The Perfect Stranger (11 page)

“Exactly.” Frank started ticking off Hank Heywood’s known stressors on his fingers. “The guy loses his job. His mother loses her marbles
and
her ability to live alone. He’s going to lose his wife sooner or later . . .

“Looking at it strictly from a financial standpoint, sooner would be preferable, because his health insurance runs out soon, and if he doesn’t find a new job with benefits, they’re screwed. He’s thinking it’s better to collect on her life insurance policy now instead of later, right?”

Crystal shrugs. “At that point, if they’ve lost their health care for any amount of time, the payout might not even cover the debt they’ll have racked up on her medical care.”

“So we have motive. And opportunity. Yeah, we know he was seen in Cleveland Saturday night and again on Sunday morning, but it’s a four hour drive, tops. He could’ve left after the neighbor saw him by the Dumpster, driven down to his house, killed the wife, and driven back before dawn.”

Yeah. He could’ve.

Or, Hank Heywood could’ve been right where he said he was, sadly cleaning out his failing mother’s condo in preparation to list it, completely unaware that his beloved wife of more than thirty years lay dying in the master bedroom they shared back home.

Still a tragic scenario, but that one would undoubtedly sit a hell of a lot easier with the three kids who lost their mother.

The rest of the family has fairly solid alibis for Saturday night. Both of the sons were home with their wives and kids. The daughter was at a party for a colleague. Her husband wasn’t with her—he was with someone else, Keith Drover finally admitted after hemming and hawing when they interviewed him today.

“Another woman?” Frank had asked—probably recognizing a kindred philanderer, Crystal thought at the time.

Turned out that wasn’t the case—exactly.

Drover begged them not to tell his wife the truth—especially after they said they’d need to talk to his lover to confirm his alibi.

Assured that they weren’t going to turn around and tell Rebecca, on the heels of losing her mother, that her husband was in love with another man, the poor sap looked relieved. But only until Frank reminded him that this was an active homicide investigation.

“When you’ve got a high profile case, the dirty laundry sometimes tends to come out before all is said and done,” he warned Keith. “You might want to think about coming clean to your wife before she hears it from someone else.”

Poor Rebecca. She’s managed to hold it together so far—in fact, she was doing much better today than she was when Crystal first met her at the scene on that rainy Sunday afternoon. She can still hear the young woman’s anguished screams; can still feel Rebecca clutching her sleeve, asking who had done this to her mother.

“We’re going to find out,” she promised her then, and again today, before she and Frank left the house after questioning the family members again. “Our job is to make sure justice is served.”

That’s what it’s all about. You can’t turn back the clock and bring the loved one back to the family, and Lord knows you can’t take away the agony of loss.

All you can do is try to give them closure.

“So how’s it going? What do you think?” Jermaine asks now, stroking Crystal’s hair.

“Same thing I thought this morning, and yesterday, and the day before.”

“Which is . . . ?”

“That Meredith Heywood wasn’t killed by some stranger she’d surprised when he was robbing her house.”

“You sure? There have been an awful lot of break-ins around here lately. That’s nothing new.”

She nods, well aware national statistics show that Ohio cities have a disproportionately high number of burglaries, with Cincinnati near the top of the list.

But—statistics again—stranger homicides are extremely rare. Victims—particularly female victims—usually know their killers.

She doesn’t have to remind Jermaine of that.

But he’s a cop; he’s trying to remind her that sometimes, in an investigation, what you see really is what you get.

Not in this case, though.

She updates her husband about the rest of the evidence they’ve been gathering. It indicates that Meredith Heywood had been killed almost instantly with a blow to the head.

“What was the weapon?”

“Probably a household object. Could have been a baseball bat, a hammer, an andiron—not sure.”

“From her household? Or did the perp bring it with him?”

“Again—not sure. We didn’t find the weapon.”

She goes on to tell him that the victim’s body was found on the floor, which was clearly meant to indicate that she’d been hit while she was standing or moving.

But Crystal is fairly certain she’d been killed in her bed—maybe even while she was sound asleep—and then moved to the floor postmortem.

The bedding was spotless—too spotless. The spatter pattern surrounding the body on the floor indicated that it should have extended up onto the bedspread, but it didn’t. The bedspread was pristine, and lab tests turned up no sign of blood.

Beneath the spotless sheets, the mattress gave off a faint bleach smell, and is still being tested for evidence of blood that may have been cleaned up by the perpetrator.

Nearby, the bedside table was overturned, a lamp broken, a water glass spilled.

“So it looked like there was a struggle,” Jermaine says.

“Right. But there wasn’t. It was staged, just like everything else.”

The house appeared to have been ransacked. The family was able to pinpoint a few things that were missing—an envelope of cash kept in a desk drawer in the den, a small bureau-top chest filled with the victim’s costume jewelry, the victim’s laptop and cell phone that had probably been sitting out in the open.

But a professional burglar wouldn’t have missed the coin collection on the shelf of a basement closet whose door was left ajar as if it had been ransacked. Nor would he have overlooked the relatively valuable jewelry stashed in several padded cases tucked into the back of a drawer that was found open, its contents rumpled to look like someone had gone through it.

It was all for show, to cover up the real motive for the break-in: murder.

Whoever did it was a novice.

A more seasoned killer—or a pro, a hit man—would have made the fake burglary more convincing, and wouldn’t have been so clumsy about moving and repositioning the body.

“So who did it? The husband?”

“I’m not sure.”

“What’s your gut telling you?”

She shrugs. “The guy is the picture-perfect image of a distraught, shell-shocked, bereaved widower.”

“Which means absolutely nothing to you.”

“Exactly.”

Last year, she interrogated a twenty-year-old mother who’d drowned her own baby in a toilet. The girl—her name was Diaphanous Jones—never stopped crying while they talked, heaving sobs, gasping for air—the picture of maternal devastation. Yet, chillingly—she’d confessed her crime immediately after she committed it, and never once tried to retract.

Grief, regret—normal reactions to any loss. Visible emotions don’t let you off the hook.

That Hank Heywood is, on some level, a bereaved husband is not in dispute. But there were a number of potent stressors in his life leading up to the murder. He was under a lot of pressure. Something might very well have happened between him and his wife that caused him to snap.

“Maybe he was seeing someone else,” Jermaine speculates.

“Or maybe
she
was.”

“You think?”

She shakes her head. “There’s not a shred of evidence pointing in that direction, but . . .”

She and Frank haven’t completely dismissed the idea that Meredith had a lover who might have been in the house with her in her husband’s absence. Maybe the lover had killed her. Or maybe her husband had found out about him—or her—and acted out of vengeance.

Meredith’s daughter had been adamant that her mother wasn’t living a secret life—which Crystal is now inclined to take with a grain of salt, given Rebecca’s husband’s illicit affair.

Keith Drover seems certain his wife is clueless about it—but then that, too, could be open for debate.

In any case, Rebecca had insisted that no one close to her mother—no one she knew, anyway—would have been capable of hurting her.

“Everyone loved her,” she said tearfully. Clutching a handful of sodden tissues, she answered all of Crystal and Frank’s questions about friends and individual family members . . .

Something flickered in her eyes, though, when she was first asked about her father.

A hint of . . .
something
, and then it was gone.

Her parents had a great, loving marriage, she said.

Right.

Diaphanous Jones’s family had told Crystal she’d been a great, loving mother.

She loved that baby more than anything . . .

“My mother and father worshiped each other,” Rebecca said.

Most kids are going to believe that about their parents, if there are no overt signs of marital trouble in the household. Especially adult children who have moved on. Crystal’s own son was stunned and bewildered when she called him at boot camp to tell him that she and his dad would be going their separate ways.

“But why?” he kept asking. “You guys never even fight.”

Not true, exactly—but damn, she and her ex were good at hiding the tension. Practice makes perfect.

Maybe Meredith and Hank Heywood really were happily married.

Maybe not.

Hell, some days she wonders if any marriage—outside of her own, of course—is entirely happy.

“The other thing we’re looking at,” she muses aloud to Jermaine, “is the Internet.”

“What about it?”

“The victim was a blogger. She put way too much of her personal life out there for anyone to read.”

“Yeah, well, we’ve seen more and more of that sort of thing. People go blabbing on social networking Web sites, not just about birthdays and their mother’s maiden names, but where they’re going, and for how long, and who they’re with. The next thing you know, they’re reporting that someone’s stalking them, or their identity’s been stolen, or their empty home was burglarized . . .”

“Or worse,” Crystal says with a nod.

She explains to her husband that Meredith Heywood was a breast cancer survivor who wrote a very public blog that had hundreds, maybe thousands, of followers.

“You think one of them killed her?”

“Could be. But if that was the case, it wasn’t necessarily a complete stranger. Not in the usual sense of the word.”

“What do you mean?”

She tells him about the last piece of evidence—the one that’s been nagging her from the moment she first saw the body.

Jermaine shakes his head. “So you really do think it was the husband, don’t you?”

She hesitates, remembering the raw pain in Hank Heywood’s face.

Remembering the flicker of doubt in his daughter’s eyes.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I honestly don’t know.”

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

How on earth did this happen—again?

It’s not like I’m someone who just goes around . . . killing people.

Meredith was the first, and she was supposed to be the last, the only.

But now look.

The crumpled figure lying on the ground moans, clenching and unclenching the hand that until moments ago held a puppy on a leash.

The puppy is running loose somewhere down the street, still dragging a length of leather and chain from its tagged collar.

The man’s hand is covered in blood, reaching for the knife sticking out of his stomach, reaching . . . reaching . . .

He’s too weak. He’s not going to make it.

It was different with Meredith. She was likely unconscious before she grasped what was happening, unlike this poor soul who must know he’s dying, an ugly, painful death at that.

With Meredith, it wasn’t ugly and painful.

It wasn’t impulsive, and it wasn’t about anger. No, it was about—

Well, it was far more complicated than anyone could possibly understand. But it was the right thing to do.

This . . .

This was probably the wrong thing.

It was
probably
the wrong thing? It was definitely the wrong thing!

Look at him! Look what you did to him!

The man on the ground moans again.

Oh, dear.

“I’m sorry. Really. I didn’t mean for this to happen, but . . . I only wanted to be left alone. Why did you have to stop me and ask for a light? Why couldn’t you just walk on past me?”

Another moan, the low, terrible sound of an animal being tortured.

This is bad. This is wrong.

But I couldn’t help myself.

He kept talking, and he said the wrong thing, and . . . and I’ve been under so much pressure these last few days with everything, that I just . . .

Snapped.

Yes, snapped, like a turtle, when someone gets too close.

Now someone is suffering.

Because of me.

No—that’s wrong. This isn’t my fault. It’s his.

“You know, I told you I didn’t have a light! Why didn’t you let me walk away? Why did you have to try to make conversation? Who does that at this hour on a deserted street? Who are you? Who
are
you?”

Unlike Meredith, this person is a stranger in every sense of the word.

Unlike Meredith, he’s suffering terribly.

All that’s visible of his face in the predawn shadows is his mouth, surrounded by a stubbly growth of beard. Just a few minutes ago the mouth was smiling and forming questions, far too many questions. Now, it’s contorted in agony, and blood is beginning to gush from it.

I can’t stand to see him in pain, whoever the hell he is.

He’s a human being.

I’m
a human being, for Pete’s sake. I have a heart. No matter what anyone thinks . . .

But who would think anything different?

No one in this world knows what really happened to Meredith, and no one is going to figure it out.

As for this stranger . . .