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Carole placed a palm over her son’s hands, which he’d folded on the table. “Don’t answer that.”
Foster sat back, dead in the water. “Look, we’re trying to figure this out.”
“Really?” There was no masking the woman’s skepticism. “I don’t think I’ve ever met a detective once who was in it to ‘figure it out.’” She flicked a distrustful look at Lonergan, whose face had turned to stone.
Foster slid a sheet with five photos on it toward Keith, Peggy Birch’s image among them. “Do any of these women look familiar to you?”
George reached out and picked up the sheet, studying it before passing it to his son. “You can answer.”
Keith took a look, then shook his head. “No.”
“Do you own a hunting knife, Keith?” Foster asked.
Carole banged her fist on the table. “He does not.”
Foster waited a moment. She needed an answer from the kid, not his mother. “Keith?”
He turned to his mother, then his father, checking to see if it was okay for him to answer. They each gave him a subtle nod. “No,” he said. “I don’t hunt.”
Foster studied him for a time. “Did you go into any of the restaurants or bars along the Riverwalk yesterday? Did you drive downtown or take the bus? Which friends do you think you were with on Sunday?”
Carole tapped her son on the hand again. A signal. There was, apparently, something in the barrage of questions she would allow him to address.
“Me and some friends went to the march. I remember that. Afterward, we hung out. Maybe I had a couple beers.” He slid his mother a look. Legal drinking age was twenty-one. He was in violation, though a murdered woman rather trumped the Class A misdemeanor.
Foster scribbled a note, underlining the word march as Keith spoke. “But not on the Riverwalk,” she said. “Where then?”
His mother tapped him again. “The park,” he replied. “By the boats.”
“The boats?” Lonergan’s tone was disbelieving. “At the marina?”
George turned on Lonergan. “That’s his answer.”
“And the K-pin you were conked out on,” Lonergan said. “Where’d you get that?”
“I don’t do drugs. Somebody must have slipped me something.”
“And we’ll be looking into that, believe me,” Carole said. “Anything could have happened to him. He could have fallen into the river and drowned, been attacked . . .”
Lonergan’s brows lifted. “Or ended up next to a dead girl? And by ‘somebody’ he means . . . one of his friends?”
Beer. Boats. Marina. Foster jotted down the details. “But you don’t remember meeting anyone new? Or walking to the bridge?” She walked the route in her head. Keith could have stumbled away from the marina and gone one of two ways, either along the path south, ending up on Lake Shore Drive, or north and west along the pedestrian path through the tunnel to the Riverwalk. “You had to get back to the dorm. Were you headed to Michigan to catch an Uber or cab?” If that was the case, they could trace that.
There was a blank expression on Keith’s face. It didn’t look like he knew which side was up yet. “I was sitting on the grass and looking out at the boats. We talked about the march. No big deal.”
Lonergan’s brows rose. “The antipolice march?”
Keith straightened, assurance returning. “We’re not antipolice, we’re antidying. Raising our voices so the killing stops.”
Lonergan clenched his teeth. She could tell by the rippling along his jawline as he bore down. “You remembered all that well enough.”
“Names?” Foster asked. “Of the friends you were with.” As Keith came up with them, she wrote them down.
“No blood match, no prints,” George said. “Close by, but no witnesses putting Keith together with the victim. If you had any of that, again, you would have led with it.” George stood, pushing his chair in. “Okay. We’re done. I’m going to make some calls. Meanwhile, not another word, Keith.”
When he swept out of the room in expensive shoes, his wife’s eyes narrowed as she took in Lonergan none too pleasantly; then she turned and stared at Foster, as though she’d chosen the wrong side in a righteous fight.
“I’d like to confer with my client,” Carole snapped, ice in her tone. Foster wondered if the woman ever rattled, ever broke to show any emotion or hint of vulnerability.
Lonergan jabbed back, seemingly still put out by the accusation of wrongdoing on the part of the first officers on scene. “If he’s so innocent, how do you explain the blood?”
“It’s not my job to explain it,” she said. “It’s yours.” She looked over at her boy. “He’s my job. My one and only.”
Foster recognized the stalemate and pushed away from the table. She stood and began gathering her papers and files along with her notebook. George Ainsley was right about one thing: The clock was ticking, only time wasn’t on their side. Never was. Lonergan pushed back from the table, too, scraping the chair legs noisily along the floor. He was out of the room like a bullet without another word. So much for teamwork.
“Get you anything?” she asked Keith. “A cold pop? Water? A snack?”
He lowered his chin to his chest and shook his head, but his mother wasn’t about to let up. “Unnecessary. We won’t be here that long.”
“Right.” Foster headed for the door.
“My son didn’t do this,” Carole called out. “You know he didn’t.”
Foster turned back, her eyes moving from mother to son. Did she know? She couldn’t tell innocence or guilt by looking or feeling; nobody could. She opened the door. “Sit tight.”
Carole Ainsley stood. “I’ll fight like hell for my kid. I won’t allow you to take him from me.”
Foster didn’t bother turning around again. There was nothing she could say that Carole Ainsley would accept. She eased out of the room and closed the door behind her. For a moment she stood at the door, her hand on the knob. “Good.”
CHAPTER 8
Restless, needing to be outside instead of in, Bodie had an Uber drop him off a mile from where he was going. He’d walk the rest of the way, down streets he knew and could likely navigate blindfolded if he had to. He’d grown up here. He knew this town and the secrets it held. They were the same ones he kept now.
His feet kicked up leaves along the sidewalk as he buried his hands in his jacket pockets. He took everything in—what was the same, what was different. Fourteen years had passed since he’d been back. There wasn’t a single thing he’d once thought he needed to see ever again, and yet here he was, kicking up horrors with every step he took. He was curious, trepidatious. Even the chilly fall afternoon couldn’t stop him from sweating under his fleece jacket.
He rounded the corner and saw it sitting there in the middle of the block. The white house on the quiet street. As he stood, his eyes glued to the structure, he couldn’t get his feet to move or his brain to process a single coherent thought. It was as though he had suddenly forgotten everything—how to walk, talk, be.
There it stood. The two-level, white-shingled nightmare with attached garage and asphalt driveway. The American flag flying from a pole on the front porch was new. Tom Morgan hadn’t been the patriotic type as far as Bodie could recall. In fact, Bodie couldn’t remember that he’d been at all fervent about anything, except his compulsion to kill young women with red hair and blue eyes. That was Tom’s sin, but it was his and Am’s blood curse. Their father was a killer. Their basement was his killing field, and they’d known it since the age of twelve, when they’d found the basement door unpadlocked and wandered downstairs to find what remained of someone’s daughter. Bodie had wet himself. Amelia had been brave, stoic. Neither of them had opened their mouths about what they’d seen, not to the police or a school counselor, not to a priest or a neighbor. Tom Morgan’s infection of evil had become their shame, their secret, their family legacy.
Thank God he was dead, Bodie thought. He had to be. Bodie hadn’t heard a single thing from him in almost fifteen years, and he fantasized about a painful death, a true reckoning. The man had deserved no less. One thing was certain: if Tom Morgan were still alive, still here, Bodie wouldn’t be. He couldn’t imagine coming anywhere near this place if Tom Morgan still walked the earth. Even now, though, as he neared the house—as his reluctant feet slapped against the concrete sidewalk, as he stirred up fallen leaves in his path, his eyes boring into the shingles—he had the very eerie sense that his father’s eyes were tracking him.
Staring up at the second-floor windows, one looking out from his old bedroom and the other from Amelia’s, he was back there again, in the basement, staring into the stillest, bluest eyes he’d ever seen. This was where it all started, or was it more accurate to say ended? This was where he could have become something different and had that chance stolen from him. This was where he’d been changed.
“Help you?”
He reeled to find a man standing at the garage in a flannel jacket and skull cap. He was holding an old rake. Bodie had been so haunted by the house, so drawn in, that he hadn’t noticed that the garage door was up or that there were garbage bags of raked-up leaves sitting on the driveway. The man looked to be in his midfifties. This was his house now, obviously. For a moment, Bodie stared at him. Did the man have any idea what he’d inherited? Bodie doubted it.
He smiled. It was the smile he’d seen his father give a million times—warm, friendly, fake, well-practiced. “Sorry,” Bodie said. “I used to live here as a kid. I was in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d come take a look.”
“A walk down memory lane, that it?” The man tossed down the rake and leaned down for a plastic garbage bag. “When’s the last time you saw it?”
Bodie scanned the house’s exterior again. “Almost fifteen years.” He pointed at the upstairs window on the left. “That was my room. That old hickory tree still in the back?”
“It’s partly to blame for me being out here. I hit the back this morning. Perks of home ownership, right?”
Bodie chuckled. “Right. How long you been here?”
“Me and the family moved in about ten years ago. It’s a great neighborhood. Not so busy. The neighbors keep to themselves.” He gave Bodie a playful wink. “And the school’s just up the way, but you’d know all that.”
He knew about the quiet neighbors. “I went to that school,” Bodie said.
“What’s your name?” the man asked.
“Dan. Dan Flynn.” The lie rolled off his tongue easily, but he doubted the man would check the house’s provenance to see if any Flynns showed up in the search.
“Frank Gibson.” Gibson gave him a good long look. Bodie was clean shaven, neat, nicely dressed. He didn’t look like a thief or a criminal. He looked normal, like someone the man would know and have a beer with. Safe. “You want to take a quick look inside? For old times’ sake?”
The thought alone made Bodie tense. Though the smile hid most of his unease, inside his head a Klaxon sounded. Seeing the house again was one thing, but he absolutely couldn’t step inside. “No. Thanks,” he said. “I remember it. Besides, what’s that they say? You can’t go home again?”
Bodie noted that there were flouncy yellow curtains hanging in his old room instead of the blue ones with stripes that he remembered having. He’d stood in that room on his last day, waiting for Tom Morgan to start the car. All Bodie had wanted to do was go. He and Am had lived with their basement discovery six years by that point without either of them talking about it. He couldn’t fathom now how they’d accomplished such a thing, how they’d managed to appear normal, act normal, say nothing, and continue to live in the same house with a murderer. The world beyond his room had felt like a giant trap. What if he slipped up? What if he told? Worse yet, what would he become if he didn’t?
That last day here, Tom Morgan stared at him with his warm brown eyes, not the cold ones Bodie had seen when Tom had discovered them in his private place, the ones that held not an ounce of humanity, the ones he feared at night. He’d wondered often which eyes his father’s victims saw when they realized they were going to die. Were they still alive when he disemboweled them or cut their hands from their wrists or their feet from their ankles? Some monsters didn’t look like monsters. No one would ever imagine the personable CPA who helped with homework and took his daughter to ballet class on Saturday mornings held such darkness, such a twisted soul.
There were no parting words of wisdom on that last day before they were driven off to college. He and Am just packed their things, got in the car, and were driven away. And Tom was gone. Phone number disconnected. House sold. He and Am had been on their own at eighteen. He knew Am had tried to find their father, but Bodie had never bothered. Why would he when he could finally breathe?
“You all right there?” Gibson asked.
His question brought Bodie back to the present. “What’s that?”
“Looked like you got lost there for a minute.”
Bodie smiled. “Guess so. Memories are funny that way. I won’t hold you up any longer. I was just curious and wanted to see.”
“No bother. It’s a good house,” Gibson said. “Feel free to stop by anytime.”
Bodie backed up a bit. He wouldn’t be back. “Thanks,” he said, already moving away, but he turned back. “My father set up a workshop in the basement.”
“That right?” Gibson said.
“He made wooden toys—little things.” It was the reason he had given them for spending so much time locked below stairs. There had been toy trains for him, dollhouses for Am, but not enough to account for all his time.
“I’ve never been handy like that. I converted it into a family room for the kids. Pool table, TV, sofas. My daughters spend half their time down there. You ever listen to a bunch of teenage girls giggling and squealing like little magpies? It’s an experience, let me tell you.”
“Right.” Bodie’s eyes swept over the lawn. “Well, good luck with the leaves.”
He could hear Gibson’s rake start its steady scraping behind him as he walked away. Family room, he thought. A pool table and television set, sofas. He picked up his pace.
“And daughters,” he mumbled to himself.
CHAPTER 9
“Not enough to hold him and have it stick, and you all know it,” Griffin announced. “The state’s attorney would have laughed in our faces.” The team had gathered around her to report what they had—or, more importantly, didn’t have.
“So instead, we sit on our hands and let him waltz out of here?” Lonergan said, having just watched Keith and his parents walk out the front door.
“Until we can match that blood to Birch or find that knife with his prints on it? Yeah.” Griffin glanced over at Foster. “What do we have?”
“We have Rosales’s preliminary report from the scene. We have Keith Ainsley’s fuzzy recollections of Sunday night. We have two names from Birch’s parents: Joe Rimmer and Wendy Stroman—her ex-boyfriend and her roommate at school. Since Peggy was living away from the house, her parents couldn’t account for her time day to day, but those two might have a better idea. If we can track her movements, maybe we find a point where she and Ainsley met somewhere.”
“What about Ainsley’s friends from the park?” Griffin asked. “Anybody talk to them?” She got nothing but shaking heads back as a response. “Right. That’s why Ainsley walked. We don’t have our ducks in a row. We have less than nothing.”
“Blood’s not nothing,” Lonergan groused.
Foster turned to him. “But he wasn’t covered in it. If he killed her, he would have been. It would have been under his nails, in his hair, on his shoes, socks.”
Griffin watched the two of them, still clearly assessing their viability as a team. “Right. So stop whining, Lonergan,” she said. “Him walking now gives us time to build a case. If we’d kept him, that would have started the clock on our forty-eight. Smarter not to waste it until we have something more than what we’ve got now.”
“Maybe if we’d sweated him for forty-eight hours, he’d have given something up,” Lonergan pushed back.
Symansky chuckled and straightened his gaudy tie. “Doubt it. His parents were all over that. I’m with the boss. We’d have lost our shot keeping him.”
Detective Tony Bigelow pushed his eyeglasses on top of his head and then swiveled in his chair. “Her and Ainsley being at the same march sounds like it might be something.”
“Maybe, but there were hundreds of people marching along with them,” Foster said.
“Right. She coulda met anybody,” Symansky said. “Those marches are like friggin’ mosh pits.”
Foster consulted her notes. “Otherwise, Birch and Ainsley didn’t go to the same school; they didn’t come from the same neighborhood. I doubt we’ll find friend groups in common. Nothing else seems to connect them.”
“No way I’d let my kid sign on to that fringe mob crap,” Symansky offered, leaning back in his chair. “It’s likely some freak taking an opportunity.”
“Fringe mob?” Detective Vera Li asked, her brows raised. “What happened to free speech? And they’re not entirely wrong on some points.”
“Commies,” Symansky countered. “This is America. They don’t like it, they can leave it.”
Li lobbed a balled-up report sheet at his head, but he snagged it midair and tossed it back to her. “What decade are you in, Al? Are you really advocating for America, love it or leave it?”
He shot Li an impish grin. Apparently, he enjoyed winding her up. “I just don’t like kids wet behind the ears telling me how stuff’s supposed to run. They don’t have the life experience, and they sure as hell don’t know how things work. Give them a couple of decades after the world hits them hard, and then let’s see what they’re willing to march for. That’s my point.”
Lonergan nodded, twirling a ballpoint between his fingers. “Hear, hear.”
