Murder Road (18 page)

Something bad is about to happen.

Was it a thought, or a voice?

“April?” Eddie said again.

Something bad is about to happen.
I opened my mouth to say it aloud, to warn Eddie or Rose, or maybe to warn myself. I had the urge to turn and run out the back door of Rose’s house, to make for the trees and keep running as fast as I could until I was so deep in the darkness that no one would see me. But I gripped the counter and stayed still.

There was a knock on the front door.

“I’ll get it,” Rose grumbled, crossing the room.

I looked at Eddie, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was throwing out the napkins, then turning toward the door.

Rose opened the front door, and her tone was disdainful. “Oh. It’s you.”

“Good evening, Rose,” Detective Quentin said. “Can we come in?”

Detective Quentin sat in one of the fussy chairs in Rose’s living room, one with curled arms and upholstery of pinkish-brown flowers on a cream background. He was wearing dark blue dress pants that were cut close to his slim figure, in contrast to the boxy, pleated suit Detective Beam wore. Once again, Quentin had skipped the jacket and tie for only a crisp, white shirt, the top button at the throat undone. The entire effect should have been dandyish, but it only made Quentin look otherworldly, as if he had been ported to Coldlake Falls, Michigan, from some other place and time. He regarded me steadily with his eerie blue eyes and ignored the Diana portrait behind his shoulder. The fear roiled in my stomach as I looked at him.

Detective Beam took a seat on one end of the sofa, and I took the other. Rose sat in one of the chairs turned away from the abandoned kitchen table. Eddie had declined to sit and instead
stood by the entrance to the kitchen, his arms crossed over his chest.

“My apologies for the disturbance,” Quentin said. “My partner and I have come across some information in our investigations, and we have questions.”

“We’re done with your investigation,” Eddie said. “We already established that.”

Quentin raised a hand, the movement oddly graceful. “The questions aren’t for you, Mr. Carter. At least, the first questions aren’t. The first questions on our list are for your wife.”

I went still as he turned his dark blue eyes to me. On the other end of the sofa, Beam fidgeted. I had never seen him fidget before.

“We’ve learned,” Quentin said, “that a long-distance call was placed from this house this afternoon. We traced the number to the Central California Women’s Facility.”

There was silence in the room.

“Luckily for us,” Quentin went on, “phone calls placed to prisoners are logged in the CCWF system. We cross-referenced the time the call was placed with the calls that came in, and we found a match. The call was placed to a prisoner named Diane Cross, who is currently incarcerated for the murder of her husband, Ron, in 1981.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Eddie said.

For the first time I could remember, I couldn’t look at him.
Diane Cross.
It had been years since I’d heard that name; it wasn’t the one Mom was using when she was arrested. Diane Cross had been left for dead a long time by then. I dropped my gaze to my knees.

Think, April. Think.

“That’s an excellent question, Mr. Carter,” Quentin said. “What connection could the Diane Cross case have to the people in this house? The answer was easy to find when we looked at the case itself. After Diane bludgeoned her sleeping husband to death in his bed with a baseball bat, she set the bed on fire and fled with their twelve-year-old daughter.”

Stupid. It had been so stupid of me to call Mom—I should have known that Quentin would have some way to find out. But I had needed that money, and my feelings had been hurt. My mother could still do that to me after all this time.

I raised my gaze and locked it with Quentin’s. “I called my mother,” I said clearly. “She’s in prison for murdering my father. Is that all you have to ask?”

Quentin’s hard, blue eyes flicked to Eddie. He’d gambled that Eddie didn’t know, that I’d lied to my husband. He’d gambled correctly. He looked back to me. “You were interviewed by us at length, Mrs. Carter. You never mentioned this.”

“Because it has nothing to do with what happened to Rhonda Jean.”

“Leave the question of what’s relevant to us,” Quentin said.

“Our job is to gather information.” This was Beam, speaking for the first time. He sounded angry. I didn’t look at him. “We can’t do our jobs if the people we interview withhold information.”

“Do you think I’m a serial killer?” I asked Quentin, my voice snapping with anger. “Do you think I’ve been lurking on your stupid road since the seventies, killing hitchhikers, because of my mother? I was a toddler when the first murder happened. Do you think I did it?” The anger had me now, and I was in its grip, unable to stop. “You don’t even know whether there’s one killer or ten.
You don’t know why the murders are happening, or what will make them stop. You can’t find a pattern. You don’t know who will be next, or when. You’re chasing me and my mother, and you don’t know
anything
.”

“How did you get my phone records?” Rose added angrily. “That’s violating my privacy.”

Quentin gave her barely a look, as if her question was beneath his notice, before he turned back to me. “The FBI had some interesting information about Diane Cross,” he said. “They got involved once it was clear that she had left California. Murderers who cross state lines become their concern. It took some time, but they tracked down several of Diane’s aliases. There were likely more.”

I was silent.

“The aliases they did find,” Quentin went on, “were in some trouble. It seems that, under several different names, Diane Cross was good at defrauding people of money. She started with a house-sitting scam, giving customers false references, then robbing them when she got access to their house while they were away. Then she moved up to stealing people’s bank and credit card information instead of simple theft. She’d collect the information while house-sitting, then clean out their accounts several weeks or months later, leaving them to backtrack to figure out who it could have been. There were other scams. Do you want to hear about them?”

The blood was roaring in my ears. I had known about the scams—there was no way I couldn’t have known. But Mom had kept the details from me, not out of consideration for my tender feelings, but because that way I couldn’t tell on her if the police ever picked me up. She was sentimental like that.

Still, I knew that the money in our joint bank account came from something illegal. I never asked. And I never told on her. I didn’t have the luxury of being moral. I had needed my mother to survive.

Quentin didn’t seem to need any answers from me. He was reciting all of this from memory, without even a notepad to read from. “Diane’s daughter was even more elusive than she was. Even the FBI could find almost no information about her. We do know that when she left California with her mother, her name was—”

“Stop.”

“I beg your pardon?” Quentin asked.

I ground the words out. “I don’t want to hear that name. Not now, not ever. Don’t say that name.”

There was a second of surprised silence, but then, with perfect inexorability, Quentin spoke the words. “Crystal Cross.”

My stomach rolled, and I wondered what it would be like to get sick right here in the sitting room, in front of everyone. It might happen. That name—that stupid name that my mother had thought was a great idea when I was born—was a burden I’d thought I’d dropped forever. “Crystal Cross is dead,” I managed.

“She was very much alive in 1981, when she presumably left California with her mother,” Quentin said. “After that, she disappears nearly into thin air. The FBI assumed she took a new identity. However, Diane was clever enough not to give her daughter’s new identity the same last name as any of her own new identities. She likely changed her date of birth, too. And since a teenage girl wasn’t implicated in any of Diane’s money scams, the FBI wasn’t interested—unless Diane had murdered her daughter, too, and she wasn’t alive at all.”

“My mother would never murder me,” I said. “She killed my father because he abused her. Because he abused both of us.”

“There were no police reports to that effect,” Quentin said. “However, I’ve been a policeman long enough to give you the benefit of the doubt on that. I’m not completely heartless.”

Anger seethed through me. The gall of him, to think he knew anything about what it was like to be me. To be my mother. To live in that house day after day.

“I talked to one of the original detectives on the Cross murder case.” This came from Detective Beam, on the other end of the couch. I’d almost forgotten he was there. “He told me that there were reports from the neighbors. The abuse was most likely true.” He cleared his throat. “He was probably doing it for years.”

“Thank you, Detective Beam.” Quentin’s tone was icy. “I’m certain all of the evidence was presented at trial.” He turned back to me. “Mrs. Carter—though that isn’t actually your name—I admit I’m curious about you. About why you’re here in Coldlake Falls. About why you haven’t left yet. About—”

“Enough.”

Eddie spoke from his position in the doorway. I gathered my courage and looked at him. He was tense, his arms crossed over his chest, his jaw hard, his eyes blazing with anger. Eddie was rarely angry.

“Stop harassing my wife,” he said, his voice rough.

I wasn’t stupid enough to see this as a loyal defense. Some of that anger, I knew, was directed at me. Eddie’s trust was hard-won, and I’d broken it. What the damage might be, I had no idea.

“Mr. Carter,” Detective Quentin said.

“Leave her alone,” Eddie told him. “We’ve cooperated with
your investigation. We’ve been interrogated twice. You’ve gone through our car, our luggage, our lives. None of this has anything to do with Rhonda Jean or your other murders on Atticus Line.”

Detective Quentin was looking at Eddie with his sharp, crystal gaze, his attention leaving me behind. “Are you sure about that?” he asked.

“Of course I am.” Eddie’s temper was rising. It was obvious, at least to me.

There was a moment of silence, and I panicked. I knew what was coming—not exactly what, but I had an idea. Enough to be sure that I didn’t want to know whatever the detective was going to say next. I opened my mouth to shut him up, to tell him to get out of here, to tell him to get out of our lives. This was over. I never wanted to see Detective Quentin again. But the detective spoke first.

“We’ve been given some interesting information about your discharge from the army,” Quentin said to Eddie.

Eddie went still.

“There were some incidents on your record,” Quentin said, again from memory. “Psychiatric incidents. A disagreement with another soldier. Behavioral problems. When you were discharged at the beginning of this year, an unauthorized handgun was found in your personal effects. I believe it was a .22.”

“I got rid of that gun,” Eddie said, his voice dangerously quiet. “It was legal.”

“But it wasn’t legal to have on base, was it?” Quentin’s tone was chillingly polite. “However, the gun is not what interests me about your record. What interests me is that you were stationed at Fort Custer in 1993, before you went overseas. Fort Custer is a few
hours from here. You were on authorized leave from March 1 to March 4, 1993. Katharine O’Connor was killed on March 2, 1993, and her body was left on Atticus Line.”

There was not a single sound in the room except for the ticking clock. Rose was perfectly still, her knuckles white as her hands fisted in her lap. Eddie and Detective Quentin had locked gazes, Eddie’s expression hard and defiant. I glanced at Detective Beam to see him looking at Quentin. His expression was dark and almost impossible to read, but it looked a lot like hatred.

“So,” Quentin said, as if we were all having a conversation, “you can see where my interest is piqued when a man with your . . .
issues
appears at my murder scene. A man who claims he was going to a resort miles away in the wrong direction. When the same man was stationed nearby, on leave, at the time of my last unsolved murder. When he appears in town with a woman who has quite possibly made a living as a con woman since childhood.” Quentin looked at me. “I don’t know where you were in March of 1993, Mrs. Carter. I don’t even know what your name was that year. Maybe you’d care to enlighten me.”

“You need to leave.”

This was Rose. She pushed her kitchen chair back, the scrape of it making a loud sound.

“You need to leave,” she repeated, speaking to Quentin. “This is my house. Go away.”

Quentin’s voice was soft, yet somehow carried command. “Rose.”

“Go away,” she said again, louder this time. “This is my house, Robbie’s house. He was a good cop, and you never gave him the time of day. Go.”

Quentin looked like he was going to argue again, but Beam stood from the sofa. “Good day, Rose,” he said, nodding politely at her. Without another word or a look at his partner, he walked out of the house, the door clicking shut behind him.

There was a pause, and then Detective Quentin stood. “I’ll be in touch,” he said to us, then followed his partner outside.