Lily stood on the porch of Linton Hill and watched the police pull out of her driveway. Two squad cars, then a van from the crime lab. Each of her hands held a fragment of a Wedgwood coffeepot shattered by a careless policewoman. A family heirloom, Princeton pattern. Her husband’s hushed voice sounded from the foyer behind her. He was talking to his attorney. The police had demanded John’s presence at the station for questioning. In fourteen years of marriage, she had never heard her husband sound afraid, except during the worst of her depression, when for a week she had actually considered suicide.
He sounded afraid now.
As the police vehicles rolled up State Street, Lily felt the tears she had suppressed throughout the search. In addition to manhandling her family’s most precious belongings, the searchers had also taken away several boxes of photographs, all three home computers-Annelise’s Apple notebook included-and an assortment of clothes from John’s closet. The clothes had been unceremoniously dumped into plastic bags and thrown in the back of the van. The only mercy of the morning was Penn Cage’s warning. An hour before the search, John had driven Annelise to Lily’s mother’s house, so that she would not have to witness the event.
“Lily?”
She turned. Even in his black cashmere sweater, John already looked like a man on the run. His face was drawn, almost haggard, and his bloodshot eyes had dark bags beneath them. He had spent the remainder of last night dumping the stolen truck and walking home while Lily slept with Annelise.
“I’ve got to go to police headquarters,” he told her.
“They broke my grandmother’s coffeepot.”
He took the fragments from her hand. “I’ll have it repaired. I’ll send it back to England and have the factory do it.”
“It won’t ever be the same.”
“No.” He touched her arm. “But it will be all right.”
“I’ll go with you.”
He set the fragments inside the foyer, then came out and hugged her. “Penn’s going to meet me there. I don’t want you exposed to any of that. You should go check on Ana.”
“When do you have to leave?”
“Now.”
A surge of panic went through her, but she steadied herself so that he wouldn’t worry more than he already was.
“I’ll call you and let you know what’s going on,” he promised. “Keep your cell phone on.”
“I will.”
John’s face became as serious as she had ever seen it. “Depending on how the questioning goes, Penn thinks I could be arrested this morning.”
She closed her eyes and reached for his hand.
“If that happens, Penn will contact you about bail. You should follow his instructions to the letter.”
She wanted to speak, but all she could manage was a nod.
John hugged her once more, then went down the steps to his Land Cruiser. As he drove down the lane leading to State Street, Lily felt something deep within her give way. Last night’s hysterical anger had withered into ashes during the search, leaving only terror at the impending destruction of her family. Her terror made her ashamed. Fear could not help her. Nor could it help John or Annelise. She had to overpower her fear and use the only weapon she had ever really had: her mind. The shattered china coffeepot in the foyer could never be made right again, but her family could. People were different from objects. After bones healed, they were stronger in the broken places. A family could be like that.
She could do nothing about the murder case. That was Penn Cage’s job. But the other threat was something else. She allowed an image of Cole holding his pistol to Annelise’s sleeping head to fill her mind, but instead of fear, she felt cold, implacable rage, all of it focused on the woman who had wrecked her life. Her hands shook with the power of her hatred for Mallory. As she stood on the porch of her violated home, she heard a voice that seemed the voice of a stranger, but it came from her own lips.
“You can’t do this,” it said. “Not to my family. I will
She turned and hurried into the house. In the kitchen, she drew an eight-inch carving knife from the butcher’s block and ran her finger along its serrated blade. Then she grabbed her cell phone and her keys and ran for her car.
Waters sat in a plastic chair on one side of an aluminum table bolted to the floor, Penn Cage to his left. Detective Tom Jackson sat across from them, and Jackson’s partner, the short, pockmarked officer named Barlow, paced the tile floor in the space behind Jackson.
An audiotape recorder sat on the table, the tape spooling slowly through the machine, but this was only for backup. A large video camera stood in the corner of the room, recording Waters’s every nervous tic as he faced the detectives.
Tom Jackson treated the questioning as he had the whole business, with the regretful firmness of a friend forced by circumstance to carry out an unpleasant task. He acted as though Eve’s brutal murder were a crime any man might have committed in the heat of passion.
“We’re not arresting you yet,” he said. “But things don’t look good, John. We have a lot more evidence than you and your attorney are aware of, and I want to be straight with you about that.”
Penn’s skeptical look told Waters that his lawyer doubted the police would be straight about anything.
“You know that we have a videotape of your vehicle near the hotel within one hour of the murder,” Jackson said. “You know you were twice seen going into Bienville with the murder victim. You
At the mention of FBI involvement, Penn shifted in his chair.
“That evidence is now being sent to the FBI lab in Washington. It will be compared with the semen sample taken from Eve Sumner’s body, and also with the blood you gave yesterday.”
Jackson looked as though he expected a response to these revelations, but neither Waters nor Penn said a word.
“We also have your cell phone records. Those records show that for a period of two weeks prior to the murder, you received daily calls from three different pay phones. The bulk of those calls originated from one less than a quarter mile from Eve Sumner’s real estate office.”
Waters struggled to keep his face expressionless. So far, all they were talking about was evidence of an extramarital affair.
Jackson looked down at a file before him. “The DNA testing will take weeks, but we already know your blood type matches that of the perpetrator. AB negative. That’s fairly rare. You’re also what’s known as a secretor. So is the perpetrator.”
“You seem to be assuming,” Penn interrupted, “that whoever last had sex with the victim also murdered her.”
Jackson seemed surprised by this objection. “I
“I urge you to keep an open mind,” Penn said. “Assumptions of any kind are always dangerous in murder cases.”
For the first time, Jackson showed signs of irritation. “Let’s get down to it,” he said, looking at Waters. “You were having an affair with this woman. All the signs point to it. And if the DNA is going to come back and prove it, what’s the point in lying to us about it?”
Waters looked at Penn, but his lawyer’s face revealed nothing. He had a distinct feeling that if he did not give Tom Jackson something today, he was not going to be allowed to leave this building. And with Mallory on the loose, that was simply not acceptable. He’d given some thought to a plausible story before the morning’s search, and he was about to try it out when a uniformed cop came in and whispered something in Detective Jackson’s ear.
Jackson got up and left the interrogation room without a word.
Penn reached out and squeezed Waters’s shoulder.
