Cold feet (12 page)

"I can't borrow that truck," Caleb said.

"Why not?"

"Having me act as an agent for the police in order to obtain evidence could get you fired, for one thing. And I'm moving out of here."

"You're making this a bigger deal than it is," Gibbons replied. "I'm not going to touch the damn truck or its tires. The tread of this imprint is unusual enough that I should be able to get some idea from a visual inspection. If it checks out, I'll ask for a warrant. But I have to know I'm not out of my mind for wanting to see Purcell's vehicle when the man's already dead."

Caleb looked over at his packed bag. He'd been halfway out the door.... "Can't you see the truck's tires some other way?"

"I could if Purcell's widow ever drove it."

"Madison won't lend me her father's truck," Caleb said, remembering how difficult it had been for her to even talk about Ellis.

"She hasn't figured out who you really are, has she?"

"No."

"Then how do you know she won't do you a favor? You haven't asked her yet."

"She's trying to put her life back together. She's running a business, raising a kid. I can't--"

"Are you interested in solving this or not?" Gibbons interrupted.

"Of course." He wanted to solve it now more than ever. All the friends and family members of the various victims he'd met through the years suddenly seemed far closer to him. Instead of telling the story from a distance, he was now part of the actual picture--and the irony didn't escape him. To think that someone he knew, someone he cared about, had suffered as Susan must have suffered made him ill and showed him the difference between empathy and real understanding.

But he didn't want to use Madison. After last night, he knew that much.

"So what are you thinking?" Caleb asked.

"I don't know," Gibbons said. "Maybe we were wrong about Purcell. Maybe he wasn't the strangler, after all. Or maybe someone else has picked up where he left off. Someone close enough to know how he worked."

"Like who?" Caleb asked.

"Remember that license plate you had me run? The car you said Purcell's son was riding in a couple of nights ago?"

"Yeah?"

"It came back as stolen."

Caleb scrubbed a hand over his jaw. "You don't think Johnny's somehow involved, do you? He was in prison when some of those women were murdered."

"Well, he's not in prison anymore," Gibbons said. "They let him out three days before Susan disappeared."

CHAPTER NINE

T
HEY'D LEFT THE VIEWING
room fifteen minutes earlier. Caleb and Holly had stared at Susan's body through a small window; they'd been separated from her by a wall and a glass panel, so Caleb knew he had to be imagining that he couldn't rid himself of the sweet, cloying scent of death. But he still would've headed directly home, stripped off his clothes and taken a long hot shower--with plenty of suds and vigorous scrubbing. Except he couldn't leave Holly. She was in no condition to be on her own, and her parents' flight from Phoenix wasn't arriving until later this evening.

"You okay?" he murmured as they sat on a bench in the hallway of the morgue. Holly had wept since he'd told her about Susan, but she seemed to be coming to the end of her tears. Her skin was splotchy, her eyes red and puffy, her hair somewhat tangled, but her face had taken on a stark expression that conveyed the depth of her grief far more effectively than simple crying.

She didn't answer him. She just wrapped her jacket more tightly around her.

"Hol?" He gave her shoulders a gentle squeeze.

"How can you even ask me that?" she said dully, her voice barely a whisper. "Of course I'm not okay."

"You have to get through this," he said. "Susan wouldn't want you to fall apart."

"Susan." Tears welled in her eyes again, but she didn't curl into him as she had before. She sat on her hands and stared blankly at the floor.

Down the hall, Detective Gibbons stepped out of the autopsy room. "You're still here?" he said when he saw Caleb.

Caleb hadn't been able to get Holly to leave. She couldn't bear the sight of Susan as she was now. But the battered and badly decomposed corpse was all that remained of her sister. For Holly, walking away would sever that one last tie.

"You got a minute?" Gibbons asked. Though Gibbons's language and manner were pretty rough, he did wear a suit. It was a rather cheesy, three-piece affair--a throwback to professional fashion in the seventies--but it was a suit. And the way he straightened and buttoned his coat told Caleb that Gibbons wanted to talk to him alone.

Caleb was reluctant to abandon Holly. She seemed so fragile. But when he hesitated, she lifted her gaze to his and the tears that had pooled in her eyes brimmed and rolled down her cheeks. "Go. I want this bastard caught."

With a nod, Caleb got up and followed Gibbons into the coroner's office, where the smell of fresh-brewed coffee heartened him. He'd received Gibbons's call so early, he hadn't showered or shaved, and he felt rumpled and dirty, as though he'd been sleeping in his clothes.

Turning the bill of his ball cap to the back, he glanced around the empty room before propping himself against the coroner's desk. "Tell me you've found something," he said.

Gibbons sighed. "Autopsies take time--you know that. And they haven't even started yet. But judging by the injuries to her forearms, this young lady put up a good fight."

Susan would, Caleb thought; she had Holly's spirit. "Which means we have a chance of finding biological evidence under her nails, right?"

"Or on the sheet in which her body was wrapped. The forensics team has found a drop of blood that definitely doesn't belong to Susan."

"What can I do to help?" Caleb asked.

Reaching into his breast pocket, Gibbons pulled out a copy of the picture that had been taken at the pizza parlor, and handed it to him. "Take this and go back to the pizza place tonight," he said. "Show it around and see if you can find out who was driving that truck. And who was arguing with Susan."

"So you're officially on the case?" Caleb asked.

"Because Susan was killed in the same way as the victims of the Sandpoint Strangler, I'm not only on the case, I'm lead detective. The department doesn't want to waste resources by rebuilding everything I've already put together."

"No one knows more about the Sandpoint Strangler than you do."

Gibbons raised his brows. "Except maybe you. You're the one practically living with Madison Lieberman. Think you can get hold of Purcell's truck?"

Caleb let his breath seep slowly between his teeth as he considered the question. He hated the thought of embroiling Madison and Brianna in another painful investigation, this one centering on Johnny. She'd already been through more than enough. But he couldn't let whoever killed Susan get away with it. Especially when chances were likely that the sick bastard would strike again. "I'll figure something out," he said.

Gibbons clapped him on the back. "Good man."

M
ADISON LEANED CLOSE
to the window to peer out at the dark drive as she finished drying the pans she'd used to make dinner. She knew Caleb was still gone. She'd been listening for his car for several hours and hadn't heard anything beyond the wash cycle of her dishwasher.

Where was he? It was getting late. He'd indicated that his work schedule wasn't especially grueling, yet he'd been gone from dawn until ten or eleven at night four days in a row. He hadn't even wanted dinner. He'd left a brief message on her answering machine Monday through Wednesday saying that he had to work late and not to expect him.

It wasn't until this morning, when she'd bumped into him as she was leaving to take Brianna to school, that she'd actually spoken to him. He'd been dressed in a dark suit, seemed far more somber than the man she'd thought she was getting to know, and had very little to say, except that he didn't want dinner again tonight.

Maybe he was avoiding her. Maybe that kiss had bothered him even more than she'd assumed.
That you, of all people, could do this to me.
What had he meant by that? Was he as afraid of intimacy as she was? Was he worried she might fall at his feet and try to extract some kind of commitment--over one silly kiss?

She shook her head. If so, he didn't understand that she wasn't open to the possibility of falling in love. She couldn't deal with the hope, the effort, the risk. Too much was riding on the next few years, for her business and her daughter.

"Mommy, look what I found!" Brianna said, charging into the kitchen.

Madison glanced through the window once more to find the drive still empty, then turned to see her daughter carrying a large photo album. There was anticipation on Brianna's little face. But Madison had to bite back a groan when she saw that it wasn't just any album. It was the album she'd hidden under her bed.

"See? It's my baby book!" she announced proudly. "Come on, Mommy, let's look at it."

The album contained pictures of Brianna's birth and infancy, and a few photos of when she was a toddler. Madison and Brianna used to spend a lot of time poring over this particular book. Like most children, Brianna was fascinated by pictures of herself and the concept that she hadn't always been as she was now. But there were also photos of Madison's father in there that Madison didn't want to see. Not now. She'd just taken down every picture of him.

"It's getting late, punkin," she said. "Why don't we look at that tomorrow?"

"No," Brianna said. "You promised you'd read me a bedtime story. I want to look at my pictures instead."

"But--"

"Please, Mommy?" Brianna wore such a beseeching expression that Madison couldn't refuse.

"For a little while," she said.

Brianna rewarded her with a beaming smile and started pulling her into the living room. "Come on, let's sit down."

Madison took a deep breath, steeling herself for the moments to follow, but it didn't help. Once they were seated on the couch and going through the album page by page, Brianna not only insisted on pointing at every person in every picture, she demanded Madison tell her all the old stories. How the doctor had missed the delivery when she was born and the nurse had to step in. How Daddy had fallen asleep in the chair by the bed and nearly slept through what had almost turned into an emergency. How Grandpa used to stand her up in the palm of his hand before she could even walk. How Grandma had once dressed her up in a snowsuit and taken her to Utah to visit Madison's Aunt Belinda, or Aunt Bee, as Brianna knew her.

By the time they'd gone through several pages, the memories crashed over Madison like waves, hard and fast, threatening to drag her out to sea. Through it all, she couldn't help wondering--what had gone wrong? If her father
had
killed those women, what had been so incredibly different about him that he could harm others, seemingly without remorse? Surely there must've been some clue that she'd missed. But she couldn't figure out what it would be. Her father had been quiet and difficult to know because of that, but not every strong, silent male becomes a mass murderer.

She knew he'd had a difficult childhood, that he was brought up in a strict household where corporal punishment was sometimes taken to the extreme. But other than maintaining a rigid belief in the father as patriarch of the home, he didn't seem too affected by the past. He went to bed early, got up before dawn, worked hard and took care of everything in the house with a fastidiousness seldom seen in the American world of "easy come, easy go." He'd been a simple man. Or so she'd thought.

"What's wrong, Mommy?" Brianna asked, frowning when Madison didn't turn the page.

Madison closed her eyes, remembering. Her father had never been demonstrative, but he'd always had a roll of Lifesavers in his pocket for Brianna. Whenever they visited Grandma and Grandpa's house, Grandpa had let Brianna help him husk corn or snap peas or tinker in the garage.

That she'd trusted her father enough to let him get so close to Brianna terrified Madison now, just in case he'd been what everyone said he was.

"Mommy?" Brianna asked, sounding worried.

Madison pulled herself out of the sea of memories long enough to force a smile for her daughter. "What, honey?"

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing. I was just thinking."

Uncertainty flickered in Brianna's eyes, but Madison easily distracted her with the next picture. "This is when Grandma baked you a Barbie cake for your second birthday, and Grandpa made you that playhouse in the backyard. Do you remember?"

Brianna's forehead wrinkled. "Daddy said he built the playhouse."

"No, it was Grandpa." Her father had come over to build the playhouse because the guy Danny hired didn't show. Madison remembered being upset because it was Sunday, a day Danny didn't have to work, yet he'd been gone anyway. Madison knew her father found it strange that Danny wasn't more of a support to her. She'd thought Ellis was going to say something about it as he left that day. Instead, he'd squeezed her shoulder--for him, the equivalent of a long conversation.

With her father, so much went unsaid. And yet she'd always known he loved her....

"Mommy, why are you crying?" Brianna asked.

Madison hadn't realized she
was
crying. Dashing a hand across her cheeks, she searched for words that might make things clear for her daughter. But she knew Brianna wouldn't understand even if she tried to explain. Madison herself didn't understand, at least not fully. The fact that someone she loved and trusted so deeply could ruin the whole essence of who he was for reasons she couldn't begin to fathom was simply confusing and painful. And that was before she considered the victims and their families and friends....

"That's enough for tonight," she said, closing the book. "It's time for bed."

A knock at the door stole Brianna's attention. She hopped off the couch to answer, but Madison caught her by the arm. "You know it's not safe to go to the door alone, especially after dark. I'll see who it is. You get your pajamas on."