Chapter Five
Livvy had to fight the panic she felt clawing its way up her throat. It was closing in, smothering her, causing her to feel her control slipping away.
Ethan must have realized what was happening. Of course he did. He’d been her champion and her rescuer for years when they were growing up. Rushing into her room at night to wake her from the horrible dreams. He’d been there, too, when the flashbacks had been so bad they’d brought her to her knees.
Like now.
The mother lode of flashbacks. The dead woman in the tub. Zadie, dead and posed the same way.
Blood on her own six-year-old hands.
Livvy could practically see that blood now. Could smell it. And could feel that fear that she’d experienced as that traumatized child. She’d told every bit of what she remembered to Dr. Carter, and now the therapist’s adoptive son had just admitted he’d gone through her files. So, he knew.
God, he knew.
“This way,” Ethan insisted, hooking his arm around her and pulling her into the small observation room. He shut the door, whipped out his phone and texted Grace. “I’ll ask her if she can get someone else to finish the interview.”
Livvy groaned. She hated that she couldn’t do her job and was putting this on her boss, but she was too shaken to finish the interview. Too close to the detail. And that kind of closeness could fuel mistakes.
With that reminder, she looked up at Ethan.
He was typing away at the text on his phone, but he was certainly close.
So close that it both helped and hurt. Livvy felt her nerves start to settle.
Ethan could work miracles like that—an instant soother for the flashbacks.
But that closeness lit up the fire that always seemed to be simmering between them.
“Grace will handle it,” he said when he got a reply to his text. “She’ll do the interview herself, and we’ll soon have a report on Ivy Milbrath and Chloe’s marriage and divorce.”
He looked at her then, their gazes colliding, and he must have seen that heat in her eyes. No way to shut it down, and over the years, she had tried. Mercy, had she. Nothing had worked.
Normally, Ethan just turned away or quickly found an excuse to put some distance between them. But he didn’t do that now. On a sigh, he pulled her into his arms.
“I can’t be weak,” she muttered. “I need to face this head-on.”
“You are facing it,” Ethan assured her. She felt his warm breath brush against her cheek. Almost a kiss. And yes, that calmed her, too.
Along with giving her a tug of that heat.
But unwanted heat was far better than the stomach-twisting panic.
“I’m letting Grace down by walking out of that interview,” Livvy insisted, and even though she hated to do it, she stepped out of Ethan’s arms. Ready to go back into that room with Anthony.
Ethan stopped her by taking hold of her arm.
“Play this out in your head. If Anthony did kill Zadie and he used info from your childhood trauma, then it’s best if Grace does the interview.
You’re too close to this. Hell, I’m also close to it,” he admitted.
“I’ve seen you go through the nightmares, and I know what they do to you.
If Anthony is toying with that to get back at you, then it’s best if we hand over the questioning to someone else. ”
Ethan was right about this being too personal. The entire investigation was for both of them. And to add to the problem, there were all those blasted blank spots in her memories.
“Maybe I killed Anthony’s mother when I was six,” Livvy threw out. “I don’t remember doing it, so I have no idea what would have prompted me to resort to something like that.”
“To possibly have resorted to it,” Ethan corrected. “When you were six, you were scrawny. A grown woman could have easily fought you off.”
She wanted to believe that, but why had she had blood on her? And did that blood have anything to do with Ivy?
“There’s also a chance that you were around when Anthony’s mother was murdered, and he might believe you can tell him the identity of the killer,” Ethan reminded her.
Livvy considered that. And she certainly didn’t dismiss it. But it seemed extreme for Anthony to stage Zadie’s body to trigger those memories in Livvy to help him bring his mother’s killer to justice.
Of course, there was also the possibility that Anthony might not have even been responsible for Zadie’s death. Yes, he was a person of interest, but so far, there was no concrete evidence linking him to the crime.
She was mulling that over when their phones both dinged with an incoming message. “It’s the reports on Chloe and Ivy Milbrath,” Ethan relayed to her as he opened the file.
Livvy opened her copy, too, and saw the first report was the information on Ivy. As Anthony had said, she had been run off the road and her car had gone over a bluff. The vehicle had then caught fire, destroying a good portion of Ivy’s body along with any potential evidence.
Her attention froze on the summary from the medical examiner. It appeared that Ivy had stab wounds, so there was the possibility the woman had been dead before the car crash. If so, then someone could have put her in the vehicle and then pushed it over the bluff.
“Stab wounds,” Livvy repeated, and she had to fight the blasted flashbacks again.
“Yeah,” Ethan muttered, and he sent off another text.
“I want the ME’s full report to see if Ivy’s wounds could possibly match Zadie’s.
And I also want to read what the CSIs wrote about all of this.
” He looked at her again. “Because there’s no way you killed Zadie, and you sure as hell couldn’t have killed Ivy and staged her death when you were six. ”
No, but it went back to the possibility that she’d seen or heard something. Maybe something her own mother, father or caregiver had done.
Whoever they were.
Because if Livvy had indeed witnessed one of them murdering Ivy, then it could maybe explain why they hadn’t come looking for her. She could have incriminated one of them for murder. And the trauma of her seeing something like that might’ve been the reason she’d blocked it out of her memories.
“Ivy died just a mile and a half from Renegade Canyon and only a little over three miles from New Hope,” Ethan pointed out. “I guess that makes sense since she had a surrogacy connection to New Hope.”
Yes, she did. But had the woman been heading toward New Hope? Or trying to get away from the place? That might be something the ME’s or CSIs’ reports could tell them.
“Chloe and Franklin will need to be reinterviewed,” Ethan said as he continued to read. “And I’m betting Chloe won’t like the past being dug up.”
Livvy had no doubts about that, and she mentally set aside Ivy’s death and moved on to the info in this latest report about Chloe.
This one had the basics that Ethan and she already knew about the woman’s position at New Hope and the fact that she had no criminal record.
But there were some details about her marriage and divorce, and that was what Livvy focused on.
“She married Paul Heller when she was twenty-eight,” Livvy read aloud. “Thirty years ago. Paul was a real estate agent at the time of the marriage.”
“And he later failed at that,” Ethan supplied. “He also failed at the investment business he started…with Chloe’s money,” he tacked on.
Livvy pulled up the photos of the man that’d been included in the reports, and she studied his face. Not familiar. And she didn’t get even a trickle of recognition the way she had with Franklin.
Looks could definitely be deceiving, but Livvy could practically see the cockiness oozing from Paul. And he was drop-dead gorgeous, which meant he probably had attracted other women. That could mesh with what Ivy had written about him in her diary.
“Wow,” Livvy went on when she saw the divorce summary. “During the divorce proceedings, Chloe proved infidelity to block Paul from getting any portion of her estate.” Which was sizeable. Well over two million dollars. “No details, though, of anyone she would have named to prove he cheated.”
Ethan made a sound of agreement. “I’ll do some digging on that. We probably can’t get a search warrant for the actual divorce decree, but there could be something about it in Ivy’s diary.”
True, and Grace would either have the diary copied or else take it into evidence since it could point to Anthony’s motive for killing Zadie.
“We’ll need to interview Paul, too,” Livvy commented, and she glanced through the rest of the report to see if there was a current address.
And everything inside her went still.
“Paul’s dead,” she told Ethan, and then she stopped reading and looked up at him. “He died in a car accident the year after Chloe and he divorced.”
Ethan muttered some profanity. “That doesn’t feel like a coincidence.”
No, it didn’t. And Livvy went ahead and pulled up the details that were in the police database. Ethan moved closer to her, shoulder to shoulder, so they could read it together.
Livvy immediately saw that it wasn’t the full report, only a short summary. She also noticed that there weren’t a lot of similarities to Ivy’s fatal car crash. Paul had been killed in downtown San Antonio when his vehicle had smashed into the back of a semi. He had been killed instantly.
“No stab wounds,” Ethan pointed out. “No injuries that weren’t consistent with a traffic accident.” He stopped though when they got to the tox results. “He had a huge dose of muscle relaxers in his system.”
He had indeed. But according to the ME, Paul’s doctor had prescribed the medication for a back injury. So, maybe Paul had just taken too many and made the mistake of getting behind the wheel. That didn’t feel right though, and Ethan must have decided the same thing.
“I’ll request the files on both the police investigation and the autopsy,” he said, switching away from the report to do just that.
He had barely finished the message when his phone rang, and Livvy saw County Crime Lab pop up on his screen.
“Deputy Oakley,” Ethan answered with the call on speaker.
“It’s Harris,” the caller said. No need for him to give his surname, Mendoza, since both Ethan and she knew the lab tech. “I just tried to call the sheriff, but it went to voicemail.”
“She’s tied up in an interview. How can I help?” Ethan asked.
“I just examined the knife that was sent over as highest priority,” Harris explained.
“No results on the blood yet. That’ll be a while since it’s degraded.
But there were fingerprints.” He paused, and it sounded as if he dragged in a long breath.
“The prints were small, almost certainly made by a child.”
Livvy felt as if someone had punched her, knocking all of the air out of her. Still, she forced herself to listen to the rest of what the tech had to say.
“We got a match on the prints,” Harris said. “And they belong to Deputy Livvy Walsh.”