Birdie nodded, slow and thoughtful. “Could be. Could also have been pushed.” He held both palms out to them and then slammed them forward. “For a child her size, it wouldn’t have taken much force. So it could be possible not to see any contusions or lacerations from a struggle.”
“Are you ruling out that she was hit with something, then?” Alice asked.
Birdie sucked in his top lip between his teeth, then let it go. “Because of the location of the wound, a deliberate strike with a blunt object from an average-size adult would be unlikely.”
“Why’s that?” Nakamura asked.
“You would normally see a wound at the temple if that had been the case”—Birdie touched the delicate spot near his eye—“or closer to the crown of the head. If she was curled up with her knees and arms underneath her, with the top of her neck exposed, you might see this wound. Or if it was a low swing of the arm that connected underneath the base of her skull while she was turned away. But it’s not the most natural movement if you’re attacking a child.”
“All right,” Alice said. She looked down at her hands gripping the sides of the chair. Her knuckles were white splotches against the rest of her skin. Unfurling each finger from the wood, she relaxed back into the seat. “Time of death?”
“That would be between midnight and four in the morning, August first,” he said, glancing back down at the papers. “So three days ago.”
Nakamura shifted. “So not in the hours directly before she was found on the beach.”
They had been operating under two possible assumptions. One, that Ruby might have been killed the day she was kidnapped. The other was that she was killed the morning before she was found. This TOD fit neither scenario.
“Could the beach environment have skewed those readings?” she asked.
Birdie glared at her over the top of his lenses. “Are you questioning my results?”
“Never,” she said. “I’m a city girl, though. Gotta be slow with me.”
He thumbed over his mustache. “There’s always a window,” he said.
“By a day?” she asked, even though she knew what the answer was going to be.
“No.” It was definitive. “That set you two off, huh?”
Alice ignored the question. “Did you find any skin under her nails? Fibers? Errant hair?”
Birdie whistled, long and low. “She’s clean. Cleanest I’ve seen in a long time.”
“And . . . any signs of sexual abuse?” Alice asked, wishing she didn’t have to.
In a surprisingly quick move, Birdie tore the reading glasses off and dropped them on the desk. His eyes raked over her face, searching her expression for something he wouldn’t find. She’d learned long ago to hide her emotions. She wondered if he’d heard the rumors about Sterling Burke.
“No,” he finally said.
“Email me the report.” Alice pushed out of the office into the cold, sterile hallway.
“Already in your in-box, lady,” Birdie called out as Nakamura followed her.
Neither of them talked as they made their way out of the ME’s building. But when they stepped into the sun, Nakamura stopped her, wrapping his long fingers around her arm, just above her elbow.
“What if it’s not the family?”
The skin above her upper lip was already slick with sweat, and she licked at it, the salt sharp against her taste buds. “Can we not do this in the sauna that y’all call weather down here?”
Nakamura laughed, as she’d meant him to, and let her go. The thing was, he was somehow immune to the heat, the humidity. He wore light blue button-down shirts without fear of stains turning them a shade darker; his hair never frizzed or stuck to his forehead in a damp mess of strands. And then she was a perpetual mess who always looked like she’d just climbed out of a swamp.
They didn’t speak again during the short drive back to the station, and by some unspoken agreement, they kept quiet until they were in their makeshift war room in the basement. The pictures she’d hung up were still there, as were the arrows connecting them all.
She stood looking at them, her back to Nakamura, when she finally prompted, “So what if it’s not the family?”
“Want me to tell you a story?” Nakamura asked from behind her. He’d settled into the foldout chair, and she knew without having to look over her shoulder that he was squeezing his stress ball.
“No,” she said, wrapping her arms around her waist. “I want you to tell me what you actually think happened.”
Nakamura hummed, a low, surprised sound.
“The bruises,” he said. “I think that signals that there’s a chance she wasn’t led away by someone she cared about.”
“There was at least a small amount of struggle,” Alice agreed.
He nodded. “The death was also somewhat violent.”
“We don’t . . .” Alice trailed off, shoving her free hand in her pocket. “It could have been an accident.”
Nakamura nodded. “True. But the timeline is kind of weird, right?”
It was what had thrown them the most in Birdie’s office. “If it was a fit of rage or a psychotic break by someone in the family, time of death probably would have been the day Ruby went missing.” Alice laid out what they both were thinking.
“But why fake the kidnapping, hold her somewhere for three days, and then snap?” Nakamura asked.
A plan altered.
“It doesn’t rule out the family,” Alice corrected.
“How do you figure?”
Trudy had borrowed Zeke’s car on the day of the kidnapping.
Bridget had reported back that there were no traces of blood or DNA in the fabric, but what was more interesting was that there was no sign it had been cleaned recently, either. So why would Trudy have taken the car when every other time she’d had Zeke drive her?
“What if Trudy and Charlotte both wanted Ruby out? If we go on rumors, Sterling Burke is a danger to women in his household. So they hatch a plan to escape.” She paused. “But what if their plan went wrong and they got desperate?”
“Wait.” He held up his hand. “Do my ears deceive me, or did you actually just admit it could be Charlotte?”
She flipped him the bird, though without any heat.
“All right.” Alice started pacing. Her legs were restless, her body needed to move. “So they plan the kidnapping. Charlotte takes Ruby ‘to the beach,’ but in actuality, Trudy takes her in Zeke’s car to some place to hide her.”
“Enrique Lopez’s house,” Nakamura chimed in. He shrugged when she turned on him. “It would be perfect, right? No one in the family knows he has any connection to Charlotte or Trudy.”
“It’s a huge leap to say that he does,” Alice said.
“Think big, Garner.” Nakamura grinned a little, then pointed at her. “Keep going.”
“They’re planning on holding her there a few days until everything calms down a little.” Alice went back to stalking across the floor. “Something happens, Ruby falls, or is pushed. They didn’t mean for her to die.”
“Shit.” Nakamura whistled, and the sound scraped along her nerves. “That’s interesting.”
But Alice was already shaking her head. “Why keep her in the city?”
“They didn’t expect there to be so much attention?” Nakamura suggested, but she heard the doubt in his voice, too. It didn’t make sense.
Two strides had her in front of the pictures, and she slapped her palm against the wall. Hard enough so that it stung, so that it reverberated into all the bones in her hand. She wanted it to hurt more, wanted to feel those bones break. “We’re going in circles.”
When Nakamura spoke, it was careful and soothing, as if she were a wild animal. “Lopez. Let’s go back and talk to him.”
“Why?” Alice hadn’t removed her palm from the wall, and she thought that maybe it was the only thing holding her body up.
“We didn’t know what we were looking for before,” Nakamura said in that same awful tone. She h
ated when people talked to her like that. He thought she was breaking.
The terrible thing was that he might not be wrong.
“What are we looking for now?” she asked, trying to get her hands to stop shaking.
“The wound’s on the back of her head,” Nakamura said. “From what Birdie said, that seems to mean it’s more likely she fell or was pushed than straight-out attacked. Slammed against something on the floor. A fireplace, maybe. I don’t know. Let’s go see if he lets us look around.”
“I want it to be noted that I think it’s a waste of time.”
He laughed, easy as always, but there was something watchful about his eyes. “Noted. Come on.”
It was late in the day, but there were still a few people milling around the bull pen. Alice and Nakamura stopped through to direct them to start searches on Enrique Lopez before they made the drive back to the beach house.
The car that had been parked in front of it was gone, but that wasn’t surprising. They pulled up and got out anyway.
“Not here,” she said, stating the obvious even as they climbed the stairs. Nakamura’s hands were relaxed, but they hovered near his holster, and she could tell by the way he was glancing around that he was on alert.
He hummed but didn’t say anything. With one more sweeping glance around the porch, he knocked on the door.
As predicted, there was no response. He knocked again anyway, and she cocked an eyebrow at him when he looked over at her. “Think he ran out to the market?”
“It’s late.” She shrugged.
“Popped out for a beer?” Nakamura suggested, but she heard the doubt there.
On a normal day, it wouldn’t be unusual for a person to head out for the night, run errands, continue with his life. For a day when said person was interviewed by the police about a murder outside his house? Well, that wasn’t the best picture to paint.
Nakamura stepped to the side, cupping his hands so he could peer into the big living room windows. “I can’t tell if it’s different,” he said. “It wasn’t exactly well furnished before.”
It didn’t matter. There was an air of abandonment to the place that was palpable. What little clutter there had been was removed. The desk and table were empty; the shirt that had been draped over the railing was no longer there. They moved to the other side, the dining room. It was a similar scene. The table was still there, but it was the only thing left.
They’d need to get a warrant to confirm it, but Lopez was gone.
Nakamura knocked her with his elbow, catching one of her ribs in the process. “Still think this was a waste of time?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
TRUDY
August 3, 2018
Five days after the kidnapping
“What did you tell them?” Trudy asked Zeke. They were back at the park, back to that first conversation. She wished she could return to that night, when she still thought she knew what the right thing was.
Zeke’s eyes were downcast. Shame. It was so much a part of her that it didn’t take long to recognize it on the faces of others. “I’m sorry, Trudy. I had to tell them.”
“I know,” she said. She did. Who was she to blame him for sharing the secrets that he knew, when she had given him no reason to trust her and every reason to doubt? “What did you tell them?”
“Everything,” he murmured. “All of it. I even told them the rumors.”
No.
She didn’t need to ask what rumors those were. They’d never talked about it. He’d never hinted that he knew, but sometimes it was in his eyes when he looked at her. It had been there when she forgot to scrub her face clean after a shift at Mac’s, and it had been there in the club, beneath the pulsing lights.
Pacing away from Zeke, she watched the dust that kicked up beneath her Converse shoes. The police knew, then. How long would it be until everyone did? “Okay.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again, as if repeating it would compensate for the utter meaninglessness of the words.
She breathed in and then out, inhaling the smells of night and summer and flowers and stale air. There was nothing to do about it. The cops hadn’t burst into the house to drag her off in cuffs, so whatever Zeke had said hadn’t been enough to ruin her. But that also meant she had to act. And quickly.
“I need you to drive me somewhere,” she said, turning back to the boy. He was sitting on the picnic table, just as he had before. But instead of the blank expression he wore so well, his eyes were filled with concern and a bit of helplessness.
“I think we’ve been here before,” he said, smiling for the first time all night.
Trudy didn’t smile back.
“Are you running, Trudy?” Zeke asked, his own amusement sliding off his face.
She shook her head. “No.” She wasn’t. But it had been so long, living in the world of secrets, that sharing anything felt like slicing open her chest and letting someone play inside. Her tongue fumbled for the words, the right ones, the ones that would convince him. It would have to be the truth, and that was terrifying.
“It wasn’t me, Zeke,” she started, because she had to start somewhere. “I don’t know if you think it was or not, but it wasn’t me. I didn’t kill her.”
It would be a long time before she could admit that Ruby was dead without a vise tightening around her heart. But she pushed through the pain—she had to. Sadness wouldn’t find Ruby’s killer; only ruthlessness would.
“I don’t think you killed her, Trudy,” Zeke said, and a small part of her relaxed. “Remember, I saw you that day. I know you were planning on running away with her.”
That day the dream had seemed within reach. The impossibility of it all had shrunk because they were actually doing it. They were going to get her away.
“It wasn’t my aunt, either,” Trudy said, with just a hint of desperation on the edges of the words. She couldn’t prove it, didn’t even know if she believed it, but if she said it enough? Well, maybe it would be true. Maybe those haunted eyes hadn’t meant anything. Maybe Trudy would stop seeing them when she closed her own. “I know what people are saying. Even in our bubble, I know what people are saying.”
“Trudy . . .” Zeke said her name like a plea. Like he was asking her to think reasonably.
“No.” She shook her head. “She was helping me. That’s why she was at the beach. She wanted to get Ruby away.”
“But maybe.” He paused. “Maybe that’s why. She thought she could let her go, and then it was too much.”
The day at the mall, melting ice cream. A tear-drenched face. It was like a loop, those moments, running in her head.
“No,” she said.
“Did you see her at all that day?” he asked.
Trudy hadn’t. That was part of the plan, though. “She didn’t do it, Zeke.”
It was only then that she realized she was panting, that she realized she’d pressed her heel into the top of her other foot to the point where the fragile bones beneath cried out in pain. He noticed, too.
“All right, okay,” he said, his palms up and out. “Who did it, then, Trudy?”
“You’re going to think I’m crazy,” she said, consciously relaxing her muscles one by one.
“The bus has left the station on that one, hon.” Zeke laughed a bit.
So she told him. She told him about the person who’d contacted her, the one who’d given her directions to the women who helped victims of abuse, the one who had deleted their account before she could get any more information.
By the end of it, his eyes had narrowed.
“You think it was this person?” he asked, his slow drawl even thicker than usual.
“It’s not that crazy.” She spun away from him, not wanting to see the doubt. “It’s not. Why would they have so perfectly led me down this path?”
“Because they were trying to help,” Zeke said, soft like he was pulling a punch. “The information was good, wasn’t it? They helped get you the passports. Helped set you up w
ith those ladies.”
Trudy shook her head. “Which made us vulnerable. Don’t you see? It’s perfect.”
Zeke sucked his bottom lip in between his teeth but didn’t say anything further.
“Get Ruby away from the safety of the house, this town, her family.” The words were rushing out with hardly any space between them. “Create an opportunity and then seize it.”
“Trudy . . .”
“No.” Not wanting him to see her eyes, she looked down at her fists and uncurled her fingers. There were bright pink half-moons where her nails had dug into her palm. There were three heartbeats of silence and then four heartbeats more. Each one pounded in her chest.
“What about the cops?” he finally asked. “They’re going to notice you’re gone. They’re going to want to come after you.”
The breath she’d been holding escaped from her lips. “They’re distracted.”
“Enough not to notice one of Ruby’s family members left the city?” Zeke asked.
No, not that distracted. It was a terrible idea to leave in the middle of the investigation. And she also didn’t care. At least she’d know she’d tried.
“I don’t think that’s something you have to worry about,” she said. Which was only partially true. The cops probably wouldn’t look too favorably on Zeke if he helped her, but maybe they didn’t have to know.
Zeke didn’t bring it up, even though he could have. “So. Jacksonville.”
She nodded.
“You want me to drive you there,” he said.
“Yes.”
He scratched at his neck. “What exactly do you think you’ll find? Jacksonville may not be huge, but it’s a city.”
“I know,” she said. “My grandfather was born there.”
He studied her. “You think that’s significant?”
Yes. But she just shrugged. “Out of all the IP addresses, in all the world, it happens to be one from the city where my grandfather was born? And Ruby was kidnapped on the day we were trying to get her away from him?”
“You think he has something to do with it?”
She tried to think about Sterling as little as possible. He would sneak in, though, sometimes. Like when someone ordered a Scotch neat at the bar, because that’s what he’d drink after dinners with the family. Or when she spotted a Windsor knot, because he’d always loosen his when he came into her room. Or when she smelled peppermint, because he liked to chew on the leaves, and his breath always reeked of candy canes.
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