Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
The morning after, I look at the detective across the kitchen and I can't read him, which is telling in itself. Detective Rodriguez has an even expression after a night that ended with one man on a stretcher and me shaking on the porch.
He sits in the hard morning light like this is the most ordinary house he's been in all week. My coffee's going cold at my elbow. I haven't touched it.
He sets a tablet on the island, turns it so David and I can both see, and presses play.
It's our road at night in the grainy green of somebody's doorbell camera, the Werners' by the angle of it.
Two figures come up the road and climb over our gate in the rain.
Their heads are down, their hoods up. Both wear gloves.
One is taller. They pass through the frame and never once show a face.
I lean forward and make myself look, but I get nothing. They could be anyone.
"That's the best we've got," Rodriguez says. "Piecing the footage together, it looks like they arrived on foot. We figure they parked farther out. Your neighbor's camera stops at the property line, and yours doesn't exist."
"We're aware," David says.
I'm at the island on a stool. My arm is strapped across my chest. My shoulder has a heartbeat now, a slow deep throb that pills take the edge off but nothing takes away.
I only slept two hours last night. Every time I closed my eyes there was a hand on my ankle.
Every time I opened them, the dark end of the hall was waiting. So I sat on the window seat until dawn.
Hanson stands nearby with his hat in hand. Rodriguez does all the talking. He looks less rested than he did the morning after the Ericksons. I take a little comfort in that. It's costing him something too.
"We're still looking for the guy who went over the fence into your neighbor’s property," he says. "We've got a few shots of him fleeing on the way out, and footprints, but that's it. He's gone, and unless he does something stupid, he stays gone."
"And the other," I say.
Rodriguez looks at me.
"The other one's at UW Medical Center," he says. "Intensive care."
David goes very still beside me. I feel it—a change in the room I register before I can name it.
Rodriguez turns the tablet toward us and brings up an old booking photo. A man about thirty, gaunt in the face with that exhausted stare they all wear in those pictures. "That's him. The one in ICU.”
"Who is he?" David asks.
"He's from downtown. Pioneer Square, Skid Row, give or take.
Long record, mostly drugs, a string of break-ins, an assault.
" He swipes to a second face, older, harder.
"This one we can't be sure of yet. But he and our man have gone through doors together before.
The build fits your camera, so we're calling him the one who went over the fence.
We just can't find him." He swipes back to the first and sets the tablet down.
"This is the one who matters. He landed hard on your flagstones.
There's bleeding on the brain. They took the pressure off overnight.
" He says it as if reading a chart he's read a hundred times. "He hasn't woken up."
"Is he going to?" I ask.
"They don't know. But if he does, we plan on talking to him."
I think about last night. The one thing I'd swear to in a courtroom is the tumble of a body going down wood, the thud of it landing. I never saw it, but I heard it.
“Is Henry in trouble?" I ask.
Rodriguez looks at me for a second.
"He won't be charged," he says. "Two armed men came into an occupied home in the middle of the night. A neighbor heard the disturbance and intervened. One of them injured himself fleeing. Under the law, that's about as clean as these things get. No prosecutor in this county will touch it."
"It's convenient that Henry was nearby," David says. He doesn't make it a question, and he doesn't look at me when he says it.
"Mr. Westburn gave a full statement. It matches the scene and what your wife remembers," Rodriguez says. "What there is of it."
"I told you, I don't remember much. I hit the floor pretty hard."
"I'm not faulting you for the gaps, Mrs. Grant.
I wouldn't expect anyone to give me a clean story after a night like that.
The clean stories are the ones I worry about.
" He lets that sit for a second. I can't tell if it's aimed at me or past me.
That's the trouble with Rodriguez. He leaves everything slightly ajar.
He nods at the empty corner over the door where a camera isn't. "Get something on the house.
Cameras, an alarm, the works. Today, if you can. "
He turns the tablet off. The screen goes black, and in the reflection I see the kitchen behind me. Me and David side by side on our stools, like a photograph of a marriage.
"Detective." I hear myself before I've decided to speak. "If you've got these two coming up our road on camera, then the night the Ericksons died, you must have whoever did that too."
"Unfortunately not." His face doesn't move. "Whoever murdered the Ericksons came in off the water. No road, no cameras, nothing on the lake side to catch him."
"They didn't have security?" I ask.
He raises an eyebrow, the first thing his face has done all morning. "They had security. It wasn't switched on that night."
"So the intruder knew it was off?" I ask, and the old machine turns over in me, the one I'm not supposed to run anymore. "Or..."
"Or he was close to them and knew that detail," Rodriguez says, and then he stops there, before I can push it any further.
"So you think they randomly picked our house?" David says.
"That's what we hope to find out when the man in ICU wakes.
If he does. Right now, we don't have enough to say.
But what we do know is they were determined.
They walked straight up this long road in the worst weather we've had all year.
" He spreads his hands. "They skipped the Shaw place, which is bigger.
They didn't bother with the empty Erickson house.
Instead they came right here. To the house with no cameras.
The house with a woman alone inside, her husband gone, on the one night the storm took the power down.
Maybe it's coincidence. Maybe they cased three streets and picked the softest door.
That happens." A pause. "But it's a lot of maybes. "
The throb in my shoulder goes all the way up into my jaw.
“Do you think it's connected?” I ask.
"I don't have a single thing that says it is." He picks up the tablet. "That bothers me too."
David stands. His hand finds the small of my back, and I've started to notice how often that hand arrives when I'm the one asking the questions.
"Thank you, Detective," David says. "Thank you both."
Rodriguez takes his time gathering himself. At the door he stops with his hand on the frame and turns back.
"We'll find out why these men targeted your home. In the meantime, get that security system in."
We watch them go. The county SUV backs down the drive and the marked car follows it. Once again the road is just the road, green and quiet. Frank Werner is standing at his gate pretending to look at his hedge.
David shuts the door and leans his forehead against it for a second, and when he turns around he's my husband again, the one from before all this, tired and frightened and reaching for me.
"Come here," he says.
I let him fold me in against his chest, careful of my arm. I put my face in his shirt and breathe him in.
For a moment, it's enough. Almost enough.
The size of him around me. The ordinary thud of his heart.
Over his shoulder, through the kitchen window, the aviary is loud and the pool lies blue and untouched. Past the fence, the Erickson house sits empty behind its cedars. Twelve hours ago, a man I barely know fought off two intruders, and now one is lying in a hospital bed.
He might wake up.
I want him to wake up.
I want it so badly it frightens me.