Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
Rodriguez comes to the house in the early evening, straight from the Langford place. He brings Hanson with him. They sit on the same sofa as before, and Rodriguez tells us, kindly, that there's nothing here.
The rain has thinned to something that doesn't announce itself, a fine gray drizzle that's been falling on the lake all day. David has made coffee nobody drinks. We sit in the living room like people waiting on a diagnosis, which is a thing I've done in this marriage before.
"Let me tell you what we've got," Rodriguez says, "and then you can tell me what I'm missing."
He lays it out straight, without any drama.
Henry Westburn is a real man. That's the first thing, and it lands strangely, because some part of me had started to believe he might not be.
He has a driver's license and a work history.
He's a licensed agent with the property company Diane Langford hired to handle her mother's home.
The company took Eleanor's keys and began preparing the property for sale once Eleanor could no longer manage it herself. Henry was the agent assigned to it.
"He had every right to be there,” Rodriguez says. "His company had the keys and the contract to manage the sale. What he didn't have was permission to live there."
He shifts on the sofa.
"The problem is proving that. Eleanor's furniture is still there. He didn't move anything in. A razor, a toothbrush, some food in the fridge... that tells me somebody stayed there. It doesn't tell me he was living there."
"What about the sign?"
"That bothers me more. He pulled it so people would stop asking questions about the house." Rodriguez rubs a hand over his knee. "Diane terminated the contract and reported him to the licensing board. She could take him to court if she wanted."
"But?" I ask.
"She wants him gone. She wants the house sold. That's it."
"But he lied to us," David says. "He told me he was in security. He sat at my dinner table and lied about who he is."
Rodriguez exhales, tired. "He didn't invent the security company. His brother owns HomeShield. It’s real.
The property company Henry works for uses that firm on its listings, so there was enough truth in the story to make it believable.
But no, he's not security. He's a realtor. He just let you believe otherwise."
“So, I’m right. He lied,” David says.
"He misrepresented himself. That matters. But it's not the same thing as a crime."
“Oh, come on.”
Rodriguez groans, like he's had this conversation in a hundred living rooms. "Doctor Grant.
I've been doing this a long time. Lying about your job to impress the people on a nice road is not a crime.
It's a sad, strange thing for a grown man to do, and I've got the same bad feeling about him you have, but a feeling isn't evidence.”
David nudges me. "Tell him about the mail."
I've been turning it over all day. Now I finally put it in the room.
"It started with his mail," I say. "A package of his came to us by mistake.
Our house numbers are close enough to confuse a tired driver, and I opened it before I saw the name.
Inside were clippings about a series of murders in Oregon.
Years of them. News articles. Coroner's reports.
He's built a whole case around it in that house. "
I hear how it sounds and keep going.
"He told me one of the victims was his sister.
I don't know that she was. He showed me a clipping with her name, but I couldn't verify it. The newspaper’s tiny, it's out of state, and I don't drive.
He said her name was Claire Doyle. Twelve years ago, in a small town in Jackson County.
He said she'd married, so she'd dropped the Westburn name. "
Hanson looks up from his notebook.
“Do you believe he was telling the truth?” Rodriguez asks.
“Maybe. Now? I don't know.”
“Oh please. Clearly he was lying about that too,” David says.
Rodriguez writes the name down, which is more than I expected and less comfort than I wanted.
I don't tell him about the phone I took from the second intruder either. I managed to charge it, but I couldn't get past the lock screen. Now it's upstairs in a drawer, useless to me and impossible to hand over without explaining where I got it and why I took it.
"I'll look into Claire Doyle. I will." He sets the pen down.
"But I want to be straight with you about what I think I'll find.
There are a lot of people, more than you'd think, armchair detectives and true-crime types, who fall in love with a case like that.
They know it better than the detectives who worked it.
They drive to the towns. They make the victims their own. "
He looks at me.
"They'll tell you a dead woman was their sister to buy a little sympathy, and they half believe it by the time they've said it enough. It's a lonely, desperate thing, but it isn't against the law. All it reveals is that a man like that will attach himself to whoever will sit still and listen."
I feel that land where he meant it to.
"That's the man I think you've got. A lonely liar who found a case to claim, a house he could stay in for free, and a road full of people who'd have him to dinner. Not the other thing. The clippings you saw are gone. Whatever he built in there, he took it with him."
"Okay, and what about the birds?" David is barely catching his breath. "And our missing dog. Or the cameras?"
Hanson answers, gentle, reading off his notebook.
"The power went out across the whole point.
PSE confirms it. Several alarms on the point were affected by the same outage.
There's no forced entry here. The gate wasn't broken.
Someone could have opened it, or the latch could have worked loose in the storm.
The birds, I'm sorry, there's no way to say who or how. And you said your dog..."
"Luna." The name comes out before I can stop it. "Her name's Luna."
"Luna. Right." Hanson doesn't push it. "You said you’ve got a dog flap.
A dog with a flap and an open gate. In weather like that, you do the math.
" He closes the notebook. "I know how it feels.
I do. But nothing here points to anyone we can name.
And the one man you want it to be had a key to a house up the road, and no reason we can prove to be in yours. "
"He controls our security," David says. "He could shut every camera off from wherever he's sitting."
"So can the company that monitors it. So can a power cut. We can't tell which from a dark screen." Rodriguez spreads his hands. "And, not to state the obvious, but why would he want to harm your dog or your birds? By every account you had a good relationship with him."
I nod. "He did give me one of the birds."
Rodriguez continues. "Listen, for what it's worth, I called the brother's firm.
They were knocked out in the same outage, same as half the point, which is likely why the number on Mrs. Langford's contract has been ringing out on her too.
If you want the system out of the house, take it out.
Change the codes. But wanting it to be him and proving it are two different things, and I only get to work with what I can prove. "
"I don't get it." David is on his feet now. "You're going to do nothing? What if he was behind what happened to the Ericksons?"
"Being a liar doesn't put him in that house, Doctor." Rodriguez holds his eye. "But you can be assured, we'll look into him."
“And what about Chris Brockwell?"
"Julia Shaw's boyfriend?"
David nods. "The one who knocks his girlfriend around. He stood up at my wife's birthday and spat a lie about me in front of everyone. He put his hands on me, and now he's telling the whole club I assaulted him."
"Do you have video of any of that?"
"I have forty witnesses."
"We'll look into Mr. Brockwell." Rodriguez doesn't hurry. "But tying what happened to your dog and birds to him is a stretch, and turning up on a man's doorstep with an accusation and no proof is how you end up with nothing. Or worse."
David groans and drags a hand back over his head.
Rodriguez stands. Hanson follows. At the door, with his coat half on, Rodriguez gives us one last thing to hold onto.
"He misled you," he says. "That's not a crime, and it's not murder."
"But why would he?" David says.
"That's what we hope to find out."
David turns to me in our doorway with the rain behind the detective and the whole terrible day in his face.
I understand what he wants. He wants his wife.
He wants me to say it with him, out loud, in front of them.
Henry is dangerous. Tell them what you know, Mallory.
He's been alone in his certainty all afternoon.
Now he's holding out his hand to me, and all I have to do is take it.
But I don't.
I stand there and look at my husband. I think about the green dot over the hospital, the complaint to the board, the folder on my island, the sedative in the blood, and a scene too clean to be rage. About how sure he is. How sure anyone can sound when they need to be believed.
I say nothing at all. I watch something in his face go out as he understands I'm not going to give it to him. And I let him stand there alone in it, because I'm no longer certain the danger is the one he's naming.