2

“Your father?” Ellery asked, confused. “You mean your biological father? Does that mean you’ve found him, too?”

“Oh, yes, I found him all right,” Reed replied. “Turns out he was right there all along.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Do you remember that little DNA project my sister had going at Christmas?” He bent down and retrieved his laptop.

Ellery nodded. One of Reed’s many sisters had decided that the whole family should get DNA tests as some sort of genealogy project for their father. The sister asked Reed to get tested, too, even though he was the only one in the family who was adopted, a twist that had struck Ellery as a cruel joke. Reed had insisted that his sister meant no harm and that she was hoping they might even find they had a common ancestor, someone way back on the family tree who would finally link them all by blood. “You said you weren’t sure about going through with the genetic analysis,” she said to Reed.

“I wasn’t, not at all. I sent in the DNA swab and got the results, but then it took several weeks before I could make myself look at them. Finally, I thought maybe it would be better to know. That I should find out anything I could about my background for my daughter’s sake. So, I looked.” He turned around the laptop so that she could see the screen. It had a lot of information on it, with numbers and bar graphs, but what jumped out at Ellery immediately were the three names listed under Reed’s: Kimberly, Suzanne, and Lynette—Reed’s three older sisters. Probable match, it said next to each one: 99 percent. Probable relationship: half sibling.

Ellery leaned in closer. “I’m not sure I’m reading this right,” she said. “Does this mean the DNA test shows you’re related after all?”

“All four of us,” Reed replied grimly. “It seems we’re siblings by blood as well as circumstance. And since I’ve seen enough family photos taken around the time that I was born to know for sure that my mother wasn’t pregnant at that time, that means that the DNA link has to come from my father.” He punched a few keys and called up a picture of Virginia State Senator Angus Markham, an aging lion complete with a full head of white hair. “Meet my dear old dad.”

Ellery looked from the picture to Reed’s face and back again. “What? How? I mean, I know how, but—Why would your own father have to go through the charade of adopting you?”

“Because he obviously didn’t want anyone to know he was my father.” Reed’s voice took on a hard edge. “You’ve seen the crime scene photos, so I’m betting you can guess why. What was he supposed to do—swoop in and say, ‘The child is mine from some random Latina waitress I impregnated on a trip to Vegas’? You think my mother would have stood for that? You think the voters in Virginia would have?”

“He could have told you the truth. He owed you that much.”

“He plucked me out of foster care and set me up in a sprawling mansion,” Reed said darkly. “He probably thought he’d done enough. Besides, do you think he could have shared this little bombshell with me alone? It would have detonated the whole family.”

“You’re saying your mother doesn’t know,” Ellery realized. “You think she’s been kept in the dark just like you have.”

Reed scrubbed his face with both hands. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything right now. I can’t see how she could’ve known and kept up the good face all these years. Dad’s always been the showman, not her. But maybe I’m the one lying now, lying to myself. Maybe I just don’t want to believe it.”

Ellery stretched her hand across the countertop, almost but not quite touching him. “I’m so sorry,” she murmured. “It’s terrible that he lied to you all those years. Still, he must have loved you, must’ve wanted you…” She let her voice trail off. Her own father had skipped out on her family when Ellery was ten, and he hadn’t looked back—not when she was kidnapped and brutalized by Francis Coben, not when her brother, Daniel, had died of leukemia. Ellery had spent weeks and months waiting by the phone or at the window, hoping for some sign that John Hathaway remembered the family he’d left behind. She’d designed a million scenarios to explain why he might not have been in contact. Maybe he was secretly an American spy who’d had to abandon his children to keep them safe. Maybe he’d been kidnapped himself, held prisoner by some crazy person like Coben. At fifteen, she’d floated this idea past her mother, that maybe her father was trapped somewhere, needing their help, and that they should look for him. She must have picked a bad day, one where her mother had worked since dawn cooking, cleaning, and looking after deathly ill Daniel, because her mother’s answer was uncharacteristically flat and direct: Your father left because he wanted a different life. One that didn’t include us. If he wants us, he knows damn well where to find us. Meantime, we’re not going chasing after him.

So, they didn’t chase, and he hadn’t come around again. Not for fifteen years. Then a few weeks ago, Ellery had received a letter forwarded from the Woodbury Police Department with a return address of John Hathaway in Franklin, Michigan. She’d put it directly in a drawer. During her growing-up years, she’d made up every excuse in the world to justify his behavior. Now she knew—there was nothing he could say to make it right.

“What did your father say when you told him what you’ve found out?” she asked Reed.

“I haven’t asked him about it yet.” He frowned at his father’s image on the screen.

“What?” Ellery would’ve taken the DNA results and shoved them in Angus’s face. “You have the proof. It’s not like he can deny it.”

“Yes, he’d have to acknowledge the truth about my paternity, but that’s not enough for me anymore. All these years, I thought I knew who he was—I thought I knew myself. Now it turns out everything I thought I knew was based on a huge lie. I don’t want a little bit of the truth; I want the whole thing. All right, I can prove he’s my biological father—that’s great, fine. I want to know who he was when he slept with this girl. I want to know why he didn’t step up right away. I want to know…” He broke off and swallowed hard. “I want to know if he could’ve done this to her.”

Ellery’s gaze drifted to the horrific crime scene photos. “You really think he’s capable of something like this?”

“I don’t want to think it.” He touched the pointed edge of one photo. “Camilla’s killer stabbed her twenty-seven times. She fought him hard. The autopsy shows numerous defensive wounds on her hands and forearms.” He raised his arms as if to protect his face. “The knife kept coming at her over and over again until she was on the floor bleeding to death. But her attacker didn’t stop there. He stabbed her at least six more times and then left the knife like that, stuck inside her body. Even that wasn’t enough to satisfy his rage, because then he grabbed a metal horse head bookend from Camilla’s shelves.” Reed sifted through the photographs until he came across one that showed a heavy metal horse head. “He used this bookend to bash her face in. He didn’t just want to kill her. He wanted to obliterate her entire existence.”

His words sent a prickle over Ellery, making her mouth go dry. She’d once been the girl on the other end of that white-hot rage. Coben had derived his power from seizing young women at will, feeding on their fear, and keeping pieces of them where only he could see. He’d cut off their hands and dumped the rest like trash in the street. Ellery had escaped with her life, with her hands intact, but Coben had kept her fear and nothing would ever change that. She pushed the pictures of Reed’s mother out of her line of sight. “Your father had an affair,” she said. “But it’s a big leap from illicit sex to … this.”

Reed turned his head so it was half in shadow. “I know that; of course I do. But back when it happened in 1975 no one understood that much about these kinds of murders—or any kind of murder, for that matter. My job didn’t even exist yet. The cops at the scene saw the pile of valuables at the door and they made an easy call that Camilla had surprised a burglar. But a burglar just wants to get in and out with the goods—he’s not looking for confrontation. At most, if surprised, he might fight long enough to get away. He’s not going to hang around and stab a woman twenty-seven times. He’s not going to pick up a bookend and smash her in the head. He’s a stranger who doesn’t care one way or another about the people he’s stealing from—he just wants to make a quick buck and get out of there. The person who did this to Camilla knew her and hated her.”

There was a beat of silence as Ellery let this sink in. “And you think he hated her,” she said softly. “Your father.”

“I think … I think he had an enormously dangerous secret and she was the one who knew it. She had a lot of power over him back then. She was a waitress, a struggling single mom who was strapped for cash. Maybe she saw my father as her meal ticket.” A pained look crossed his face, and he shut his eyes tight. “I certainly don’t want to believe it. But everything in my training tells me it could be true. When a woman is murdered like this in her own home, there is a ninety percent chance that her intimate partner is responsible. I can’t ignore those odds. Could you?”

Ellery bit her lip, her role in this conversation becoming suddenly clear. Reed knew very well that she always leaped when she should’ve looked. “What are you going to do about it?”

Reed stretched back in his seat, diffident now that he had to say the words out loud. “The case is inactive. The last detective assigned to it gave up about eight years ago, after decades with no new leads. He gave me a courtesy call to let me know the case was closing. It’s not like there would be some turf war over whose investigation it is. If I want it, it’s mine. The way I see it, I’ve got the first new suspect in more than forty years.”

“What about the old suspects?” she asked. “Did the cops have any at the time?”

“A few. Cops back in 1975 weren’t totally ignorant—they checked up on her current boyfriend, a guy named David Owens. But I’m not sure how hard they looked at him because it turns out that Owens was himself a cop.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. I guess it was a meet-cute story for the time. He stopped in every night after his shift at the restaurant where Camilla was working and they got to talking. I gather from the notes that their relationship was getting serious at the time she was murdered. His statement says he’d been looking to buy her a ring. Near as I can tell, the cops did a cursory check into his relationship with Camilla and everyone said they got along fine. But what sealed the deal was that Owens was working a beat across town on the afternoon Camilla was killed. Absent both motive and opportunity, David Owens dropped off the suspect list pretty quickly.”

“I guess I can understand that, but you do have to wonder how carefully they checked his whereabouts.”

“The cops liked this guy,” Reed said, pulling out a new photo, this one a black-and-white mugshot. It depicted a white male in his twenties with receding hair and narrowed eyes. “His name is Billy Thorndike, and he sold drugs out of the basement of the house next door to where Camilla lived. She dropped a dime on him to the cops and they showed up to bust him. Needless to say, Billy wasn’t happy about it.”

“Alibi?” Ellery asked as she studied Thorndike’s mugshot. There was a hard, angry demeanor about him despite his scruffy appearance, as though he’d stood in front of the cops’ cameras before and knew this wouldn’t be the last time, either.

“Yeah,” Reed replied laconically. “His mom.”

Ellery snorted. “We all know how much that’s worth,” she said, and Reed nodded.

“Less than the paper it’s printed on.”

“So then what’s your plan?” Ellery wanted to know.

Reed shrugged. “Go to Vegas. See if I can find Angie Rivera or Billy Thorndike, or any of the other witnesses. See what they might have known about my father, if anything.”

Ellery glanced at the horrible photos and imagined walking in on a friend slaughtered like that, lifeless with a knife in her chest. “You would think Angie would have known the truth, right? Her best friend. If she’d suspected your father at the time, then she might have said something to the cops.”

Reed thought for a moment and then punched a few keys on his laptop. A video of Angus Markham delivering a campaign speech began to play. Broad-shouldered and attired in a vibrant blue suit, he might have been a ringmaster or an actor seizing the stage. “You know,” he said, his voice at once friendly and booming from the podium, “sometimes a candidate for public office, if he has an admirable track record, might be tempted to rest on those laurels. He might say, ‘Look at my long list of good deeds and consider them when casting your vote.’ But, my friends, past good deeds are just that: in the past. They’re not enough. They do not help us now. Our people are always looking forward—this is a go-ahead country; we in Virginia want to lead the way. However good things are today, we want them better tomorrow, for ourselves and for our children.”

He paused for the roar of the crowd, and Ellery let out a shuddering breath. “He’s good,” she admitted as Reed stopped the video.

“You should see him in person,” he said. “He walks into a room and he doesn’t even have to say anything. It’s like the energy changes—like the charge in the air before a lightning storm. You’re drawn to him. You forget whatever you were talking about because you want to hear whatever he has to say.” He shook his head. “So yes, I can definitely see why a young woman might’ve gone to bed with him. I can also see why another young woman—if she thought he had done this to her best friend—might’ve wanted to keep her mouth shut.”

Ellery dragged one of the pictures toward her and she made herself look. At the end of this quest, no matter where it led, was a person capable of butchering another human being. “So, when do we leave?” she asked, and Reed’s eyebrows lifted.

“We?” he echoed.

“Of course we. That’s why you’re here, right? That’s why you told me all of this. I’m the only person you know who’s crazy enough to go chasing after a killer whose trail is forty years cold by now.”

“I wanted a sounding board, and I couldn’t tell my family—not yet, anyway. You’re smart and you’re a cop. I figured if I was a making mistake, you’d let me know.”

For the first time since he’d brought out the pictures, Ellery smiled. “Bullshit,” she said. “You told me ’cause you knew I’d say go for it.”

An answering smile played at Reed’s lips. “I didn’t expect you to volunteer to go with me. I’m touched, by the way.”

She gave an exaggerated shrug. “What else have I got to do? You’ve got a badge behind you, but I don’t. Seems like each one has its own advantages.”

“Meaning?”

“You have to play by the rules. I don’t.”

Some of the color drained from Reed’s face, like maybe he was remembering what had happened the last time she hadn’t played by the rules. Either way, she always got results. He knew that, too. She collected the last of their dishes and took them to the sink.

“I have a flight booked for Monday,” he admitted finally.

Amused, she turned around to look at him. “Oh, I see—and you still want to stick with that story about how I was going to talk you out of it?”

Reed ambled over to the sink and leaned against the counter next to her, six feet of warm, sleek male. He was an amazing leaner—casual but authoritative. She envied the comfortable way he occupied space in the world. “I could’ve canceled the ticket,” he told her.

“You could still cancel tomorrow’s,” she replied. He had a nine A.M. flight home to Virginia.

She felt him stiffen, felt his intake of breath. Her bold invitation vibrated the air between them. Ellery had taken men to bed before, but never her bed, never in her private space, and never for pleasure. After all the years, Reed was still the only man who had seen her all the way naked, back when she was fourteen and there wasn’t much to see except a skinny girl covered in cuts and bruises. Her body seemed to remember him, enough that she’d broken her own rules a couple of times and let him touch her. As a result, she’d awoken in the dark with the memory of his hot mouth on her bare shoulder, throbbing in places she usually tried not to think about.

“Ah, I…” He backed away infinitesimally, just enough for her to get her answer.

“Forget it. Forget I said anything.” She pushed off from the sink and fled to the shadows in the living room. Reed trailed after her, but she kept her back to him, searching around in the shadows for his overnight bag. Ever helpful, Speed Bump snuffled around with her. “Do you need a ride to the hotel?” she asked, her voice echoing to the high ceiling. “Or I could call you a ride if that’s easier.”

“Ellery…”

“Oh, here it is,” she said, her hands closing around the plastic handle. “You should be all set now. What flight are you taking to Las Vegas? Let me know so I can book one for about the same time.”

“I’ll book you one myself,” he said, his voice gentle.

Her chin rose up. “I can pay my own way.”

“I know, but I insist.” He was standing close to her again, near enough that she could smell his aftershave. “You’re the one doing me the favor this time.”

She kept her eyes trained on the floor. “I haven’t done anything yet.”

“Yes, you have.” He touched her chin, urging her upward until she had to look at him again. The intensity in his dark gaze made her catch her breath, but she didn’t move away. They watched each other as he brushed his fingertips over the curve of her cheek like a blind man reading Braille. “I want to stay,” he murmured, his voice thick. “So much. But you don’t know how crazy I’ve felt these past few weeks, ever since I found out the truth about my paternity. Like I’m going out of my skin.”

A shiver went over her at the word “skin.” She never let anyone touch her like this, but with Reed she couldn’t seem to stop. “Reed, I—”

His fingers landed on her lips, shushing her. “There’s a chance I’m making a terrible decision with all of this. I—I don’t want to make more than one of them. Not now. Not with you.”

Shame washed over her, hot and quick, and she pulled back. She was always someone else’s mistake. “It’s okay. I get it. Let’s just forget the whole thing.”

Reed shook his head slowly. “No,” he replied. “You’re distinctly unforgettable.”

She hugged her arms around her middle and regarded him in the low light. Speed Bump leaned against her legs. “Why did you really come up here to see me?”

He took a long time with his answer. “Because,” he said finally. “I always know who I am when I’m with you.”