The Prettiest One: A Thriller (5 page)

Hunnsaker said, “ME’s best estimate is a nine-millimeter.”

“We get an approximate time of death?” Padilla asked.

That was another thing that wasn’t quite the way Hollywood made it seem. On TV, the ME always gave a tidy little two-hour window, and anything that fell even five minutes outside of it completely exonerated a suspect. In the real world, such estimations were far from precise. There were a lot of variables that could affect an estimate—ambient temperature, the pre-death health of the victim, whether he had taken drugs shortly before he was killed, and a host of other considerations. But though timing a death was not an exact science, an experienced ME would use a combination of science, the available information, and educated guesswork to get pretty close most of the time.

“TOD is probably between nine p.m. and midnight last night,” Hunnsaker said. “The ME’s got an assistant somewhere around here finishing up the mundane stuff and waiting for us to be done with the body. He said we could ask her questions if we think of something that can’t wait. Said she’s pretty sharp.”

For a few moments, Hunnsaker watched the crime scene techs go about their painstaking, methodical work, taking photographs, measuring distances, videotaping the scene, sketching it, setting little flags on stands beside things that could prove to be evidence. They obviously knew what they were doing, so Hunnsaker left them alone and went back to walking the scene in her flimsy little slip-on booties—required footwear at crime scenes to avoid site contamination. She hated wearing the things, which made her feel a little as though she were wearing clown shoes, but she’d be the first to drop a load of bricks on anyone she saw walking around without them. A minute later, she looked up to see a uniform walking quickly toward them, his body language screaming that he had found something.

“Got something you should probably see, Detectives,” he said, his eyes dancing. Hunnsaker may have been on the wrong side of forty, but she still remembered being that young and enthusiastic.

“Lead the way,” she said.

They followed the uniform and his flashlight down one of the outermost aisles, along the back of the building. They passed a few small offices, all of which would have to be searched thoroughly. Ahead, Hunnsaker saw a door on the rear wall, a strip of sunlight at the bottom.

“We going out the back?” she asked.

“No, ma’am,” the uniform replied.

Just before he reached the door, he aimed the beam of his flashlight into a small opening in the wall, a few feet to the right of the exit. It had been a closet once, with double doors, but the doors were long gone. The closet wasn’t empty, though. Several blankets were piled in one corner with a depression in the middle. It reminded Hunnsaker of a big bird’s nest.

“May I?” she asked, taking the flashlight from the uniform. She shone the light into the closet. Crumpled fast-food wrappers. Cigarette butts. A skin magazine, its pages wrinkled and worn. A few empty beer bottles, one lying on its side.

“Think someone’s been living here?” Padilla asked.

“Or just comes to get drunk now and then,” Hunnsaker said. “Someplace he can be alone with the girls of his dreams. But whoever he is, it’s not our victim. At least I don’t think so. We’ll dust in here for prints, but the vic looked too healthy to be living like this.”

“So if it wasn’t our vic using this hangout, it was somebody else,” Padilla said. “And that somebody could be a witness, or even our shooter.”

Hunnsaker knew that the squatter, if that’s what he was, might not even have been at the warehouse when the killing took place. And if he was, he might have been dead drunk. Or sound asleep. Or busy focusing on Miss July’s naughty parts. But then again, if they were lucky, maybe he was in the building and
did
see something . . . or someone.

She pointed the flashlight at the open bottle lying on its side. There was still some beer in it. A few inches away was an irregular shape in the grime on the floor that looked like a dried puddle of something in the dust and dirt around it. Hunnsaker stepped closer without entering the closet and squatted down.

“That look like spilled beer to you?” she asked Padilla. “From the bottle right there, before it rolled a few inches away?”

“Looks like it,” Padilla said.

“A guy who hangs out here, drinking cheap beer, he’s not the kind of guy to leave beer in a bottle, is he? I mean, even if he knocked over the bottle by accident, there’s still beer inside. See that?”

Padilla picked up the thread. “So maybe he got startled by something and knocked it over, and was too distracted by whatever it was to pick it up and finish it off. Maybe he got up and shot our vic.”

“Or maybe he heard the shots and realized he had to get the hell out of here fast. Either way, if he was here, we want to talk to this guy.” She turned to the uniform and said, “Good job.” The man nodded smartly and professionally in return, but Hunnsaker knew he’d be telling his wife or girlfriend tonight all about the big part he’d played in a murder investigation today. To Padilla, she said, “Let’s hope we pull some good prints from in there, because I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that the kind of guy who spends his time in that closet is in our system.”

She turned toward the uniform, who stood waiting nearby, practically at attention. “You were one of the first on the scene, right?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “My partner and me.”

“Did you interview the kids who found the body?”

The victim was found by two grade-schoolers who had planned to spend that morning exploring an abandoned warehouse instead of learning geometry. Surprisingly, rather than flee the scene and avoid exposing their morning of playing hooky, they actually called 911 on a cell phone that Hunnsaker thought the kids were probably too young to have. Then again, she wasn’t a parent, so what did she know about it?

“I did, ma’am,” the uniform replied, “but not too much. Just enough to make sure there were no threats that they were aware of. We left anything more to you guys, ma’am.”

Hunnsaker and Padilla would be talking to the kids in a little while. “And they didn’t mention seeing anyone other than the victim?” Hunnsaker asked. “Like our closet dweller, maybe?”

The uniform shook his head. “They said they didn’t see anyone else.”

“Did you believe them?”

“Seemed like they were telling the truth, but I couldn’t swear to it.”

Hunnsaker turned to Padilla. “If there’s any chance they saw this guy, we need to know about it. Either way, somehow, we’ll find him. And when we do, if we’re lucky, we find our killer.”

“And if he didn’t pull the trigger himself . . .” Padilla added.

“Then maybe he saw who did,” Hunnsaker finished for him.

CHAPTER SEVEN

CAITLIN INSISTED ON DRIVING. She knew that Josh hadn’t slept a wink after she’d come home, while she’d stolen a few hours of admittedly fitful sleep. Sure, she’d tossed and turned and sweated her way through yet another nightmare encounter with the Bogeyman, but still, she’d slept a bit while Josh hadn’t. Besides, she hoped that driving the same route she’d driven the night before—even though it was in reverse, and it was day now rather than night—might act as a mental Heimlich maneuver to make her mind cough up a little nugget of memory.

Caitlin had wanted to take separate cars on this trip. It made sense to her. She’d drive the Skylark she had—hopefully—borrowed from Katherine Southard, and Josh would follow in his Subaru. That way, they’d be able to drive his car home again after . . . well, after whatever they were going to do in Smithfield. But Josh had insisted on riding with her, saying they could rent a car when they were ready to return to New Hampshire. Caitlin almost stood her ground, arguing that it would be far more efficient to bring two vehicles, but then realized that Josh was probably nervous to let her out of his sight for long so soon after finally getting her back from her mysterious seven-month absence.

So Caitlin drove and Josh rode shotgun, using a GPS application on his tablet to guide them to Katherine Southard’s address. Before they had left home, she thought about making a few calls to the people to whom she felt she owed them, those few she couldn’t bear to keep in the dark any longer about the fact that she was alive and—at least physically—well. Then she realized, with no small amount of sadness, that other than Josh, there were no such people. Her wonderful parents, who had taken an orphan girl into their home and adopted her when she was five years old, had passed away years ago. Caitlin had no brothers, no sisters. Her father had been an only child himself, and it had been years since Caitlin had heard from Aunt Sophie, her mother’s sister in San Antonio, despite the Christmas and birthday cards Caitlin sent her every year. And as for her friends, there didn’t seem to be any left. She’d had some at the time she disappeared, some good ones, she’d thought, but they ceased being friends to her the moment they turned their backs on Josh after she went missing. So no, there was no one she needed to call.

Caitlin and Josh spent the first part of the drive just catching up, which was strange for her. Josh needed to bring her up to date on what he had been doing for seven months, but to her, it was as if no time had passed. She had no memory of what she had been doing all that time. The last thing she remembered apparently took place the day before she disappeared. Then she was in that warehouse parking lot. So it was a fairly lopsided conversation, with Josh filling her in on various things. At first, Caitlin wanted to keep things light, so she asked about movies that had come out in theaters while she was . . . away. And about which celebrities were dating each other now. She asked whether the president had become embroiled in any interesting scandals and whether any of the various dictators around the world had invaded one of his country’s neighbors. So for a while, Josh caught her up on current events that weren’t all that current several months after they’d taken place.

Finally, shortly after they crossed the border into Massachusetts, Caitlin asked Josh how he was, how he had fared while she was gone. He was silent for a few moments. Caitlin let her gaze drift from the road and stole a glance at him. His eyes were closed. He looked as though he were steeling himself for this part of the conversation. Finally, he looked over and said, “One day, everything was fine. We were happily living our happy life together. The next, you were just . . . gone. In a blink, everything changed. I didn’t know that right away, but soon enough . . .”

He paused and took a deep breath.

“At first, of course,” he said, “I thought it was because of our argument that night. That you needed some space. After a few hours, though, I tried calling your cell. You didn’t pick up.”

It was only then that Caitlin remembered that she no longer had a cell phone. She suddenly felt naked without it, like she’d left home without her pants. She made a mental note to buy a new phone when she got the chance.

“By three in the morning,” Josh continued, “I figured you’d gone to stay at a friend’s house. I called Lucy first, then Michelle.”

“You woke them up?”

“I did. You weren’t there. And you weren’t at Bethany and Carl’s place, either.” He paused, then added, “I even tried Rick.”

“Rick?” She looked over at him again. “You thought I went to stay at my old boyfriend’s house?”

He shrugged sheepishly. “I didn’t know how mad you were about . . . whatever we were fighting about.”

Wow. She looked back through the windshield at the highway stretching up and over a rise in front of them. “I bet you were relieved I wasn’t at Rick’s,” she added in a weak attempt to lighten the mood.

“Honey, I just wanted to know where you were. I didn’t care where that was as long as you were safe.”

She felt another pang of guilt for what she’d put him through, even though she hadn’t meant to put him through it . . . or could even remember doing so.

“When six in the morning rolled around, I got really worried. I called the cops. They listened, but like on TV, they don’t get too worked up about someone who’s been missing for only eight hours. Especially when I admitted that you’d walked out after a fight. They said you’d probably come home after you cooled off. They didn’t care that that behavior wasn’t like you, that you’d never done anything like that before. They told me to call them back if you hadn’t returned by dinnertime. Hell, dinnertime. Another
twelve hours.
”

He fell quiet for a moment. She let him have his mental space and just focused on the road. Finally, he spoke again. “By the next day, everyone was looking for you. And everyone was looking
at
me. In the first few hours—
very
few hours—people were sympathetic. But the longer you were gone, the less innocent I began to seem, I guess. The police started asking me questions that anyone who has watched even a few hours of cop shows knows meant that I had become a suspect. They asked about our relationship, whether you might have been seeing anyone, whether that made me angry—”

“They thought I might have been cheating on you?”

“It was a theory.”

“And then you found out and killed me?”

He shrugged. “Like I said, it was a theory. Or if you were still alive, maybe you ran off with the guy. That was a possibility, too.”

“Well, none of that happened.”

“I know that.”

“Did they also consider the possibility that
you
cheated on
me
, or was I the only suspected adulterer?”

“Of course they did, Caitlin. Don’t they always suspect the husband is having an affair when a wife disappears?”

“With anyone in particular?”

“First it was Eve, down the hall from me at work. When they got nowhere with that, they moved on to Gretchen, if you can believe it.”

“Your boss’s secretary? The trashy one who came on to you at the company picnic? How stupid would that have been?”

“That’s the one, and she actually supports Mr. Rollins, my
boss’s
boss, which would have been even stupider. Anyway, they poked and prodded and made everything I ever did—hell, everything
we both
ever did—seem suspicious. That was bad enough, but then the media started in on me. Again, at first I was the innocent husband, as much a victim in this as you were. Then when the police started eyeing me, the media began to circle. I swear to God, I could almost see their fins sticking out of the waves. I assume the cops leaked something about my being a suspect, because the reporters went into a frenzy like blood had hit the water. All of a sudden, I was a monster. I’d been having an affair, or I found out you’d been having an affair, so I killed you. For a while, I had drowned you. A few days later, they were saying I stabbed you to death. At some point there was talk of me stuffing you in a wood chipper.”