Last Light (19 page)

The chilled soup was surprisingly spicy—a perfect combo for such a hot day. “It’s delicious.”

“So, TK, what brings you to our little corner of heaven?” Carole asked in between sips of soup.

“She’s here with the team looking to re-open the Martin case,” Blackwell answered for her.

Carole arched her delicately plucked eyebrows. “Really? Well, I hope you all are more considerate than all those conspiracy theorists on the Internet. The things they imply—”

“Like what?” TK asked.

“That Lily Martin was killed by an irate lover,” Blackwell said. “Or Peter was killed because of his gambling debts and the rest of the crime scene was just a cover-up.”

“A few have even contacted me to ask for confirmation if Roscoe was having an affair with the Martin woman,” Carole said. “Really, the man’s been dead and buried for over two decades. Can’t they show him any respect?”

“Well, now, Dad did have a reputation with the ladies.”

TK looked between the two. Seemed like a pretty inappropriate conversation to be having between mother and son, much less in front of a total stranger, but from the indulgent look Carole responded to her son’s comment with, it was obvious Blackwell and his mother didn’t share a traditional relationship. Still, she made a note to tell Lucy about it. Even if it was almost thirty-year-old gossip, it might still be worth following up.

“Great men have great appetites,” Carole said in a chiding voice. “Besides, wherever your father may have strayed to, he always came home to me.”

Blackwell took a sip of soup, head bobbing in a nod that made him appear like a little boy rather than a grown man. He set down his spoon and stood. “Shall I carve?”

Without their answering, he brought the meat platter to the table and began slicing large chunks of beef and ham. TK hurried to finish her soup, only to have a woman in a maid’s uniform appear from nowhere and whisk it away, leaving her a clean plate. The same maid moved the side dishes to the table within easy reach before vanishing once more.

“What do you think happened to the Martins?” TK dared ask Carole while Blackwell distributed the meat to their plates.

“Me? Dear heavens, I have no earthly clue. But I can tell you that neither Lily nor Peter were the saints everyone made them out to be. Lily latched on to any man who looked at her twice, desperate to leave Peter. And Peter—” She rolled her eyes. “Whatever happened, it destroyed poor Roscoe. He just never was the same after, was he, Caleb?”

“No, ma’am, he wasn’t.”

TK frowned. It was Caleb, the son, who’d actually gone inside the scene, seen the bodies. Why would Roscoe, the father, be so devastated? “How so? Did he go inside with you, Caleb?”

The sheriff didn’t seem to mind her use of his first name, but it was his mother who answered. “Didn’t you know, dear? Roscoe killed himself a year later—on that very same day.”

TK stopped chewing and had to force herself to swallow. That tidbit of information had not been any of the files she’d read. “He did? How awful for you both.”

Carole cut a piece of beef into smaller pieces and speared them with her fork. “Can’t help but wonder if the two were related. But of course, they couldn’t be. After all, Drew Saylor caught the killers, didn’t he?”

Her words dangled in the air between them, and TK stared at the mother and son as they ignored her to focus on their food.

Could they really be implicating Roscoe Blackwell in the murders of Lily Martin and her family?

AFTER FINISHING WITH
Drew Saylor, Lucy returned to Canterville. She grabbed lunch for her and TK at the fast-food place. TK didn’t answer her texts and her phone went straight to voice mail. Lucy debated going to the sheriff’s department to check on her, but decided against it. Last thing she wanted was to micromanage. TK was a former Marine, used to fending for herself, and would only resent a hovering supervisor. Instead, Lucy headed back to her motel room. She went in through the side entrance, avoiding the prying eyes of the clerk on duty.

She’d left the AC running in the room and it smelled musty, but the maid had been and gone again so she didn’t have to worry about any interruptions. She did take a quick look in the bathroom—no signs of any scorpions. But that was kind of the point, wasn’t it? Scorpions wouldn’t necessarily leave any signs even if they were there.

Shit. Back home she was the strong one, dealt with spiders or snakes in the garden without worry. Was she really going to let some weasely insect send her into a freakout?

No, she was not. She would deal with this like the fully trained federal agent that she was. Well, used to be.

First, assess the situation. Her luggage was on the rack, above the floor. She was wearing her boots and her only other shoes were a pair of sneakers she hadn’t had a chance to unpack yet, so they were safe. What possible avenue of approach could the enemy take?

She glanced at the two beds, neatly made by the housekeeper. Both had bed skirts that dragged on the floor. Scorpions slithered and crawled, but did they climb?

No sense taking chances. She tucked in the skirts under the mattresses of both beds. Then she piled pillows to use as a makeshift laptop desk on the second bed, emptied her notes and files on the bed beside it, and spread out a towel as a placemat for her burger and the chocolate shake she’d indulged herself with.

Satisfied that she’d established a secure perimeter, she plugged in her laptop and phone; took her boots and brace off, leaving them on the bed; and settled in front of her laptop, her legs crossed in front of her. Perfect.

As she ate with one hand, she downloaded the scans TK had sent to their cloud account. This was everything the prosecution had not been obligated to turn over to the defense. Maybe the missing piece of the puzzle lay somewhere in the photos and scanned reports. It was like an itch she couldn’t pin down—or that ghost-limb syndrome Nick said amputees felt—this feeling that something was off, didn’t fit the picture the evidence painted.

Or that someone had arranged the evidence to paint. That was always a risk—humans were naturally inclined to turn chaos into order, whether it was inventing stories of constellations from random star groups or settling on a “logical” explanation for a murder.

Once the files were downloaded, she separated them into chronological order and placed anything from the actual crime scene, whether photos or coroner’s report or lab analysis, in one folder; anything peripheral to it such as witness statements, the transcripts of Michael Manning’s interviews and confession, memos from the state’s attorney, warrants, etc., in another.

She opened the crime scene folder. She’d already read Saylor’s notes and his deputy’s report from being first on-scene. Time to fill in the blanks with what they actually encountered.

First, the exterior. Thankfully one of Saylor’s people was camera-happy and had snapped a lot of photos—only about ten percent of them had made it to the defense, probably because many were duplicates. Made sense. If you were documenting a homicide, you wouldn’t risk something happening to one shot, so you’d snap several as backup.

The exterior appeared just as Saylor had described it: the unoccupied vehicles, one with a door open and bags of groceries spilled near by. Hmmm...groceries. And the open door. Could either help narrow their timeline?

She switched to the second folder, the one with the extra detritus that accumulated during an investigation. Scanned the files until she found what she was looking for. Thank you, Sheriff Saylor. The man had followed the book to the letter. Including tagging the grocery receipt as evidence. Lily Martin had bought her groceries at four-fourteen on Friday, November 13th.

And yes, there were two witness statements, one from the store’s cashier and one from a bag boy, to verify that she’d been there Friday afternoon.

Lucy turned a legal pad sideways, drew a horizontal line across it, and then a vertical hash mark labeled:
4:14 PM FRIDAY AT STORE
. At the far end she placed a second hash mark labeled with the time of the call to the sheriff’s department:
7:09 AM SATURDAY.

Time to drive from the store to her home? She pulled out her map, realized she’d driven almost the same distance when she’d gone to the Saylor house. He was a little more east and Lily would have turned off sooner and gone a bit more north. Guessestimate with a note to drive it and double check: twenty to thirty minutes.

She added a third hash mark labeled:
4:45 APPROX ARRIVAL HOME
. Made another note to ask if Lily’s car battery was dead Saturday morning. If the interior light was left on because of the open door, that might give them another way to measure when she was interrupted while unloading her groceries.

She stayed with the exterior. Peter’s truck. It was parked beside Lily’s wagon, but at an unusual angle, pulled wide to the left to avoid the open car door and spilled groceries. He’d arrived home after Lily—did they know when?

Another scan of the second folder gave her the answer. Peter had worked the morning in the fields before leaving for a shift at his part-time job at the feed store. He’d clocked out at five-oh-four. Which would have put him home around five-twenty according to a helpful entry in Saylor’s notebook. Thirty-five minutes after Lily came home with the groceries and failed to finish unloading them.

What had happened during that time? Saylor had asked himself the same question, circling it and adding two question marks. It was clear Lily was interrupted—what were the odds that a mother with two kids would have left half her shopping out in the driveway?

Lucy could think of a thousand interruptions that would have pulled her away when Megan was young. A scraped knee, spilled milk or juice, dirty diaper, hungry baby...but why did Lily never return to gather her groceries or close the car door? And what could have been so urgent that she wouldn’t have at least reflexively shut the car door?

Only something life-and-death.

Lucy filed away the thought, not wanting to jump to conclusions, and kept moving through the crime-scene photos. No obvious disturbance once you got past the vehicles and went down the front walk until you reached the front door: it was ajar a good four inches.

She flipped to the crime scene sketch that showed the position of Peter Martin’s body inside the door. Then she moved back to the photos. He still wore his vest from the feed store and near the body was a silver Thermos. The kind a husband would bring home from work to refill for the next day.

If Peter was killed as soon as he came home, then the killers were already in the house with Lily and the children.

But all this was Friday afternoon and early evening. While Michael Manning was playing football in front of a thousand fans. She leafed through the alibi statements the defense attorney had gathered. Seemed like he’d done a rather half-hearted attempt to mount any kind of defense in case his clients changed their minds about their plea deal. According to his notes, while Michael had been with the team, Michael’s brother, Richard, had no alibi, although he claimed to have been with his friend, Ronald Powell. Said they’d left the game around six-thirty in Powell’s vehicle.

Six-thirty. Almost an hour after Pete would have gotten home—if he’d driven straight home from the store. Maybe he stopped somewhere? That would totally skew the time line if he had.

Lucy made a note to try to follow up on that idea as well as asking Saylor exactly what time it was that he’d seen Ronnie Powell at the game. She continued through the crime scene photos, pushing her forgotten lunch aside, knowing this part would be difficult.

The first photos weren’t too bad because they were taken from the doorway to the baby’s room, and you couldn’t tell what was in the rocking chair facing away from the door and toward the crib.

The next photos circled around the room. A few were directed up at the ceiling, where thin ribbons of blood could be seen. As if the photographer didn’t want to capture the painful reality of what had happened in that room. But finally, they ran out of other details to photograph and focused on Lily and her baby.

The brutality that Lily suffered was immense. Ravaged was the word that came to mind—no, savaged, that was better. It had to have gone on for quite some time, long enough for her restraints, normal household clothesline, to cut into the flesh of her wrists and ankles. There was no sign of a gag. None of the cuts were deep—they all seemed designed to maximize the torture while also prolonging her agony.

Not the frenzied attack she’d first imagined, Lucy realized. Thorough. Methodical.
Personal
.

She blew her breath out and braced herself for the next series of photos: the baby. She clicked through them quickly but then stopped and forced herself to examine them more closely.

After, she sat, eyes closed for a long moment. Then she went back through them one last time.

She’d found her missing link. The thing that changed everything.

Her chest was tight, her breathing shallow as she called Nick—he was the only person she could trust to objectively evaluate her theory. Thankfully, he’d just finished with a patient and had time to talk. She outlined what she’d found and emailed him a few of the photos so he could see what she saw.

“Could it be possible that this entire crime centered on the baby?” she finished. “That she was the true target? The attack on her was so extreme—worse than even the mother’s. The mother was tortured, her death prolonged, but the baby, that beautiful, innocent baby...”

She had to blink back tears and catch her breath. “That baby, she was butchered by an animal. It’s the only evidence of pure, unadulterated fury and hatred at the entire scene. Tell me I’m wrong, Nick. Tell me I’ve lost it.”

He was silent for a long moment. “No. I think you’re right. From the evidence you sent, I think it was the baby who was the killer’s focus. He wanted to punish the mother. But the infant? He wanted that baby erased, annihilated.”