Vernice shook her head and groaned softly. “We talked for about five minutes, and I didn’t go anywhere else in the house. I left. And then when I got back to town, I heard about the shooting.”
Livvy thought of what Vernice had just said about not knowing Chloe well enough to detect if she was lying. Well, she felt the same way about Vernice. The woman might not be telling the truth about anything. Hopefully, Grace would be able to determine that once she had her in an interview room.
“I didn’t kill Chloe,” Vernice said as she started pacing in the short space between the side of Grace’s desk and the door. “I have no reason to do…” She stopped when her attention landed on something.
Livvy shifted and saw that Vernice was staring at the sketch that Grace had printed out. And not just staring at it either. It was as if Vernice couldn’t take her eyes off of it.
“Do you recognize her?” Livvy had to ask.
Vernice didn’t respond for a long time before finally tearing her attention from it. “No,” she insisted.
But Livvy wasn’t convinced. Apparently, neither was Ethan. “You’re sure? Because you look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”
She did, and that stark shock continued in Vernice’s eyes as she looked at Livvy. “I don’t know her,” the woman muttered,and this time she did head to the door. She threw it open with far more force than necessary.
“I’ll wait for Grace out here,” she muttered, slamming the door shut behind herself.
Livvy considered going after the woman, to press her for what she knew. And Vernice obviously knew something, or she wouldn’t have reacted that way.
“I need to let Grace know about this,” Ethan said, jotting down some notes that he would no doubt pass along to her before she took Vernice into the interview.
He had just finished writing when there was another knock at the door. At first Livvy thought that Vernice had returned, but when she opened it, Rory was standing there. One look at his face, and she knew something was wrong.
“What happened?” she asked.
But Rory didn’t respond until he was in the office and had closed the door. “I just got off the phone with the lab. They got the results back on the knife that was left at Vernice’s. Results on the traces of blood,” he clarified.
Livvy’s heart started to tighten into a knot. “I’m guessing they got a match?” she managed to say.
Rory nodded but then shrugged. “Not exactly, but there’s a familial match in the system.”
Her head was suddenly whirling, making it hard to think, and her blank expression was probably why he spelled it all out.
“A familial match points to a close biological relative of the unknown DNA,” Rory said, the sympathy practically seeping off him. “A match to you, Livvy. The lab techs believe the blood on that knife belongs to your mother.”
Chapter Fourteen
Ethan watched as Livvy sat in his kitchen, eating the salad they’d picked up from the town’s diner on the way back to his house. It was obvious from her expression that she wasn’t enjoying the late lunch, that she was merely going through the motions.
He figured she was eating solely for the baby, and he suspected if she hadn’t been pregnant, she would have just gone somewhere alone to try to process what Rory had told them. Ethan was trying to process it, too, and while they now had an answer as to whose blood was on that knife, it had only fueled more questions.
Who was Livvy’s mother? Was she dead?
And if so, who had killed her?
Yeah, plenty of questions, including how the hell had the knife ended up being delivered to Vernice? Or maybe it hadn’t been delivered after all. It was possible that Vernice had had it all this time but had chosen to give it to the cops because she could have known it would incriminate Livvy since her prints were also on it.
He ate some of the burger that had also come from the diner and realized he was going through the motions of eating, too. He wasn’t the least bit hungry. Not with his stomach in knots over what Livvy was going through. But his body needed the fuel so he could continue the investigation.
Unfortunately, his heart wasn’t in doing that either, but he had his laptop open on the counter and was reviewing the list Eden had given them. He definitely wasn’t making muchprogress and hadn’t found squat that would help them with those answers they desperately needed.
Livvy grunted a little, and she put her hand on her belly. “More kicks,” she muttered, no doubt when she saw the alarm skirt across his face.
Good timing, Ethan thought, because that seemed to snap her back to the moment. A moment where there hopefully wasn’t any images of her nightmare.
But there obviously was.
“It’s likely my mother was the dead woman in the bathtub,” Livvy said, causing him to sigh. He reached for her, but she shook her head. “If you hold me now, I’ll break. And that can’t happen. Because I don’t need to think like a traumatized six-year-old girl. I need to think like a cop.”
