Losing Leah Holloway (A Claire Fletcher and Detective Parks Mystery Book 2)

by Lisa Regan

  “The forensic dentist?” Connor asked. “Didn’t you just call her yesterday?”

  “She flew right up,” Boggs said. “Got a hotel room last night.”

  “We woke her up at her hotel,” Roger added. “Asked her to come in early. She will do a more thorough examination later today and prepare a report.”

  The men looked at one another again. Connor couldn’t shake the utter creepiness of the whole thing. A day ago, Holloway had been a suspect. Twelve hours earlier, Jade had been sitting outside of his house. Now she was dead. Yet, Holloway was not their man. Connor had never bought Holloway as the Soccer Mom Strangler, but now with objective proof he felt more unsettled than ever.

  The three detectives left the examination room like zombies. Finally, Boggs said, “So Holloway is out. Where does that leave us?”

  “Jim Holloway may be out,” Stryker said, “but Leah Holloway is still the closest connection we have to finding this guy. They were practically in Holloway’s backyard when he killed Jade.”

  Boggs said, “Follow the Holloway leads. See if you can track this guy down that way. We’re back to the profile. A young white male. Try to find out if there was anyone in her life who is close to the description that Agent Bishop gave us—maybe this landscaper we’re trying to track down or someone Leah worked with.”

  “We’re heading over to Leah Holloway’s employer now,” Stryker said.

  “I just need to do one thing,” Connor said. “Who’s on the DNA samples?”

  “Stark,” Stryker said.

  Connor said, “Meet you at the car in fifteen, okay?”

  Boggs and Stryker left, their strides more purposeful now that the investigation had a direction to go in. It was then that Connor noticed Davey Richards slumped on the hallway bench. He wore a rumpled suit. A five-o’clock shadow covered his cheeks. His hands rested on his thighs. For a moment, Connor thought he was sleeping, but as he drew closer, he realized he was just in a state of disbelief. Red-rimmed eyes looked up from beneath a shock of black hair. “Roger won’t let me see her,” Davey said hoarsely.

  Connor tried to remember how long ago Jade had broken up with Davey. It had been at least a year.

  “I just want to see her,” Davey said, his gaze dropping to his feet.

  “You don’t want to see her like that.”

  “I saw her yesterday,” Davey whined.

  Connor swallowed his annoyance. He’d worked with Jade on a daily basis. They’d been good friends. He’d been with her less than an hour before she was murdered. He had left her, and she was dead. He had little patience for Davey’s grief, palpable though it was.

  “I didn’t realize you two were so serious,” Connor said.

  “We were together for two years,” Davey said.

  Connor tried to keep the surprise from his face. He hadn’t realized that they’d dated that long, mostly because he knew for a fact that Jade hadn’t been with only Davey during the last few years. She hadn’t been the monogamous type.

  “On and off,” Davey added, as if sensing Connor’s discomfort. “You know she didn’t want kids?”

  “Yeah,” Connor said. “She mentioned that.”

  “That was what did us in. I wanted kids, and she didn’t.”

  “Hard to get around that,” Connor agreed. He looked up and down the empty hallway. The place was unusually quiet for a Monday morning.

  “I still loved her.”

  “I know.”

  A female voice shattered the stillness of the moment. “Parks, is that you?”

  Lena Stark worked in the Sacramento County crime lab. She and Connor had always had a good rapport. They’d dated briefly after Connor’s divorce, but his heart hadn’t been in it. Then he’d met Claire. Lena had actually helped him with her cold case. Now, she waddled down the hall toward him in a white lab coat that barely reached around her swollen midsection. He hadn’t seen her in a few months. It had slipped his mind that she was pregnant.

  He motioned to her belly. “How are you feeling?”

  She blew out a breath, sending her blonde bangs up in the air. The rest of her hair was tied back in a ponytail. “I feel like I’m about to give birth.” She rested both hands on the top of her belly and looked down at Davey. “Jesus, Davey,” she said. “Go home and get some sleep. You know what Jade would say if she saw you here, right?”

  A smile pinched Davey’s lips. “To stop stalking her.”

  “Yeah,” Lena answered. “And to get a grip.” She reached out and squeezed his shoulder. “This is hard on everyone. There’s a lot of work to be done on Jade’s case. We need all hands on deck. Go home and get some sleep.”

  Wordlessly, he stood and nodded at Connor before shuffling off down the hall. Lena let out a low whistle once he was out of sight. “He’s taking it hard.”

  Connor swiped a hand through his hair. “No shit.”

  Lena winced and rubbed the side of her belly. “What’s going on?”

  Connor was glad she didn’t ask him how he was holding up. It was a conversation he wasn’t ready to have. Not while he was trying to find Jade’s killer. He needed to stay focused.

  He pulled a folded copy of the Genechek file from his jacket pocket. “I have this maternity test,” he began. He explained what he was trying to figure out and left the file with her. She promised to review it as soon as she finished processing the evidence from Jade’s case.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  KZLM Radio was located in an industrial complex in the Southport Parkway in West Sacramento. The office suite was housed in a converted warehouse with high ceilings and huge windows. The place was bright and airy, glass partitions dividing up the offices in the open floor area.

  Connor was thinking about Leah and how her life seemed so normal and transparent, and yet she’d obviously been hiding some large and terrible things—an affair and possibly a sexual assault. He was no stranger to people’s capacity to hide scandalous secrets, but he wondered how she had done it. From all accounts, all she did was work and come home to her kids. Sure, her husband was oblivious. Connor wasn’t at all surprised by Holloway’s lack of knowledge of his wife’s life. But her best friend lived right next door, and the two seemed very involved in one another’s lives. How had Leah hidden things from Rachel? How had she surreptitiously gathered enough secrets behind her glass partition to make her want to kill herself, her kids, and her best friend’s kids?

  Stryker elbowed him sharply. Out of the side of his mouth, he said, “I feel like we just crashed a funeral.”

  “Bad choice of words.”

  Everyone in the place had stopped what they were doing to stare at the two men. In their suits, they stood out. Connor didn’t even think it was necessary, but he pulled out his credentials and handed them to the woman at the reception desk, explaining that they needed to talk to people who had worked closely with Leah Holloway.

  “Her assistant?” the woman asked.

  “Sure,” Connor said. “Let’s start there.”

  Silently, the receptionist led them through a maze of desks, each one with a new, gawking face behind it. Connor felt like he was the star attraction in some kind of freak-show parade. The silence in the place was a cacophony. Stryker whispered, “Any chance her assistant is a white male between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six whose mother abandoned him?”

  The receptionist stopped abruptly and the two men nearly bowled her over. She turned to face them and waved her arm to her left with a flourish, like Vanna White presenting the answer to a puzzle. “Mrs. Holloway’s office.”

  Outside of Leah’s glass-enclosed office they were greeted by a tiny brunette with ruddy cheeks and four-inch heels that still didn’t make her very tall. Her hair was thrown up in a messy bun. She wore a white wrap dress over black leggings. Everything about her looked thrown together. She stood up from her desk like they’d pulled their guns on her. Hands raised, eyes wide, back searching for a wall.

  “You’re here about Leah,” she
said.

  They handed her their credentials, and she studied each one like she was looking for something counterfeit. The nameplate on her desk read: “Ashley Copestick.”

  Connor said, “Ashley, we just have a few questions.”

  She folded her hands and hung them over her midsection. “Is it true?”

  “Is what true?” Stryker asked.

  “She killed all those people?”

  Stryker nodded. “She killed four people and herself.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Ashley,” Connor said. “How well did you know Leah?”

  She shrugged. “Pretty well. Better than anyone else here. I mean I am—I was her assistant.” Her eyes closed and sprang open on the exhale of a long sigh. “Guess I’m out of a job. God, no, that sounds terrible. How are her kids?”

  “Traumatized,” Connor said. “Ashley, can you tell us if anything unusual happened in the last week? We believe that Leah may have been attacked by someone in the days before her death. Did she say anything to you? Start acting odd?”

  Two pink circles appeared on her cheeks. “Well, I don’t even know if this counts. I mean, I don’t actually know if anything happened, but last week, Wednesday, I think it was, she went out to lunch, which she never does. She was gone almost two hours. When she came back, she looked …”

  “How did she look, Ashley?” Connor coaxed.

  “She looked … in disarray. Pale. Like something bad had happened. Her blouse, it was missing its top three buttons. She was walking funny, like it hurt her to walk.”

  “Did she have any marks on her?” Stryker asked. “Bruises? Abrasions?”

  Ashley shook her head. “No, none at all. That’s why I wasn’t sure if something had happened or not. Like maybe it was my imagination or something. I asked her if she was okay, and she said she was fine. She said she had fallen in the parking lot. I asked her if that was what really happened or did she want me to call the police, but she insisted everything was fine. She had fallen, and she was already embarrassed enough, could we just stop talking about it? So we did.”

  Tears filled Ashley’s eyes. “Oh my God. I should have called the police, shouldn’t I?”

  “If she was sticking to the story about falling, there’s little even the police could have done,” Stryker assured her.

  “Do you know where she went to lunch?” Connor asked. “Was she meeting anyone?”

  Ashley shook her head. “She never said. It was weird. She was in her office, working, and then she just came out with her purse and said, ‘I’m going to lunch,’ and before I could even ask where or with whom, she was gone. It was weird, though. Like I said, she never went out for lunch. She always ate at her desk.”

  “She never went home for lunch to meet her husband or out with a friend?” Stryker said.

  “No, no. She always ate here. She worked through lunch. Not that she would have told me where she was going anyway. Leah was very private. I mean, I know a lot of stuff that happened to her, but not really because she wanted me to or because we were friends, just because I’m her assistant.”

  “What kind of stuff?” Connor asked.

  She looked at them meaningfully. “You know about Lucky, her dog?”

  “That he ingested something that killed him?” Connor said.

  “That someone poisoned him with Xanax,” Ashley said.

  “So she told you.”

  “Yeah. Well, I took a message from the vet. She was so upset. She asked me not to tell anyone, at least until she had a better handle on things.”

  “What things?” Stryker asked.

  Ashley’s shoulders sagged. She put a hand on the back of her chair. “Well, I think maybe someone was messing with her. She never said, but there was the thing with her dog and right after that, the thing with the car seats.”

  Connor flipped open his notepad. “The thing with the car seats?”

  She nodded. “She put the kids into her car one morning to take them to day care, and all their car seat straps had been slashed.”

  “When was this?” Stryker asked.

  “Two months ago.”

  “She told you this?” Connor asked.

  “She was late for work. She called and asked me to meet her down the street from her house. She had me sit with the kids while she went to the store and bought new car seats. She used her credit card. Cost her a fortune too. She asked me not to tell anyone.”

  “Did you?”

  “No, of course not. When people ask me to keep something a secret, I do. I’m telling you guys now ’cause Leah’s dead, and I guess it doesn’t matter now.”

  “Why didn’t she just get her husband to help her?” Connor asked.

  Ashley shrugged again. “I don’t know. She said she didn’t call Rachel—that’s her best friend—because she would be too gossipy about it. She really didn’t want anyone to know. She was pretty embarrassed.”

  “What did she do with the old car seats?” Connor asked.

  “She brought them here and threw them into the dumpster. I thought she should call the police, but she wouldn’t. She said she couldn’t get them involved.”

  “Did you ask her what was going on?” Connor said.

  “Of course. I was concerned. For someone to target her kids is pretty messed up. Right before that, Hunter sliced his palm on glass in the sandbox.”

  Connor and Stryker looked at one another. “What sandbox?” Stryker asked.

  “The one in their backyard. Jim called here one day. He had the kids after school and day care before Leah got home. I guess he had them in the yard playing. They have a sandbox. Hunter and Peyton were playing in it, and Hunter sliced his hand pretty good. Jim called here furious—said there was all kinds of broken glass in the sand and basically blamed Leah. Like she would put glass in her own kids’ sandbox. Her husband is kind of an ass.”

  Connor immediately imagined Jade’s response to that. You think? It was like a punch to the gut. But it would be like that now. She was gone. Her scathing commentary would live on in his head.

  Ashley continued. “Anyway, naturally, I heard them on the phone arguing about where it came from. Then she flew out of here to meet them at the ER.”

  “Which ER?” Stryker asked.

  “Sutter Children’s, I think. I’m not sure. She acted like it didn’t even happen the next day. But I knew something was wrong. She was rattled.”

  “In what way?” Connor asked.

  “She just seemed like scared, you know? Distracted. She wasn’t worried about every little thing anymore. Her hair was always a mess, like she didn’t even care how she looked anymore. She started walking out with me at the end of the day.”

  “You two didn’t walk out together normally?” Stryker asked.

  Ashley gave them a wry smile. “I’m the assistant, remember? I always got here before her and left after her. I’d be here for an hour after she left, finishing up work. But then it was like she didn’t care whether or not I got things finished before the end of the day. At three she would say ‘Stop whatever you’re doing, let’s get out of here.’ At first I thought she was grateful for me helping her out with the car seats, but then I started thinking she was just scared to walk to her car alone. I could tell ’cause she was always looking around the parking lot like someone might jump out at her.”

  Connor said, “And these things, they started a few months ago?”

  Ashley nodded. “Like right after she came back from maternity leave.”

  “She never gave you any indication that she knew who was doing these things?” Connor asked.

  “No. Well, I only asked her about it that one time, and she really wouldn’t talk about it. At that point, I already knew way more than she would want anyone to know about her life. Like I said, Leah is—was very private.”

  “And there were no strange incidents during her pregnancy with Tyler or before that?” Connor asked.

  Ashley took a moment to consider this. Then she said, “No
. It started after Tyler was born. She took six weeks of maternity leave. The glass in the sandbox, the car seats, the dog—those all happened in the last few months. I mean that’s just the stuff I know about. I couldn’t tell you if anything happened while she was home.”

  “And you’re not aware of any other unusual incidents?” Connor asked.

  “No, nothing.”

  “How long were you Leah’s assistant?” Stryker asked.

  “Almost five years.”

  “Ashley, we have reason to believe that Leah may have been … involved with someone other than her husband within the last couple of years. Are you aware of anyone in her life she might have been seeing?”

  Nervous laughter bubbled up from her diaphragm. “You’re joking, right? You think Leah was having an affair?”

  “Something like that,” Stryker said.

  Ashley shook her head. “No way. I mean, no one would have blamed her—her husband was a big, dumb douche—but for some strange reason, Leah loved him. She never cheated. She wouldn’t.”

  “What makes you say that?” Connor asked.

  She shrugged. “She told me her dad ran around on her mom her whole life, and then her mom killed herself. Leah said she would never do that to her kids. That’s why she married Jim. She knew he wouldn’t cheat.”

  “Who else was she friendly with here?” Connor asked.

  Ashley laughed. “No one. Like I said, Leah was private. She was nice to everyone, but there wasn’t anyone she really confided in. I can give you a list of names of people she works—worked with the most, if you think it will help.”

  “That would be great,” Connor said.

  “How about men?” Stryker asked. “Anyone here Leah might have been involved with or who might have been interested in her?”

  “She probably had the most contact with Kyle in accounting, but he’s gay.”

  “What about young men?” Stryker continued. “Do you have any male staff members—say, under the age of twenty-six, twenty-seven—who might have taken a recent interest in her?”

  “Leah and a young guy?” She gave her head a sharp little shake. “Listen, the Leah you’re talking about, I just can’t—Leah was all about her kids. She had her hands full with that idiot husband of hers. Even if we did have a hot, young guy working here, she wouldn’t give him the time of day.” She seemed to notice Stryker’s withering glance and added, “But we do have a male intern. He’s about twenty-six, good-looking. He gets a lot of female attention. I’m sure HR can give you a complete list of employees.”