10

“I need you to think very hard,” Preach said, watching the retired professor carefully. “Do you remember anything at all about this woman you saw through the window? Hair length, clothes, shoes, hat, glasses ?”

Sharon was staring intently out of the sliding glass doors, as if trying to recreate the image. “From the position of the window, I could only see her from the waist up. I don’t remember any distinguishing clothing, and I can’t even remember if I saw long hair or not.”

“What made you think it was a woman? Besides the slim build?”

“That’s it, I guess,” she said after a moment. “I hadn’t thought about it before you asked. The memory just sort of . . . slips away.”

“Recall is hard,” he said, distracted as he considered the implications. The fact that someone was with David later that night, in his house, was monumental.

The person Sharon had seen could have been any woman or, for that matter, one of David’s smaller male friends. A prosecutor would have a hard time, maybe an impossible one, using the testimony in court. But in terms of the investigation, it meant that someone David knew—and knew well—was with him that night.

And that person could have been Claire.

His throat felt dry as he pressed Sharon for more information. After failing to learn anything else of use, he told her to expect a sketch artist, thanked her for her time, and stepped outside. He ran a hand through his hair as he walked back to his car, his gaze slipping back to Claire’s house.

Anything could have happened that night. The murderer and an accomplice could have confronted David in the house while Claire was asleep. Or David might have brought a friend or a girl back to the house, then gone off with someone else.

If I think long enough, I can come up with anything.

Yet Claire had lied about where the argument had taken place. Why? Was it a lapse of memory, or was she covering something up ?

Should he confront her now or wait for more evidence ? Was he allowing their personal connection to impact his judgment?

Or, God forbid, his feelings?

He snarled and walked faster to his car. He wasn’t that kind of police officer. He wasn’t that kind of man.

There was zero evidence of motive. He couldn’t even imagine what it would take for a mother to kill her own son, even in a fit of rage. He had never heard of such a thing, outside of severe mental illness.

Check your facts, buddy. Just the other day, a stepfather in North Carolina took his three-year-old daughter out to the woods and shot her. It was all over the papers.

That was a stepfather, he chided himself. A male. A soulless bastard.

No sane mother would ever harm her own child.

But there are cases like that every year, all over the world.

There’s always an exception. Always a case for evil.

Yet the night he had told Claire about David’s death, every instinct Preach possessed screamed that her response to the news was genuine.

Claire is very intelligent and has been an actress since high school. She even got a few professional gigs. Or maybe her guilt is genuine because she killed him in a fit of rage, and now she’s aghast at what she’s done.

With one hand on the car door, he took a moment to steady himself. Just investigate, he told himself. Do your job. Still debating as to whether to confront Claire, his gaze slipped to the tract of woods behind the houses.

He still believed the swamp behind Barker’s Mill was a dump site. He needed to conduct a full forensics search of the house, and he wasn’t sure why David might have gone or been lured outside. But if nothing else, it would give him something to do while he considered his options.

As he left the car and strode through the space between Claire’s house and Sharon’s, out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw Claire watching him from a window. He turned and saw a flutter of

curtains.

Jaw firm, he thrust his hands into the pockets of his overcoat, reached the tree line, and stopped to peer at the back of Claire’s house. The kitchen was at the rear of the first floor. Between the kitchen and her office was a mudroom with a door that opened onto the back yard. The same door he was looking at right now.

His eyes ran along the wall of hardwoods lining the edge of the forest. Pine and hickory and sweet gum. The woods bookended the entire subdivision, and he wasn’t sure how far they ran, or to where. He made a mental note to have Terry check.

A footpath cut into the woods about twenty feet past Claire’s house. After toeing through the leaves piled alongside the path, he stopped to listen. Songbirds chirped, a hawk shrieked in the distance, and squirrels clambered over tree limbs. His own pulsebeat pounded in his head.

Walking as slow as poured syrup, he proceeded down the path, canvassing the terrain for anything out of the ordinary. Thirty feet in it linked up with a wider trail, and plenty of footprints made it obvious the path was in use. Most of Creekville’s neighborhoods were connected to a greenway or a wilderness trail of some sort.

A few hundred yards in, something caught his eye. A fallen tree trunk beside the path, covered in moss and fungus. The woods were covered with them, but this one had a jagged impression a few feet from the end of the log nearest the path. He bent to inspect it. The width of the impression was about the size of a shoe.

The position of the hole raised Preach’s hackles. As if someone had stepped off the path in the dark for some unknown reason, and their shoe had plunged right through the rotten wood. It could have been an animal or kids playing chase, or a split in the wood when it fell. But something felt off.

He bent to inspect the log and took a picture ofit. After that, he rose and slowly circled it, toeing through the leaves and brush. He turned over the top layer, displacing moldy pine straw and a host of insects. After widening his search, he caught a glimpse of sunlight glinting on metal. Expecting a coin, he leaned down, brushed aside the leaves, and found a silver cigarette lighter. It had a protruding lip to aid the thumb swipe and an elegant floral pattern etched in gray lines on both sides. A vintage piece. He carefully dropped it into an evidence bag.

Another hour of searching turned up nothing else in proximity to the log. He could have spent all week digging through the woods. Still, his interest piqued, he kept an eye out on the way back, letting his gaze roam higher, not focused on the path alone. A hundred yards or so away, he spotted a pile of leaves that gave him pause.

Hundreds of leaf piles dotted this stretch of woods alone. Leaves sitting atop fallen logs and brush piles, leaves bunched in mounds over time by the wind. This one looked different for two reasons. First, the pile was structured in a way that looked abnormal to his eye. Too circular, and not contoured enough on the top. Second—and he wasn’t positive about this—the area between the mound of leaves and the path, about ten feet of woods, looked as if it contained fewer leaves than the area around it.

Almost, he thought, as if it had been raked.

A layer of leaves still covered the ground, but leaves were dropping every day. If someone had wanted to cover something up, they would have tried to deflect suspicion by leaving some of the leaves in place.

When he probed the pile using a long stick, it went all the way through to the ground. He poked a few more places to be sure. After that, he used the stick to sweep off the top layers. The leaves in the middle of the pile weren’t as damp as he had expected. In fact, they weren’t very damp at all. He was no forest ranger, and was probably making something out of nothing. Still, stubborn as a rusty lock, he kept going, unable to let go of the thread once he had started to pull.

Moments later, his breath stuck in his throat, and he stood staring down at the pile. Suddenly feeling as if someone were watching, he glanced around the woods, then bent to sort through more of the leaves. After uncovering a few more handfuls, he was sure of what he was seeing.

Starting about halfway down the pile, some or all of the leaves had dark spots on them, ranging from dabs of discoloration to large splotches. They were all the same color, as if saturated in the same ink or painted with the same brush.

The splotches were not the sort that appear from water permeation, because these leaves were not even wet. These leaves—the entire middle of the pile—had been stained by a different substance.

And that substance, he was guessing, was blood.