Page 53 of You Know Why

“Is it worse?”

“Yes and no. This is all bad, sir. All bad.”

When they finally cut down Colonel Locke, the truth is revealed—he was alive when he was strung up. His eyes are bright red, the petechial hemorrhage of his sclera a telltale giveaway of suffocation. He is transported with the cord still wedged into the skin of his neck.

Mrs. Locke’s injuries are just as horrific. In addition to the ruby necklace, there are deep contusions on her face and arms, and she is missing two fingers.

The coroner shows up and decides almost immediately that, considering the magnitude of the case, the autopsies would best be handled by the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s office rather than his own.

“Why?” Theresa asks. “You are the best in the area.”

She’s not kidding. Reginald Booker is solid. The town’s sole doctor, he still makes house calls and treats his vocation as something sacred, a service to his community. He’s smart, and she trusts him to do this right.

“Because we are friends,” he says simply, and she nods. She wants him, not a stranger in Fulton County, but she’s not about to force him into it. She puts her good hand on his shoulder in sympathy.

“I can’t say that I blame you. This one’s going to be hard all the way around. When did you see them last? They’ve become pretty reclusive.”

“They have. But I was here three days ago.” He mops his face with his sleeve, drying up the tears. “Lucy’s been fighting some pneumonia—they both had COVID earlier this year, and she wasn’t bouncing back as well as I’d hoped. The antibiotics I prescribed were causing some issues with her heart, and I was in regular contact to make sure she was doing okay. Andy was worried about her, understandably.”

“Have they talked to Andrew recently? Did they say?”

He shakes his head. “As far as I know, they haven’t heard from him in years. The situation with Chloe’s death and Andrew’s leaving has broken them both.” With a glance over her shoulder, he touches her arm and gently leads her away from the scrum of first responders. He pitches his voice low. “Whoever did this was sadistic. They died in great pain. You can’t think it was Andrew.”

“I don’t know what to think, Reggie. Andrew was in Atlanta yesterday and walked out of the airport, leaving his young family behind. Then his wife was hit by a car and gravely injured. Now his parents are tortured and murdered?” She doesn’t bother with her own brush with death. “It’s all tied to Andrew. All of it. Of that I have no doubt.”

“But was he the one holding the knife?”

“I don’t know.”

It takes several more hours to work the scene. Despite the cold, fat flies bumble through the house, seeking their bloody treats. Fulton County is overwhelmed and bumps her to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation in Decatur. The GBI is happy to get involved, especially when she mentions the case’s ties to Drake in Quantico. Turf war—they want the glory. They send their people for the bodies.

Before they leave, the EMTs stitch her hand and give her both a tetanus shot and an antibiotic booster; their well-practiced bandages are much more comfortable than her makeshift one earlier. They make her take a painkiller with some codeine in it, and between it and the numbing lidocaine, she feels floaty, and that’s honestly not a terrible thing, considering.

A call to Drake to fill him in goes unanswered, so she leaves him a brief, succinct message.

And the whole time, she can’t shake the feeling that every move she makes is being watched. Judged. Measured.

She lines up the facts. Andrew nearby. Eden calling her to meet Andrew’s new wife, who is severely injured in front of her eyes. His parents, gruesomely murdered, Theresa first on the scene.

Everything they have points to Andrew.

But the stranger who followed him from the airport, and her nocturnal visitor . . . She flexes her hand. A man who attacks a cop in her own home is more than capable of murdering two old people, right? To what end, though? Sending a message? Information gathering? If he killed them, why hadn’t he just killed her, too?

You know it’s both, Theresa. You don’t torture people if you don’t need information. He was looking for something, something worth killing for. You just need to figure out why everyone around Andrew is dying.

She thinks about her talk with Drake. About the money stolen from the Gussins’ company. It’s not out of the bounds of reason to assume that whoever did this was looking for the money—and Andrew himself.

“Hey, Detective?”

It’s one of the crime scene techs, a kid they call K-Swiss because of his love of the sneaker. Kevin is his real name. He gestures for her to follow him and disappears back inside the house.

She catches up to him in the foyer.

“What’s up?”

“I just found this. Thought you might want to see it.” He points to a chair in the dining room that’s been pulled free of the table. Against one of its legs is a blue passport.

“Have you opened it?”