CHAPTER ONE
Rachel had the sauce going and the pasta water not quite boiling when she heard Paige's voice drifting in from the dining room table. Her tone was low and mumbling, evidence that she wasn’t speaking to Rachel, but to herself.
It sounded like she was reciting something, maybe studying and trying to retain the information.
Rachel turned the burner down and walked to the doorway with a wooden spoon still in her hand.
Paige had her laptop open, along with three tabs of what looked like newspaper archives and a corkboard app she'd recently downloaded.
Red string connected small digital pins across the screen, each one labeled in a font too small for Rachel to read from the doorway.
Rachel was interested at once. Apps that were centered around organization in any way, shape, or form had always piqued her interest.
"What is that?" she asked.
Paige didn't look up right away. "A case board. For the Delacroix thing."
She didn’t need to ask what she meant by the Delcroix thing. It had been a hot topic of conversation for Paige over the past two or three days. "The documentary," Rachel said.
"The murder," Paige corrected. "The documentary's just how I found out about it. It's from 1998. A woman named Renee Delacroix was killed in her own kitchen and they never found who did it. I'm mapping the timeline of everyone who was in the house that night."
Rachel came around behind her and looked at the screen properly.
There were photographs, court documents, a scanned page from what looked like an old police report.
Paige had organized it by hour, starting at six in the evening and running until just past midnight, with question marks scattered along a gap between nine and ten.
"You built this today?"
"Since I got home. It's not done." Paige clicked one of the pins and a photo enlarged, a grainy shot of a kitchen with an evidence marker propped on the counter.
"The original detectives thought it was the husband, but he had an alibi that checked out.
Nobody's ever really explained the gap between when the neighbor heard yelling and when the 911 call came in. "
Rachel looked at the photo for a second longer than she meant to.
She'd spent twenty years looking at photos exactly like it, and it had never once occurred to her that her thirteen-year-old daughter would be pulling them up voluntarily on a Tuesday night before dinner. Thank God it wasn’t of a body.
“Where’d you find these photos?”
Paige shrugged. “They’re all over the internet.”
"You know this is a real person," Rachel said. "Not a puzzle."
"I know that." Paige said it without defensiveness, which somehow made it land harder. "That's kind of the point. Nobody figured it out for her. Doesn't that bother you?"
"It does," Rachel admitted. "It's just a lot for a school night. I mean…don’t you have homework?”
“I did it all in study hall,” she said proudly.
“Anyway…” Paige minimized the board and turned in her chair, and something in her face softened, like she'd read the concern under the question and wanted to answer that instead.
"I'm not trying to freak you out, Mom. I just think it's interesting. You do this exact thing for a living."
"I do this for a living because someone has to," Rachel said. "That's different from choosing it for fun."
Paige considered that for a second, then shrugged again. To Rachel, it meant that the distinction didn't fully land, or that she'd decided not to argue it tonight. "Dinner smells done, by the way."
Rachel went back to the stove and stirred the sauce, which had in fact started to catch slightly at the bottom of the pan. She scraped at it and lowered the heat further. Behind her she heard the soft click of Paige's laptop closing, the case board tucked away for later.
Jack got home five minutes later, just a little after seven.
His tie was already loosened, and he looked like a man who had spent the day in a room full of people discussing something that mattered enormously to nobody in particular.
He kissed Rachel on the side of the head and dropped his bag by the stairs.
"How was the meeting?" she asked.
"Long." He rolled his shoulders. "They want to restructure how field offices report case metrics up the chain, so now there's a working group. I'm apparently on the working group even though I was not asked if I wanted to take part in said group."
"That sounds like a punishment."
"It might be. I said one smart thing about data redundancy in March and now I get invited to everything." He came over and looked into the pot. "This looks good."
He kissed her again, this time properly, and went to set the table.
After a while, Paige pitched in. Rachel let herself enjoy the small domestic rhythm of it, plates and forks and Jack humming something under his breath.
She knew he was tired and likely stressed out from the meeting, but she appreciated how he never let it cause him to crash when he got home.
He always made sure he had time and attention for his girls.
Dinner was easy, casual, and comforting…
which had become typical as of late. It had honestly become one of Rachel's favorite parts of the day.
Paige talked about a history project on the Industrial Revolution that she found tedious compared to everything else she was working on, and Jack asked enough questions to seem interested without prying.
Rachel mostly listened, deciding it might be best not to mention the case board.
She caught Jack's eye once across the table, and they shared a knowing smile as Paige dissected her day.
After dinner, Paige disappeared upstairs with a promise to be asleep by nine, which Rachel gave maybe even odds of being true.
She made a mental note to head up and check at 9:15 just to make sure.
Jack took the dishes and waved her off when she tried to help, so she poured herself half a glass of wine and sat at the kitchen table with it, not really drinking, just holding the stem.
She reached into the pocket of her cardigan and took out Eleanor’s key.
It was small, brass, and old enough that the metal had gone slightly dull along the shaft but not so old it had corroded.
She turned it over between her fingers the way she'd been doing most nights for weeks now, running her thumb along the short row of teeth. Her friend Eleanor had pressed it into her hand just minutes before she’d passed away, without much explanation, and Rachel hadn't wanted to waste time asking questions. In the moment, with her friend just a few breaths away from death, it honestly hadn’t seemed all that important.
Eleanor had been eighty-three, a hospice patient Rachel had grown close to over months of Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, working her way through a stack of novels she'd always meant to read and never quite gotten to.
She'd died with more grace than most people managed, and she'd given Rachel the key without saying what it was for, only that she wanted her to have it.
Rachel had looked it up online afterward.
Small brass bow keys like this one were most commonly used for lockboxes or old-style safety deposit inserts, nothing as large as a house key, nothing shaped for a storage unit padlock.
It didn't match any lock in her own house, and it hadn't matched anything Eleanor's niece could think of either, when Rachel had gently asked.
She turned it over once more and set it on the table. The small metallic click of it against the wood was strangely loud in the quiet kitchen.
Thinking of Eleanor in such a way was hard because it brought up other heartbreak.
It had been four years, almost to the week, since Grandma Tate had died.
Rachel hadn't said anything about it to Jack or Paige, because there wasn't really anything new to say. It came down to the same old ache surfacing on schedule the way it did every year around this time. She thought of her grandmother briefly, feeling a bit ashamed that she didn’t want her thoughts to venture towards that particular pain tonight.
Even if she’d wanted to, she wouldn’t have had time.
Her phone rang on the counter before she could pick the key back up.
Novak's name was on the screen. She checked the time, saw that it was 8:15, and she was almost certain there was a case on the other end of this call.
Novak never called after six or so unless it was work-related.
"Hey," she said, answering. "It's late for you."
"Oh, but I have a reason,” he said. “There's a body in Arlington," he added without preamble, as if he were telling her a weather report. "A woman. Local PD caught it a few hours ago, but something about it kicked up to us fast, faster than it should have for one dead woman in her own house."
"What kind of something?"
"I don't know yet, honestly. Anderson is looking into it; I should know more in the next fifteen minutes or so.
For now, though, whoever flagged it upstairs didn't leave much of an explanation, just a note that said it needed federal eyes and to loop us in tonight instead of in the morning.
" He paused, and she could hear him moving—the creak of a door, the slight jingle of keys.
"I don't love working blind, but Anderson wants us on it, so... "
“Arlington, tonight?”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
"Give me twenty minutes," Rachel said, already working through what the rest of the night might look like with an unexpected case call coming in so late.
She ended the call and sat there for a second with the phone still in her hand, then picked up the key from the table and carried it to the drawer in the hallway console.
It was the drawer where they kept spare batteries and old receipts and things that didn't have another home yet.
She set it inside, toward the back, and closed the drawer.
Jack appeared in the kitchen doorway, drying his hands on a dish towel. "Novak?"
“Yeah, good guess. Anderson wants us in Arlington tonight. A woman's dead and nobody seems totally sure yet why it's ours.”
"Sounds promising," Jack said dryly, and then, more seriously, "Go. I've got Paige."
He said it with the heavy understanding of a husband who knew everything this job required of a person. And she knew he meant it.
She kissed him on her way to the stairs, where she’d head up and tell Paige goodnight…that she needed to hit the road for a case that came up out of nowhere. She, too, would understand.
And probably be a little too interested.