CHIEF TREVOR MORRIS entered the small house with his hat in his hand, the way he had done many times in his career, bringing news of a loved one’s death to frightened, wide-eyed relatives. But the elderly woman who walked ahead of him now had already heard that news many years ago. He imagined that night, the patrol officers who had come into the neat dining room and sat at the table with the Howeses, the way they’d tried to avoid looking into the eyes of the couple in case they should accidentally, somehow, worsen their experience. Death notifications were, in a strange way, ceremonial. There was a script. A right and a wrong way to hold one’s facial expression. Pops was sure that none of it helped.
Only Diane, Rachel’s mother, was here tonight. She’d told Pops on the phone that Rachel’s father couldn’t handle talking about their daughter’s murder by Regan Banks more than fifteen years earlier. He had gone out for the evening while Pops visited. Pops hadn’t been assigned the case at the time, but he’d seen pictures of what Regan had done to the pretty veterinarian in the clinic on that awful night. He put a notebook on the dining-room table and refused coffee. Diane Howes was a picture of her daughter at an age she would never reach. Elegant, slender, the strong hands and short nails of a woman accustomed to wrangling animals. Pops spied a pair of enormous Great Dane hounds staring at him through the windows to the patio, taking quiet but intense interest in his presence.
“I know you’ve already been interviewed by police as recently as a week ago about Regan,” Pops said gently, finally allowing his eyes to rest on Diane’s. “But I’ll just make sure by asking what I’m sure you’ve been asked—Regan has made no contact with you, has he? You’ve received no strange calls or visits?”
“No, nothing,” Diane Howes said. “Honestly, Regan Banks has been responsible for so much horror, I’m sure he doesn’t even remember Rachel or the effect he’s had on our lives. I saw her picture in the newspaper the other day. A single photograph as big as a stamp in a collection of others, distinguished only by being his first victim.”
She glanced at a folded newspaper at the end of the table. Pops wrung his hands in his lap.
“Regan was seventeen at the time.” Pops tried to take refuge in his notebook. “You got to see him in court.”
“He was a ratty-looking child.” Diane nodded. “Lean, lanky. Hollow-cheeked. He’d been out that night stalking around the neighborhood, trying to get into trouble. Rachel shouldn’t have been working so late, but they’d had a particularly difficult surgery that day. A young dog that had been hit by a car. She would often stay late with the very sick ones.”
“Was there ever any suggestion, as far as you’re aware, that Regan might have had company that night?” Pops felt the muscles beneath his eyes twitch as he braced for an answer he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear. “The reason I ask is that I’ve come into some information that might explain the connection between Regan and Samuel Jacob Blue.”
“The Georges River Killer,” Diane said. “Or so they say.”
“Yes.”
“It’s his sister who’s missing now, isn’t it?” Diane looked at the newspaper again. “They think Regan’s after her. Or that she might be after him.”
“That’s her,” Pops admitted.
“I don’t believe anyone but Regan was responsible for my daughter’s death,” Diane Howes said. “I looked into that boy’s face, and he stared right back at me, and I could almost see in his eyes what he had done to my child. As a mother, you can feel these things, and I felt a cold wave of emptiness coming off that boy that could cut you right to the bone.”
Pops nodded.
“In court they played a recording of a phone call,” Diane said. “It was made at the same time that Rachel was being attacked, some streets away. The anonymous caller contacted Crime Stoppers and posed as someone who was watching the break-in at the clinic happening, but of course that wasn’t possible from such a distance. So it was someone who had seen Regan go into the clinic, but someone who hadn’t hung around to see what occurred. Police theorized it was a young woman who’d perhaps driven by and stopped at the phone box and then continued on her way.”
“I see.” Pops nodded as he wrote.
“But when I heard the call, I thought that the voice wasn’t a woman, but a boy.” Diane squinted as she remembered. “The voice was high. Young. I thought he sounded uncertain. Almost guilty.”
“Guilty because he’d helped with the break-in?”
“Maybe,” Diane said. “But I’ve always felt it sounded more like he was dobbing in a friend. I don’t know how to describe it. He almost sounded disappointed.”
Pops pursed his lips. It made sense. Regan had told Harry that Sam had been responsible for his going to prison. An anonymous call to police during the attack on Rachel Howes would have made Regan a sitting duck.
“Did Regan ever say anything to you at all during the trial?” Pops asked.
“Oh, no.” Diane spread a hand on the lace tablecloth, stared at it, remembering. “He pleaded guilty. Didn’t offer an explanation or an apology for the sentencing part. Something that’s always confused me was that the prosecution wanted to bring in a report from Regan’s childhood to aid their argument during sentencing, but the judge wouldn’t allow it.”
“The prosecution?” Pops said.
“Yes.” Diane nodded. “Whatever it was, the report would have aided the case against Regan. It spoke of his inherent danger as an individual.”
“There are plenty of reports of him being violent during his childhood years in care,” Pops said.
“And we heard all of those.” Diane said. “But this one was something different. I believe it was about what happened to get Regan into care in the first place.”
Pops felt the hair on the back of his neck rise.
“Did the judge say why he wouldn’t allow the report?”
“No. I don’t think so.” Diane shrugged. “But I remember only a few things from those days, because I was so weighed down by my grief all the time. Walking through fog, you know.”
Pops folded closed his notebook, signaling that Diane could end their meeting then if she would like. He had imposed on her enough, and the heaviness of the grief she spoke of was plain in her face. He expected her to rise from her chair, but instead she spoke.
“I remember the psychologist saying something that ended up being struck from the record,” Diane said. “That always stayed with me. It confirmed an idea that I already had about Regan.”
“What was it?” Pops asked.
“He said Regan gave him the impression of someone who knew how to kill.” Diane lifted her eyes to his. “Because he’d done it more than once.”