Page 81 of Wrong Mail

“Oh, come on.”

Rodriguez groans, like he's had this conversation in a hundred living rooms. "Doctor Grant. I've been doing this a long time. Lying about your job to impress the people on a nice road is not a crime. It's a sad, strange thing for a grown man to do, and I've got the same bad feeling about him you have, but a feeling isn't evidence.”

David nudges me. "Tell him about the mail."

I've been turning it over all day. Now I finally put it in the room.

"It started with his mail," I say. "A package of his came to us by mistake. Our house numbers are close enough to confuse a tired driver, and I opened it before I saw the name. Inside were clippings about a series of murders in Oregon. Years of them. News articles. Coroner's reports. He's built a whole case around it in that house."

I hear how it sounds and keep going.

"He told me one of the victims was his sister. I don't know that she was. He showed me a clipping with her name, but I couldn't verify it. The newspaper’s tiny, it's out of state, and I don't drive. He said her name was Claire Doyle. Twelve years ago, in a small town in Jackson County. He said she'd married, so she'd dropped the Westburn name."

Hanson looks up from his notebook.

“Do you believe he was telling the truth?” Rodriguez asks.

“Maybe. Now? I don't know.”

“Oh please. Clearly he was lying about that too,” David says.

Rodriguez writes the name down, which is more than I expected and less comfort than I wanted.

I don't tell him about the phone I took from the second intruder either. I managed to charge it, but I couldn't get past the lock screen. Now it's upstairs in a drawer, useless to me and impossible to hand over without explaining where I got it and why I took it.

"I'll look into Claire Doyle. I will." He sets the pen down. "But I want to be straight with you about what I think I'll find. There are a lot of people, more than you'd think, armchair detectives and true-crime types, who fall in love with a case like that. They know it better than the detectives who worked it. They drive to the towns. They make the victims their own."

He looks at me.

"They'll tell you a dead woman was their sister to buy a little sympathy, and they half believe it by the time they've said it enough. It's a lonely, desperate thing, but it isn't against the law. All it reveals is that a man like that will attach himself to whoever will sit still and listen."

I feel that land where he meant it to.

"That's the man I think you've got. A lonely liar who found a case to claim, a house he could stay in for free, and a road full of people who'd have him to dinner. Not the other thing. The clippings you saw are gone. Whatever he built in there, he took it with him."

"Okay, and what about the birds?" David is barely catching his breath. "And our missing dog. Or the cameras?"

Hanson answers, gentle, reading off his notebook. "The power went out across the whole point. PSE confirms it. Several alarms on the point were affected by the same outage. There's no forced entry here. The gate wasn't broken. Someone could have opened it, or the latch could have worked loose in the storm. The birds, I'm sorry, there's no way to say who or how. And you said your dog..."

"Luna." The name comes out before I can stop it. "Her name's Luna."

"Luna. Right." Hanson doesn't push it. "You said you’ve got a dog flap. A dog with a flap and an open gate. In weather like that, you do the math." He closes the notebook. "I know how it feels. I do. But nothing here points to anyone we can name. And the one man you want it to be had a key to a house up the road, and no reason we can prove to be in yours."

"He controls our security," David says. "He could shut every camera off from wherever he's sitting."

"So can the company that monitors it. So can a power cut. We can't tell which from a dark screen." Rodriguez spreads his hands. "And, not to state the obvious, but why would he want to harm your dog or your birds? By every account you had a good relationship with him."

I nod. "He did give me one of the birds."

Rodriguez continues. "Listen, for what it's worth, I called the brother's firm. They were knocked out in the same outage, same as half the point, which is likely why the number on Mrs. Langford's contract has been ringing out on her too. If you want the system out of the house, take it out. Change the codes. But wanting it to be him and proving it are two different things, and I only get to work with what I can prove."

"I don't get it." David is on his feet now. "You're going to do nothing? What if he was behind what happened to the Ericksons?"

"Being a liar doesn't put him in that house, Doctor." Rodriguez holds his eye. "But you can be assured, we'll look into him."

“And what about Chris Brockwell?"

"Julia Shaw's boyfriend?"