“She was juststandingover Aunt Anne,staringat her.” His voice thinned into a kind of desperate whine. Funny how trauma showed up even in the voice. And Harry didseem traumatized. His eyes were bloodshot—from last night’s overindulgence, or from crying, she couldn’t tell. And the way he stood, with his shoulders caving toward his sternum, warped his age, made him appear simultaneously very old and yet somehow childlike. “She nearly jumped out of her skin when she saw me. I wasn’t thinking—I think I asked her to call the police. I let her walk right out of the house ...”
Detective Stetson said, “You think she had something to do with your aunt’s murder?”
“I don’t think it. I know it. Who else could it have been?”
Who else? Rourke tried to imagine the scene: the young delivery driver with a dead body at her feet. Yes, she supposed it was possible that the young woman—whoever she was—had killed Anne. It was very suspicious that she’d been in the house at all. Harry had mentioned that she’d seemed familiar with his aunt—friendly even. That meant she might have been familiar with the home, with the location of the valuables. Could this woman, this delivery driver, have been aiming to commit robbery when she approached the house that morning, under the guise of delivering a package? Perhaps Anne had caught her in the act and intervened.
It waspossible. But the broken French doors were a problem. If the delivery driver had aimed to make it look like a normal B&E, surely she wouldn’t have left behind an actual delivery—a padded envelope, now sitting on the couch. They could easily verify her route, find out what time she’d arrived at the house.
And if she’d broken the French doors after committing the murder in a panic, why had she just been standing in the living room when Harry Bridges came downstairs? Why hadn’t she fled immediately?
“And if this woman—this delivery woman—was responsible,” Detective Stetson was saying, “any idea whatshe did with the murder weapon?” Detective Stetson was good. Solid. He had a way of asking serious questions casually.
“I—I don’t know,” Harry conceded. “She probably chucked it in the sound.”
“Did you see the murder weapon? Was this woman holding anything when you found her?”
“I don’t know,” Harry said again. Now he sounded almost petulant. “I was focused on Aunt Anne.”
Rourke let herself tune out of the conversation, drawing her focus back to the scene. They would get an official statement from Harry later, anyway. And she would have to track down this mysterious woman, the one he’d found standing over his aunt’s body. A murderer, possibly. But Rourke doubted it. The killing had been messy. If the delivery driver was responsible, she would have left the home covered in blood. Surely someone would have seen her. Surely the forensic team would have found blood in the hall or on the porch or leading away from the scene.
Besides, the timing seemed off. Detective Stetson had noted that the blood spatter was already dry by the time the police arrived on scene, only four minutes after Harry had made the call.
Most likely, Anne had been killed earlier that morning, well before the delivery driver had gotten to the house. Most likely, her arrival on scene was simply bad luck: Because Anne had, in fact, ordered something online.
Staring at the padded envelope on the couch, Rourke felt unexpectedly sad. We always counted ontomorrowto arrive. We took it for granted that we would be there to receive it.
She shook her head, as if to dislodge the thought. So many years in the police force should have hardened her, made her into a cynic. And for a while, it had. But now, asshe approached retirement, she found herself moved often by unexpected things: a mangled bicycle on the side of the road, proof of an accident that had sent a teenager to the hospital; a burglarized vehicle, bawling its alarm into the night. Broken moments, broken things. The damage we did to one another.
She was getting old. That was the problem. Cynicism was for young people, who could afford the secret hope that someday, somewhere, someone would come along to undo it.
It was getting crowded in the living room. Murder scenes always felt like some distorted version of a cocktail party—blunted greetings and small talk and everyone stepping neatly around some underlying horror. She gave Stetson a nod and watched him gently shepherd Harry into the other room, leading him by the elbow. Harry cast a last look over his shoulder at her, making sure that Rourke saw him shudder as they skirted past the body.
She shook her head again. She didn’t like Harry. That was the problem. That’s why she didn’t trust him. Forty years old, unmarried, with a job as a “content curator,” whatever that meant. She didn’t trust that whole generation.
Coming into the entrance hall again, she ran into Sergeant Ruiz, just descended from the upstairs. He met her eyes and shook his head.
“Nothing?” she asked him quietly.
“Nothing I could see just poking around,” he said. She had told him to take a glance through the upstairs rooms, paying close attention to the guest room where Harry had been staying for a week, and the bathroom where he’d allegedly been showering just before finding the body. If he was lying—if he’d been the one to attack his aunt in the early-morning hours—he would have had a bloody mess to deal with. He would have had to stash his clothes, and the murder weapon, somewhere. “But the techs might have better luck ...”
Ruiz lingered even after Rourke thanked him. She could tell he had something on his mind.
“I was thinking ...” he said, and then stopped again, blushing. He was new to the force and still had the habit of turning all of his statements into questions. “We could talk to Search and Rescue? Maybe get some divers in the sound?”
Harry had made almost the same suggestion. It made sense. The water was less than a hundred yards away, making it the perfect place to dispose of evidence—and a pain in the ass for the police. Still. The currents in the sound weren’t especially strong; if the murder weapon had been chucked out into the water, it was very likely sitting where it had been dropped.
“Better talk to the neighbors first,” she said. “Especially the one with the yappy dog.” The houses were close together here, nuzzling the coastline side by side. Someone might have noticed a person on the beach in the early morning, especially one behaving strangely.
Rourke stood for a minute, puzzling over the shattered vase and the little pile of dog turds. So Anne had risen early to take her dog out for a walk. But before she got to the front door, someone had attacked her, wrestled her back into the living room, and either shot or bludgeoned her to death—hard to tell, with all that blood, which it had been—and then simply vanished again into the half dark.
Was thatsomeonethe delivery driver, looking for something to steal? Or—Rourke let her imagination travel—someone else, a stranger, maybe a drug-addled itinerant from somewhere else in the corridor?
It waspossible. But to Rourke, it didn’t make much sense. If someone had broken in through the French doors in the living room, intending to rob the house, and been surprised by the sound of Anne approaching the front door, why botherattacking her? Why deliberately enter the foyer and wrestle herbackto the living room to kill her? Why not just leave by the French doors again, and return when the house wasn’t occupied? For that matter, why assume a house with a car in the driveway was unoccupied in the first place? Surely Anne must have turned on lights when she came downstairs.
And if the intruderknewthat the house was occupied, and came prepared for murder ... what had been the point? From what Rourke could tell, nothing had been stolen, nothing disturbed except for the French doors and the flower vase in the front hall, presumably toppled during a brief tussle. Standing there, Rourke felt the accordion of her memory expanding, swelling to include all the robberies and break-ins she’d worked over the years. Not one of them had ended in this kind of violence. Not one of the scenes had looked like this, either.
The fact was when Rourke stood there, contemplating the scene, letting her mind fill and fill like a balloon, drawing some kind of picture, some suggestion of a criminal profile, or even a name, she came up empty.