“I’m going to make a call,” Josie said.
It took a few minutes for the dispatcher at the police department that had handled the murder case to put her through to someone who could help. The original detective assigned to the case had retired years ago but the woman she spoke with was able to access the file. Within fifteen minutes, emails began to pop up in Josie’s inbox.
“He met a woman at a bar,” she read as she scrolled through the documents. “Went back to her place. There was some kind of altercation and he killed her.”
Josie clicked through to the offender information. An inmate photo from three years earlier filled the screen. It was the same man from Cassidy’s sketch, but in color. His cold brown eyes held the promise of violence and retribution. Quickly, Josie moved on to the autopsy report. The details were chillingly similar to the preliminary autopsy findings that Dr. Feist had given them on Maxine and Haven Barnes, but what made Josie’s skin turn clammy was the cause of death.
Asphyxia due to traumatic asphyxia and smothering, otherwise known as burking.
FIFTY-THREE
Alone, Reina stayed curled on her side for what felt like a week though it probably wasn’t more than an hour, praying. The more time that passed, the more she was convinced that those prayers wouldn’t be answered. He’d been so pleased when he’d returned to find her mother clad in the old, ugly dress he’d brought, meek and pliant. What had happened? What had he done with her? Or did it take time to find someone to marry them? Was her mother really going to go through with it?
Where the hell was her brother?
She didn’t have to wait long for an answer. Soon, the door creaked open and he staggered down the steps. One side of his face was swollen, a black eye forming. One of his hands cradled his ribs. Reina scrambled to her feet and ran across the room, throwing herself into his arms. She was too distraught to even register his yelp of pain. Sobbing into his shoulder, she said, “Where have you been? We needed you!”
Griffin held her tightly. “I’m sorry, sis.”
“We needed you,” she wailed again, feeling guilty for putting their fates on his conscience. He was only two years older than her. Only eighteen. But she couldn’t help herself. After their mother, Griffin was all she had left.
He patted her back and herded her up the steps. She barely looked at their surroundings until they were outside. Griffin’s old, beat-up Honda was parked in Saul’s driveway.
“I’m taking you home,” he said.
She planted her feet, refusing to move. “You are not taking me home to them. She married him, Griffin. I’m not going back there. I’m not. I’d rather be homeless. Dad had cousins in the Carolinas. I can go there. Maybe you can come with me.”
“Reina,” he said softly, hugging her to his side. “What about Mom? We can’t just leave her here.”
She turned her tear-stained face up toward him. “She went with him?”
With his free hand, he massaged his jaw. “Yeah. She told me to get you and take you home.”
Reina pushed him away. “Then we should run.”
Griffin grabbed her shoulders and leaned in until his face was inches from hers. “We can’t. I’m afraid he’ll really hurt her. Especially now that she knows what was really happening. If she confronts him…”
Reina felt all the color drain from her face. “What are you saying?”
“I know what he was doing to you,” he said softly. “I saw him coming out of your room last week.”
“No.”
“The way he looked,” he screwed up his face as if he was going to cry, “I knew he could only be in there for one reason. I thought back to how you’d been acting for months before that. I always figured it was because of Dad, but then I knew. God, Reina, I hated myself for not noticing. You should have told me or Mom. Why didn’t you?”
Her skin felt uncomfortably hot. “I couldn’t! The things he did to me—I couldn’t say those things out loud. I can’t—can’t talk about them. It’s humiliating. I hate that you even know.Besides, he told me he would kill you both. Do you realize what this means? If he finds out that she knows, he’ll kill her and then we’ll be next. We can’t risk staying. She would want us to run, to save ourselves.”
“We should go to the police,” he said. “Right now. You and me. We can’t just leave her with him.”
Reina hadn’t been lying when she said she never wanted to discuss what Saul had done to her, ever, but with her brother by her side, if they went to the police right now, maybe they could stop him. Before she had a chance to decide, her mother’s old pickup pulled into the driveway. Reina’s heart squeezed in her chest. She tucked herself against Griffin’s side, convinced that Saul was going to emerge from the driver’s side door.
Instead, it was their mother.
“You two were supposed to go home,” she said before flinging the door open. “I went there first and you were nowhere to be found.”
She stepped out of the cab, standing straighter than Reina had ever seen her. Blood colored her blonde braid and the ringlets surrounding her face. It smudged her cheeks, flaked in the hollow of her throat, and stained her wedding dress. Only the hem remained white. It should have been terrifying but instead, it was the most beautiful, most powerful thing she’d ever witnessed. Before her mother even spoke, Reina knew that they were free.
“It’s over, my darlings,” her mother said when she reached them. “He’s dead.”
