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“She died the summer you would have graduated. I thought maybe you know what happened.”
“I wasn’t around that summer. Left for vacation not long after graduation. By August, I was in the navy. Boot camp. They ran us so hard I don’t remember anything other than the pain.”
By the time they were finished talking, it was well after midnight. Dan offered to walk Rachel to the car, but she refused. Rachel wouldn’t be cowed. It was a promise that she’d made to herself years earlier when the cops told all the girls in the neighborhood not to walk around at night after Cat Girl had been viciously raped and strangled near her apartment.
Rachel had decided then that she would not be intimidated. Not by anything. Or anyone. Certainly not by the dark.
Dan let her out through the front door, turning on the porch light as he watched her navigate down the garden pathway. As she reached the street, she heard the door close and the metallic click of a bolt. Leaves scraped against the asphalt in the light breeze as Rachel walked into a cloak of darkness, down the deserted street toward her car.
After she turned the corner, she heard footsteps behind her. It sounded as if she was being followed. When she turned around, she saw nothing but shadows. She walked faster. More footsteps. She wondered if they were her own and she was scaring herself.
She crossed the road on a diagonal and clicked her keys to unlock her car. It beeped and the lights turned on. Rachel jumped inside and drove back to the hotel.
14
Rachel
Rachel didn’t so much as twitch when her cell phone first rang. Eventually, the familiar ring tone registered somewhere in her exhausted brain. She reached out her hand from under the covers and turned off the phone without waking. She buried her head under a white pillow and sank back into a heavy sleep.
The old-fashioned peal of her hotel room phone rudely woke her a few minutes later. Rachel jerked the phone console toward her. It toppled onto the bed as she randomly pressed buttons with her eyes closed. All she wanted to do was shut the thing up and go back to sleep. When nothing worked and the insistent ringing continued, she pulled the phone under the covers.
“Who’s this?” she croaked.
“It’s Pete.”
“Pete? Why’re you calling me in the middle of the night?” she asked, her eyes still closed.
“It’s morning, Rach,” said Pete. “You asked me to wake you early so you could go for a run. Remember?”
Rachel opened her eyes and peeped out of the covers. Bands of bright sunlight at the edges of the drapes indicated it was well into morning.
“So it is,” she said. “I’m so exhausted. I fell asleep at threeA.M.”
Rachel sat up and rested her head on a pile of pillows. The green fluorescent numbers of the clock radio told her it was three minutes before seven in the morning. She’d slept for four hours.
“How did it go with Dan Moore?” Pete asked.
“Not sure.” She yawned. “He was reluctant to talk about anything that might come up in court. He mostly told me what happened when he and his wife found out that Kelly was missing.”
“Why make you meet with him in the middle of the night if he wasn’t going to dish dirt?”
“Don’t know. What I do know is that he made me park a block away and sneak into his house after his wife had gone to sleep. He said he didn’t want her or the prosecutors to find out that he was talking to me. I don’t know why anyone would care. It’s not like he told me that much. In fact, he was very—” She heard a murmur of voices over the phone line.
“Rach, my surgeon just arrived for ward rounds. I’ll call you back as soon as he leaves.”
Rachel stifled a yawn and the overwhelming desire to return to sleep. Instead, she rolled out of bed and had a hot shower to wake up while she waited for Pete to call back. She dressed and was pulling open the drapes when her cell phone rang.
“What did the surgeon say?” Rachel asked.
“I need to stay until the end of the week. Between you and me, I’m thinking of staging a prison break. I am so over it,” he said, his lighthearted tone not quite hiding his despondence. “Tell me what Dan Moore said.”
“I’ll do one better. I’ll read you his quotes. Verbatim,” said Rachel, taking out her notebook and sitting cross-legged on her unmade bed as she turned to the first page.
“‘We were driving up to Norfolk to see John, my son. He’s an ensign in the navy. His base was open for family visits that Sunday. We stopped at Lexi’s house to get Kelly. Since Kelly wasn’t answering her phone, I went inside to get her.
“‘It was obvious there had been a party. There were yellow trash bags overflowing with beer cans piled up by the garage doors. Someone had thrown up in a garden bed. I was surprised Lexi’s parents allowed a party, because they’d only moved into that house a few months earlier. No adult in their right mind would knowingly let their kid throw a party in a brand-new house. It made me immediately suspicious.’”
Rachel climbed off the bed and turned on the kettle. She tore a coffee packet with her teeth and poured the freeze-dried granules into her mug while she read.
