CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Dusk had leeched all of the color from the city as Ella aimed the car towards Charles Street and Jared Novak’s house. Ella’s mind was doing laps. She shot a glance at Ripley, who looked how she felt. Gears turning with no destination.
She spoke first. ‘So, let me get this straight. The snowman around Amber Holloway’s neck is from Rose Michaels’s music box?’
Lily Michaels had recognized the figurine a mile off, and that was good enough for Ella. ‘That’s what we’re going to find out.’
‘And Rose donated the music box a while ago, but we don’t know where.’
Ella gripped the wheel a little tighter.
‘Here’s what I keep coming back to. Amber Holloway worked at Dollar General and drank like a fish.
Rose Michaels was a custody-wrecked musician who barely left her sister’s apartment.
These two women didn’t know each other. Nothing in their finances, their social media, their daily routines puts them within a mile of the same orbit. ’
‘But the figurine does.’
‘The figurine does. Someone took a piece of Rose Michaels’s life – an object given to her by the father of her child – and left it on a stranger. That’s not a coincidence. That’s either a message or a mistake, and this killer doesn’t make mistakes. He brings glue.’
‘So, first we have Amber, fresh out of an ugly divorce. Then Rose, a wannabe rockstar who just lost custody of her kid. Both were forced to move in with family members. I’m seeing a link. Are you?’
‘Yeah. They have terrible taste in men.’
‘Come on Dark, you know how good guys are at hiding their flaws. Then once they’ve got you hooked, that’s when the real person comes out.’
Ella glanced sideways at her. ‘You’d know all about that.’
‘Low blow.’
‘Sorry. So, where does Jared fit into this? Either he gave Rose the music box and some random stranger picked it up from the donation shop, or Jared knew she’d got rid of it and went and retrieved it himself.’
‘And if he retrieved it, he had access to the figurines before either woman died.’
‘Which gives us a man with motive and means. He knew the music box existed because he bought it. And a man with opportunity, if he tracked down the donation. But what I’m wondering too is what does the ballet dancer mean?’
Ella didn’t like to admit it, but she had to. ‘I don’t know, but let’s focus on this lead first.’
Ella followed the GPS through a residential stretch toward Lakeview. The houses out here were modest but well-kept. She turned a corner and the GPS told her she was four hundred yards out.
Ripley said, ‘What’s with these youngsters and their fancy houses? Most twenty-somethings I know can barely afford to eat, let alone get on the property ladder.’
‘Lily said Rose’s ex had a good job.’
‘I guess.’
‘There’s a problem with the theory though,’ Ripley said. ‘About the figures, I mean, not the houses.’
‘I know. If Jared killed these women, why would he use a figurine from a music box he gave to his ex-wife? It’s a neon sign pointing straight back at him.’
‘Exactly. I know killers are prone to bad decisions, especially spree killers, but even so…’
‘Maybe that’s the point.’ Ella had been chewing on this since they’d left Lily’s kitchen.
‘Think about it. What criminal is stupid enough to leave his own property on a victim? Nobody. Which means if the cops trace the snowman back to the music box and the music box back to Jared, his lawyer’s first argument is that somebody’s framing him.
It’s too obvious, therefore it can’t be him. ’
‘A double bluff.’
‘Make it so blatant that it looks planted. The best place to hide is in plain sight.’
‘You know, I worked a case in Connecticut back in the day. We were in this café, and in walked this guy who looked exactly like Michael Bolton. He had the mullet and satin shirt and everything.’
‘And?’
‘Nobody bothered him. Nobody even looked at him, because we all figured he was just a guy trying to look like Michael Bolton. After he left, the owner said it was actually Michael Bolton. He went in there all the time. He just got less attention when he didn’t try to hide who he was.’
‘Point proven.’
‘Yeah, but I don’t know, Dark. Maybe our guy is just arrogant enough to think nobody would trace a ceramic snowman back to a donated music box through a dead woman’s sister.’
‘That too. Arrogance and stupidity look the same from far away.’
The GPS brought them to a house that didn’t quite fit with the rest. It was half the size and a fraction of the opulence.
Ripley gazed out of the window and said, ‘Our guy’s got the right idea.’
‘How’d you figure?’
‘Cheapest house on the street. Market value is only going up.’
‘Alright, Mia, we’re not here to talk real estate.’ Ella pulled out her Glock and checked her ammo levels. ‘Good to go. Vernon gave us clearance, right?’
‘He wasn’t happy about it, but I talked him into it.’
‘I bet you did.’
They were out of the car, up the driveway and at the front door a second later. A silver Honda sat in the driveway.
‘Someone’s home,’ Ripley said.
Ella knocked, then clasped the evidence bag in her palm while she waited. ‘Come on, open up.’
No response.
Ripley knocked harder. Ella stepped to the side and stole a glance through the front window but there were no signs of life in the living room.
Ella knocked a third time. ‘Jared Novak? FBI. We need to talk to you.’
No answer.
She tried the handle. The door was unlocked. It swung inward six inches and stopped against a draught excluder.
‘Dark! You can’t do that.’
‘We’ve got a car in the driveway, no answer at the door, and a man with a history of violent threats connected to two homicide victims,’ Ella said. ‘That’s enough for me.’
‘Fine, but you’re explaining things to Vernon.’
‘Deal.’
She pushed it the rest of the way with her forearm and the hallway opened up in front of her. Ella nudged the door open and stepped inside, relishing the sudden burst of adrenaline. A hallway yawned before her, a set of stairs to the right, a row of doors to the left.
‘Jared Novak, FBI!’ Ella yelled. She trained her gun on the distant kitchen and began moving forward, but three steps in, a siren punched through the house so hard it felt like someone had driven a nail into both ears simultaneously.
It jolted her out of the moment, burned her eardrums, rattled her brain. It took her a second to figure out an alarm was blaring somewhere up above.
‘Jesus, Dark,’ Ripley yelled. ‘We’re going to draw a crowd.’
‘Goddammit. We need to turn that thing off,’ Ella fired back. She doubted Ripley could hear her.
‘No chance. We need to stay back, because if…’
Ripley’s final syllable seemed to amplify, because it took Ella a second to realize that the deafening siren had died.
But when Ella looked up, she saw a figure. A man was standing in the kitchen doorway at the end of the hall. He had a shotgun levelled at Ella’s chest.
‘Who are you?’
Ella raised her own pistol, but the man stepped forward. Ripley edged closer with her Glock trained on the man too.
‘Jared Novak?’ Ripley called.
‘Who’s asking? Why are you in my house?’ His gun darted from Ella to Mia, and Ella used the opportunity to scrutinize him from top to bottom, see if he fit the profile of someone who could kill two women.
He was wide, stocky, solid muscle underneath a few layers of fat.
Her immediate conclusion was that he could.
‘Because we want to talk about Amber Holloway and Rose Michaels,’ Ripley said.
Jared’s expression deflated. He lowered his gun a fraction. ‘Rose? What about her?’
‘Why don’t you come with us and we’ll tell you,’ said Ella.
Jared began to shake. ‘Is she… okay?’
Ella let the silence do the talking. Jared stared at her for a long moment, then the shotgun drifted downward until the barrel was pointing at the floor. He backed up until he found the kitchen doorframe and leaned against it, then dropped the shotgun to the floor.
She holstered her weapon. She looked at Ripley over Jared Novak’s broken shape and neither of them said a word, because there was nothing to say yet. Grief and guilt looked exactly the same from the outside, and right now Ella couldn’t tell which one she was looking at.