“Lay it out for me,” Kayla ordered. She and Jericho were sitting in her office, both of them leaning back in their chairs and staring at the ceiling as if the answers to all their questions were written on the beige surface.
“We’ve got one suspect,” Jericho said. “But if we don’t get a match on the fingerprints, we don’t have enough to hold him. That what the prosecutor said?”
“It is,” Kayla agreed.
“I tracked down a guy from the national park who gave Lorraine a hard time a few months ago—he admitted it to me, seemed pretty freaked out by the whole situation. Solid alibi and doesn’t give me a bad vibe. He’s not our guy.”
“So that’s it? That’s all we’ve got?”
Jericho sighed. “We’ve got a dead cat. Seems to be the victim’s cat. I want a time of death for the critter, but from the pictures I saw, it’s been dead for longer than Lorraine. I called down for them to check its nails, and they were cut short, like Sandi said they would be. There are no ‘missing cat’ posters in the neighborhood or anything like that. It’s almost certainly her cat.” He paused to let her object to his conclusion, but she didn’t. “So that’s either a hell of a nasty coincidence or it suggests some level of stalking. The perp kills her cat, nails it to a tree. Kills her, with supplies that we think he brought with him. Takes her phone and her appointment book, which suggests that there was incriminating evidence in those items. So he was someone she knew, someone she had contact with. Someone who called her on the phone, or took calls from her, and I don’t see our nonverbal suspect being the type to do either of those things, you know?”
“You believe he’s innocent?”
“Honestly? Yeah. The psych report from the social worker says Will’s operating at first to second percentile for most mental tasks. I guess he’s better at some things than others, but overall, he’s working at a pretty basic level. IQ, low seventies. I’m not saying our perp is a criminal mastermind, but he’s thought parts of this through. And the only record of violence for Will has been spontaneous stuff, nothing premeditated. So this seems beyond his capabilitiesandout of character. The only evidence tying him to the crime is that he found the body.”
“And was covered in blood,” Kayla added. “The lab’s analyzing his clothes now, trying to figure out a splatter pattern or anything else that would help us. It’s difficult because he wore the clothes for quite a while before we got them, so there was a lot of smearing and contamination.”
“He could have got bloody from trying to pick her up or something. He might not have known she was dead, might have tried to resuscitate her. There are definitely footprints in the blood at the scene, but they’re too messed up to get a clear message out of them. So we hold him until we get the preliminary fingerprint analysis, and take it from there?”
“Sounds good,” Kayla agreed.
“In the meantime, I’m going to kick up the gears on hunting for her phone records. I assume the phone itself has been destroyed, if the killer has any sense, and it’d be easy enough to burn an appointment book. There’s no account under her name at any of the phone companies, so we’re thinking she used prepaid cards. But if we can get the phone number, we can get the call records and see what the perp’s trying to hide.”
Jericho spent the rest of the day driving around to every place in town that might have ever gotten Lorraine’s phone number from her. Doctor, dentist, bank, grocery store—they were all busts. Apparently she’d neglected her health and paid for her goods in cash, which made sense, given her source of income. The house was a rental; the landlord lived in town and went to visit her rather than calling. The man said he’d been happy to have the opportunity to check on his property and make sure it was still in reasonable shape, but Jericho got the feeling there was more to it. Like maybe the landlord had been willing to take out at least a little of his rent in trade. But there was no impression of violence from the guy, nothing that twigged Jericho’s fairly well-developed instincts for sniffing out murderers.
His last stop came courtesy of Sandi Granger’s information. The woman in the office at the Lutheran church had been a few years behind him in school, was welcoming enough, and seemed thrilled to be involved, even peripherally, in a criminal investigation.
“Technically, that’s confidential information,” she told him when he asked about the records they kept from their women’s shelter, but she said it in a way that made it clear her objection wouldn’t slow her down for long.
“It’s really important that I know about this,” Jericho tried, and gave her a mix ofsincere little boyandappreciative gentlemanin his smile.
She smiled back, said, “Hold tight,” and wheeled her chair around to face a tall bookcase along the wall. She reached for a green binder, spun around and placed it on her desk, then flipped it open.
“You don’t know the actual date she was here, do you?” she asked with a smile that was probably meant to be flirtatious.
Jericho smiled back. Never hurt to use what charm he had. “Uh, no, sorry. A few months ago, as I understand it.”
“Hmm.” She flipped a few pages. “I remember her being here. There was a woman with two kids in at the same time, and I was worried that the mom wouldn’t like her kids hanging out with—well, you know—but the mom wasn’t worried at all. And then I saw more of the mom and kids and started to wonder if maybe it should be Lorraine I was worrying about protecting.”
It was just idle chatter. There were plenty of rough women with two kids in the Mosely area. Absolutely no reason for Jericho’s radar to be pinging. But when the woman behind the desk triumphantly said, “There she is,” Jericho let his curiosity get the better of him.
He craned his neck as if he was trying to see the listing, but really he was looking at the one directly above it.Nikki C., with two children.Reason shelter needed was marked withnot given, of course, because Nikki wasn’t the sort to share her troubles with a stranger.
Goddamn it.
Nikki had taken the kids to a women’s shelter. Maybe he could twist it around, try to make it something more palatable, but he forced himself to see the truth.
Jericho had run away, and his dad had stayed behind and he hadn’t changed. He’d been an abusive asshole with Jericho, and then he’d been an abusive asshole with someone else.
Had it been Nikki or the kids? All of them? Yeah, all of them, because if someone in the home was getting beat up, it hurt everyone living there even if only one person was getting hit.
He’d known what his father was, and he’d walked away. Never made a police report, never bothered to have the damn conversation, never told Eli that beating on people weaker than him was a coward’s way out and he was no kind of man if he ever did it again. No, Jericho hadn’t thought about anyone but himself; he hadn’t done a thing to help Nikki and the kids.
He might not have been part of the problem, but he sure as hell hadn’t been part of the solution. It wasn’t just Lorraine he’d let down.
“I’ll write that number down for you,” the woman behind the desk said. She was frowning gently at him, like he’d been staring at the book for too long, and Jericho had to fight to remember what she was talking about.
“That’d be great,” he managed. “Thanks.”
She beamed at him. “I’m happy to help.”
He took the slip of paper she offered him and stumbled out of the office, then down to the street where his cruiser was parked. When he reached the car he didn’t get in, though. Instead, he carefully tucked the paper into his jacket pocket and leaned back against the hood. Things in Mosely never really changed; they just looped around back to the beginning and started the same patterns all over again.
