Victoria and I ordered a couple of lattes at a café in the city, and then we strolled along a wooden walking path next to the pier. We sipped our drinks and soaked up the tropical sun. I thought about how far away I felt from home and how different things were here than the hustle and bustle in the States. In Cairns life seemed to almost come to a standstill at times. The air seemed different because it was. A place like this gave one time to think—really think. To put things into perspective. I thought about the last time I’d been here, and of Marissa, and how she had probably walked the same path I was walking now on the night she had been murdered.
How fleeting life was, and how fragile. One day we’re alive and free, the next we’re turned to dust, evaporating into an afterlife I wasn’t even sure existed. Some days I felt larger than life, like I meant something and like I mattered. Today I felt small and insignificant, like I could exit life’s door tomorrow, and in a hundred years, there would be little left of me to remind anyone of my existence. Thinking about it now, I vowed to make my mark in some small way. I wanted to be better—to make a difference—not just for myself, but for all those around me.
I glanced at Victoria who was eyeing me curiously, like she could tell my mind had drifted and she was wondering how far.
“I was surprised James asked you to come here,” Victoria said.
“Why?” I asked.
“I don’t know. He doesn’t let many people in—not when it comes to his personal life, and the murder of his sister ... well, I can’t think of anything more personal than that.”
“It doesn’t feel like he’s letting me in. It feels like I’m just one more card in the deck he’s been dealt recently, and after some thought, he’s decided to play multiple hands to see which one gives him the best results in the fastest time frame.”
“You think so?”
“I do. He wants to know what happened, and he wants to know now. The police are doing everything they can, I’m sure, but he’s impatient. He wants another perspective. That’s where I come in. How’s it been since everything happened?”
“It has been a trying couple of weeks for all of us. He’s not the only one pushing for answers. Everyone is. It’s a tremendous amount of pressure.”
“I’m sure he feels like he’s in a fishbowl right now,” I said. “Cairns may be a city, but it’s also a small, close-knit community. There was a table of women in the coffee shop discussing the details of the murder while we waited for our lattes, and when we walked outside, a man was showing his wife the front page of the local paper. Have you seen it?”
She nodded. “I haven’t read the latest article, but I’ve seen the photos they posted of Caroline and Hugh. You don’t miss a lot, do you?”
“I wouldn’t be any good at my job if I did. Everywhere I look, people are talking about what happened. They’re all speculating and drawing their own conclusions. It’s almost like what happened to Caroline has also happened to them. Whether they knew her or didn’t, it’s still personal to them.”
“That’s an interesting way of looking at it.”
It was also an accurate one, and it made Cairns special, different than most other places where I’d been involved in an investigation.
“You called the senator by his first name a few times today,” I said. “Aside from your forensic work on the case, are you two friends?”
She bit her upper lip.
They were connected somehow.
She stared at her latte. “I feel like I need a much stronger drink if I’m going to talk about it.”
“Is it that bad?” I asked.
“It’s not bad. Not really. I ... uhh ... we dated for a while. Well, not a long while. A couple of months a few years ago.”
“What ...”
Happened.
I left the word I didn’t say alone. What happened wasn’t my business. If she wanted to tell me, she could. And though I was curious, I wasn’t going to pry. Not with her love life, anyway.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I don’t mind talking to you about it. We met at a holiday fund-raiser for the city after he became senator. He was single, and I was going through a divorce at the time, and I wasn’t in the right place in my life to start a new relationship. He was, and after dating for a short time, he wanted a commitment. I wasn’t ready. I couldn’t give him what he wanted, so I broke things off, even though I can admit now that I really didn’t want to.”
Years had passed, but from the look on her face, the pain of her decision to end the relationship was still fresh in her mind, even now.
“Must have been hard,” I said. “I’ve been there before.”
“I still wonder if I should have done things differently. We weren’t together long, but the bond we shared together was unlike anything I’ve experienced before or since.”
“Have you ever thought about talking to him or trying to get back what you once had?”
“I almost called him a few times, but I didn’t.”
“What stopped you?” I asked.
“I have no interest being in the public eye the way he is in his career right now. If he were no longer senator, maybe it would be different.” She paused, then abruptly switched subjects. “Hey, you want to sit down for a few minutes?”
I nodded, and we crossed into a park-like picnic area along the esplanade. I spotted a vacant table nestled under a ficus tree, and we sat down.
“What can you tell me about Caroline’s death?”
“She was knifed in the chest.”
“How many times?”
“Once.”
“She died from a single stab wound?” I asked.
“She did. The knife punctured her abdominal aorta, which means she would have died shortly thereafter. Looking at how specific Caroline’s injury was, I would assume the killer knew where the knife needed to enter her body in order to be fatal. The puncture wound was clean. With Hugh, it was different.”
“Was the knife recovered from the crime scene?”
“It was found outside, in Caroline’s back garden. The length and width of the blade are consistent with the wounds found on Caroline, but there were no prints on the knife’s handle. Not even a smudge.”
“So, someone took the time to wipe their prints off the blade but was careless enough to leave it behind?”
Victoria lifted a finger. “I’ll get to my theory on that in a minute. Another interesting thing of note is that Caroline had no defensive wounds, but Hugh had a slice on his neck that wasn’t deep, like he had been trying to fight his attacker off before he tumbled down the stairs to his death.”
“How many cuts did he have?”
“Only one, and like I said, it wasn’t deep. It was more like a scrape than a stab wound. Hugh is a lot bigger than Caroline, and if he did have the chance to fight for his life, the killer would have had a harder time doing what he’d come to do.”
“Hugh died from falling down the stairs, right?”
She nodded. “His neck was broken. From what Grace told us, we know Hugh was still alive when she discovered her mum. And yet, at some point after Grace climbed out of the bathroom window, Hugh was also murdered.”
“I suppose it’s possible the killer was in the house the entire time, hiding out somewhere,” I said.
If true, the question was—why?
And had the killer intended to kill Grace as well?
“This leads to my theory about why the knife was left behind,” she said. “I believe the police arrived shortly after Hugh was killed. The killer was still in the house, and he panicked. He escaped, wiping the handle of the knife off as he ran out the back door. He dropped the knife, which I believe was an accident. At some point, he would have realized his mistake, but with cops swarming the place, it was too late to go back for it.”
There was a glaring, obvious question we hadn’t addressed yet. Why had Grace’s life been spared? Maybe the killer had intended on killing all them all, but when Grace escaped through the bathroom window, he lost the opportunity.
“What do you know about Caroline and Hugh’s whereabouts on the night they died?” I asked.
“We know Caroline took Grace to a movie around seven. It got over at half past nine, which put them home around ten. Adelaide Wiggins, one of Caroline’s neighbors, corroborated this.”
“Was Adelaide’s house where Grace ran to after climbing out the bathroom window?”
Victoria nodded. “Adelaide was in the kitchen, ending a call with her daughter, when Caroline and Grace returned home from the movie. She checked the time of the call and said they would have arrived home a few minutes before ten. She said she watched Caroline and Grace get out of the car and go into the house. She saw no one else, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary.”
“What do you know about what followed?”
“Grace told the police she had fallen asleep in the car on the way back from the movie, and she went to bed as soon as they got home. Not long after, she woke to the sound of her mother screaming.”
“What time did Grace call the senator?”
“Half past eleven.”
“So both murders took place within an hour or so of Caroline arriving home.”
“Right, and it fits with the overall condition of the bodies when I found them. Both were showing early signs of lividity, particularly Caroline, but there were no signs of rigor mortis yet.”
“When did Hugh arrive at the house?”
“He was on a flight back home from Sydney when Caroline and Grace would have returned after the movie. The plane arrived in Cairns a few minutes after ten. He had no checked bags, and there’s video surveillance showing him getting into his car at a quarter past ten. Police believe he went straight from the airport to Caroline’s house. Hugh had a key, so it’s likely he let himself in. What we don’t know is whether Caroline was alive when he arrived—if she’d been attacked yet or if she was already dead.”
This led to another possibility. If Hugh had arrived and Caroline was dying or dead, and the killer was still there, perhaps Caroline had been the only intended victim, and Hugh had suffered the same fate because the killer was still in the house when he arrived and hadn’t made his escape yet.
Or maybe Hugh had killed Caroline and was so distraught at what he’d done that he threw himself down the stairs.
“Grace is sure she didn’t see or hear anyone else in the house?” I asked.
“She swears the only person she saw was Hugh.”
“She heard her mom scream. How long was it before she went to check on her and discovered she was dead?”
“That part we’re a bit unsure about. At first, Grace didn’t know whether she was dreaming or if what she’d heard was real. When she realized something might have been wrong, initially she was scared. She didn’t go to her mum’s room right away, and we aren’t sure how many minutes passed before she was brave enough to walk down the hall and check things out.”
“Where are the police in the way of suspects?”
“Not far. As far as they can tell from those they’ve interviewed, everyone loved Caroline. They’re struggling to even find a motive for her death. Hugh, on the other hand, didn’t have the best reputation around him. Some people liked him, others didn’t. He was known to have an aggressive side in his younger years.”
“Aggressive how?” I asked.
“I went to school with Hugh. He was the kindest person one minute, and the next, he’d explode over something insignificant.”
Sounded perfectly bipolar to me.
“He dated one of my friends back then,” she said. “At one point, he even proposed, and for about a month, they were engaged.”
“What happened?”
“She didn’t say much about the breakup. She just said he was controlling and called all the shots in the relationship. That was twenty years ago, though. People change.”
Sometimes. Other times they don’t.
“Do you have any idea how he treated Caroline?” I asked.
“I saw them out in the city a few times when they first got together. From what I could tell when I saw them, they seemed to have a good thing going.”
“Have you heard of any incidents involving Hugh since high school?”
“Only one. Last year, police were called to a brewery downtown. Caroline had walked up to the bar to get a round of drinks, and a guy put his hand on Caroline’s shoulder. Assuming the guy was hitting on her, Hugh came over and threw a punch at the guy without even saying a word. Both men were tossed out of the bar, and when the police arrived, Hugh was arrested, but the guy he punched dropped the charges. I guess he was also a therapist. Hugh apologized, and the guy let it go.”
In the time we’d been sitting together, Victoria had continually rubbed her hands together, one over the other, like a nervous tic. She’d told me far more than I had expected, but I believed something big was missing from the overall narrative. What I couldn’t figure out was whether it was something she couldn’t tell me, didn’t want to tell me, or just couldn’t bring herself to say. I didn’t have her trust yet, and she didn’t have mine, but a level of comfort existed between us that had formed the first time we’d met. I decided it was best not to try and get it out of her just yet, figuring I had a better chance of her revealing whatever it was in her own time.
“I appreciate you sharing information with me,” I said. “You didn’t have to, and it really helps me out that you did. It gives me a good place to start.”
“James must think a lot of you. He wouldn’t have asked you to come all this way otherwise.”
I wasn’t sure what he thought of me, but he’d seen how committed I was at working my cases all the way through.
“Speaking of him, I should probably get moving. Is there anything else I should know before we go?”
We sat in silence for a time while she pondered the question. Ordinarily, I found silence between two people for any length of time to be awkward, but as awkward as it was, I thought waiting it out might be just what she needed to say what hadn’t been said. Sadly, I was disappointed.
“I think that’s all for now,” she said. “If there’s anything else, I have your number.”
We returned to the car and drove out of the parking garage. One minute, we were engaging in small talk as she wound around the streets of the city, and the next, I was drifting in and out of consciousness. The car came to a stop, and when my eyes opened, I glanced around, realizing she hadn’t taken me to James’ office. She’d driven me to my hotel.
“I thought you were taking me to meet James,” I said.
“I was, but you’re exhausted, Sloane. You might want to get some rest first and see James later. I can let him know I talked to you and dropped you at the hotel, if you like.”
I shook my head. At this point, it was better coming from me. “That’s okay. I’ll go check in, splash some water on my face, and see if he still wants to see me today. Maybe we can talk over the phone and visit in person tomorrow.”
I grabbed my bag and stepped out of the car. As I turned to walk toward the hotel, Victoria’s passenger-side window came down. She leaned over and said, “Hey, Sloane, there’s umm ... one more thing, something that’s been bugging me that you should probably know.”
I assumed I was about to find out what she hadn’t told me earlier. “What is it?”
“It’s Caroline’s autopsy. She wasn’t just stabbed.”
“What do you mean?”
“There was a considerable amount of bruising on her back and chest, and a bruise on one of her shoulders in the shape of a thumbprint.”
“Do you think they were related to the night of the murder?”
“I don’t. They weren’t fresh, meaning they weren’t inflicted the night she was killed. I believe Caroline was in some kind of physical altercation recently.”
I assumed the senator knew of the bruising, but he hadn’t mentioned it over the phone. “Any idea how old the bruises are?”
“Fresh bruises tend to be reddish-blue or purple in color. The bruises on Caroline were brownish-green. Bruises can be tricky things to put a timeline on, but based on the discoloration of her skin, I’d guess they were at least a week old. I don’t know if what happened prior to her death has anything to do with why she was murdered, but something happened to Caroline before the night she died, and no one seems to know anything about it.”