“We’re looking with everything we’ve got,” the chief said.
Rae had gone out in the woods with the searchers, came back soaking wet. “Nothing. You figured out what you missed yet?”
“No. I keep going back to look but don’t see it anymore, whatever it was.”
“Maybe a brain fart,” Bob suggested.
“Don’t think so. It felt too real.”
—
AT TWO O’CLOCKin the morning, the police chief told Lucas, “We might have a problem. There’s an old guy here who said his wife went out to a grocery store sometime after nine-thirty and she hasn’t come back. He can’t get her on her phone.”
“Ah, Jesus. She’s gone, she’s dead,” Lucas said.
“Don’t tell me that,” the cop said. “Please don’t tell me that.”
—
THE THREE MARSHALSwere on the scene until four in the morning, until there was nothing more to see or say, and the FBI crime scene crew told them to go. There were still cops in the woods, and they’d be there through the next day, the chief said. There was no sign of the old woman or her car.
Lucas got Russell Forte out of bed to tell him what had happened.
“Oh my God,” Forte said, and a woman’s voice in the background demanded, “What happened? What happened? Is Sara okay?”
They agreed to talk the next morning.
—
LUCAS, BOB, AND RAEwere halfway back to Washington, and the after-shooting was setting in. Bob was nearly asleep in the back, Rae was glassy-eyed in the passenger seat, when Lucas braked and pulled the Evoque to the side of the road.
He shifted into park, put his hands on the steering wheel at ten and two o’clock, and leaned his forehead against the wheel. Rae asked, “What? What? You okay?” echoed by Bob in the back, “What’s going on?”
“I figured out what I didn’t see in the kitchen. I didn’t see a fuckin’ thing,” Lucas said.
“What?”
“I smelled it,” he said.
Rae: “What?”
“When I was investigating Taryn Grant back in the Twin Cities, I interviewed her several times, and one time got in her bedroom after she was robbed... Well, never mind about that. Anyway, she uses a heavy scent, a perfume called Black Orchid. Kind of funky. I got a whiff of it when I ran into the kitchen, Just a whiff, but I know I’m right.”
“You’re saying...”
“That wasn’t Wendy in there. That was Taryn Grant. She killed them all. Everybody who could take her down.”
—
BOB AND RAE DIDN’T QUITE BUY IT.
“There was the smell of the gunpowder—that’s what I noticed—and the smell of blood. And the odors from the forest outside. And then Chase got shot... It’d be impossible to pick out a dab ofperfume,” Rae said. “I mean, I’m wearing perfume and I can’t even smell myself.”
“I smelled it,” Lucas said.
“Even if you did, a jury would never convict,” Bob said. “It’s useless as evidence.”
“Ah, you’re right, you’re right,” Lucas said.
