“I just—You should go.”
“Stella, no. I—”
“Out of the pool, both of you,” Oliver said from behind me. I turned to find the woman standing at the edge of the pool, her eyes fixed on the girl in front of me, a white robe in her hand. I didn’t hear her walk up. For all I knew, she may have been there the entire time, watching us like the others. “Stella. It’s time.”
Stella drew in a breath and drifted soundlessly away from me, further back toward the deep end of the pool, beyond my reach. I remained still, standing there, unable to move. Her eyes remained on me for a moment as she floated backward. She turned and swam the remaining distance to the far wall. She grabbed the edge and held a hand out to the man dressed in white standing near the pool house door. “Help me out.”
The man said nothing.
He shifted his weight and seemed to shrink back toward the building at his back, his eyes locked on Stella’s outstretched hand. “Help me out of the pool,” Stella repeated.
He shook his head. “No.”
Stella reached for the woman standing beside him. “You, then.”
The woman shook her head and took a step back.
Stella eyed them both, then placed both hands on the edge of the pool and pulled herself out, standing there naked, before us all.
I heard Oliver round the side of the pool, but I didn’t see her. My eyes were locked on Stella, on the water dripping from her long, dark hair, down her bare back and legs, and pooling at her feet. Oliver pushed past the two sentries at the pool house and wrapped the robe around Stella’s shoulders, cinching it at the front. “Enough of this,” Oliver said to her. “You’re needed at the house.”
Stella didn’t move, though. She stood, statue-like, facing the two in white. A murmur rose from the sentries standing among the trees surrounding the pool. Oliver hushed them all with a single glance, then turned back to Stella. “Now.”
Oliver started back around the pool toward the house, scooping up Stella’s gloves as she went. Stella fell in line behind her, the thin robe clinging to her frame. Her eyes met mine for the briefest of seconds as she passed—the tears were gone, the warmth was gone, her eyes were dark, as if the girl from only moments earlier somehow retreated deep inside.
Oliver nodded toward me. “Get him out of the water. Burn those horrid clothes of his and give him something to wear, then bring him to us. I want him to watch.”
11
The license plate turned out to be a bust. Faustino knew he wrote the number down correctly, but when he keyed it into the DMV, the plate came back as “UNKT” or “Unknown Tag.” He was still staring at the computer screen when Fogel entered the office and dropped the folder for the ’78 murder on the desk between them.
“How’s Stack holding up?”
She dropped into the chair across from him. “You didn’t say anything about a missing kid.”
“It’s just a theory. We’ve got lots of theories. Stack’s theory happens to involve a missing kid.”
“And yours doesn’t?”
“I can see why he’d lean that way, and I want to agree with him, but I’ve learned half of being a good cop is keeping an open mind. The second your brain wraps around a specific theory, you tend to block out all other possibilities. If your theory is wrong, and you’re no longer willing to accept other theories, you’ve got zero shot at solving the case,” he explained. “Stack closed all the other doors. I kept them open. That’s where we differ.”
Fogel flipped open the folder and pulled out the photographs of the victims, laying them out side by side on the desk. “How do you explain the differences here? Why do these three match all the others on your Wall of Weird, while the man and woman found downstairs appear to be regular homicide victims?”
Faustino looked at the photographs—the man in the library and the woman on the stairs. “I agree with Stack on that part of his theory. I think the three men we found upstairs are responsible for killing these two. Stack and I have always butted heads on what came next, though. We could never agree on who killed the three perps.”
“You don’t think it was his mysterious ‘fourth perp?’”
Faustino said nothing for a second, his thumb flicking the edge of one of the photographs. “I don’t think there was a fourth at all.”
“Then what killed them?”
“I think whatever they found in that room killed them,” Faustino said. “And whatever it was, they were the unfortunate souls who let it out.”
12
Stella and Ms. Oliver disappeared down the cobblestone path, and I remained frozen in the water, both unwilling and unable to move. For the first time, I realized how quiet the world had gotten. Not a sound from a single living thing. The sentries at the pool house watched them leave, too, as did the ones in the woods, but none moved.
“Out of the water,” the male sentry at the pool house finally said, breaking the silence.
