Chapter Fifteen
Livvy sat at the kitchen counter, listening to the phone conversation that Grace was having with the lab. It was the second time the sheriff had been on the line with them since she’d arrived at Ethan’s house about an hour earlier.
An arrival brought on by Ethan’s call to let her know what had happened.
And what had happened was a lot.
Livvy was still reeling from everything that Franklin had told them, and it felt as if she was mentally wading through thick, sticky mud.
There were so many thoughts coming at her.
Broken bits of memories, too, and it was hard to sort everything out.
But sorting and dealing were going to have to happen.
And fast.
Because if everything Franklin had told them turned out to be true, then what had happened twenty-eight years ago could be the reason Chloe and Zadie were dead.
That was why Grace was on the phone, trying to get info on the lab from the file she’d had a courier pick up.
She was especially interested to learn if the recordings were the real deal or something that had been faked with AI or spliced together from other recordings.
Because knowing that could determine if Franklin had put it together to cast blame on his sister while also trying to make himself look innocent of murder.
Before the lab courier had picked up the file, Ethan had made copies of everything, and he was now seated across from her, listening to one of the recordings through an earbud. He’d likely chosen to review it that way so he could spare Livvy having to hear Chloe plotting murder.
Drawing in a long breath, Livvy forced her attention back to the laptop in front of her, the one with what seemed to be an endless search for a woman named Belinda Anderson.
There were over two hundred possibilities in the databases, and so far none of them were panning out to have possibly been her mother.
Her dead mother.
Who Chloe had supposedly killed.
As sickening as that possibility was, Livvy wished she could remember. Not just fragments but the entire hellish ordeal. That way she would know what was true. That way she would know if she was this Belinda Anderson’s daughter.
She glanced up and saw that Ethan was looking at her.
Studying her. No doubt checking to see if she was on the verge of falling apart.
Again. That’d happened right after Franklin had left.
Her legs had simply given way. Her breath had vanished.
And her heart had felt ready to beat right out of her chest.
Ethan had held her. Soothed her. And leveled her out enough for him to call Grace. At the time, Livvy hadn’t wanted that, hadn’t wanted the sheriff to see her in this emotional muddle. But it’d been the right thing to do because now they were focused on the investigation.
“Thanks,” Livvy heard Grace say to the person on the other end of her phone line.
Ethan hit Pause on the recording, and Livvy and he shifted their attention to Grace.
“The recordings are legit,” she relayed to them. She pinned her gaze to Ethan. “Are you getting anything from them?”
He nodded. “So far, it’s just as Franklin said.
Chloe was jealous of Belinda and went after her.
Hank saw what went on, blackmailed her, and Chloe kept the file as leverage over him.
” Ethan huffed. “What I can’t figure out is why Chloe didn’t lock the file away instead of shelving it with her other records. ”
“Sunny might be able to help with that,” Grace said, surprising them.
“The lab IDed multiple sets of prints on the folder. Ethan’s and yours, of course. Zadie’s and Chloe’s, since theirs are now on file. An unidentified set that no doubt belongs to Franklin.” She paused. “And Sunny’s.”
“Sunny’s?” Livvy questioned. “Why were her prints on the folder? And in the database?”
“She gave them voluntarily earlier today when I told her we needed them for elimination purposes to help the CSIs who were processing the crime scene at New Hope.” Grace shrugged.
“Of course, her prints could have gotten on the folder just because she handled it, not knowing what it was. But the tech believes Sunny’s and Zadie’s are the most recent ones.
Theirs and a third set that probably belongs to Franklin. ”
Livvy considered all of that. Sunny certainly hadn’t mentioned a file like that, and it seemed as if she would have.
“Trust me, I’ll be asking Sunny about this when I pick her up soon.” Grace checked the time. “And FYI, I’ll be taking her to my place. There’s good security there, and you two have enough to deal with right now.”
Livvy couldn’t argue that, though she did want to talk to Sunny.
Not only about the contents of that file but any gossip that Sunny might have heard about Chloe’s violent streak.
It was possible that Chloe had run-ins with other women about Paul, and if so, they might have info. If they were alive, that is.
“Sunny also asked if tomorrow morning I could take her to the house where her sister’s body was found,” Grace continued. “I reluctantly agreed,” she muttered, not sounding especially pleased about that. “It hasn’t been cleaned yet, which means Zadie’s blood is still there.”
“The house needs to be processed for old blood,” Livvy blurted. “For my…mother’s,” she managed to say. The word felt as if it’d gotten stuck in her throat.
Grace sighed, nodded. “That’s being done as we speak. And the CSIs should be done in a couple of hours. If they turn up anything, they’ll let us know.”
Finding blood or DNA that old was a serious long shot, but it was possible some blood had seeped into the old wood floor and had gotten trapped there.
“I want to see the house, too,” Livvy said.
And that got instant headshakes and disapproving groans from both Grace and Ethan.
“It might trigger my memory,” she argued before Grace could flat-out refuse. “And if I remember something, then it could give us a clearer picture of who murdered Chloe.”
They didn’t dispute that. Couldn’t. But Livvy saw the concern in their eyes. She was feeling a whole lot of concern, too, but this might be the fastest way to recover her memory and catch a killer.
“It’s time I remembered,” Livvy added.
The seconds crawled by. And crawled. Before Grace muttered some profanity and nodded. “All right, you can go there in the morning with Sunny and me. You, too,” she added to Ethan, “since I know you want to be there for Livvy.”
“I do,” he was quick to verify.
“Tomorrow morning at eight, then,” Grace decided. “Meet us there, and maybe we’ll get a break.” She tipped her head to Livvy’s laptop. “Speaking of breaks, anything yet on our Belinda Anderson?”
Livvy was about to say no, but when she looked at the screen, she saw the last entry, and something about it jumped right out at her. Thirty-one years ago, a Belinda Tate Anderson had testified against her husband, Quentin, in a case of felony domestic violence.
“Maybe,” Livvy heard herself say.
She sat back down on the barstool, her fingers moving quickly now on the keyboard to pull up the file. Ethan and Grace must have realized that she was onto something because they moved in closer so they could see the screen.
And the info loaded.
The picture popped up first. One from an old driver’s license. Livvy felt the slam of emotions. The shock, the grief, the unbearable sadness all rolled into one.
Because that was the face of the dead woman, the one from her nightmares.
Livvy couldn’t look at the picture for long, not with the reaction it was causing inside her.
She had to focus. Had to keep reading. And she saw that nearly thirty years ago to the day, Belinda had testified against her husband in a San Antonio trial that had resulted in his conviction for felony domestic violence.
Since it’d been his third conviction, he had been sentenced to ten years.
Livvy kept scrolling, moving to the background info on Belinda Tate Anderson.
Born fifty-seven years ago in Houston, where she was orphaned at age sixteen when both of her parents were killed in a car crash.
And the irony of that? Livvy saw that Belinda had spent the next year and a half in the foster care system.
Much less time than Livvy but still the same system.
“No criminal record,” Ethan read aloud. “Married to Quentin when she was twenty-one, and two years later, she had a child, Alyssa.”
“Alyssa,” Livvy repeated.
After a couple of deep breaths, she kept on scrolling, only to realize there wasn’t anything else after the trial. That was it. No driver’s license renewal. No cyber footprint left of any kind.
“That’s when she went to New Hope,” Livvy concluded. “And after she disappeared, there was no missing person’s report ever filed.”
If Franklin was to be believed, Chloe had told him that Belinda had simply left. Of course, she hadn’t left by choice, and if Chloe had indeed murdered her, there was no way she would have told the police she was missing.
“What about her husband, Quentin?” Grace asked.
Livvy shifted the search, wondering if he could have played a part in Belinda’s death. But she soon dismissed that. Less than a year after he’d gone to prison for the felony domestic abuse charge, Quentin Anderson had been killed in a fight with several other inmates.
So, both of her parents were dead. And while Livvy was actually thankful that Quentin wasn’t in the picture, she felt the loss of her mother bone deep. It crushed her heart to think of the hell Belinda had gone through with her husband only to end up being murdered.
“This is her,” she said. “This is the right one.”
Neither Grace nor Ethan disputed that. Grace put her hand on Livvy’s shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. “I’m sorry,” she muttered.
The silence hung there for a while, not nearly long enough for Livvy to try to grasp everything she’d just read, but Grace and Ethan gave her some time to tamp down the worst of the sensations. The senseless loss for both Belinda and her.