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“Scotland Yard finally granted our warrant request for Gresham Schmidt’s financials and phone records.” The lieutenant shoved through the double glass doors leading out into the parking lot. Colburn Park spread out across the street. The crime scene tape was still in place with a few officers peppered as security. “We got a hit.”
Standard protocol. Nothing he’d said raised her suspicions. Leigh tried to keep up with him as they descended the stairs and rounded into the parking lot. There was no stopping him in this state, and her instincts said this was just a fraction of the intensity he tried to keep to himself on the job. “Where are we going?”
He nearly ripped the driver’s side door straight off his patrol car. Boucher set one hand over the top of the vehicle. “The Fireside Inn.”
TWENTY-ONE
Lebanon, New Hampshire
Monday, March 15
11:30 a.m.
“I want every inch of this room processed in the next hour, Reed.” Director Livingstone’s heels had started wearing through old brown carpeting with each pass across the compact hotel suite. Quiet waves of anger followed her every step. “Find me something that tells us who’s targeting these victims.”
“This doesn’t make sense. Schmidt’s luggage, passport, Scotland Yard credentials—it’s all still sitting here.” Leigh flipped through Gresham Schmidt’s British passport left on the beaten dresser with nothing but an empty gum wrapper in the top drawer. None of the toiletry seals had been broken in the bathroom. Not even a drop of water sticking to the bottom of the shower surround. A king-size bed that looked as though it’d never been slept in took up the most space, blocking the team from moving freely. A griminess she couldn’t see but felt with every cell in her body closed in. The blackout drapes had been closed and held on to odors of a cleaning agent. Recent from the potency. The desk, too. The Fireside Inn was known for its cozy woodwork, cabin feel with dark paint on feature walls and fireplaces in every room, but Leigh had never felt so cold as she did right then. “It’s like he walked out of this room and left his entire life behind. Why?”
“Place has been cleaned. I’m not finding any prints, and if I stay too close to these curtains, I’m going to pass out from the fumes.” Chandler Reed let that statement gain tension between the four of them. He didn’t have to fill in what the rest of them were thinking. This resembled Michelle Cross’s home. A professional. Someone who knew exactly where forensic evidence might hide and how to get rid of it. “Either the maid service employs a crime scene clean-up crew, or someone went out of their way to destroy any forensic trace Gresham Schmidt was here.”
Leigh wasn’t sure any of them wanted to acknowledge what Chandler meant.
“Then why leave his belongings?” Two possibilities took hold. Either Gresham Schmidt had left them behind or someone else had, but Leigh couldn’t jump to any conclusions until they figured out what the hell was going on here. “Schmidt has never investigated a case in the US. He doesn’t have any real connection to this town or the people in it. What was he doing here?”
Leigh pressed her thumb into the most recent page stamped in the passport. There was a photo there, wedged in the crease. Old. Bent at one corner, fraying along the opposite side. It’d lived in the leather wallet for some time, but it was a familiar face staring down at and hugging the boy—around nine or ten—in the photo that pooled dread at the base of her spine. A boy she recognized better than she recognized herself in the mirror. “I think we can safely assume Schmidt was, in fact, investigating my brother’s case.”
She handed off the passport to the director.
Livingstone’s expression didn’t even tic. Guarded as though she lived her life expecting the people around her lied on a daily basis and nothing could knock her off-balance. “The stamp confirms Gresham Schmidt arrived in the States five days before his body was left for us to find in the orchard.” She flipped the photo over. “Joel and Troy, 2003.”
The energy in the room quieted. Boucher’s shoulders deflated while the rest of them tried to hold it together. “Shit. How did Schmidt get ahold of one of your family photos?”
“I don’t know.” Pieces of the massive puzzle they’d all taken on shifted a bit closer to fitting. Gresham Schmidt’s legacy wasn’t just in his impeccable record or case closure for Scotland Yard. Not even the miraculous serial case he’d somehow closed after a year of dead ends. He’d started investigating Troy’s death—without resources, without cause, without personal benefit. He’d taken on Leigh’s murder investigation as his own and was one of three who’d paid the price in the end. “All we can confirm is both Gresham Schmidt and Michelle Cross were looking into a twenty-year-old murder case. And it stands to reason Dr. Jennings found something integral to the investigation to make her a target.”
Boucher scrubbed a hand through his hair, the circles under his eyes much darker than this morning. “This shit just keeps getting weirder and weirder.”
Leigh didn’t have an argument.
“How would Schmidt have even learned about the Brody case?” Chandler Reed’s attention slipped to her, and she couldn’t help but feel the weight of the entire room on her chest. “Local homicides are rarely—if ever—newsworthy on an international level.”
“That’s for me to find out.” Livingstone handed back the passport. “I understand what we’ve learned about Gresham Schmidt is bright and shiny and looks like a promising lead, but the goal hasn’t changed. We have three victims. Our focus has to remain on them. Agen’ Brody, I want you in Concord. Given your history with police there, you’ll take the lead in following up with Dr. Jennings’s coworkers in the medical examiner’s office. I want statements from her neighbors and to make sure her apartment is processed according to protocol. I’ll let the captain know you’re on your way. Boucher, you’ll go with her. There’s a good chance Schmidt reached out to someone in the ME’s office if he was working the original investigation. Find out what Gresham Schmidt was doing in between the days he landed stateside and was killed and get back to me. Reed, I trust you can do your job without my standing over your shoulder. Seems I have a few calls to make.”
The director carved one last path through the ugly carpet on her way out.
Leigh couldn’t help but connect the dots her gut didn’t want to consider. That whoever’d tried to get her to leave the past in the past had first tried to make his point clear through another investigator getting too close. She skimmed her thumb across the photo tucked into Schmidt’s passport. It was too late to verify where it’d come from now. Everything, including her family photo albums, had most likely been destroyed in the fire, but given the damage done to the house before her return, it wasn’t hard to imagine someone getting their hands on the photograph without her knowledge. “Someone must’ve brought my brother’s case to Gresham Schmidt’s attention. Maybe they thought he was the best option for solving cold cases given his case history, but that doesn’t explain why they believed police didn’t have the right suspect.”
“What about Michelle Cross?” Chandler asked. “We already know she had another suspect in mind. Only she didn’t possess the access, the knowledge, or the clout a former detective would have to get the information she needed for her book.”
“It’s possible.” She didn’t have evidence. She had nothing more than instinct and experience, and the pressure to prove it gripped her by the throat.
“As much as I want to jump on board with your little theory, Brody, we can’t ask a dead woman if she consulted a burned-out detective on a twenty-year-old case. We have to look at the evidence and victims we have now without our personal biases. You should know that better than any one of us seeing as how you couldn’t convince anyone your daddy was innocent all those years ago,” Boucher said. “If Dr. Jennings found a lead during the Cross autopsy that made her a target, Livingstone would’ve been the one she called. Unless the dear old director isn’t telling us everything.”
He was right. They had to focus on the here and now. What they had in front of them. Not wishful thinking. She was letting her personal feelings impact the investigation, but the idea Livingstone was keeping information from the team didn’t feel right. None of this did. The weight of Chandler’s gaze struck her as sharp as an invisible needle in her chest. This entire case had spun out of her control in a matter of days to the point she wasn’t sure which way was up.
And it all tied back to her brother’s and Derek Garrison’s murders two decades ago.
There had to be a reason for that, but that reason refused to slow down enough to let her catch on. “Okay. Then, as of right now, we assume Gresham Schmidt was looking into the case from twenty years ago. That’s the connection between the first two victims. We need to put out an all-points-bulletin and present Schmidt’s photo to public. Someone has to have seen him over the past few days. Until then, there’s something I need to do back at the station before we leave for Concord.”
“Now, how did I know you were going to say that?” Boucher collected his keys. “I’ll drive. You look like you’re about to pass out.”
