“Maybe I’m just being paranoid, but I had an odd moment at the market today. Helen Hanley rang up my groceries. As I was leaving, she bumped into me—hard—then told me I should be careful, that she’d hate to see me get hurt. I thought she was just being rude. But the more I thought about it, the more it felt like something else. When I went back to talk to her, I saw that she had a bruise on her cheek. She’d tried covering it with makeup, but I could still see it. And then Dennis showed up. She was terrified of him, Roger. And I don’t blame her. He was wearing a white coat smeared with dried blood. He must have just left his shift at the meatpacking plant. I didn’t put it together until I got home and unwrapped a package of cheese from the deli.”
“Cheese?”
“It was wrapped in white paper. Butcher paper—like they’d use at a meatpacking plant.”
There was another pause while he connected the dots. “The note,” he said finally. “You think Dennis wrote the note.”
“I’m crazy, right? Putting two and two together and coming up with five?”
“Maybe not. In fact . . .”
Lizzy waited for him to finish. When he didn’t, she prodded him. “In fact what?”
“It’s something I heard from a buddy right after Hollis died. New guy got the call—Steve Gaffney. He was a good guy, but he bungled it a little bit.”
Lizzy’s pulse ticked up. “Bungled how?”
“He claimed there was a note at the house, a suicide note essentially. Hollis’s wife found it tacked up on the refrigerator, and gave it to Gaffney when he showed up to tell her about the wreck. He said she was crying, but didn’t seem that surprised by the news.”
“What was in the note?”
“The kind of stuff a man writes when he’s on the edge. According to Helen, he came back from Afghanistan pretty wrecked. She begged him to get help, to join a support group, but Dennis put a stop to that. Said the Hanleys deal with their own problems.”
“Spoken like a true expert on PTSD,” Lizzy muttered.
“That’s the thing. Hollis was never actually diagnosed with PTSD.”
“Maybe not officially, but something must’ve happened over there. A year after he comes back he commits suicide? What did the note say?”
“Nobody knows. Gaffney screwed up and left the note behind. Rookie mistake, I guess. Your first DRT can shake you up pretty bad, especially if it’s messy, which this one was.”
“DRT?”
“Sorry, it’s police slang for dead right there.”
“Nice.”
“Not really, no. But it’s a coping thing. Anyway, when they went back for the note, it had disappeared.”
“How does a note disappear?”
“With help. By the time they got back to the house, Dennis was there and Helen had developed a severe case of amnesia. Claimed she never saw the note. When they pressed her, Dennis stepped in. Said Helen had been through enough, and he’d be handling things going forward. There was no suspicion of foul play, so they let it go. People are funny about suicide, squeamish. But the disappearing note rubbed Gaffney wrong. There were a few lines that stuck with him, about how some people deserve what happens to them, while others just get caught in someone else’s nightmare, and how he was going to hell for what he’d done.”
“Well, it fits, doesn’t it? He must have seen some awful things in Afghanistan—maybe even did some awful things—and it obviously haunted him. Maybe Dennis knew too, and didn’t want anyone poking around and finding out.”
“That’s how it reads if you don’t know the whole story. But Gaffney couldn’t let it go. He knows a guy Hollis was stationed with, and the way he tells it, Hollis Hanley never fired his weapon. First mission out, their unit got into a mess. They were pinned down in some shelled-out building, taking heavy fire. Hollis shouldered his weapon, and then . . . nothing. He froze. A couple of guys managed to drag him down before he got himself killed. They found him a noncombat role, but it was no good. Something in him was broken. He wound up getting separated. Sorry, it means discharged.”
Lizzy digested Roger’s words, laying the pieces end to end. “If Roger didn’t kill anyone in Afghanistan, why did he think he was going to hell?”
“Now you see where I’m going.”
The gears turned slowly, eventually clicking into place. “You think he committed suicide because of Heather and Darcy—because he killed them. And Dennis knew.”
“It was years after the murders. Not likely anyone would have connected the dots back to Heather and Darcy. But now I think it bears looking at. It would explain Dennis getting rid of the note. He was always Hollis’s protector. Maybe that didn’t end when Hollis died. Maybe he wanted to make sure no one would ever ask the kinds of questions we’re asking now. Then you show up and start digging.”
Lizzy sat with that last part. The note. The fire. The silhouette in the kitchen. “Helen was trying to warn me. She knew Dennis was behind everything that was going on.”
“It’s just a theory, but it fits.”
“So what do we do?”
“We don’t do anything,” Roger told her pointedly. “If we’re right, and there’s a good chance we are, Dennis Hanley is a dangerous man. Summers can’t bury it this time. Where’s Andrew?”
“In Boston. On a job.”
“You might want to give him a call. Let him know what’s happening. I’ve got a few calls of my own to make. Stay near your phone.”
Lizzy put down her cell and splayed both hands on the workbench. Andrew had enough on his plate in Boston. She’d call him tonight, after she heard back from Roger. In the meantime, she’d get some work done, and try to wrap her head around the possibility that Heather and Darcy Gilman’s killer might actually be brought to light, if not to justice, that at long last Althea’s name might be cleared.
Things were beginning to tie up, the
