Rachel moved swiftly, pulling the brightly colored scarf from the back of the chair and dumping it on the broken cup, scooping up shards of china and spilled coffee. David had always hated that shawl, the one piece of color in the austere living room, so she figured he wouldn’t object. There was no way she was going to leave the room without hearing what Maggie had to say.
She dumped the shawl and its contents into a wastebasket before turning back. Everyone had composed themselves—they were all looking solemn and unsurprised.
“What happened?” David said, sounding distraught. “Not another student?”
“Not another student. They found a young woman’s body over by the Idaho state line. The good news is that apparently the Northwest Strangler has moved on, and so has the FBI.”
“Thank the good lord,” Stephen Henry, the atheist, said with devout piety.
“Yes, thank heavens,” David said. “The entire campus has been in a state of panic. Now that the danger has passed maybe we can get back to our normal lives.”
Caleb wasn’t saying anything at all.
“Not necessarily,” Maggie drawled. “The FBI is sure they’ve got a good lead on the man, and they’ve handed local authority back to me.”
“But you’re not convinced,” Rachel said, a statement, not a question.
“No, I’m not. Maybe the FBI’s right, and we have nothing more to worry about. We were just a pit stop for a monster making his way across the Pacific Northwest. But I don’t like unanswered questions. This doesn’t smell right to me.”
“Don’t you think you should let it rest, Maggie?” Stephen Henry said in his most dictatorial voice. “If the FBI is satisfied then you should be, too.”
“Professor Middleton, I’ve never been the kind of gal who takes someone else’s word for things. I make up my own mind, and right now Rachel’s absolutely right. It doesn’t feel right to me. I’m not letting go of it until I’m convinced the murderer is hundreds of miles away from here. In the meantime, I’d like to talk to each of you, alone.”
“At this hour?” Stephen Henry exploded. “Don’t be ridiculous. This is hardly the time for social calls.”
“Didn’t I just tell you that this is far from a social call?” Maggie drawled. “Now you can meet with me, one by one, in the dining room, or you can come with me down to the station. Makes no difference to me—I’ll get the job done either way.”
“It can’t wait until tomorrow?” David said, his forehead furrowed.
“I’m afraid not. I do think the killings have stopped for the time being, whether or not the murderer has moved on. Maybe he’s thinking he’s managed to fool everyone, and he’s too smart to jeopardize his position right now. For the time being people are safe. Unless he’s gotten totally out of control and can’t help himself.” She looked over at Caleb, who met her gaze with a calm, steady expression.
“Sophie, I think you should go to bed,” David said. “Maggie won’t be needing to talk to you and I know how upsetting this must be.”
Rachel didn’t miss Sophie’s instinctive pout.
“I’m afraid I meant it when I said I need to talk to all of you,” Sheriff Bannister said. “I can take Sophie first so she can get to bed sooner.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Stephen Henry said, his voice raised to almost bellowing levels. “You can’t tell me you suspect my granddaughter of being a serial killer!”
“Sheriff Bannister just wants to talk with me, Stephen Henry,” Sophie said calmly. “She probably wants to know if I’ve seen anything, noticed anything out of place or peculiar. It’s no problem—I don’t mind.” She rose. At age thirteen, she was already nearing five feet seven—in another year she might be taller than David. “I was getting pretty tired anyway.”
“You mind if we use the dining room, Rachel?” Maggie said.
She could sense David’s irritation that he wasn’t being consulted. “It’s fine with us,” she said deliberately, giving David his ounce of power. And annoyed with herself for doing so.
“Don’t any of you go anywhere. You stay and keep the boys from killing each other, Rachel.” With anyone else that would be a joke. Coming from Maggie’s flat, affectless voice it sounded far too real.
“This is ridiculous,” Stephen Henry fumed once Maggie and Sophie disappeared. “I don’t know what’s gotten into that woman—she should know better than to harass members of one of Silver Falls’s most important families.”
“Oh, come on, Father,” Caleb drawled, still sitting a little way off. “Don’t be modest. What’s this ‘one of’ bullshit? You know that no one else in the area comes near our exalted level.”
Stephen Henry didn’t deny it. “I was being tactful,” he said, drawing up his dignity around him, ignoring Caleb’s mockery. “Which is something you could work on, my boy.”
Caleb’s dark, wicked eyes met hers for a brief moment before he turned back to his father. “Tact is for pussies.”
“Caleb!” David said, shocked.
“Oh, come on, David!” Caleb said. “You’re just too damned easy to rile. Loosen up. There are all sorts of perfectly good, Anglo-Saxon words with effectively crude meanings. I bet Stephen Henry approves of them.”
“I do, indeed,” the old man said. “I don’t know how you became such a little prig, David. I would have thought marriage and the love of a good woman would have loosened you up, but you’ve still got that revolting little minister deep inside you. Sometimes it’s much more fun to raise the devil.”
“You’d know,” David said with far less than his usual grace. He glanced toward the hallway. “How long do you think this imposition is going to last? Why couldn’t she wait until tomorrow to talk to us?”
“Now that’s the interesting question,” Caleb said. “Why does she come after us the moment she gets control of the case back? Kind of makes you wonder?” He leaned back, perfectly at ease.
A moment later Maggie appeared in the door. “Rachel, you want to come next?”
Stephen Henry rolled his wheelchair forward, bumping into the coffee table. “I’m an old man and I want to go home to my own bed,” he said peevishly. “If you want to talk to me you’re going to do it now. In front of my children.”
If Maggie was impressed by his bluster she didn’t show it. “All right. I’d like to know your schedule for the last four days. Where have you been?”
“At home, of course. You think I miraculously climbed out of my wheelchair, strangled and raped some poor girl, carried her up the mountain and dumped her into Silver Falls before climbing back down and getting back into my wheelchair? Don’t be absurd.”
Maggie didn’t even blink. “Why did you put it in that order?”
“What do you mean?”
“You said strangled and raped, not raped and strangled. I don’t think that bit of information was made public. That she was raped post-mortem.”
Stephen Henry looked at her blankly. “This is a small college town, Mrs. Bannister. If you think there are any secrets here you’re sadly mistaken.”
“It’s Sheriff Bannister, Professor. Or Maggie.” Her voice was even. “And you’d be surprised at the secrets some people can keep.” She looked over at Caleb, who was lounging off to one side, seemingly at ease. He gave her a faint smile.
“Answer her question, Father,” David said in a weary voice. “She’s not going to leave us alone until she gets what she wants.”
Stephen Henry looked sulky. “Most days I wake up, my aide dresses me and puts me in my chair and rolls me into the bathroom. I take care of my bodily functions. I come out and Dylan rolls me into my study, where I set to work on a new collection of poetry. Dylan leaves for the day, returning in time to assist me in getting ready for bed, and one day is pretty much the same as the next. Do you need any other details?”
“What about yesterday? Any phone calls? Did you check your computer, answer e-mails?”
“E-mails are an invention of the devil, the single greatest contribution to the wretched illiteracy of the masses. I won’t have a computer in the house.”
“Luddite,” Caleb said sweetly, and Rachel resisted the impulse to grin. David was almost as bad—he used a computer only when he had to, and if Rachel hadn’t insisted he would have continued to survive on dial-up in the house.
“So you have no witnesses to your whereabouts between the time your aide left and the time he returned.”
“You’re talking about yesterday? David,” he said promptly. “He came over in the middle of the day. We needed to have a family powwow, and he cancelled classes and came to talk to me.”
For a moment David started, and he glanced at his father so swiftly Maggie probably didn’t notice. But Rachel did.
“And I presume Caleb was there as well.”
“Not me, Sheriff,” Caleb said. “I think I was the family problem they were discussing.”
“Is this true, David?”
David hesitated. “Yes, it is. That we met, not that we talked about Caleb.”
“Then why didn’t he join you?”
“I assume he was busy elsewhere,” David said, glancing at him. “Maybe you should ask my wife where he was.”
Rachel froze. “I beg your pardon?” she said in her iciest voice.
David turned to look at her. “You’ve been up at his place. It only seemed logical.”
“Sheriff Bannister isn’t interested in your brother’s tomcatting ways, David,” Stephen Henry said.
Rachel looked over at Caleb, who simply looked back at her, unperturbed. “Caleb’s tomcatting ways have absolutely nothing to do with me,” she said, not certain who was pissing her off the most.
“There’s no need for anyone to get edgy,” David said with his usual easy charm. “I’m sure we’re just one of many families she’ll be talking to. That’s how police work is done, isn’t it? Patient footwork, talking to dozens and dozens of innocent people until you find the clue that puts it all together.”
“That’s the way it usually works,” Maggie said evenly.
“So tell me, Sheriff,” Caleb said suddenly. “Why don’t you think the murder over in Idaho was committed by the Northwest Strangler?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then why don’t you think our two little murders were committed by the same man?” David asked.
“We haven’t established that the second body found was actually a murder victim. And I wouldn’t exactly call our crimes little. No death is ever small.”
Rachel noticed she didn’t answer that question, but went on as if it had never been asked. “It’s turning out that our Northwest Strangler might not be that localized. There have been similar cases as far away as Portugal and West Africa.”
“Then that leaves our family out,” Stephen Henry said triumphantly. “Except, for perhaps…” His glance strayed toward Caleb, who was listening to all this with no more interest than if he were watching a trial on television.
“Except for me, Maggie,” he said. “I’ve been in Portugal, West Africa, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Russia…you name it, I’ve been there in the last fifteen years or so. Now all you have to do is find similar murders in each country, check my whereabouts at the time and you’ve got your man.”
“That’s not funny,” Rachel snapped.
His smile was oddly sweet. “I don’t know, I can find a certain black humor in it. What is it, Maggie? You want to take me in? I won’t put up a fight.”
“Well, I certainly will,” his father said. “Neither of my sons have a violent bone in their bodies, and—”
“Now that’s definitely not true, S.H.,” Caleb said. “I can hold my own in a bar fight, and I’ve got the scars to prove it. I fight dirty, I’m ruthless, and I can do what I have to to get the job done. Seems to me I’m the perfect candidate for murder.”
“And then there were the dead animals,” Maggie said, her voice even. “I’m not sure that torturing animals is something you just outgrow.”
It hit her so fast she was shocked. Rachel had been sitting there, an unwilling witness to all this, when her stomach suddenly lurched. “Excuse me,” she said, bolting from the room, barely making the bathroom before she was sick.
It seemed to last forever, which, considering how little she’d been eating, didn’t make sense. When she’d finally gotten rid of everything in her stomach she leaned back against the wall, closing her eyes as her breathing slowly returned to normal. No one had ever said a word about tortured animals—the very thought almost had her hurling again. She took calm, shallow breaths as a cold sweat covered her. What the…fuck…had she gotten herself into?
She heard the sound of voices in the hallway outside the powder-room door—Stephen Henry’s sculptured tones, David’s measured ones. She pushed herself up, splashed water on her face and rinsed her mouth out before opening the door.
Her bright smile must have been a little wavery. “You okay?” Maggie asked, and Rachel realized with shock that she was the only one in the room who actually cared. There was too much going on in the tangled mess of the Middleton clan to pay much notice of a married-in stranger.
“Just a touch of the stomach flu,” she said, forcing her voice to sound stronger.
“Yeah, that’s been going around,” Maggie said, covering for her. “Caleb’s taking Stephen Henry home and then coming down to the station. I’m finished with David. He’s been real helpful.”
She couldn’t look at him. Not without thinking about it, not without having to turn around and head straight back into the bathroom. No wonder David had been so adamant about not having animals. She didn’t even want to think what he went through as a child, having a sociopath for a brother.
She’d spent far too much time reading about serial killers—before Tessa was murdered. Once that happened, she’d found the very thought of it so revolting that she’d had to avoid certain sections of the bookstore. Some of the other parents had wanted to read everything they could, trying to understand the how and the why of Tessa’s death. Rachel didn’t want to understand anything. She’d simply wanted to take her daughter and run to a safe place as fast as she could and David had appeared, deus ex machina, to protect her, when she’d never thought she’d needed protection before. And now here they were, in a place that was anything but safe.
She wouldn’t, couldn’t look at Caleb. He’d told her to leave town, and she should have gone at the first warning. She should have listened. If Maggie was right, and you didn’t outgrow torturing helpless creatures, then chances were he’d moved on to bigger and better victims. And sending her out of town would have been the perfect setup. David would insist on coming with her and there would have been no one left to stop him.
Or maybe Caleb had some sick, strange compulsion and he was trying to stop himself. Maybe that was why he wanted to send her away, to somehow keep her safe from his own monstrous hands.
“Give an old man a kiss, Rachel,” Stephen Henry said, still with that annoying tone that had become part of his everyday speech.
She leaned down dutifully, trying not to look at the man standing behind his chair, the hand that rested on the handles, strong and long-fingered and tanned by the sun. Hands that had done things too horrific to even think of. Even if he’d been a perfect Boy Scout from there on out, there was a darkness of the soul that would never leave you.
She brushed Stephen Henry’s cheek with hers, but before she realized it, Caleb had caught her chin in his hand, tilting her face up to his, forcing her to look into his dark, endless eyes for a long, silent moment.
He had to see the disgust and condemnation there, even while she tried to hide it, and then she pulled herself away, stepping back. “Good night, Rachel. If Maggie hauls me off to prison without giving me a chance to see you again I hope you’ll be very happy with my brother.” There was that malice again, hidden beneath the polite words, malice that only Rachel seemed to hear.
“That’s not going to happen, Caleb,” Stephen Henry said. “As soon as I get home I’ll call our lawyer.”
“Not necessary, Father. I’m sure Sheriff Bannister and I can come to some kind of understanding. If not, I think I can manage to escape before she calls out the bloodhounds.”
Maggie didn’t blink, didn’t respond. “You take care of yourself, Rachel,” she said, turning her back on the men. “You and Sophie mean a lot to us Bannisters, and I need to make sure you two are safe. Nothing’s going to happen to either of you, not on my watch. But it doesn’t hurt to pay attention.”
Attention to what? Rachel wanted to ask. But they were already heading out the door, leaving her behind.
At the last minute Caleb turned back to look at them, an unreadable expression in his eyes. David put an arm around her. For some strange reason she wanted to throw it off, but she remained still, motionless, the perfect image of a devoted couple.
And then they were gone, the door closing behind them. David took a step away from her, almost as if she were an infection. “I’m going in my study for a while, dear,” he said smoothly. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
At least his earlier amatory mood had vanished. The thought of fending off one of David’s rare romantic moves was enough to make her want to head for the powder room again.
But she composed her face in a Madonna-like smile, and kissed the air beside his cheek. “Sleep well, then.”
His smile was benevolent. “I will, my love. I will.”