I couldn’t hear much of anything over the dogs down the street… They seemed to quiet once he was gone.
Barking dogs. I’d heard dogs barking in the parking lot that night at The Lush as I’d loaded Harris into my van. And again later that night, while I’d been on the phone with my sister. According to the news report on the night she went missing, Patricia didn’t own any dogs. But Aaron had adopted plenty.
Had Molly and Pirate been with him in his car?
I thought back to the brown Subaru I’d seen in Patricia’s garage, with two human stick figures and two stick-figure dogs. In the photo in the break room at the shelter, Patricia had been sitting beside Aaron with Molly and Pirate, and she hadn’t been wearing her ring. Had Aaron been more than a friend? Had he been a boyfriend? A lover? Had they planned a future together? Was that whythey were both so eager to be rid of Harris? And if so, who’d helped Aaron shut Harris in my garage?
If he really had been alone, like Mrs. Haggerty said, how would he have kept the garage door from slamming closed without being close enough to… hold it?
I turned to Vero and took the ice cream scoop from her hand, dumping it in the ice bucket. “Give me your belt,” I said.
“My belt?”
“Just trust me.”
Vero unbuckled her leather belt and pulled it through the loops in her jeans. It was thinner than the one Aaron had been wearing the day we saw him at the shelter, but it looked just as sturdy. “Stay with the kids. I’ll be right back.”
I hit the remote button on the wall of the garage. Late-afternoon sunlight poured over the concrete and I stood in the middle of it, staring up at the tracks, searching for a way to use the belt to keep the door from falling, the way Aaron had used his to prop open Sam’s kennel.
In the front corner of the garage, at the top of the tracks near the curve where they turned, two metal bars intersected. I grabbed the step stool, climbed up, and looped the belt around them, securing it just below the bottom of the open door. Then I moved the stool to the center of the garage, climbed up, and pulled the release cord.
There was a soft snap as the door disengaged from the motor. It sagged, suspended in place against Vero’s belt.
Aaron had killed Harris.
Not Theresa and Aimee. Not Feliks and Andrei. Aaron had done it alone. He knew the door would slam and I would come running, the same way the self-closing kennels had wreaked havoc inthe shelter when Vero set the animals loose and let the doors bang closed. Aaron had tied his belt to the track. Then he’d pulled the cord to free the door from the motor. Quietly, he’d unhooked his belt with one hand, and he’d gently lowered the door.
But if Aaron had killed Harris to be with Patricia, why bother leaving town now that Patricia was dead? I was the only person who knew the truth about Harris’s death, and, as guilty as I looked, I wasn’t any more inclined than Aaron to report what I’d uncovered. With Patricia gone, Aaron could just as easily have stayed here in town and moved on with his life. Unless…
Patricia Mickler no longer exists. I made certain of it.
I thought back to my conversation with Irina in the gym. She’d never come out and stated Patricia was dead. Only that there was nothing of Patricia Mickler left to find.
He has friends that can make almost anyone disappear… new name, new passport, and wipe them off the map as if they’d never existed.
What if Patricia Mickler wasn’t dead after all? What if Irina had only helped her friend disappear? What if they’d dumped her car and her personal effects in the reservoir and staged her death? What if Patricia was just someone else now, living someplaceelse, withsomeoneelse? Someone who would take care of her and make her feel safe.
The car I’d seen in her garage must have been Aaron’s—the stick figures on the rear window must have been them and their family of dogs. What if they’d driven off into the sunset in his Subaru? Aaron and Patricia could be anywhere. Wiped off the map, as if they’d never existed. Which left me—soon to be the only suspect in Harris Mickler’s death, my word against the mountain of evidence against me.
Numb, I stepped down from the stool.
My phone buzzed relentlessly in my pocket. I fished it out, surprised to see I’d missed a dozen calls: my parents, Georgia, Sylvia… All of them probably to congratulate me on the article in the newspaper. I couldn’t stomach the idea of talking to a single one of them.
Tires screeched into my driveway. I whirled, flinching as a silver bumper stopped inches from my knees. Nick’s face was furious through the windshield of his sedan. He pointed at me with a hard finger, then at the passenger seat. “Get in,” he mouthed.
I looked longingly at Vero’s shadow in my kitchen window before opening Nick’s car door and sliding in. He put the car in reverse and hit the gas, fishtailing out of my driveway, silently seething as we peeled away from my house. He made a hard turn into a cul-de-sac down the street and jerked to a stop at the curb, refusing to look at me.
“Funny thing happened when I left your place. I called my commander,” he said, “to tell him I was onto something big, that I had news. He informs me he has news, too. Then he tells me all about some press release in the local rag.” Nick pulled a newspaper from the glove box and tossed it in my lap. “Apparently,I’mthe unsuspecting hotshot cop, and my investigation has just been some big research project for your book.”
“It wasn’t like that… It’s not what you—”
“I’m on suspension.” The words stole all the air from the car. “Pending a review by my superiors. They took my piece. They took my badge. And now I have to wait until Monday to walk into my boss’s office and explain why I let a novelist with a personal stake in the case work my investigation. By then, the whole damn thing may be over.”
My mouth went dry. “What do you mean, over?”
“My boss took over my case. He’s coordinating with Fauquier County PD to move forward with the request for a warrant. If they can get it tomorrow, they’ll have that field torn open and have Feliks and Theresa in custody by the time I get my badge back.”
“I’m sorry.” My apology spilled out on a panicked breath. “No one was supposed to know what the book was about. I only sent it to my agent. She got carried away and—”
