The drive from Kirkwood to Chesterfield took half an hour with traffic, and with each passing moment, the knot in my stomach grew tighter. The file in Julia’s office had brought back a lot of memories I wished I could forget, and almost all of them had taken place in Christopher’s home. I was glad I had shot him. I should have felt bad, but I didn’t. He deserved everything that happened to him.
As I turned onto his street, my entire body trembled, and my throat grew so tight I had to pull off to the side of the road and force myself to breathe. For a split second, I was fifteen years old again. I lived in his house. I could feel his breath on my cheek, and I could taste the tropical drink he had drugged me with before raping me. A shudder passed through me, and I gripped my steering wheel as hard as I could so my hands wouldn’t tremble.
“He’s dead.”
In my mind, I knew it was true. I could close my eyes and see his body on the ground in the woods near my house, I could smell the stink of his fresh blood intermingled with the earthy odor of clean soil, and I could hear his dying breath as the life left him. Even knowing that, seeing his street made every awful memory I had of him fresh.
“You killed him, Joe,” I told myself. “He can’t hurt you anymore.”
As I stayed there, my heart slowed, and my breath came easier. I was okay. I could do this. I put my foot on the gas and crept forward until I reached the circular driveway in front of his gaudy mansion. Everything looked just as it had when I lived there, save one detail: There was a white paneled van from a carpet cleaning service out front.
I parked behind the cleaners and walked to the open front door on wobbly legs. The van hummed with some kind of machinery, and a pair of hoses snaked out and into the house. Even though the house’s front door was open, I rang the bell.
“Diana Hughes?” I called. Nobody answered, so I walked inside. Diana had changed the dining room furniture, and she had added a table in the front entryway, but it looked just as I remembered it. I walked through the front hallway to the kitchen, calling out again. As before, nobody answered, so I walked back to the entryway and then followed the carpet cleaners’ hoses to the master bedroom.
There, I found two men in coveralls. One held a normal vacuum, while the other had a commercial steam wand that left steaming patches on the carpet.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I called out, walking toward the man with the steam wand. He was running it over red stains on the carpet. Though I was far from an expert, I had seen a lot of blood spatter over the years, and this was arterial spray. The man with the steam wand pulled a handle on his device to turn it off. Then he raised his eyebrows at me. The man with the vacuum stopped what he was doing.
“Can we help you?” asked the steamer.
“Did Diana hire you for this job?”
“Mrs. Hughes did, yeah,” said the steamer. “Can I help you?”
If she called in the cleaning crew, this wasn’t her blood. It wasn’t Christopher’s or Warren Nichols’s blood, either, because they had died elsewhere. If I had to guess, that spot on the carpet belonged to James Holmes.
“What did she tell you that you were cleaning?” I asked.
“Cranberry juice,” he said. “She tried to bleach it, but she couldn’t get the stain out. It’s well set now, so we’re having a hard time lifting it ourselves.”
I looked around the room for anything else out of place. The dresser and chest of drawers looked closed and blood free, the laundry hamper was closed, and there were no coffee cups or paperbacks on the end table beside the bed. It could have been a room from a magazine shoot, save one thing: Someone had taken all the pillows off the bed. I pulled back the floral-print cover to reveal a mattress with a massive blood stain in the center.
The two carpet cleaners froze. One cocked his head to the other and shrugged, confused.
“Everybody out,” I said. “Leave your equipment, but go back to your truck. You weren’t cleaning up cranberry juice. That’s blood. That’s why you were having a hard time removing the stain. This house is a crime scene.”
Their dumbfounded stares continued, but I got them out of the room and back to their van, where I took their keys so they couldn’t leave with evidence inside their vacuum cleaner. That done, I called Julia.
“Joe, I’m busy. I’ll call you back.”
“Diana Hughes killed James Holmes in her bedroom. His blood’s all over the place.”
She paused. “Say what?”
“I’m at Diana Hughes’s house. When I arrived, I found two men cleaning the carpet in her bedroom. Diana Hughes hired them to remove what she described as stains from cranberry juice. It’s blood spatter. There’s more on the bed. She broke her husband out of prison, killed him, and now she’s moved on to his business partners.”
She paused again. “I asked you not to go to Diana Hughes’s house.”
“I know. You can arrest me for interfering with a police investigation, but get down here.”
“I’ll call this in and be there as soon as I can.”
“See you—”
She hung up before I could finish. I followed the carpet cleaners’ hoses outside and found them smoking cigarettes inside their van. Both men looked pale, and they moved with the deliberate gestures of actors playing roles they didn’t fathom. I doubted either was involved in a murder, but the police would still have to clear them. Hopefully neither had too many skeletons in his closet.
I had nowhere to sit, so I stayed outside and paced up and down the driveway. Every part of my body buzzed with anticipation. We did it. Diana was our shot caller. We didn’t have enough evidence to convict her yet, but I was sure we’d find it inside her house. Then, once we had Diana, we’d find her accomplices. She couldn’t have done this on her own.
I had just solved the biggest case of my life. It wasn’t through genius or special insight. It was hard work. I might even get a letter of commendation out of this.
Within five minutes of my call, I heard the first sirens. A pair of marked police cruisers screeched to a halt behind the carpet cleaners’ van, and a uniformed officer jumped out of each. I didn’t know what Julia had told the dispatcher, but one officer went to the carpet cleaners, while the second put a hand on my elbow and led me toward his cruiser.
“Ms. Court, I’ve been instructed to take you into custody for interfering with a police investigation.”
I scoffed and rolled my eyes but didn’t move. Of course she’d do this.
“What did Captain Green tell you?”
“I’m just following orders, miss,” he said.
“Did she tell you I’m a detective with the St. Augustine County Sheriff’s Department?”
He stopped and looked at me up and down. “Do you have a badge?”
I closed my eyes. “It’s a long story. Did she tell you I’m her daughter?”
He hesitated. “Family life is your own. If you’re a detective, your CO will talk to my CO and get this sorted out. In the meantime, I need you to have a seat in the car.”
We walked to the car, and he opened the rear door for me.
“There’s a gun in my purse.”
“Do you have a concealed carry permit?”
I cocked my head to the side. “I have a badge in my boss’s desk in St. Augustine.”
“So you don’t have a permit with you.”
I closed my eyes and shook my head. “No, I don’t.”
He made me sit in the car while he searched my purse. Upon my request, he handed me my phone, which I used to text Julia to let her know the first officers on the scene had placed me under arrest for interfering with a police investigation.
You asked for it. I’ll see you soon.
I wanted to text her something mean in response, but that would have just made her drive slower. Within moments, more officers came to the scene, including two plain-clothes detectives. About half an hour after I arrived, Julia pulled to a stop in the driveway. She saw me in the back of the cruiser but only came to talk after first speaking with one of the plain-clothes detectives.
“Am I under arrest?” I asked.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Travis called the police in Chesterfield to let them know who you are. I would have let you rot in jail.”
I swung my legs out of the cruiser. “Thanks. I appreciate that.”
“You’re a civilian. You quit.”
“Then I’m a civilian who found something you missed. Is that what you’re mad about?”
She crossed her arms and raised her eyebrow. “Don’t go there, sweetheart. I’m angry because we may not have a complete chain of custody on any blood evidence you’ve found inside the house. You know how defense attorneys work. They will look for any weakness in our case, and you’ve introduced a weakness. Did you even have cause to enter the house?”
“Someone is killing people connected to Christopher Hughes. Diana Hughes has a connection to Christopher Hughes,” I said, drawing the inferences. “The front door was open. There were men inside the house. Fearing for Mrs. Hughes’s safety, I entered the premises and conducted a safety sweep. Upon arrival in the master bedroom, I found potential blood evidence in plain sight. It’s admissible in court.”
“That might be true if you were a police officer. Instead, you’re a woman trespassing. Your word won’t carry a lot of weight in court. You should have stayed outside and waited.”
“Two things. If I hadn’t come here when I did, the carpet cleaners would have destroyed the evidence. You wouldn’t have even seen it. Second, I still have a badge. Your concerns are irrelevant,” I said, folding my arms and looking toward the house and then to my adoptive mother. Her eyes were wide open, and her gaze was hard. “While I was solving your murder, what have you been doing?”
She stared at me for another moment with those angry eyes of hers and then looked away.
“I was trying to track down Randy Shepard. He lives and works in Illinois, but we’ve had our eyes on him for a while. He’s a pimp with a sizable business that specializes in young women. We think he also owns some strip clubs, but we can’t tie him to them. I suspect he hired some of your foster sisters once they aged out from the program.”
“And Randy worked with Christopher Hughes?”
“We never knew how, but yeah.”
Even hearing that made me feel ill. It also made things click in my mind in a way they never had before.
“That was why Christopher wanted us around,” I said. “If he were just after sex, he could have bought it from prostitutes. He brought us in because he was recruiting for his buddy.”
“That’s one theory we worked on,” said Julia. “Christopher was part of the pipeline. He used his position as a foster father to find vulnerable young women, whom he then pushed on his pimp friend for a cut of the profits.”
I closed my eyes. “I’m glad he’s dead.”
“Don’t say that aloud,” she said. “People are still investigating your shooting.”
I nodded and looked around the scene. There were half a dozen police cars in the driveway, and already uniformed officers were knocking on the doors of houses nearby.
“When I lived here, Diana and Christopher had sensors on every window and door. Nobody could walk into this house unnoticed. That means Diana let the victim inside and took him to the bedroom. The victim trusted her, and she killed him.”
“You seem sure Diana is the killer.”
I nodded, more to myself than to her, as my thoughts coalesced.
“Christopher was a monster, but he couldn’t think his way out of a paper bag. The moron showed up at my house in the middle of the night and acted surprised when I pointed a shotgun at him. He didn’t build his business on his own. He had help.”
Julia crossed her arms. “What are you thinking?”
“Diana was the shot caller—and not just today, but twelve years ago, too. I’ve read your files. Twelve years ago when Megan went missing, your entire case against Christopher rested on my allegation that he had raped me and that he had raped Megan. You didn’t even have enough for an indictment, but then Diana gave you everything you needed. She saw an opportunity to stop your investigation, and she took it. She set her husband up and put him away for life before you could dig into her. Now, she’s killing off her husband’s business partners.”
Julia said nothing for a moment. Then she nodded. When she spoke again, her voice was low and almost sounded defeated.
“Why do you think she’d do that?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe she thought they would turn on her. Maybe they had evidence against her. Maybe she was tired of sharing the profits. The why doesn’t matter. She worked with Sherlock to get Christopher out of prison, and then she killed them both.”
Julia swore under her breath and looked down. “It’s plausible.”
“You going to pick her up?”
Julia raised her eyebrows and looked up. “We need to find her first, but yeah. In the meantime, I need you to write an after-action report of what you did today. Go home. Even if you are a detective, this isn’t your case anymore.”
My mind was already ahead of her, so I nodded.
“Yeah. I’ll head out.”
I started to walk toward my truck, but Julia stepped in front of me. She crossed her arms.
“I know you.”
“I know you, too, Julia,” I said, feigning a smile.
“That’s not what I mean, and you know it,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re planning something. I can see your brain working.”
“My brain is always working. It keeps me alive.”
“No, no, no,” said Julia, shaking her head. “You can’t joke your way out of this. You know where Diana is.”
I blinked a few times and started to say something, but Julia held up a finger and stopped me.
“Reconsider whatever story you planned to tell me,” she said. “I’ve known you for a long time. Please don’t lie.”
I considered what to say.
“It’s a long shot,” I said.
“Okay,” said Julia. “Go on.”
“Diana used to own a health food store in Ladue. Christopher mentioned it once.”
Julia blinked and shook her head. “We looked into Diana’s finances. She didn’t own anything. It was all in her husband’s name.”
I raised my eyebrows. “I’d say you missed a few things.”
Julia exhaled a slow breath. Then she looked toward the uniformed officers on the scene before turning to me.
“You’re right. Get your firearm. We’re going for a drive.”