Page 84 of M for Murder

‘You weren’t bending the rules. You were breaking them.’

Hickok shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Now you’re just being picky.’

Rebecca rolled her eyes in frustration. ‘I’m going home,’ she muttered, crossing the office to the locker rooms, too tired to keep up the fight.

‘Good idea,’ Hickok agreed. ‘You’re gonna need all the sleep you can get. We’ll be busy tomorrow.’

‘Why is that? Planning on breaking a few more laws?’ she remarked dryly, stepping into the locker room before he had a chance to retort.

She wondered what her family would think if they knew what kind of people she was working with. Vic the lazy cop, whose first concern was always for himself, and Hickok and

Sutton, both dedicated to hunting criminals, but willing to break the law to catch them. Her parents would be shocked, especially her mother. Uncle Lou would probably approve of them; never one to back away from scandal, he would tell her to quit being so uptight.

‘Nobody’s perfect, Rebecca.’

‘The law isn’t necessarily always right.’

He would probably use her mother as an example of the last comment. Sarah and Lou had never seen eye to eye. She thought he was a rogue and he found her a little too virtuous.

Sarah Angell, the prude; Sarah Angell, who always did the right thing; Sarah Angell, only ever seeing black and white and not prepared to accept that there was a whole lot of grey in between.

God! That’s it. I’m turning into my mother!

Maybe that was it. All along, her tomboy ways, the rebellion against her parents, the drinking and hanging out with Uncle Lou, perhaps it had been a subconscious act. Maybe she had been in denial all these years because she didn’t want to accept the fact that she was an exact copy of her mother.

No! It wasn’t true. She was just tired and letting her imagination get carried away. She was nothing like her mother. The reason she was so pissed at Hickok for illegally searching Lawrence Parker’s house was because she still couldn’t convince herself the man was guilty. It was stupid, she knew. The evidence against Parker was overwhelming. But she had a nagging doubt that he wasn’t responsible; that she had missed something in the files that she’d read on Rodney Boone. Boone couldn’t have escaped from the fire after he had been stabbed and left for dead on the cellar floor, but why hadn’t the police recovered his body? There had to be a logical explanation of what had happened to him and Rebecca had a sudden determination to find out what it was.

Instead of driving home, she followed the road left out of the precinct, driving past the college and out of the city towards the coast. Until his disappearance, Rodney Boone had remained living in the house he’d inherited from Cedric and Phillipa Boone. Rebecca had never been to the house, but she did have the address etched in her memory after meticulously studying the files on Boone, and she found the dilapidated old building without too much difficulty. The house was set back off a narrow country lane about two miles from the coast and hadn’t been lived in since the fateful night when Jennifer Isaac had managed to escape from his cellar. Rebecca had heard rumours that the land had recently been purchased by a hotel group that planned to rebuild the place and use its grisly history to draw tourists. As yet nothing had been done and, pulling her Jeep to a halt in the driveway, she could see where what was left of the once white walls had darkened to a charcoal grey.

She spent a moment staring at the house, trying to imagine how it had looked before the fire. Old and imposing, probably with many hidden rooms, isolated enough that no one would ever hear the Boones victims scream. Her mind sifted through the files she had read.

Jennifer Isaac had been down in the cellar with Boone. The police report said that she had stabbed him twice; once in the stomach with a screwdriver and then in the back with a butcher’s knife. Boone had fallen into a candle knocking it to the floor and Jennifer had left him on the cellar floor believing he was already dead. She hadn’t stopped to look for a phone, running straight out of the unlocked front door. She had tried the doors of the car parked in the driveway, hoping to use it to make her getaway, but they had been locked, so she had made her way on foot to the nearest farmhouse just over a mile away.

Rebecca tried to picture the scene in her mind: Jennifer running out of the house, trying the car then heading down to the road in search of help, leaving the burning building behind her.

The police hadn’t been called until an hour later, which would have allowed Boone time to escape, but how had he managed to get out? When the police and the fire crew arrived at the house, the building had been pretty much devastated. The reports said that the cellar, all of downstairs, the car in the double garage, much of the main staircase…

The car in the garage!

Jennifer Isaac had said in her report that the car had been parked in the driveway. Yet the police report stated that it had been in the garage, gutted by the blaze.

Had there been two cars?

Rebecca felt her heartbeat quicken. If a car had been parked in the driveway, it wouldn’t have been touched by the fire. Had the police seen it when they arrived? The report hadn’t said so. Was it possible that the car hadn’t been there when they arrived? That Boone had used it to make his escape?

The idea of a badly injured man crawling from the fire, finding his car keys and then managing to drive to safety was still a little far-fetched. But then it hit her. What if the car hadn’t belonged to Rodney Boone? What if there had been someone else in the house with him? Someone whom Jennifer hadn’t known about and who had pulled Boone from the fire then used the car to escape in?

Certain that she was onto something, Rebecca reached into her purse on the seat beside her and pulled out her cell phone. She called Hickok.

The two Federal Agents had already pulled the files and made several calls by the time Rebecca arrived back at the precinct.

She saw Hickok glance in her direction as she walked through the door, an almost sheepish look on his face, and realised she had been presented with a perfect opportunity to gloat.

The truth was she was too damn excited to want to bother.

‘The car outside wasn’t Boone’s,’ Sutton told her without preamble. ‘It was a silver Plymouth. Boone only had one car, a red Ford. That was the only car there when the cops arrived, and they found it sitting in the garage burnt to a cinder.’

‘So you think that there was someone else in the house with Boone?’ Rebecca asked, trying hard to maintain a professional tone.