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

by Lisa Regan

  She didn’t have to find out.

  The moment she had what she needed, she snuck out. She made it halfway back to work before she had to pull over and vomit on the side of the road.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  “Tyler Holloway is the Soccer Mom Strangler’s son,” Connor confirmed. When Rachel didn’t speak, didn’t move, he said, “You know, if I found out my kid was the son of a serial killer, I might want to drive into the nearest river. So Leah was having an affair with the Soccer Mom Strangler. Had his kid. Figured it out. Went berserk. Case closed, right?”

  Rachel licked her lips again but went silent.

  “Except that Leah also sent in a maternity test. I kept asking myself why she would need a maternity test. Surely she hadn’t forgotten giving birth five months earlier. I double-checked the medical records. She definitely gave birth to a baby boy five months ago. Maybe she thought there was a mix-up at the hospital. Maybe the nurses accidentally switched babies. That’s happened, hasn’t it? Switched at birth. Maybe that explained how Tyler could be the son of the Soccer Mom Strangler. Except for the hairbrush.”

  She looked away.

  “Leah paid over three times as much for the maternity test than she did for the paternity test. Do you know why?”

  No response.

  “Because the sample she submitted was from a hairbrush, not a swab. The DNA had to be extricated from the hair on the brush. It’s harder to do, takes longer, and so it’s more expensive. So I ask myself, ‘Why would Leah send her hairbrush and pay three times as much for the results of the test when she could simply swab her own cheek?’”

  Rachel sank down in her chair, arms folded over her chest. Her “#1 Mom” charm lay untouched on her chest, its shine dulled from all of her fidgeting.

  “You and I both know why. She used your hairbrush. Guess what else? The sample she sent in for the maternity test for Tyler wasn’t Tyler’s. The profile doesn’t match the profile Genechek has on file for Tyler for the paternity test. But guess whose profile it does match?”

  Again, no response.

  “Ding, ding, ding!” Connor hollered, simulating a bell and startling Rachel into meeting his eyes. “Jackpot! It’s the Soccer Mom Strangler. Congratulations, by the way, you’re officially a grandmother.”

  Rachel closed her eyes. Tears leaked from the corners. Her shoulders shook.

  “Does your husband know that your son is the Soccer Mom Strangler?”

  She opened her eyes. Her expression was both tortured and resigned. “He doesn’t know that D.J. is my son. Please. No one knows.”

  “Please what?” Connor barked a laugh. “You think there is a scenario here where no one finds out that this kid is your son? For all we know, you’re in collusion with him. You could be going to prison. He’s killed five women, that we know of, including one of my colleagues. He is never going to stop hurting people until we catch him. So I need to know what you know. Now. No more lies.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  SEVENTEEN MONTHS EARLIER

  She hated herself, before, during, and after. Even as the pleasure of the earth-shattering orgasms coursed through her, she hated herself. Daily, she weighed the pleasure against her shame: the satisfaction of somehow besting Jim against the cost, should she get caught. The whole affair didn’t last long. A few months. The sneaking around, alone, was enough to give Leah a heart attack. She didn’t understand how other people did this. D.J. seemed completely unaffected by the stress of it, although they never discussed it.

  They didn’t talk much. It wasn’t that kind of relationship. Besides, Leah was usually rendered speechless by him—by the way he looked, by the confidence with which he touched her, took her, by the hunger in his eyes when he gazed at her. She was torn between feeling like some sort of centerfold model and defenseless prey. She didn’t understand his insatiable desire for her. No one had ever wanted her the way D.J. did. A part of her was always waiting for the punch line. Was she on some sick version of Candid Camera or Punk’d?

  At first, the intensity of his lust was electrifying. He would wait until she got the kids down for bed at night, and then he would sneak into her house while Jim was at work. She rarely heard him enter. There were nights she even locked the doors, but still, he found his way in. She would be putting in a load of wash or clearing off the perpetually messy kitchen table, and suddenly he’d appear behind her, his hungry mouth on her neck, his hands all over her. He’d do whatever he wanted with her body, speaking only to give her instructions:

  “Take off your shirt.”

  “Lie down.”

  “Ride me.”

  Occasionally, he would pay her a crass compliment that made her skin burn like she had just jumped into a pit of lava:

  “You’re so fucking hot.”

  “I love your tits.”

  He said other, dirtier things to her too. Things she could never repeat to another human being. Even thinking about the things he said after the fact gave her hives. She had never watched pornography, but she wondered if that’s where he learned such things.

  One night, they had just finished an especially acrobatic session in the laundry room when little Hunter wandered in. His tiny face was foggy and scrunched with sleep, his hair flattened on one side of his head. He carried his stuffed T. rex in one arm. The room was dark, thank goodness. Leah shrieked when she saw him, pushing D.J. away from her. Thankfully, he disappeared into the shadows as Leah scooped Hunter up and made a beeline for the door. She held him against her naked skin and hustled him back to his room.

  “Mommy,” he said. “I was looking for you.”

  She couldn’t catch her breath. “I was doing laundry, Bug,” she said in a shaky voice.

  He poked her breast. “You’re naked.”

  She smiled tightly. “I spilled soda on my clothes and had to put them in the washer. Now you stay here while Mommy goes to her room for pajamas.”

  “Mommy, there was a man in our house.”

  Her skin felt like ice. She was certain her son could feel her heart pounding in her chest. “Oh, honey,” she said. “There was no man. You were just dreaming, okay, sweetie?”

  He rubbed his eyes. “Did you check?”

  She smoothed his hair away from his face with one hand. “I sure did. There was no man. It was just a dream. Go back to sleep, okay, Bug?”

  “Okay, Mommy.”

  She tucked him back into his toddler bed, which was just a twin mattress on the floor. They’d done away with his crib a few months earlier after he kept climbing out of it. She kissed his forehead and went to her bedroom to put some clothes on. Once she was sure Hunter had fallen back to sleep, she went in search of D.J., but he was gone.

  She didn’t see him for three days after that. Every time Hunter spoke in front of other people, Leah held her breath, just waiting for him to talk about the man he had seen in their house, but he didn’t bring it up again. Apparently, he believed it really was a dream, or he simply didn’t remember.

  The next time D.J. snuck in, she managed to sidestep him before he could touch her. She had been at her kitchen sink, washing dishes, ears pricked for the sound of him creeping up on her. She put the kitchen table between them in what, to anyone else, might look like a child’s game of keep-away. D.J. laughed. “Leah,” he said.

  She extended a soapy hand in his direction. “Stop,” she said. “You stay over there.”

  Again, he laughed, but she needed him on the other side of the room if she was going to talk to him. “We can’t do this anymore,” she told him.

  A grin remained on his face. His eyes wandered from her face to her breasts. She could practically feel his gaze, like two hands groping her. She tugged at the collar of her T-shirt.

  “Why?” he said. “’Cause your kid saw us? What is he—one? He won’t remember.”

  “He’s two and he does remember things. All I need is for him to tell Jim that he saw you here with me.”

  D.J.’s eyes drifted back
to hers. “So what?”

  Her cheeks flamed. “So what? My marriage—”

  This time his laughter was sharp and derisive. “Your marriage? Really, Leah? You expect me to believe that you give two shits about your marriage? You expect me to believe you care if that dumbass you’re married to finds out? I know he’s never fucked you properly.”

  “D.J.”

  He moved around the table and she moved in concert, maintaining the distance between them. His tone shifted. “I like the way you say my name. Say it again.”

  “No.”

  “Leah.”

  “Why are you even with me?” she blurted.

  It was the question that had plagued her from the very first time he’d screwed her in the garage, but that she did not want the answer to. She thought of the half-naked twit he’d been with the first time she’d met him. He could have any woman. With his male-model good looks, his mysterious little smirk, and those muscles that rippled every time he moved, any straight woman would swoon instantly over him. He could have a young, scantily clad idiot for each day of the week if he wanted to, and yet he was visiting Leah every night, doing things to her she didn’t even know were possible.

  His gaze swept downward, toward the table. Instantly, she thought of the time they’d done it on top of the table and shivered. He looked back up at her from beneath long eyelashes, taking on a boyish, almost shy look. “Why don’t you believe that you’re sexy?”

  It was her turn to laugh. “Please, D.J. I know what I am. I just don’t think you do. You could have any woman. You could have a different woman every night if you wanted.”

  He placed both hands on the table and leaned toward her. “I don’t want other women. I want you, Leah. Maybe that doesn’t make sense to you, but it does to me. You’re a beautiful, sexy, smart, sophisticated woman with the hottest ass I’ve ever seen.”

  She had to look away from him. Her skin was on fire. His sneakered feet appeared inches from her own bare feet. With one hand, he tipped her chin, trapping her with his gaze. “What do you want, Leah? You want me to be more careful? I’ll be more careful.”

  His fingers crawled around to the back of her neck, pulling her in, pressing himself against her. She felt his erection straining against his jeans. She was aquiver with the memory of the last time he’d been inside her.

  “You can keep your dope of a husband, and I can keep fucking you.”

  “D.J.,” she protested, but his mouth crashed down on hers with a force that drove all reasoned thought from her mind. That night, she went to bed raw, sore, and hating herself more than ever.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  Rachel broke down, sobbing loudly, her whole body shuddering. It went on for several minutes. Connor left the room to retrieve a box of tissues he had spotted in their den, then came back, and she didn’t seem to notice. He pushed the tissues across the table. She plucked one out and blew her nose. Her chest heaved. She took several more tissues and dabbed her eyes before balling the tissues up in her fists.

  “I was fifteen, okay? D.J.’s dad was older—like, a lot older. He was a professor at the college. I used to walk my dog past his house. The dog was the worst. It never listened. Walking it was a nightmare, but my mom made me walk it. ‘You wanted it,’ she always said. D.J.’s dad saw me struggling. He had dogs. He was good with them. He helped me train that little asshole of a dog. Then, you know, things started to happen.”

  “Did he rape you?” Connor asked.

  She smiled ruefully and blew her nose again. “That would make things so easy, wouldn’t it? If I just claimed rape. I was the neglected teenage daughter of a single mom with more daddy issues than there are stars in the sky. I was the perfect target for a pedophile, right? Lonely, attention seeking. It probably would have been more accepted if I said he raped me. But he didn’t. He was kind and patient and caring, and I thought I loved him. When I got pregnant, he promised to care for us—for me and his child.”

  Here, more tears streaked her face. “He promised, and he kept that promise. He didn’t have to, but he did.”

  Connor frowned. “But you were fifteen. I’m not clear on the law in Pennsylvania, but in most states the age of consent is older than fifteen.”

  She nodded and dabbed her eyes. “We tried to keep things secret. We knew he’d be in deep shit if anyone found out. Of course, eventually, my mom figured it out. I was very stupid back then—if you didn’t already guess that—so I confessed everything to her, thinking she would understand.”

  “But she didn’t?”

  “Not even a little bit. She immediately kicked me out, and then she called the police. Accused him of rape. Lucky for us, we lived in a small town, and he was very friendly with the police chief and the DA. I was already staying with him because I had nowhere else to go. If they prosecuted him, I’d be on the street with a newborn. I refused to testify, anyway. They made it go away, kept it out of the press. He kept his job. I moved in. We were going to get married the day after I turned eighteen.”

  She sighed and looked up at the ceiling. “Such plans we had. Then Dylan—D.J.—came. I was wildly unprepared for a baby. You have to understand: I was sixteen years old. I’d gotten swept up in the drama and excitement of it all, this intriguing older man who was willing to move heaven and earth to be with me. The wild and crazy sex. The plans. So many plans. He wasn’t wealthy, but he had some money. We were going to travel the world together. Make love in a dozen different countries.”

  “Well,” Connor said, “a baby will throw a wrench into those kinds of plans.”

  “No kidding. It was awful. And D.J. was the worst baby. I think I knew something was wrong with him right away. Sebastian—that’s his dad’s name—thought it was postpartum, and I always wondered if he was right, but then I had the twins and it was completely different.”

  “You didn’t bond with D.J.?”

  She shook her head and lowered her voice. “It was more than that.”

  Connor waited for her to continue, but when several seconds of silence slipped past, he said, “Rachel?”

  She looked at him again. “You said no more lies, right?”

  “No more lies.”

  She looked him dead in the eye, and without blinking, she said, “I hated him.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  SIXTEEN MONTHS EARLIER

  Jim became an afterthought, his complaints and demands white noise. For once in their marriage, she was happy they worked opposite shifts. She left him a plate of food for when he came home at one in the morning. He handed the kids off to her at three thirty, and they saw each other on weekends. He still climbed on top of her some nights, waking her with sex that was as unremarkable as it was undemanding. She didn’t care. For once, she didn’t want to punch him in the face every time she saw him. For once, she didn’t have knotted muscles across her shoulder blades every second of the day. She laughed more and started to enjoy dinner with her children each night instead of dreading its hectic and unpredictable nature.

  One night, Hunter told her she was silly. They’d been making mashed potato sculptures on their plates, all three of them. They’d gone on until their sides ached from laughter, until their dinners were cold and small clumps of mashed potatoes were strewn all over the place, even in Peyton’s hair. For once, Leah wasn’t annoyed that she’d have to give them both baths after dinner. She was having fun with her kids.

  Peyton said, “I love Silly Mommy.”

  Leah laughed, molding a head for her mashed potato turtle. “Oh yeah? You like her better than Regular Mommy?”

  Peyton shrugged. “Yeah,” she said with a guileless four-year-old’s honesty. “Regular Mommy is mad all the time. Silly Mommy is happy.”

  Hunter smashed his fork into a pile of mashed potatoes he claimed was a dinosaur and hollered, “Silly Mommy!”

  Of course her newfound silliness came with a price. The stress of compartmentalizing her affair was enormous. When D.J. wasn’t screwing her, she had to prete
nd that he didn’t exist. There was no other way. The alternative was to deal with what a horrible person she’d become—a liar and a cheater. She simply couldn’t. During the day, she locked thoughts of D.J. into her mental Did Not Happen drawer. There were more than a few lies in that drawer, most of them from her childhood.

  Of course, it took enormous effort to keep that drawer closed. She pictured herself in some musty, old room filled with drawers, driving her entire body weight against that one drawer. It was mentally exhausting. She started forgetting things at work. Important things. At home, she forgot to pay the electric bill; she burned casseroles in the oven, left lights on, left water running in the tub until it overflowed, forgot to take Hunter to his well visit. Flightiness became her new normal. One morning, after she drove to work with both kids still in the back—bypassing day care altogether—she knew she was in trouble. Thank goodness the kids were old enough to say, “Are we going to work with you, Mommy?”

  She had a flash of herself as one of those parents who left their children to die in hot cars. Her kids had always been foremost on her mind. Even at her most sleep-deprived, she never forgot about them. She never understood what the hell happened with those parents who forgot about the kids in their cars. How did you forget about the single most important thing in your life?

  Like this, a voice in her head said. Exactly like this.

  Like an idiot, she didn’t ascribe her newfound mental fog to D.J. at first. She figured it was a physical problem: chronic fatigue syndrome, lupus, early onset Alzheimer’s, a stroke, maybe even a brain tumor. Okay, so maybe she shouldn’t have googled “memory loss” before she went to the doctor. Her family doctor gave in and ordered an MRI of her brain. When it came back normal, he told her that her symptoms were merely the result of stress.

  “Has anything changed in your life in the last couple of months?” he asked. “Any recent stressors?”