James swung his legs out of bed and stood, steadying himself as the remnants of the sleeping pill tried to pull him back down. Rachel worked as a financial consultant, managing investment portfolios for a handful of high-net-worth clients. The workoften kept her up late, especially during quarterly review periods, but she rarely pulled all-nighters anymore. They'd had conversations about work-life balance, about not letting clients take over their entire lives.
Maybe she'd fallen asleep at her desk. It had happened before, usually after particularly long stretches of work. James would find her with her head pillowed on her arms, laptop screen still glowing with whatever spreadsheet she'd been reviewing.
He pulled on the sweatpants he'd left draped over the chair beside the bed and headed into the hallway. Their house was a modest two-story in a quiet subdivision, the kind of place they'd bought five years ago with plans to fill it with children who hadn't yet materialized. Rachel's office was downstairs, converted from what the previous owners had used as a formal dining room.
"Rachel?" James called out as he descended the stairs. His voice sounded rough from sleep, slightly hoarse. "You down here?"
He got no answer. The house felt too quiet, that particular stillness that houses had in the morning when everyone should be awake but wasn't. James walked through the living room, past the kitchen where he'd normally find Rachel making coffee by now, and down the short hallway that led to her office.
The door was closed. That wasn't unusual. Rachel liked to keep it shut when she was working, said it helped her concentrate. But something about seeing it closed this morning made James uneasy. He couldn't articulate why, just a feeling that settled in his stomach and wouldn't go away.
"Rach?" He knocked lightly on the door. "You in there?"
Still nothing.
James tried the handle and found it unlocked. The door swung inward, revealing Rachel's office with its built-in shelvesand the large desk positioned beneath the window. Morning light filtered through the blinds, casting stripes across the hardwood floor.
Rachel was at her desk, exactly where he'd left her last night. But she wasn't working. She was slumped forward, her upper body draped across the desk surface, one arm hanging down toward the floor, the other stretched out toward her laptop as if she'd been reaching for it when she collapsed.
"Rachel?" James stepped into the room, his brain struggling to process what he was seeing. She must have fallen asleep. That's what he told himself in the few seconds before his still-bleary vision focused enough to see the rest of it.
Blood. Alotof blood.
It had pooled beneath her, spreading across the desk surface and dripping down onto the floor where it had formed a dark stain on the area rug. There was so much blood that James's mind initially rejected it as impossible, as something that couldn't be real.
And protruding from her back, just below her right shoulder blade, was a letter opener. It was the decorative kind with an ornate handle, the kind Rachel kept in her desk drawer for opening important correspondence. It stood upright, embedded in her upper back, the metal shaft disappearing into the fabric of her blouse.
James stood frozen in the doorway. His brain knew what he was seeing but couldn't make sense of it, couldn't reconcile the image in front of him with the reality of his life. This was his wife. This was Rachel. She'd been alive nine hours ago, working on her laptop, promising to come to bed soon.
"Rachel." He said her name again, softer this time, as if speaking quietly might somehow change what had happened. As if she might lift her head and explain that this was all a mistake, that she was fine, that the blood wasn't real.
But she didn't move. Her hair hung down across her face, obscuring her features, and her hand remained motionless where it had fallen.
James took a step forward, then stopped. The part of his brain that still functioned despite the shock was screaming at him not to touch anything. Someone had done this to Rachel. Someone had been in their house, in her office, while James slept upstairs with a sleeping pill in his system and no idea that anything was wrong.
He needed to call for help. He needed to call 911. But his legs wouldn't move, and his hands hung uselessly at his sides. James stood there in the doorway of his wife's office, staring at her body draped across the desk, the letter opener standing like a monument to violence in the morning light.
Finally, his hand found his phone in his sweatpants pocket. His fingers felt clumsy and disconnected as he unlocked the screen and dialed 911. The ringing seemed to come from very far away, as if he were hearing it through water.
"911, what's your emergency?"
James opened his mouth to answer, but the words wouldn't come. He looked at Rachel, at the blood, at the letter opener, and tried to make his brain form coherent sentences.
"My wife," he managed finally and ten, in a voice thick with oncoming tears he said, “She’s dead…” "
CHAPTER FIVE
Kate spent the time between her conversation with DeMarco and two o'clock reviewing case files in one of the conference rooms on the third floor. The Portland fraud case needed her attention, and working in the field office gave her access to databases she couldn't reach from her home laptop. She made notes on her phone as she went through transaction records, identifying patterns that the original investigators had missed.
Lunch was a bagel and fruit from the breakroom (also unchanged over the past several years), and she opted for tea rather than coffee because the breakroom coffee had always been awful.
At five minutes before two, she saved her work and headed back up to DeMarco's office. The door was open, and she could see DeMarco sitting at her desk with someone Kate didn't recognize. The woman had her back to the door, but Kate could tell from her posture that she was young, probably late twenties, sitting with the kind of rigid attention that suggested either nervousness or barely contained energy.
Kate knocked lightly on the doorframe. DeMarco looked up and gestured her inside.
"Kate, thanks for coming back up. This is Agent Erica Sloane." DeMarco stood as Kate entered. "Sloane, this is Kate Wise."
Sloane turned in her chair and stood as well. She was tall, maybe five-nine, with auburn hair cut short in a style that was practical rather than fashionable. Her eyes were dark brown and restless, constantly moving as if cataloging everything in the room. She wore dark pants and a blazer over a white shirt, standard agent attire, but somehow the clothes looked like they belonged to someone else. Kate had the immediate impressionthat Sloane was uncomfortable in her own skin, or at least uncomfortable in this particular role.
