Reed swallowed a pair of ibuprofens and looked at his reflection. He noted his gray pallor, his bloodshot eyes, and the two-day stubble dotting his chin. If he were one of the agents he supervised, he would send himself home immediately. As the situation currently stood, he might have little choice, anyway. The conversation with Sheriff Ramsey had not gone as Reed had hoped. The sheriff had been intrigued with the new finding that the blood on the knife was female, but he’d balked at ordering a DNA test on the hair sample Reed had collected from Angie Rivera.
“So what if it matches?” Ramsey had said. “She was practically Camilla’s roommate, right? They were in and out of each other’s apartments all the time. They shared meals together. If Angie’s blood is on that knife, she can easily explain how it got there.”
“If it is mixed with Camilla’s that provides a stronger argument.”
“Not much of one. That blood is all of forty years old by now. No telling when and where each little drop got on the knife.”
Reed had been forced to swallow his frustration. “That’s it? If Angie did it, she just gets away with it because she and Camilla were friends?”
“Yep, that’s it. It just doesn’t make sense to me, anyways. Like you say, those girls were close friends. Why would Angie want to kill her? I mean, come on now. You’re not some rookie, Agent Markham. You know as well as I do that a jury is going to want more than a couple of drops of blood on the knife. If you can’t explain why Angie might have done this, if you can’t find anything else to link her to this murder … I’m afraid your case is dead in the water.”
“What if Cammie had come into some money? Would that be motive enough?”
The sheriff had a new gleam of interest in his eyes. “Did she? This is news to me.”
Reed knew he had to tread cautiously. If he mentioned the twenty-five-thousand-dollar payout, then Angus Markham’s skeleton would come tumbling straight out of the closet and onto the front-page news. “Let’s say hypothetically that she did have a fair amount of cash in the apartment, and that Angie knew about it. Let’s further note that no cash was recovered at the scene and that Angie left for Los Angeles only a few days after the murder.”
Ramsey had leaned way back in his chair and stared at the ceiling for a long moment. “That’s all fascinating information—if it’s true. Can you prove that Camilla had this money and that Angie took it?”
“No,” Reed admitted reluctantly. He couldn’t be sure Angie took the money.
“Well, if you can get that kind of proof—or any other outside corroboration that Angie might have had something to do with this—then we’ll consider the DNA test.”
Later, Reed had tried to plead his case with his boss, but she gave him basically the same answer: a DNA match to Angie Rivera in and of itself would not be enough evidence to forge a case. Reed needed to find some other substantive link between Angie and Camilla’s murder before the director would authorize a DNA test on Angie. This left Reed right where he was now, alone in a dark hotel room with a splitting headache. He’d spent the last two hours studying the crime scene photos and the timeline again, looking for something he’d missed. He felt it when he looked at them—something wasn’t quite right—but the answer remained maddeningly vague, refusing to coalesce.
Reed tried looking at the photos from a distance. He tried placing them upside down. He went back and forth between the largely happy snapshots the police had seized from Camilla’s home and the clinical photographs taken at the time of the murder. He didn’t need to study any of the images anymore. They had been burned into his brain and he could summon any one of them at will just by closing his eyes. All the pieces of the puzzle were there: Angie’s shopping bags, abandoned by the door; the smears of blood across the floor and on the walls indicating a brutal struggle; the knife in Camilla’s chest, and the horse head bookend lying next to her, half-covered in blood. So much blood. The green diamond pattern on Camilla’s blouse nearly disappeared entirely under the spreading stains.
Maybe it was what the pictures didn’t show—Reed, as a baby, just offscreen—that made it so difficult for him to see what was missing. Or maybe he’d stared at the images just long enough to make himself go crazy. He sat down on the bed and took out his cell phone. No calls from Ellery. Part of him wished that she would come back so he could push the pictures in front of her again: What do you see here that I am missing? The other part still felt piqued that she’d run off chasing an old murder that had nothing to do with him.
Suddenly restless, Reed got up to pace the room. He had exhausted the limits of his own imagination. He needed outside input. David Owens might be able to shed some light on this new angle on the murder. Now that he’d been reasonably ruled out as a suspect, he might provide insight into whether Angie had motive to kill Cammie. Hell, Reed figured there was a fifty-fifty shot Owens had been sleeping with both girls back then. The man apparently spread himself around.
He dialed the Owens household, telling himself it wasn’t that late, just a few minutes to nine. He didn’t want to have to sit in his hotel room until morning. He felt a stab of relief when Amy Owens picked up the phone. “Mrs. Owens, hello. It’s Reed Markham. I’m sorry to be troubling you at this hour, but I wondered if I might stop by to talk to you and your husband about the case.”
“Oh? Has there been some news?” He heard the sound of her putting away dishes in the background.
“We got a DNA sample from the knife,” Reed told her. “It’s raised some new questions.” He had ruled Amy out as a suspect this afternoon when the sheriff confirmed her story about an inheritance: Amy’s uncle had died and left her a tidy sum of money just prior to Cammie’s murder, so her sudden boost in income at the time didn’t have anything to do with the missing twenty-five thousand dollars.
“DNA,” Amy said, a hint of wonder in her voice. “After all this time. Isn’t technology amazing? When I was on the job, we counted ourselves lucky to get a couple of fingerprints. What did the test show?”
“I’d prefer not to get into that on the phone. Would it be all right if I paid you and your husband a quick visit?”
He heard her hesitation. “I don’t know…”
“I don’t suspect him of the murder,” he assured her in a rush. “Not anymore. I’d just like your perspective on some new information we’ve collected.”
“Okay, sure,” Amy relented after another beat. “We’re around. Come on over whenever you like.”
Reed paused only to run the razor over his face and comb his hair. He hesitated outside Ellery’s empty hotel room, wondering whether he should leave a note, but finally decided against it. She had her leads, and he had his. On his way to the Owens house, he considered all the questions he might ask David about Camilla and Angie’s relationship. Cammie sometimes had posed as Angie on the job, Angie had said. Maybe there was money at stake somehow, like Angie figured Cammie owed her something.
The Owenses’ residential street was dark and quiet, illuminated only by sparse streetlamps and the distant glow from inside the few large houses. Reed rolled to a stop in front of the Owens house and thought it odd that their house had no lights on at all that he could see. Amy and David were expecting him, so he imagined they would leave the light on by the front door at least. Perhaps they were at the back of the house, he reasoned as he approached the darkened walkway. He rang the bell and heard it chime from inside the house. No one answered his call. Reed rang again, longer this time, but still no one appeared to let him inside. He craned his neck back to look up at the house as a distinct feeling of unease settled in the pit of his stomach. Nothing appeared amiss, not with the house or with the street in general. He was the only person around.
Reed decided to walk around to the rear of the house to check it out. Maybe the Owenses had a pool or gazebo and simply hadn’t heard him arrive. He unlatched the gate on the fence and walked around the miniature palm trees and other leafy tropical plants to get to the backyard. He could smell the pool, dark and still. He didn’t see any trace of David or Amy Owens. Reed crossed the patio and went up to the sliding glass doors. His foot crunched on something sharp and hard, and Reed realized with alarm that he was standing amid broken glass. He reached out a hand and found the shattered seam of what used to be the door. The gaping hole was big enough for a person to climb through, and so that’s what he did. He took out his gun and tried to step around the pieces of glass.
He was in the kitchen. It was difficult to see in the dark, but he took another tentative step forward. “Mr. and Mrs. Owens?” he called out. “It’s Agent Markham! Are you here?”
He listened for any answer, dread creeping up his spine when he received only silence. Get out, he thought, and call for backup. But his feet moved him forward, deeper into the house. Amy or David might be hurt, dying. There wasn’t time to waste. “Mr. and Mrs. Owens,” he tried again. “It’s Reed Markham. Can you hear me?”
He kept his gun in his right hand while he felt along the wall with his left, searching for a light switch. A woman’s voice, calm and cold, reached out to him in the dark. “Hello, Mr. Markham.”
“Amy,” he said, relief coursing through him. “You’re all right.”
“Yes, I’m fine.”
“Your house—I saw the glass. What happened?” He looked in the direction of her voice but couldn’t quite make her out. He thought he saw her silhouette on the stairs. “Is everything okay? Where is David?”
“I sent David to the store. You make him nervous.”
“I—what? Where are you? I can’t see anything.” He groped in vain again for the light. “Who broke your door? What’s going on?”
“You broke it,” she said, and Reed froze.
“No, I found it like that,” he said carefully. “It was broken when I arrived.”
“No, you broke in after David and I said we wouldn’t talk to you anymore. You were crazy. You pulled out your gun. I was afraid you might kill me.”
Reed looked down at the gun in his hand, barely visible in the low light. “I’m not here to kill you. I just want to talk.”
“No talking. There’s no time. David will be back soon.” She moved down the stairs into a patch of light and Reed saw she had a gun, too. “Drop your weapon,” she ordered.
“Amy, please—”
“I said drop it!”
Slowly, Reed laid the gun at his feet. He considered his options. David was at the store, due home soon. If Reed could keep Amy talking until then, maybe the situation could be diffused.
“Now kick it away.”
Reed kicked his gun to the side, sending it sliding over the tile floor toward the refrigerator. “What’s this about, Amy?”
“You know. You must know if you ran that DNA test.”
Ah, Reed thought, as the truth hit him too late. “You killed Camilla.” Reed kept his tone neutral, careful not to sound judgmental.
“David wouldn’t choose,” she said, her voice hard. “So I had to help him. Get your hands up where I can see them.”
Reed had been inching his hand into his coat pocket for his cell phone. Now he had to back off and put his hands up in front of him. “You can shoot me,” he said, “but they’ll still pursue the DNA results. They know now it’s a woman who killed her.”
“No, they won’t. They hadn’t touched this case in years before you came around. Sheriff Ramsey comes to our summer barbecues. You think he cares about some forty-year-old case? He and David watch football together. I know exactly what he will and will not do, and he’ll be perfectly happy to let this whole mess become ancient history again.”
Reed knew in his bones this was true; he was the only person keeping Camilla’s case alive. “Maybe the sheriff would drop it. But Ellery won’t.” He knew this in his bones, too.
Amy laughed. “She’s suspended! I read the stories online about her—half the world thinks she’s crazy. I’m not worried about her.” Amy pointed the gun at him from across the room as if taking aim. “Sorry it had to be this way,” she said, with a tinge of what sounded like real regret. “It’s not your fault your mother was a whore.”
“Wait! You can’t do this!” He blurted the first desperate thing out of his mouth. His hands trembled. His tongue went dry. He thought of his family, of his daughter, of Ellery, who would probably have to identify his body. Amy hesitated, and in the horrible, tense silence they both heard a car engine roar into the driveway. The garage door began to rumble as it opened. David.
“Help!” Reed shouted, and Amy shot him.
He felt only pressure in his chest, but he knew that he’d been hit. He yelled out again for help, but only a wheeze emerged. The room exploded with the sound of gunfire. He felt dizzy now and he struggled to breathe. His chin struck the floor hard as he went down, face-first into the hard tile floor. He heard footsteps, voices, and then everything went black.