“To get straight to the point,” he said, peeling himself off the door, “as you requested, Mrs. Kim. The facts are these: last night at 9:37 p.m. the killer slipped into your mother’s room and stabbed her with what preliminary evidence says is a long, serrated blade. After a thorough search, that blade was not found in your mother’s room.”
My mind spun.Not found in her room?“But that means—”
“The killer took it with them,” he finished.
I tossed my head, temples throbbing. “But you said 9:37? How could you know—?”
“Your mother’s bedside table clock was knocked over in the... in the frenzy of the attack. The clock broke and the hands stopped at that exact time, allowing us to be precise. But that’s not all the preliminary investigation told us,” he continued. “There was blood absolutely everywhere in that room except for one spot—where the killer stood.
“You threw a white party, Mrs. Kim,” he said, throwing my shoulders up at how fast he whipped the conversation back to me. “Everyone, including the party staff, was wearing all white. There is absolutely no hiding bloodstains on an all-white canvas. Even a few drops would’ve been noticed. But this wasn’t a few drops.
“The killer would’ve had to leave the bedroom drenched in blood and holding a bloody knife, but even though ten people went upstairs and walked past my fellow officers last night, none of them came back in such a state.
“Which brings me to my original question,” he said, voice more serious than I’d ever heard it. “Are there any secret ways in and throughout this manor? Because either one of those ten people planned the murder far enough in advance to have an identical white outfit stashed nearby along with a hiding spot for the weapon—allowing them to bypass the officer without raising suspicion.
“Or the murderer didn’t need to worry about any of that—because they used a handy network of back staircases and hidden halls to move around freely and escape unseen.” His gaze was like a lance through the chest. “Which is it, Mrs. Kim?”
My breaths came in rough, short pants. Memories flashed through my mind of the hallway with the flickering light bulb. The red carpet. The white gloved hand squeezing my fingers so tight the tips turned blue.
I saw it all, opened my mouth, and lied. “No,” I replied—my voice reflecting a calm I didn’t feel. “There are no secret rooms, stairs, or hallways in the manor.”
“Are you certain?”
“Yes,” I lied again. “I’ve lived here my whole life. Wandered in every room. Messed with all the things adults tell little kids not to touch. If there was some secret passage, I’d have found it by now.”
“Because they were common for the time period this manor was built,” he pressed. “During Prohibition, many wealthy people had secret rooms and passages built to hide the alcohol bootleggers were pirating up and down this coast. If this house was one of them, there’d be no reason to believe the estate agent would’ve known about it when they sold it to your parents. Therefore—”
“—that’s a dead end,” I broke in. “Because if the estate agent didn’t know, then my parents couldn’t know, and therefore they couldn’t share with me what they didn’t know. If we were all clueless about these hidden moonshine boltholes, the killer wouldn’t know about them either.”
His expression didn’t change. “Not necessarily.”
“Excuse me?”
“Well, it’s as you said,” he drawled, “when someone lives in a place for a long time, they... stumble over things.”
It took me a second, but then his accusation smacked me over the head.
My jaw snapped together. “No one who lives in this house murdered my mother.”
“No?” Balogun’s voice drew my attention back to her. “As Officer Davis clearly explained, we’re operating under the theory that the killer either had an identical change of clothes nearby, or there was a nineteenth exit that allowed them to bypass the other eighteen guarded ones. How could someone who entered this house for the first time last night have such a plan in place? How could someone without regular access to this manor find a hidden passage that you didn’t?” That strange, mirthless smile stretched her lips. “There’s a reason we focus our attention on those closest to the victim. It’s because it’s rarely ever anyone else.”
I looked from her, to Davis, to Kaplan, then back to Balogun. Any stereotype of schlubby detectives and incompetent officers blew out of my head. They clearly knew what they were doing, but I wouldn’t open that door—literally. Only four people knew about the secret passages in Kim Manor—and three of them were dead.
This line of thought was a dead end, and the last thing Davis was going to do was drag me down it.
“I’m not sure that tracks,” I heard myself say. “I mean, I’m not sure it’s right that a first-time guest couldn’t have stashed a change of clothes. Actually, the more I think about it, you’re dead wrong.”
A flicker of surprise flashed across her face. “Why do you say that?”
“Because I had guests coming in from all over—some of them from hours away. That’s why I told everyone they were welcome to spend the night if they decided they didn’t want to make the long drive back after the party,” I said. “So anyone planning just that would’ve brought an overnight bag, and if in that bag they had an identical white suit or dress, why the hell would I know about it? I didn’t have anyone searched on arrival.
“Also,” I said in a louder voice when Balogun opened her mouth to interrupt me. “The officers arrived when the dress arrived, but none of them took up their posts until the party started. That left hours where my earlyguests were free to roam the manor—scoping out a room with a thick layer of dust that proved it wasn’t in use because the person who was supposed to change that fact was murdered—”
Her brow twitched at the connection.
“If anyone asked them what they were doing in the room, they’d just say they were sleeping over. And, if for some reason, someone checked their bag and saw the identical outfit, they could claim they brought a backup just in case they spilled something on the main one,” I said to their slightly slack-jawed expressions. “In fact, most of our guests likely did exactly everything I just said for innocent reasons—not murderous ones.
“So no,” I said clearly, “you haven’t narrowed your suspect pool down to my family. Not even close. And the fact that you think you have and that you walked me in here believing you were going to pull a gotcha, has me very concerned. I’m a twenty-eight-year-old former influencer and I blew holes through your best theory in two minutes. What does that say about your ability to find my mother’s killer, or Mrs. Prado’s?”
