The Prettiest One: A Thriller (4 page)

Josh Sommers hated the idea of his wife going back to wherever she’d disappeared to for so long. He wanted her to stay here, with him, in their home. Frankly, he wanted to hire a marching band and drive Caitlin slowly through the streets of their town on a parade float—taking several trips past the police station—with the event covered by all the same reporters who had essentially accused him of murder. More importantly, he wanted to get her medical attention, both physical and psychiatric, to make sure that she was okay. Maybe Caitlin’s disappearance had occurred because she’d suffered an episode of some kind—something symptomatic of a serious, even life-threatening condition. Or perhaps she’d been physically hurt while she was gone in some way that she didn’t remember, that she had blocked out because it was too traumatic. God forbid, maybe she’d been assaulted. Or suffered some kind of psychotic break. Though he had no reason to doubt that she was being honest with him, he was ashamed to admit to himself that he
did
doubt her, even if only a tiny bit. Amnesia was the stuff of soap operas, not real life. He had done a little Internet research last night, while Caitlin slept, and read stories about people who seemed to have truly suffered through it. But he’d read just as many stories about how most amnesiacs are fakers. In his heart, though, he believed her, and that was where it mattered. That said, would it even help her to remember what she’d been through, or would it cause more serious mental or emotional issues? Would it really do her good . . . do either of them good . . . if she remembered
everything
?

But she seemed to desperately need whatever closure she thought she could get by returning to wherever she had been. And he couldn’t imagine how terrible and frustrating it must be to have such a void in your memory. What would it be like to just lose seven months of your life? More than half a year, gone in a flash? So even though it might cost them both in the end, he intended to follow her wherever she needed to go and find out whatever it was they would find out. And he had an idea where to start.

“I’ll be right back,” he said.

Caitlin was staring at the handgun lying on the small pile of prosthetic hands in the gym bag.

“Don’t touch any of that, all right?” Josh said. “We don’t want your fingerprints on anything.”

“They’re probably already all over the gun, at least.”

“But maybe they’re not, so let’s not put them there, okay?”

“Don’t worry, I have no desire to touch any of this.”

She looked like she meant it, so Josh headed outside. A red Buick Skylark sat in the driveway. Josh peered in the windows for a moment, shielding his eyes to see better, and saw nothing that concerned him . . . like a dead body in the backseat that he might have missed earlier, for example. He opened the passenger door, popped open the glove box, and removed a vinyl pouch in which he found the vehicle’s registration.

Inside the house again, Josh was relieved to see that Caitlin had zipped the gym bag shut. She was still on the couch, her head tipped back, her eyes closed.

“Sleeping?” he asked.

“Thinking.”

“Anything coming back to you?”

“Nope.”

“Well, I have something that might help us narrow things down a bit.”

She opened her eyes.

“Our plan was to go back to the first exit you remember on I-91. Well, I think we can do better than that.”

“Yeah?” she said. “How?”

“With this.”

He held up the Skylark’s registration.

“That’s from the car outside?” Caitlin asked.

He nodded. “It’s registered to a Katherine Southard. She lives at 18 Jasmine Street, Number 1, Smithfield, Massachusetts. We’ll start there. If I’m not mistaken, 91 South would take us right by there.”

Josh expected her to be a little excited to have such a solid lead. Instead, she looked on the verge of tears.

“Caitlin . . . what’s wrong?”

She spoke in a hollow voice. “I might have killed this woman. I might have killed her and taken her car.”

“Now you’re a carjacker?”

“How else do you explain my driving her car? It fits with the blood and the gun.”

“Maybe you were friends with her. Maybe she loaned you the car.”

“Maybe I followed her to her car, shot her in the back, and took her keys. Maybe that’s why I, uh . . . woke up in a parking lot. Maybe I’d just shot her.”

She seemed determined to be both judge and jury in her own case, and to find herself guilty.

Josh asked, “Do you remember seeing a body when you . . . when you woke up?”

She shook her head. “Doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. I wasn’t exactly thinking clearly at first.”

“You’re getting ahead of yourself again, honey. How about this? We’ll Google her. We have her name and address. Let’s see if we get any hits.”

He retrieved his tablet from the kitchen, where he’d spent a few hours last night surfing the web. When he returned, he sat at the opposite end of the sofa. He didn’t want her looking over his shoulder in case bad news popped up on the screen. He didn’t think Caitlin was capable of violence, even if she wasn’t in her right mind, but in case his faith was misplaced, he didn’t want her seeing a headline that screamed in bold type,
Local Woman Killed for Car Keys.
He looked up at Caitlin and gave a small smile, which she returned, though hers was even smaller. It was practically microscopic, nothing more than a gesture for his benefit.

He called up a search engine and typed in the name Katherine Southard. There were several hits, including one for a former Miss North Carolina by that name, so he added “Massachusetts” to his search. No hits.

He looked up. Caitlin was watching him, biting her lower lip.

“Nothing, honey. Looks like you didn’t murder Katherine Southard.”

“Nothing about her being in critical care with a gunshot wound to the head? Or maybe just missing. Nothing like that?”

“Nothing. I didn’t find a single mention of a Katherine Southard in Massachusetts on the web.”

Caitlin exhaled softly with evident relief.

“Now,” Josh said, “let’s see if her car was reported stolen.”

His fingers pecked away at his device’s keyboard until he found a site for the local Smithfield police blotter. He checked it and found no recent mention of Katherine Southard or a stolen Buick Skylark.

“So what’s next?” Caitlin asked.

“We try to call her. Tell her we found her car somewhere.”

“What if I stole it from her at gunpoint and she was just too shaken up to have reported it yet?”

“If she was scared, she would have called the cops right away. But I’ll call her and say that I found it abandoned.”

She considered that, then nodded.

Josh used his cell phone to call directory assistance for Smithfield and asked for the number for Katherine Southard in that town. There was no listing.

“What does that mean?” Caitlin asked.

“Maybe her number’s unlisted or it’s in her husband’s name. Or she just uses a cell phone.”

“But if we can’t call her,” she said, “where does that leave us?”

He sighed. “It leaves us driving to 18 Jasmine Street in Smithfield and knocking on her door.”

“Okay, so here’s the big question . . . if she answers the door, assuming she’s not dead, what then?”

“
When
she answers the door, because she’s
not
dead, we’ll tell her that we found her car, like I said. Then we’ll try to figure out your connection to her. Maybe you’ll remember her. Maybe she’ll remember you.”

“That’s the plan?”

“Unless you can think of a better one.”

She stared at the floor for a moment, then looked up at him. “Yeah, I’ve got nothing. When do we leave?”

“Right after we pack a few days’ worth of things. Just a few days, then we come back here. We can’t keep you a secret forever, Caitlin. The world needs to know you’re alive, that you’re back. And I really would like the cops to know sooner rather than later that I didn’t murder you.”

“I can see that. Apparently, our so-called friends need to hear that, too,” she added.

“Yeah, them, too. And if we haven’t gotten anywhere in a few days, we’ll probably need to try a different tack anyway. Maybe hire a private investigator or something.”

What he didn’t say was that the longer they were in Smithfield, Massachusetts, the longer Caitlin could be in danger, whatever kind it might be . . . or the greater the chance that, if she
had
committed a crime, the police would find her and arrest her.

“Okay,” Caitlin said almost cheerfully, “let’s pack and hit the road.”

He understood her sudden enthusiasm—she no doubt believed they were on their way to recovering her memory and solving this mystery—but he couldn’t fully share it. Given all the circumstances, and especially considering the gun, the blood, and what were certainly stolen prosthetic hands, he hoped this wasn’t a huge mistake for both of them.

CHAPTER SIX

DETECTIVE CHARLOTTE HUNNSAKER SURVEYED THE scene . . . what wasn’t lost in the dark corners of the cavernous room, that is. There were skylights above—remarkably, most still even had their glass intact—but they were forty feet up and their exterior surfaces were covered with grime, so they did little to chase away the shadows below. Light fixtures hung suspended from the warehouse’s high ceiling, but the owner of the abandoned building apparently had pulled the plug on the electricity long ago, so large areas around Hunnsaker were dark. The crime scene techs had set up battery-powered, high-intensity lights on tripods, but they lit only the small area at the back of the warehouse—a clearing among the shelves where forklifts might have been parked long ago. She couldn’t see much beyond the first few rows of metal shelving that stretched off into the shadows. But at the moment, she was interested only in the corpse that was lying in the big pool of blood on the floor in the center of the illuminated space.

Her experienced eyes took in the position of the body, the gun near its hand—looking like it had belonged to the victim rather than the shooter—figured where the killer likely would have been standing, and imagined in which direction he would have fled when he was finished here. Hunnsaker knew she was being sexist by already thinking of the killer as a “he,” especially considering that she had fought her own gender-bias battles over the years in the still predominantly male-dominated field of law enforcement—but statistics about violent crimes supported the bias, so the killer would continue to be a “he” in her mind until it turned out that he wasn’t.

Hunnsaker looked at the long rows of shelving—six of them, each probably fifteen feet high and forty, maybe fifty yards long, empty but for some moldy boxes and a few dusty objects scattered here and there that looked like they might have been auto parts. She wondered down which aisle the killer had fled. Probably one of the outer ones, as that would have led most quickly to an exit—either the main entrance or the nearest back door—but they’d all have to be checked, one by one. It would take time to comb through the place. This was starting to look like a needle-in-a-haystack situation. But perhaps they’d get lucky this time. Maybe the perp had been kind enough to drop a little DNA someplace obvious before he left.

“This doesn’t look professional to me,” Hunnsaker said to her partner. “I’m guessing some sort of deal that went sideways.”

Javier Padilla nodded. “That’s how I read it, too. Victim got his .22 out but the other guy was faster.” Hunnsaker glanced again at the gun near the victim’s hand. The hands themselves had plastic bags over them, secured at the wrists. The medical examiner had already processed the hands and taken fingerprints. “Think he got off a shot?”

“ME said there was GSR on his hand,” Hunnsaker said, “and gunshot residue rarely lies, so I’m hoping he hit his killer and we’ll find his blood somewhere around here. Get ourselves some DNA to match to whoever we bring in for this.”

She looked at the vic’s pasty face, his empty eyes staring at nothing. Aside from the bullet hole in his cheek and his striking deadness, he looked like a million other guys.

“I don’t recognize him,” Hunnsaker said. “You?”

Padilla shook his head. “Anybody find anything interesting around here yet?”

“Not yet. Took a little while for the DA to get a warrant.”

Despite what they showed in the movies and on TV, cops didn’t always show up at a murder scene and just start digging around for evidence. Unless they were lucky enough to have a victim killed in his own house, it was generally prudent to make sure they had a warrant, which required getting the DA’s office involved. No point in collecting evidence if it wouldn’t be admissible later in court. So they’d done what they could to keep busy without disturbing anything until the warrant had come in a little while ago.

“The first officer on the scene said there weren’t any cars in the lot,” Hunnsaker said.

“So how did this guy get here?” Padilla asked. “One-way ticket in the killer’s car?”

“Or there was more than one bad guy. Maybe they met here, and after they killed him, one guy drove off in the vic’s car and left it somewhere. But why leave the body? Why not dump it with the car?”

“Didn’t want to risk getting caught with a body in the trunk?”

Hunnsaker nodded. “Or maybe they left in a hurry. They may not have planned to ice the guy. Supports a deal-gone-wrong scenario. Things go all to shit, this guy takes a bullet, the perps panic and run. We should make a note to check into any abandoned cars that are called in or found by our guys on patrol. If one of them belongs to our vic here, it probably has bad-guy fingerprints and DNA inside.”

Padilla nodded and scribbled something in a little notepad he’d pulled from his pocket. “What did the ME say?”

“That our unfortunate friend here was killed by a bullet to the face. For the record, that was pretty far up my list of guesses, too.”

“That’s why you get the big bucks, Charlotte,” Padilla said.

He knew better than to call her Charlie. When Hunnsaker had first begun her career in law enforcement, back at the academy, everyone, it seemed—women as well as men—wanted to call her Charlie. But she never allowed it, not then and not now. It was true that she was a cop—a homicide detective for the past ten years, actually—but she was a woman, too . . . and one with a pretty nice figure for forty-one, in her opinion. Being a cop didn’t make her any less of a woman, just as being a woman didn’t make her less of a cop. She was good at both roles and proud of it. So she didn’t care if her husband called her Charlie, and he often did. And hell, her brothers had done it since the day she was born. It was okay for her friends outside the force to do it, too. But most people she worked with called her Detective Hunnsaker. She might even answer to Charlotte for those she knew well enough. But never Charlie. No one on the force had called her that since the day she made a 230-pound slab of meat in a uniform, a fellow rookie at the time, sorry that he did.