Chapter Four
Emmy felt sweat racing down her back. The hooded Tyvek coveralls were so swelteringly claustrophobic that she longed to rip them off and run over to Coach Bell’s front yard to hose herself down again.
Instead, she nodded to Sherry that she was ready to go.
They walked in tandem across the yard, their suits crinkling as they climbed the porch steps. A numbered, yellow marker had been placed by the broken glass from the side panel by the door. Emmy steadied herself on the railing while she slipped a pair of booties over her boots.
“What do you think?” Sherry kept her voice low. “Was it Bill?”
“Don’t know,” Emmy admitted. “You’d have to be a psychopath to beat a woman the way he beat Allison and still show up smiling at church every Sunday. Faking some tears would be easy.”
“And Reggie?”
Emmy walked across the porch, picked her way past the shattered glass.
A fine aerosol of blood spiderwebbed across the pieces.
She pushed open the door. The deadbolt stuck out like a tongue as it pulled away from the splintered jam.
She had breached the house under two hours ago, but it was a very different experience without the fear of being gunned down.
All the overhead lights and lamps had been turned on.
Everything was on full display. To her right, she could see a chocolate-colored leather couch and a matching loveseat in the formal living room, both of which looked like they’d never been used.
Two more yellow markers had been placed around the oak coffee table, calling attention to what looked like large globs of blood.
The one on the right glistened under the light from a bronze floor lamp.
She told Sherry, “Mandy’s wound was shallow. The bullet should be in the house.”
“We’ll find it.”
Emmy turned to her left. The dining room was even messier than she’d remembered.
She couldn’t really examine anything until Sherry had processed the room, but it was easy to see that the killer had been looking for something.
Papers were scattered everywhere—invoices, receipts, file folders, photographs.
Mandy’s backpack had been emptied. A box of colored chalk had fallen onto the floor beside the broken laptop.
There was no telling how long it would take for the GBI’s tech team to break into the hard drive.
Everything would take weeks or months to come back—blood analysis, DNA, fingerprints.
She asked, “You locate the birth certificates? A will?”
“No sign of a will. Birth certificates were upstairs in the suitcase on the bed. No father listed. I asked Allison about him once and she told me Mandy was her reward for enduring a stupid mistake.”
Emmy knew a lot of women who felt that way.
She turned her attention to the foyer. The mouth of the curving stairs filled the right-hand side.
The narrow hallway tucked down to the left.
Beige tiles in the foyer gave way to dark hardwood floors everywhere else.
Light brown carpet runner on the stairs.
Tan walls. Oriental carpets in more variations of brown.
The only bright colors came from the yellow evidence markers and fresh blood: spatter on the tiles near the door, spray around the broken side panel, a marker by a brass shell casing.
There were very few knickknacks on the entry table—two crystal candlesticks, a diffuser with black reeds.
A muted print of Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World hung over a solid oak entry table.
An olive-green leather keychain with an embossed A was in a glass bowl beside three library books.
Emmy saw a Toyota key fob. What looked like a house key.
A dimple key for a high-security lock. A barrel key, which was a specialized, tube-shaped key that was used to open circular locks like the kind you’d find on a safe.
She asked, “You figure out what these keys go to?”
“Haven’t processed them yet, but there’s no safe of any kind in the house.”
Emmy felt a flicker of surprise. “Not even a gun safe?”
Sherry shook her head, but she was clearly thinking the same thing: an abused woman with a kid in the house should’ve kept any weapons locked down tight. Especially a cop.
Emmy leaned down to read the spines on the stack of books. She recognized two of the titles, but Feynman’s Tips on Physics struck her as far outside Allison’s area of interest.
Her back twinged when she stood up. She noticed a purple velvet Crown Royal bag on the floor in the middle of the hallway. The string was loose. The bag looked empty.
She said, “We had one book club meeting here when Allison and Mandy first moved in. The whole time, Bill wouldn’t leave her alone.
Kept coming down the stairs asking Allison to help him pick out a shirt or find batteries for the remote or make him some tea.
She never hosted again. I can’t remember the last time she even showed up for a meeting. ”
“Asshole. He got exactly what he wanted.” Sherry didn’t bother to keep the anger out of her voice. “She never called you to the house off a DV?”
“Never to the house.” Over the years, Allison had reached out to Emmy at least a dozen times with complaints of domestic violence.
“It was always after the fact. She’d call me from work or find me in town the next day.
I’d go to Bill’s office to talk. Then I’d go back to her, and she would tell me it was nothing, that it all just got out of hand and to forget about it. ”
“Me, too. Every time.”
The guilty expression was back on Sherry’s face.
Emmy’s own guilt was amplified by a detail she was too ashamed to share.
Two months ago, Allison had left a voicemail on her phone saying that she was finally going to leave Bill.
Emmy had let several days pass before she’d returned the call.
Allison had lost her nerve by then, and Emmy hadn’t pushed her on it because retreating fit the pattern.
She had lost count of the number of times she’d met Allison for a drink at the Clifton Biergarten or sat in the passenger seat of her car watching her cry or slinked around the back of the sheriff’s station to listen to Allison talk about leaving Bill or having Bill arrested or somebody talking some sense into Bill or putting the fear of God into Bill and none of it had ever worked because Allison always, always went back to him.
She would never go back to anyone now.
Sherry asked, “What about Reggie?”
Emmy stepped around another marker beside pin drops of blood.
“You got him pretty good in his bad knee.”
“Did Allison ever mention she was having trouble with somebody she put away?”
Sherry paused before responding. “You think this was a targeted hit? Bad guy gets out of prison and wants revenge?”
Emmy didn’t know what she was thinking. Her cop’s intuition, her don’t feel right, was flashing like crazy. “Allison got her private investigator’s license after she retired last year.”
“I heard she was consulting for the Clayville PD, too.”
Emmy nodded. “They couldn’t fire her after she filed the lawsuit. Do you know what she was doing for them?”
“Going through old cases looking for easy solves, I think? We haven’t processed the dining room yet, but I don’t see any Clayville police files.
Just PI work.” Sherry indicated the mess of paperwork.
“Typical divorce case stuff. Invoices for expensive jewelry. Credit card records. Viagra scripts. Meal receipts. Photos of couples going in and out of rooms at the Dew Drop Inn.”
Emmy was familiar with the no-tell motel, which was one of the only businesses in the county that didn’t have some kind of security cameras installed. Guests appreciated their round-the-clock discretion. Prostitutes used it on nights and weekends. Cheating spouses used it during banking hours.
Emmy asked, “How did the killer enter the house?”
“The garage doors were both up, but the side door to the kitchen has a digital lock. The front door was locked with the deadbolt. All the downstairs windows are still locked from the inside. Most of the upstairs are painted shut. Jude told me the back door was ajar when she came inside, so we’re assuming that’s his point of entry. ”
Emmy wasn’t happy that Jude had stuck around to talk to Sherry. “You find any shoe impressions?”
“We checked the perimeter. Nothing.”
“Okay.” Emmy looked down the hallway toward the back door. Bill would’ve entered the house through the front or used the garage door that led into the kitchen. Reggie probably would have, too. Unless this was planned from the beginning. “What’s your theory of the shooting?”
“Allison was probably standing about here.” Sherry positioned herself so that she was facing the front door.
“I’m thinking she came back inside to finish packing, but she locked the door behind her in case Bill—or whoever—showed up.
So, she’s got her back to the hallway. She uses her key to lock the deadbolt.
Drops her keys into the bowl. Then she hears someone coming up behind her. ”
Emmy conjured the images as Sherry spoke—Allison turning toward the hall, the shadowy figure of a man pointing a gun.
The black nitrile gloves must have sent a spike of terror into her heart.
Premeditated. Not spur of the moment. Before the killer had entered the house, he’d already thought about covering his tracks.
“So,” Sherry continued. “Allison’s kid’s upstairs. She’s not going down without a fight. She reacts, tries to disarm him. As she’s reaching for the gun, the killer fires. The first bullet takes off the thumb and index finger of her right hand. You can see them over there.”
Emmy looked at the yellow markers near the coffee table in the living room. The glint of light was off Allison’s thumbnail.