Chapter Twenty-Two
Zach knocked on the door of the beautifully refurbished older home in Hyde Park where Professor Merrick lived with his family.
He waited, but the house was silent from inside, and when Zach leaned forward, cupping his hands around his eyes so he could see into the dim foyer beyond, it appeared to be completely empty. Confused, he stepped back.
“They don’t live there anymore,” he heard called from behind.
Zach turned, noticing the blond woman in the driveway next door handing a grocery bag to a pretty, young black woman who looked to be in her late teens or very early twenties.
The young woman disappeared into the house, her arms laden with groceries as the older woman, also holding a couple of bags, hit a button on her key fob, and the rear door of her SUV began to close.
“Do you know how long ago they moved?” Zach asked, descending the steps of what had apparently previously been the Merrick house and walking toward the neighbor.
She balanced one of the bags on her hip. “They moved a few weeks ago.”
“Did you know them well?”
She gave him a semi-suspicious look, obviously wondering why he was asking questions. He removed his badge. “I’m with the Cincinnati Police Department. I just have a few questions for Professor Merrick.”
“About those missing students?”
“In relation to that, yes. I’m hoping he can shed some light on a few questions that have come up.”
“Awful case. I hope Vaughn can help. Anyway, to your question, yes, I knew them really well. We’d lived next to each other for almost two decades. Their girls used to play with mine.” The woman nodded up to her house where the young woman was waiting on the porch.
“Do you need me to grab those, Mom?” she called.
“I’m good.” She smiled up at her daughter. “If you’ll start unpacking, I’ll be up in a minute to help.”
“Okay.” Her daughter turned and disappeared into the house.
“A shame,” the woman said, the look on her face suddenly troubled.
“What’s that, ma’am?”
“Their divorce. I knew they’d had ups and downs, but I thought they were doing really well these last couple of years.
” She shifted the bag in her arms. “Their older daughter got engaged, the younger one attends college out of state. They were out on the porch some nights having cocktails. I thought they were in a good season of life, you know? I guess you never can tell what’s going on inside someone’s home unless you’re in it. Do you have children, Detective?”
Zach was taken aback for a second by the seeming change in topic. “Uh, no. Not married.”
The woman smiled warmly. “Well, once you do, you’ll see that family life is full of all sorts of complications and unexpected challenges.
You have to work to grow together, not apart.
” She shot a disappointed look at what had once been the Merrick family home and was now an abandoned shell, not unlike their broken family, or so it sounded like.
“Mom, are you coming?” her daughter yelled from her porch again.
The older woman waved at her and then laughed softly. “I’m being summoned,” she told Zach. “I have their forwarding information, so let me run inside and get it for you.”
“That’d be great, thank you.” He watched as the woman jogged up her front steps, saying something that made her daughter laugh as she thrust the bags at her jokingly.
Zach smiled. He liked this neighbor of the Merricks.
Maybe it was her warm smile, or maybe he identified with what little he’d seen of this family.
He’d been adopted too, knew what it was like to be the odd man out among a gaggle of blonds and redheads.
His parents and siblings, whom he loved dearly, had never made him feel that way, but he’d been a kid like any other kid.
He’d struggled through that uncertain time when differences feel like strikes against you rather than assets.
Even standing there in the driveway, he could feel the affection these people had for each other, and it reminded him of his own family.
A wave of gratitude filtered through him when he pictured Josie’s mother’s house.
He didn’t know a lot about his birth mother’s situation other than she was young and impoverished.
He didn’t know if he’d have grown up in a circumstance like Josie’s, but he knew for sure he’d have had less opportunity.
He was grateful to everyone involved in gifting him with his life, including the woman who’d birthed him and made the loving choice to give him up.
The blond woman jogged back down the steps, holding a piece of paper out to him. “I’m Dawn Parsons, by the way.” She smiled. “I jotted my number down on there as well if you happen to need anything else.”
“I appreciate that very much. Thank you for your time, ma’am.”
His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he gave Dawn a wave as he turned toward his car and connected the call. “Copeland.”
Zach listened, a pit in his stomach gaping wide as he gripped the door handle, pulling it open with more force than necessary. “I’ll be there in ten.”
As he pulled away from the curb, his head swam. Holy Christ. What the fuck did this mean?
* * *
“Who found the body?”
“Neighbor,” the cop who’d first arrived on scene said. “Said she comes over to sit on the porch and have a smoke some nights with the deceased. There was no answer tonight, but when she tried the door, it was unlocked. She came in, found the old lady splayed out in the living room.”
So she’d been expecting someone. Had she unknowingly called come on in to a sadistic killer when he’d knocked on her door? He looked back toward the house where the dead, mutilated body that had been described to him still lay on the floor. Josie’s mother.
“Thanks,” Zach said, seeing the first criminalist arriving. He pulled on the gloves he’d had in his car. “Will you tell the neighbor to stay put? I’m going to need to interview her before I leave.”
“Will do.”
Zach waited for the criminalist, a guy named Barry, who he’d worked with a time or two, and they both slipped booties over their shoes before entering the house together.
The house smelled the same as it had that morning, only now there was the additional scent of burned flesh.
Other than the body on the floor, things looked about the same as they had earlier.
No signs of struggle. Nothing out of place other than a TV remote on the floor, batteries next to it as though it’d been dropped.
He came up next to the body as Barry began opening his kit. “Jesus,” he murmured.
“Not a pretty sight,” Barry agreed. He picked up his camera and began taking photographs of the body from different angles.
The woman who Zach had met that morning was staring blindly up at the ceiling, tongue lolling, eyes bugged out, tiny circular burns over every area of her face. It appeared that someone had used a cigarette to burn her flesh. “Pre- or postmortem?” Zach asked, pointing at her scarred face.
Barry lowered the camera, considering the woman. “See the blood on that one by her eye? And the pus on a few of the burns on her cheeks? Indicates she was alive when burned.”
Christ.
Zach hadn’t entertained nice thoughts about this woman, but no one deserved to die this way.
“She must have screamed,” he murmured.
Barry pointed to what looked like a kitchen towel partially balled up on the floor next to the body. “Might have been used as a gag. I’ll have it tested.”
Zach nodded, hardly wanting to picture Diana Stratton’s last moments. But it was his job. If he was going to do it well, he had no choice. The challenge was to move the images aside when he closed his eyes to sleep at night.
He glanced around. There was a full ashtray on the coffee table that he knew would be tested to determine if any of the cigarette butts had prints from someone other than Diana Stratton.
For some reason, Detective Pickering’s words about the profile of the killer came back to him: Know this, detectives—you will likely only find what he wants you to find.
Barry used his gloved hand to open Diana Stratton’s bathrobe. “It’s not just her face that’s burned either.” He bent, shooting the camera between her legs. “Same burns on her genitals.”
Zach felt ill. “Signs of sexual assault?”
“It’s hard to tell with the burn trauma. Cathlyn will have to determine that.”
“Cause of death?”
Barry lowered the camera. “Wouldn’t have been the burns, as excruciating as those would have been.
” He stepped forward, squatting next to her head and using a gloved finger to push her lower eyelid down.
“Petechial hemorrhages and lots of them.” He then moved the high neck of her robe, exposing her throat. “There you go. Strangulation.”
Zach peered at the angry red impressions. He knew Cathlyn would look at the bones in the neck and other factors before he’d have a definitive cause of death, but it sure as hell looked like Josie’s mother had been strangled.
Strangled.
Not starved. Not shackled.
“Can you check her right thigh?”
Barry pushed her robe aside to expose the top of her right thigh, Zach’s stomach dropping. Casus belli. The words were crusted with dried blood, an enraged declaration of guilt carved into the thin, wrinkled skin.
What the fuck did this mean?
Footsteps sounded behind him, and he turned to see more criminalists entering the room.
They’d be here for a while, going through this house that Josie had cleaned just that morning.
The whole scene felt surreal in the aftermath of the time he’d spent sitting in the chair by the window as he’d listened to the old woman say cruel and insensitive things to her daughter.
He needed to interview the neighbor next door.
And then he’d have to go tell Josie her mother was dead.