-draining murder investigation, but what else could she do in the face of her sister’s distress?
Back in the bedroom, she dropped the linens onto a chair and pushed up a window to let in a fresh, cool breeze. The room hadn’t been opened in so long the air smelled stale, and dust covered every flat surface. After she made the bed, she’d have to clean. She shook out a sheet over the mattress at the same time Frank jumped onto the bed. When the sheet descended on him, he wiggled around underneath, inviting Rachel to play. She tickled the cat through the cloth, her mind still on her sister.
She wouldn’t bet on Michelle and Tom getting along. And Michelle did not enjoy the countryside. What if she suddenly decided after a day or two that she couldn’t stand it here and wanted to go home? Kevin was driving her out, but if he couldn’t come to retrieve her during the work week, Rachel would have to juggle her own schedule so she could take Michelle back to Bethesda.
Maybe I’ll drop her off at the Trailways station. Rachel had to laugh at the idea of her fussy sister riding back to Maryland on a bus. Then she sank onto the unmade bed and caught her head in her hands. Frank popped out from under the sheet and butted her elbow. “She’s not even here yet,” Rachel told the cat, “and already I’m getting snarky.”
Frank replied with one of his rusty-hinge meows.
After all this time, nothing had changed in the prickly relationship between Rachel and her sister. They still circled the ghost who stood between them, unable to lay Judith Goddard to rest, unable even now to talk about what she had done to them. Rachel could see the sad irony in a clinical psychologist’s refusal to face childhood trauma, but she had suffered enough emotional pain herself to know she had no right to force it on Michelle. She wasn’t willing to let her sister drop out of her life, so she’d accepted Michelle’s rules, maintaining occasional, undemanding contact, skating on the surface while all the important things remained unsaid.
Now Michelle needed her again. She’d turned to Rachel the way she had when they were children and nightmares drove her from her bed and across the hall to seek safety and comfort with her big sister. How could Rachel say no? She was grateful that, unlike Megan Beecher, she still had her sister. She would do whatever she could to help. But she felt a deep apprehension and resistance building inside her as the weight of Michelle’s problems settled on her, and she took it as a warning that they couldn’t easily slip back into their childhood roles.
***
Tom dropped a file folder on the conference room table and flipped it open. Inside lay three sheets of paper
and a photo of Shelley Beecher, twenty-two years old, first year law student at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
“The Fairfax County police have all the records on suspects and interviews, and they’ve never shared any of it with us,” he told Dr. Gretchen Lauter and the two deputies seated at the table. “I asked a few people here some questions when she disappeared, but I didn’t have any reason to think somebody in Mason County was responsible.”
“Until now.” Sergeant Dennis Murray, a lean deputy with close-cut dark hair and wire-rimmed glasses, sat directly across from Tom.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Brandon Connolly said, “that somebody would snatch her in Fairfax County and bring her body down here. What could be behind that?” The young sandy-haired deputy often acted as Tom’s partner in investigations and Tom wanted him in the loop from the start.
“Damned if I know,” Tom said. “Whether the killer lives in Mason County or not, he—or she—was taking a chance on getting caught by bringing her body all the way from Northern Virginia. It would make more sense if she was brought here alive and killed here. But that would have been a risk too, at a time when everybody was looking for her and her picture was posted everywhere.”
“There has to be a reason the body was dumped here,” Dennis said. “I can’t even guess what it might be, though.”
“Gretchen?” Tom said. “What do you think about cause of death?” After Dan Beecher’s anguished identification of his daughter’s body, Tom had hustled him out of the hospital morgue and driven him home rather than staying to learn what Dr. Lauter’s preliminary examination revealed.
The medical examiner, a woman in her late fifties whose short curls were more gray than black these days, looked up from the batch of photos she’d been studying. “The autopsy may prove me wrong, but I’d say she died of strangulation with a leather belt or something similar, an inch or so wide with hard edges. Something that held its shape when it was pulled tight.”
She handed Tom a close-up photo she’d taken of Shelley’s neck. With her hair pulled out of the way, the ligature bruise was unmistakable.
“Did she have any other injuries? A head wound?” Tom couldn’t help hoping Shelley had been knocked out before she was strangled. “Could you tell whether she was sexually assaulted?”
“I didn’t undress her. I didn’t want to disturb the body any more than I had to before it went to Roanoke, but I can say that her clothing was intact, nothing was torn. She had no head injury, and there’s no blood on the body that I could see. She did have obvious injuries to her hands, though.” She offered Tom a close-up photo of Shelley’s hands, laid on her chest.
Tom slid the first photo across the table to Dennis and Brandon and took the second.
“Some of her fingernails were ragged, as if they were torn off while she was scratching something or somebody,” Dr. Lauter said, “The bones in two fingers on her right hand were broken. Snapped, as if—I shouldn’t be speculating, but what came to mind was somebody bending the fingers back until they broke. I’m inclined to think she put up a good fight. Unfortunately, the nails are so clean that I doubt the crime lab will find any tissue from the killer under them.”
Tom stared at the mottled blue-green of Shelley’s skin, the two fingers on the right hand that were twisted together like a pretzel. He could imagine the pretty young woman he’d known fighting, kicking, clawing while the belt tightened around her neck and stopped her scream, stopped her breath. Stopped her life.
Tom pulled himself back to the moment and slid the photo across the table to Dennis and Brandon. “What about time of death? She doesn’t look as if she’s been dead long.”
Dr. Lauter hesitated before answering. “I’m not going to make any assumptions about when she died. She could have been killed in the last few days, but it’s also possible she’s been dead longer than it might appear at first glance.”
“The body’s in good condition,” Tom said. “To keep it that way any length of time—”
“If she was killed soon after she was abducted, and stored somewhere cold,” Dr. Lauter said, “decomp and the other processes would have been slowed down considerably but not stopped.”
“Stored?” Brandon said, frowning at the photos.
“It’s just a hypothesis. I mentioned it because she doesn’t appear to have lost any weight, and if she’d been kept prisoner for a month—” Dr. Lauter shook her head. “Let’s wait and see what the autopsy shows.”
“All right,” Tom said. “We don’t know exactly when she was killed. But let’s think about the way she died. Strangulation takes strength and time. The killer had to hold onto a healthy, athletic young woman for several minutes, while she was struggling.”
“Probably a man,” Dennis said. “Boyfriend? Stalker? Didn’t the Fairfax cops check out those angles?”
“I’m sure they did,” Tom said. “Her father thinks there’s another possibility. I don’t know how seriously to take it, but Dan thinks her murder’s connected to her work with the Virginia Innocence Project in Fairfax County. I’m not sure whether she was doing it for course credit or just for the experience, but she wanted to prove Vance Lankford is innocent.”
“Yeah, I know,” Dennis said, his tone sour. He handed the two pictures back to Dr. Lauter. “The guy beat Brian Hadley to a pulp with a tire iron. Why anybody would think he’s innocent is a mystery to me, and I don’t know what an amateur could turn up six years later that would clear him.”
“I don’t either,” Tom said. “My dad worked that case. The evidence was solid. But the Virginia Innocence Project’s been able to get new trials for a few state prisoners, and they’ve found evidence to clear two people. The lawyer who runs it called me when she decided to let Shelley look into Lankford’s case, and she sounds pretty sharp. I never expected it to amount to anything, but I doubt she would have gotten the innocence project involved if she didn’t see some merit in it.”
“Do you think one of the Hadleys could have been involved in Shelley’s murder?” Brandon asked. “They haven’t been too happy about her stirring things up, asking questions. To their minds, she was trying to set Brian’s killer free.”
“Dan told me Skeet Hadley’s been harassing the whole Beecher family,” Tom said. “For months, ever since he found out what Shelley was doing.”
“That sounds like Skeet,” Brandon said. “I went to school with him, K through twelve. He’s got the worst temper of anybody I know, and he never lets go of a grudge.”
“So maybe he went to talk to Shelley and ended up killing her in a rage?” Dennis asked.
“After driving for hours to get to Northern Virginia, probably stewing about it the whole time?” Dr. Lauter put in. “That’s not spur of the moment rage. That’s premeditation.”
Tom closed the useless file. It would fatten up soon enough. “It’s just one possibility we have to look at.”
“So we start by talking to Skeet?” Brandon asked.
“After I see Shelley’s folks again. I didn’t get a lot of details from Dan earlier because there was so much going on.” As he stood, Tom glanced at his watch. Almost time for dinner. He wanted to eat it with Rachel and take a break from bad news. “By the way, the Fairfax County detective who’s been working Shelley’s disappearance is on his way down.”
Dennis grimaced and said something Tom didn’t catch.
“He’ll stop in Roanoke to see the body before he comes here. She could have been killed in his jurisdiction. Until we pin down the location of the murder, this is a joint investigation. Accommodate him as best you can—but don’t share anything with him without my go-ahead.”
Dennis grumbled, “Like we need some outside cop getting underfoot, telling us what to do.”
Which was more or less the same thing Tom was thinking.
***
Tom parked the cruiser on the side of the road a hundred feet from the Beechers’ driveway, and he and Brandon walked to the house past cars and trucks lini
ng both sides of the pavement. Vehicles filled the driveway bumper to bumper. In the front yard, half a dozen preschool boys played a clumsy, noisy game of kick-the-ball on grass still wet from the earlier rain, seemingly unaware of the turmoil and heartache gripping the family that lived here.
“My mom’s here,” Brandon said, gesturing at one of the cars they passed on the driveway. “The Beechers and my folks are good friends.”
“Yeah, I guess you knew Shelley pretty well, didn’t you?”
Brandon didn’t answer, and after a few steps Tom realized the younger deputy wasn’t keeping pace. He turned. Brandon stood on the driveway with his head bowed, thumbs hooked over his gun belt.
“You okay with going in there?” Tom asked.
Brandon drew a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and jutted his chin. “Yeah, I’m okay. Let’s go.”
Although Tom’s family wasn’t close to the Beechers, he’d known them as long as he could remember, and he wasn’t any more eager than Brandon to wade into the sorrow this house contained. Teary-eyed women, men who didn’t know quite what to say or do, Dan and Sarah and Megan in more pain than any kind words or gestures could alleviate. Every one of their friends and neighbors, faced with the loss the Beechers had suffered, would be thinking even as they offered sympathy: Thank god it isn’t us.
Climbing the front steps, Tom admitted to himself that he would feel the same way if he and Rachel had children. He didn’t want to imagine how he’d react if anything happened to his little nephew Simon, and at times like this, he wasn’t sure he wanted any kids of his own to worry about. One more way to get your heart broken in a merciless world.
Bleeding Through: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) Page 3