CHAPTER 15
Nick and I pretended to have tickets to a late show at the movies, while Vero stayed at home to keep an eye on Mrs. Haggerty and the kids. Nick drove us out of the community, checking his rearview mirror through the first few turns, making sure Mike Tran hadn’t assigned an unmarked car to stake out my house. Once he was satisfied we hadn’t been followed, he took another entrance into South Riding and parked on the street behind Mrs. Haggerty’s house.
We cut through the neighbors’ backyards on foot, past a line of tall hedges that hid us from view. Nick knelt at the base of Mrs. Haggerty’s fence.
“Should you really be doing this?” I asked as he laced his fingers together.
“Would you rather go in the front door?”
The last thing either of us needed was for Mrs. Haggerty to look out my bedroom window and see us breaking into her house.
Nick gave me a boost and I scrambled over the fence, freezing asI waited for a set of motion-sensing security lights to expose us before I remembered Mrs. Haggerty’s power was still out. Nick landed on his feet on the damp grass beside me. He took my hand, leading me around the gaping hole at the edge of Mrs. Haggerty’s rose garden. I watched the neighbors’ windows while he used Mrs. Haggerty’s key to unlock her back door.
The house was pitch-black inside.
“Why are we starting here?” I asked as I waited for my eyes to adjust. “The police already searched the whole place. And they already determined that Mr. and Mrs. Haggerty didn’t know the victim. Maybe we should be starting somewhere else.”Like Brendan Haggerty’s condo.
“I’m not buying it,” Nick said, leading me deeper into the house. “If neither of them knew the victim, why’d the killer bury the body here?”
“Probably because her garden was an easy place to dump it.”
I could just make out the shake of his head. “There’s nothing easy about hauling a two-hundred-pound corpse into the backyard of a house in a residential neighborhood without being seen, Finn. Especially when the property lines are less than thirty feet apart. Someone went to a lot of work to bury Dupree here, and I’m betting they did it for a reason. Either the Haggertys knew him or they knew the person who killed him.”
“What about Brendan?” I suggested, latching on to the opportunity to point Nick in the right direction. “He’s strong enough to move a body. And he would have had access to this house.”
“Tran already ruled him out as a suspect.”
“He ruled out Mr. and Mrs. Haggerty, too, but we’re here, aren’t we?”
Nick didn’t look convinced. “Whoever it was, there might besomething here the investigators missed.” Nick pulled his penlight from his breast pocket, careful not to let the beam veer too close to the windows as he passed it to me. “You start inside. I’ll check the garage.”
He took a small flashlight from his belt and disappeared through the kitchen. There was a soft click as the service door closed behind him.
I looked around Mrs. Haggerty’s first floor, unsure exactly what I was supposed to be looking for. I moved through the living room, fanning my light over her end tables and bookshelves as I slid picture frames and knickknacks aside to search behind them.
I pulled the cigar box on the mantel closer to the edge. It felt heavier than it looked, or at least heavier than a box of cigars was likely to weigh. I tried to peek inside it, but the lid was sealed shut. I aimed my penlight at the engraving on the gold plate. A pair of dates was etched below a set of initials. A framed photo of Mrs. Haggerty’s husband had been placed behind the box.
I shook out my hand and wiped my palm on my jeans as I realized what (or, more accurately, who) wasinthe box.
I remembered very little of Owen Haggerty. Only that he had been about as pleasant as his wife and that he had passed of a heart attack around the same time Delia had been born. He had been fit for his age when the photo had been taken. And tall, with eyes like Paul Newman’s, that gathered deep smile lines from the sun. I studied the cigar box with sick fascination. It seemed impossible that such a large man could be reduced to fit into such a tiny vessel. I wondered if there was more of him, scattered somewhere else.
I backed away, nearly tripping over a cardboard box on the floor. I knelt and lifted the lid. It was filled to the brim with family memorabilia and photo albums, all carelessly tossed inside. A sticker on the side of the box declared it was evidence—Property of LCPD.The investigators must have found nothing of value in the old photo albums and returned them after their search.
I dug through a handful of loose pictures, uncovering a stack of spiral notebooks at the bottom of the box. Their covers had been labeled with dates in Mrs. Haggerty’s shaky handwriting. I thumbed one open, recognizing it immediately as one of her neighborhood watch diaries.
My heart skipped a beat. I glanced around the corner to the kitchen, making sure Nick was still in the garage as I removed them from the box and read the dates on the covers.
They were all more than six months old.
I checked them again, searching for her entries since October, but the one diary I needed wasn’t there.
The rest of the notebooks went back five years, the earliest dated just after Mrs. Haggerty’s husband had passed away. I wondered if there was a correlation there. If she had become so obsessed about the safety of her neighborhood because she was an elderly widow living alone, or if there had been some other reason she had chosen to become so vigilant then. After all, that had also been around the same time Gilford Dupree had been buried in her yard.
I thumbed through the notebooks. They contained what I had expected, a litany of minor offenses she’d gone out of her way to record: teenagers who drove too fast, cars that played their music too loud, Girl Scouts who came to the door to sell cookies without parental supervision, door-to-door solicitors who’d been rude, and the occasional odd noises that had apparently come from my bedroom window…
My stomach turned as I spotted Steven’s name, and I realized with a stinging pang that his infidelities with our real estate agent had dated back much further than I’d known. Mrs. Haggerty hadbecome obsessed with documenting his “suspicious behaviors,” including any time he’d come home in the middle of the workday while the children and I had been out.
Only on closer inspection, not all of the surreptitious meetings at our home had been with Theresa.
