by Layton Green
She waved a hand in dismissal. “What about her?”
“Were you troubled by what David wrote on her Facebook page ?” “Troubled? Of course I was troubled. Angry with him? Disappointed? Yes. Shocked? Not really.”
Her answer surprised him. “Why do you think he wrote that ?” “Have you met her ? She’s about as subtle as an alley cat in heat. She flirts with her students, for god’s sake.”
“You don’t think there was something—”
“Of course not. I would have known.”
“Did he tell you why he did it?”
“He said she gave out grades based on looks and by how much attention the male students paid her. He got fed up with it and decided to do something about it. According to David, she calmed down after his post.”
Preach wondered how much of this was a mother’s rationale. “I didn’t hear anything like that from the principal. She said David never disclosed his reasons.”
Claire gave a thin smile. “He didn’t have any direct proof, so he made me promise not to say anything. He was afraid he’d get into even more trouble.” She seemed to sense he wasn’t convinced. “David had a temper, but it was always connected to his hero complex. He was always sticking up for kids who were bullied.”
The explanation for the Facebook post didn’t ring true to Preach, but he could tell Claire had chosen to believe the story David had fed her. Now that he was dead, he didn’t have the heart to press her. Not unless he had to.
But he was damn sure going to double-check Lisa Waverly’s alibi. “One last thing,” he said. “I’m sorry if this is insensitive, but when I asked Brett for his cell phone, he refused to give it to me.”
She grew very still. “What? Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s probably nothing. He has a right to privacy. But have you ever had any reason to . . . suspect him of being dishonest ?”
It took her a moment to find her voice. “Brett has his faults, but as far as I know, he’s been up front with me.”
She looked as if she wanted to say more, then didn’t.
“Claire ? If there’s anything I need to know, please tell me.”
“It’s nothing concerning David. I just . . .” She reached over and laid her palm atop his hand. “You don’t need to know about my relationship issues. You have a job to do.”
She let her hand linger long enough for a tingle of warmth to spread through him, then withdrew it before it veered into inappropriate territory.
The room, the gas fire flickering a few feet away, the heat from Claire’s touch: it all felt far too warm. Thoughts of Ari flooded his mind, and he pushed to his feet, feeling guilty. “I’ll be in touch,” he said, a little too sharply.
She didn’t seem to notice the change in tone. “Please do.” Her voice turned cold, and a flash of fury consumed her eyes. “And you can expect Brett to turn over his phone today.”
After leaving Claire’s house, Preach sat in his car with his hands on the wheel, still unsure about what had transpired between them at the end of the conversation, but not liking it one bit. Her scent lingered in his mind, and he worked furiously to displace it, summoning a memory of Ari and drinking deeply.
It was natural to look at another woman and feel attraction, even arousal. That was biology. He understood that.
It was how one acted in response that mattered.
Feeling the need to hear Ari’s voice, he tried her phone but got her voice mail. He decided to send her a text instead. She would see it long before she listened to her messages.
After pushing out a long breath, he stepped out of his car to talk to a few of the neighbors. He scanned the houses within view and saw no sign of a security camera. No easy insight into the night David disappeared.
He left his car in front of Claire’s house and walked next door to a mid-century modern with tall windows. No one answered his ring. He tried the next one over and got a similar response. Moving to the other side of Claire’s house, he knocked on the door of a blue Cape Cod with a tidy front garden. A gaunt black woman in her sixties answered the door, wearing house slippers and a beige cotton wrap.
He introduced himself, flashed his badge, and explained why he was there. The woman, who introduced herself as Sharon Tisdale, retired professor of sociology at UNC, was the same person Bill had interviewed.
“We’re all in shock,” she said. “He was so nice, so . . .”
Alive, Preach wanted to finish for her. He was so alive.
Though a homicide was always difficult to process, he knew it was the abruptness of death, the sudden cessation of a living thing, that caused the dazed look of incomprehension in witnesses and surviving family members. The brute shock of mortality.
How could someone whom you talked to every day, broke bread and shared life with, simply cease to exist ?
“I’ve only lived here a year,” she continued, “but he mowed my lawn a few times during the summer and always stopped to chat. God, how do these things happen? It’s so unfair.” She pressed a hand to her forehead and squeezed her eyes shut.
After a moment he said quietly, “Let’s talk about the night David was last seen alive. October 2. I understand you were home.”
“Yes. I was. I already talked to another officer.”
“That’s okay. I’m the detective in charge, and I’m just revisiting a few things. What do you remember about that night ?”
Her angular face turned solemn, which lengthened it even more. “I’m retired, my husband passed, and my daughter just moved to Raleigh. I spend a lot of time in my living room, and I have a good view of Claire’s house.”
She seemed to be apologizing in advance, and he let her continue.
“I remember them arguing outside that night—”
He cut her off. “Wait—did you say outside ?”
“In the front garden.”
It was probably just a slip, but Claire had told him they argued inside. He said, “Would you characterize it as a typical argument ?”
Her head wove back and forth, waffling. “It was loud. Claire must feel so awful about that.”
“There was shouting?”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Screaming.”
“Could you hear anything that was said?”
She mumbled something, and he asked her to repeat it.
“I hate you,” she said. “David told her he hated her.”
“And what did she say in response ?”
“It got quiet after that.”
“Was there any physical violence?”
“I don’t think so.”
“But you weren’t watching and can’t be sure.”
She gave a miserable nod. “What is this about, Detective ?”
“I’m just gathering information.”
He could tell she wanted to ask if Claire was a suspect. As her eyes slid away, he said, “Did you hear anything else strange that night ?”
She gathered the fabric of her wrap tighter at the throat. “Not that I can think of. David left and came back later that night—”
“Wait—you saw him come back home ? What time ?”
“I heard him. The Jeep has a distinctive engine.” She thought again. “I finished Jimmy Fallon and read for a while, so maybe midnight? Twelve-thirty?”
“Ma’am, I need you to think carefully. This could be very important. Did David come home alone that night?”
“I don’t know. As I said, I just heard the Jeep.”
“You’re sure you didn’t hear another voice ? Two sets of footsteps ?” “Can one make out footsteps from inside a house?” she asked mildly.
“You’re right. Okay. What else do you remember?”
“Nothing. I caught a glimpse of Claire and David in the house just before I turned out the light, and that’s it.”
He felt a prickle of gooseflesh creep along his arms. Claire had told him that David had driven off in a rage after their argument, and that she had taken an Ambien, fallen asl
eep, and never seen him alive again.
“Caught a glimpse?” he said. “What do you mean? Were you outside?”
“No, no. It’s—I can show you, if you want.”
“Please.”
She led him down a hallway to the master bedroom at the rear of the ground floor. “Excuse the mess,” she said, picking up a few clothes and then pointing at a set of sliding glass doors that opened onto the back garden. The bedroom wall angled slightly to the left, enough to afford a view of one of Claire’s windows. A set of gauzy curtains covering the window did little to conceal the interior from view.
“Do you know what room that is ?” he asked.
“Claire’s study, last time I was inside. At night, if there’s a light on, you can see right through the window. Not perfectly, but enough to see an outline. I can’t say for sure who was there that night, but David had just come home, so I assumed . . .”
She trailed off, and he felt his hand tightening at his side. “You assumed what? Were you able to get a look at the other person?”
“I tried not to look, to be honest. I wish they would change those curtains.” Her eyes slid over to the glass doors, and she sounded as if she didn’t want to answer. “But I saw two people for sure, in the center of the room. A larger figure who looked like David, and someone thinner I assumed was Claire.”
10
“I need you to think very hard,” Preach said, watching the retired professor carefully. “Do you remember anything at all about this woman you saw through the window? Hair length, clothes, shoes, hat, glasses ?”
Sharon was staring intently out of the sliding glass doors, as if trying to recreate the image. “From the position of the window, I could only see her from the waist up. I don’t remember any distinguishing clothing, and I can’t even remember if I saw long hair or not.”
“What made you think it was a woman? Besides the slim build?”
“That’s it, I guess,” she said after a moment. “I hadn’t thought about it before you asked. The memory just sort of . . . slips away.”
“Recall is hard,” he said, distracted as he considered the implications. The fact that someone was with David later that night, in his house, was monumental.
The person Sharon had seen could have been any woman or, for that matter, one of David’s smaller male friends. A prosecutor would have a hard time, maybe an impossible one, using the testimony in court. But in terms of the investigation, it meant that someone David knew—and knew well—was with him that night.
And that person could have been Claire.
His throat felt dry as he pressed Sharon for more information. After failing to learn anything else of use, he told her to expect a sketch artist, thanked her for her time, and stepped outside. He ran a hand through his hair as he walked back to his car, his gaze slipping back to Claire’s house.
Anything could have happened that night. The murderer and an accomplice could have confronted David in the house while Claire was asleep. Or David might have brought a friend or a girl back to the house, then gone off with someone else.
If I think long enough, I can come up with anything.
Yet Claire had lied about where the argument had taken place. Why? Was it a lapse of memory, or was she covering something up ?
Should he confront her now or wait for more evidence ? Was he allowing their personal connection to impact his judgment?
Or, God forbid, his feelings?
He snarled and walked faster to his car. He wasn’t that kind of police officer. He wasn’t that kind of man.
There was zero evidence of motive. He couldn’t even imagine what it would take for a mother to kill her own son, even in a fit of rage. He had never heard of such a thing, outside of severe mental illness.
Check your facts, buddy. Just the other day, a stepfather in North Carolina took his three-year-old daughter out to the woods and shot her. It was all over the papers.
That was a stepfather, he chided himself. A male. A soulless bastard.
No sane mother would ever harm her own child.
But there are cases like that every year, all over the world.
There’s always an exception. Always a case for evil.
Yet the night he had told Claire about David’s death, every instinct Preach possessed screamed that her response to the news was genuine.
Claire is very intelligent and has been an actress since high school. She even got a few professional gigs. Or maybe her guilt is genuine because she killed him in a fit of rage, and now she’s aghast at what she’s done.
With one hand on the car door, he took a moment to steady himself. Just investigate, he told himself. Do your job. Still debating as to whether to confront Claire, his gaze slipped to the tract of woods behind the houses.
He still believed the swamp behind Barker’s Mill was a dump site. He needed to conduct a full forensics search of the house, and he wasn’t sure why David might have gone or been lured outside. But if nothing else, it would give him something to do while he considered his options.
As he left the car and strode through the space between Claire’s house and Sharon’s, out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw Claire watching him from a window. He turned and saw a flutter of
curtains.
Jaw firm, he thrust his hands into the pockets of his overcoat, reached the tree line, and stopped to peer at the back of Claire’s house. The kitchen was at the rear of the first floor. Between the kitchen and her office was a mudroom with a door that opened onto the back yard. The same door he was looking at right now.
His eyes ran along the wall of hardwoods lining the edge of the forest. Pine and hickory and sweet gum. The woods bookended the entire subdivision, and he wasn’t sure how far they ran, or to where. He made a mental note to have Terry check.
A footpath cut into the woods about twenty feet past Claire’s house. After toeing through the leaves piled alongside the path, he stopped to listen. Songbirds chirped, a hawk shrieked in the distance, and squirrels clambered over tree limbs. His own pulsebeat pounded in his head.
Walking as slow as poured syrup, he proceeded down the path, canvassing the terrain for anything out of the ordinary. Thirty feet in it linked up with a wider trail, and plenty of footprints made it obvious the path was in use. Most of Creekville’s neighborhoods were connected to a greenway or a wilderness trail of some sort.
A few hundred yards in, something caught his eye. A fallen tree trunk beside the path, covered in moss and fungus. The woods were covered with them, but this one had a jagged impression a few feet from the end of the log nearest the path. He bent to inspect it. The width of the impression was about the size of a shoe.
The position of the hole raised Preach’s hackles. As if someone had stepped off the path in the dark for some unknown reason, and their shoe had plunged right through the rotten wood. It could have been an animal or kids playing chase, or a split in the wood when it fell. But something felt off.
He bent to inspect the log and took a picture ofit. After that, he rose and slowly circled it, toeing through the leaves and brush. He turned over the top layer, displacing moldy pine straw and a host of insects. After widening his search, he caught a glimpse of sunlight glinting on metal. Expecting a coin, he leaned down, brushed aside the leaves, and found a silver cigarette lighter. It had a protruding lip to aid the thumb swipe and an elegant floral pattern etched in gray lines on both sides. A vintage piece. He carefully dropped it into an evidence bag.
Another hour of searching turned up nothing else in proximity to the log. He could have spent all week digging through the woods. Still, his interest piqued, he kept an eye out on the way back, letting his gaze roam higher, not focused on the path alone. A hundred yards or so away, he spotted a pile of leaves that gave him pause.
Hundreds of leaf piles dotted this stretch of woods alone. Leaves sitting atop fallen logs and brush piles, leaves bunched in mounds over time by the wind. This one looked different for two reasons. First, the
pile was structured in a way that looked abnormal to his eye. Too circular, and not contoured enough on the top. Second—and he wasn’t positive about this—the area between the mound of leaves and the path, about ten feet of woods, looked as if it contained fewer leaves than the area around it.
Almost, he thought, as if it had been raked.
A layer of leaves still covered the ground, but leaves were dropping every day. If someone had wanted to cover something up, they would have tried to deflect suspicion by leaving some of the leaves in place.
When he probed the pile using a long stick, it went all the way through to the ground. He poked a few more places to be sure. After that, he used the stick to sweep off the top layers. The leaves in the middle of the pile weren’t as damp as he had expected. In fact, they weren’t very damp at all. He was no forest ranger, and was probably making something out of nothing. Still, stubborn as a rusty lock, he kept going, unable to let go of the thread once he had started to pull.
Moments later, his breath stuck in his throat, and he stood staring down at the pile. Suddenly feeling as if someone were watching, he glanced around the woods, then bent to sort through more of the leaves. After uncovering a few more handfuls, he was sure of what he was seeing.
Starting about halfway down the pile, some or all of the leaves had dark spots on them, ranging from dabs of discoloration to large splotches. They were all the same color, as if saturated in the same ink or painted with the same brush.
The splotches were not the sort that appear from water permeation, because these leaves were not even wet. These leaves—the entire middle of the pile—had been stained by a different substance.
And that substance, he was guessing, was blood.
11
Night Lives.
The Creekville tell-all would be Blue’s ticket to stardom. It was going to be a hit, she knew it in her bones. How did she know this? Because America, above all else, liked to be shocked. This great big, lumbering, confused, color-streaked colossus of a country had conquered the world, put a television in every house, and provided access to the information highway on every laptop. Like all great empires from history, it had nowhere left to go but down.