Snapped (13 page)

She stopped the soap spray and wiped her forehead with the back of her arm. Her skin was damp and locks of hair clung to her neck. “You were at the other one, I guess?”

“Yep.”

She looked away, at the passing cars. “I wanted to be there, but—” She shook her head. “Anyway, it’s probably for the best.”

“It was nice of you to go to the professor’s.”

She scoffed at him. “It wasn’t
nice
, it was selfish. I didn’t even know the man.”

“Still, you paid your respects.”

“I was trapped next to his bloody corpse for thirty minutes. I needed a different image of him to replace the one in my mind.” Her gray eyes gazed up at him tentatively. “I guess that sounds kind of sick, doesn’t it?”

Jonah traded the water hose for the soap one she was holding. “Makes sense to me.”

After witnessing Jodi Kincaid’s autopsy, he could relate completely. He was still trying to make the portrait
he’d seen at the front of the church replace his mental picture of her being dissected on that steel table. But it was probably forever lodged in his brain.

Jonah crouched down to do Sophie’s wheel wells.

“So, was it civic duty or professional obligation?” she asked.

He glanced up at her. “A little of both, I guess.”

Despite the developments in the case this morning, Jonah couldn’t let it go. He felt compelled to investigate the victims, even though everyone but Ric seemed to think it was a waste of time. So he’d gone to one funeral, Ric to another. Eric Emrick was being buried in Oklahoma, so it wasn’t going to be possible to attend that one, but Jonah still planned to do some basic investigating. These were murder victims in his jurisdiction, and he owed them that much.

He finished the front two tires and moved to the back. When he looked up, Sophie was watching him, the corner of her mouth lifted in a half-smile.

“What?”

“I’ve got a guy in a black suit washing my car. People are going to think you’re my chauffeur.”

She smiled fully now, and Jonah felt a warm pull. This one was the real deal. She smiled all the time, but mostly it was for show.

He stood up and moved to the back bumper. She retrieved a rag and some Windex from her backseat and started polishing the side mirror. She’d come prepared.

“So, how was your date?” he asked.

She glanced at him. “Fine.”

“Anyone I know?”

She hesitated a moment, which answered his question.

“Mark Royers.”

He frowned.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m trying to place the name.”

“He works at Delphi. He did some of the DNA work for your case last winter.”

“Mark
Royers
? The DNA guy?”

“That’s what I said.” She stopped polishing. “What?”

“Nothing.”

She fisted her hand on her hip. “What is it?”

“I just wouldn’t think you two would have much in common.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Forget it.”

“You mean because he’s a doctor? I don’t have enough letters after my name to date someone who’s smart?”

Jonah didn’t much feel like getting beamed in the nuts with a high-power hose, so he took that as a rhetorical question.

She shook her head and stalked around to the other mirror.

When he finished her tires, she was still fuming.

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

She muttered something he didn’t catch.

He hung up the nozzles and snagged the towel out of her hand. “Thank you, Jonah, for helping me wash my car in this hundred-degree heat,” he said.

“Thank you,” she parroted. Then she reached into her backseat again and pulled a diet soft drink from a cooler. She popped it open, took a gulp, then passed it to him. He hated diet sodas, but it was a furnace out here, so he downed half of it.

“I meant he doesn’t
look
like your type,” he said. “Physically. He’s kind of skinny, isn’t he?”

She didn’t like that, either. The genuine smile from a few minutes ago had been replaced by a genuine scowl. Time for a new subject.

“Listen, I stopped by to tell you something.” He tossed the towel on the floor of her car and shut the door.

“Hmm, let me guess. I passed the test?”

“What test?”

“Detective Doyle. She was sent out to vet me, right?” Sophie drained the last of the soda and pitched the can in a trash bin. “That thing about the crumpled bumper was good. I almost fell for it. She had me doubting my own story.”

Jonah pretended not to know what she was talking about.

“So, when we took Himmel’s car into evidence,” he said, “you know what we found in the trunk?”

“What?”

“A box containing an eight-inch hunting knife, a twenty-two-caliber pistol, and five grenades.”

“Gre
nades
?” She looked alarmed. “What was he planning to do with those?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. Here’s what we didn’t find in that car: prints belonging to anyone besides Himmel. We went over it three times.”

She sighed and looked away. “I know what I saw.”

“What you
think
you saw. We haven’t found one witness who can corroborate seeing a green VW on campus that day.”

Her eyes flashed with anger. “Are you saying—”

“Just hear me out. We ran every vehicle registered on
that campus, and there’re four VW Beetles. One of them happens to be dark blue.” He watched her face as she figured out what he was getting at. “Allison interviewed the vehicle owner this morning, and turns out he parked on University Avenue just a block north of Meadowlark sometime after twelve o’clock the day of the shooting.”

She stared up at him. Her mouth dropped open. “But—”

“Is there
any
possibility that could be the car you saw?”

“The car I saw was green.”

“You’re sure?” He held his breath, waiting for her answer. The entire case hinged on this
one
witness account, and Jonah needed to be certain.

“It was green.”

He blew out a sigh. She was convinced of what she saw. Or
thought
she saw. And meanwhile, news of the dark blue VW had all but annihilated any chance he’d had of convincing the rest of the task force to take him seriously with this.

Or take Sophie seriously, which was really the problem. They didn’t.

“So, what does this mean?”

She knew exactly what it meant because she was looking up at him with disappointment in her eyes. She thought he didn’t believe her.

And honestly, he wasn’t sure he did. Every shred of physical evidence pointed to a lone perpetrator. And the one eyewitness account that might indicate otherwise could be explained now by a coincidence.

“It means we’re back to the original case theory,” he said.

“In other words, that’s it? It’s over? You guys have
your man, and we don’t need to ask any more questions?”

Jonah didn’t feel that way, but she’d described Reynolds and Noonan to a T.

“Sophie—”

“Forget it.” She jerked open her door. “Believe what you want, Jonah. But I know what I saw.”

Wyatt Macon lived in an area that had once been considered the boondocks but was quickly becoming the outskirts of town. Jonah passed yet another brand-new subdivision before turning up the narrow gravel drive to the one-story clapboard house where he’d grown up.

He parked his pickup under an oak tree and pushed open the door. A golden retriever instantly poked her head in and pawed his thigh.

“Hey, girl.” He scratched Duchess between the ears, and she gleefully followed him across the lawn to where his dad was pushing his Toro mower. His face was red as a tomato, and he stopped as Jonah approached.

“You should do that in the morning,” Jonah said.

In truth, he shouldn’t do it at all anymore, but you couldn’t tell his father a damn thing.

“I had company this morning.” He pulled a bandanna out of his pocket and wiped the sweat off his face, and Jonah turned to look back toward the house, shaking his head. In one of life’s bigger surprises, his parents had just last summer ended thirty-nine years of marriage. Apparently, they’d “grown apart.” Now his dad had sleepovers on weekends and his mom had an account at eHarmony.

“Thought you’d be by today.” His dad trudged across the lawn and hiked up the steps to the front porch, where
a pitcher of lemonade was waiting with slices of lemon floating on top. Jonah’s dad didn’t make anything that couldn’t be thrown on a Weber.

He poured a glass and downed half of it in one sip, then looked at Jonah. “Want some?”

“No.” Jonah leaned back against the wooden porch railing.

“Macey makes good lemonade.”

“I’m fine.”

Jonah liked Macey well enough, but he couldn’t drink another woman’s lemonade in a house he still thought of as his mom’s, and it didn’t matter who had asked for the divorce.

“Supposed to be hot tomorrow.” His dad slumped back in a chair and stared out at the yard. “Hundred and one, if you can believe that.” Another gulp of lemonade and he looked at Jonah. “You been to the funeral, I take it.”

“Jodi Kincaid.”

Duchess settled at Jonah’s feet and he bent down to scrub her ears.

“Hell of a thing. I read in the paper this Himmel had pancreatic cancer. Think it got to his brain?”

“The ME says no.”

Jonah knew what his dad was thinking. When Charles Whitman was autopsied back in ‘66, doctors found a tumor in his brain, which confirmed a lot of people’s feelings that his ninety-six-minute shooting spree was the work of someone sick in the head.

Jonah wasn’t so sure. Some experts said that given the size and location of the tumor, it probably had no
effect on the sniper’s behavior that day. It made for a convenient explanation, though.

Jonah’s dad had been a rookie cop in Austin the day of the Whitman shooting. It had to have been one of his toughest days on the job, but he rarely talked about it—which was probably why over the years Jonah had read everything he could find on the subject. His mom had once told him Charles Whitman was the reason they’d left Austin. The clock tower was the tallest building in the city, and she couldn’t look at it every day and think about what had happened.

Jonah folded his arms over his chest and glanced at his dad. “We’ve got evidence that could indicate someone else might have played a role in the attack.”

His gray eyebrows tipped up. “A second shooter?”

“Maybe a driver. A witness thinks she saw someone besides Himmel driving his car.”

“Just one witness?”

“So far, yeah.”

He rubbed his chin, as he always did when he was considering something. “Eyewitnesses are a tricky thing.” He shook his head. “Sometimes they lie, or they forget, or sometimes they just see things funny. Pretty unreliable, you want to know the truth. You got DNA or prints or anything?”

“No.”

“Hmm.”

“There are some other things that bug me, too. This guy wasn’t from around here. We still don’t know what his connection was to the university. Why’d he do this here? And he took the trouble to file the serial numbers
off his guns. Why bother? He had to know we’d run down his prints eventually. He was in the army.”

His dad emptied his glass, then sighed. For a few minutes, they looked out over the lawn. No matter how many times Jonah offered, the man wouldn’t accept help. One of these days, Jonah was just going to show up and do it.

Jonah checked his watch. He needed to get home and do his own yard. “Do me a favor, don’t give yourself a heart attack out here.”

His father heaved himself out of the chair. “You sound like Macey,” he groused.

Jonah stepped off the porch. “About the investigation—”

“You don’t have to say it.”

It was understood that when they talked shop, it was confidential. But Jonah needed to emphasize the point. This case was the talk of the town, and he knew neighbors would be looking to Wyatt for details that weren’t in the newspaper.

His dad put his cap back on and turned to look at him. “Don’t beat yourself up over all these questions. You’re trying to make sense of something crazy.”

Jonah shook his head and looked away. He’d said almost the same thing to Sophie just the other day, but now he was having trouble following his own advice.

“It’s just, where do I go from here?” Jonah felt foolish voicing the question, but if there was one person on earth he could talk to, it was his dad. “I’m not sure what I should do.”

He slapped him on the back. “Do your job, Jonah. This town’s hurting. They need you. Close this case and let these folks get on down the road.”

•••

Sophie lay in her bed, listening to her neighbor’s television and trying not to think about Jodi Kincaid. She’d done everything she could to distract herself before bed tonight. She’d washed her car, she’d done her grocery shopping, she’d even gone to the gym for a double spin class. But although her muscles were sore and her energy was spent, the insomnia wouldn’t leave her alone.

She closed her eyes and she was back behind that statue, watching a woman’s life drain out of her.

Why hadn’t she done something?

She could have sprinted over and pressed some clothes against her to stop the bleeding. Maybe she could have given CPR or even dragged her out of there.

And he would have shot you, too
.

The answer came back, again and again. Every time someone had tried to move, or get up, or run for safety, they got hit with a bullet. She’d done the only thing she
could
have done, which was wait for Jonah’s team to go up there.

So that
they
could be the ones to put their lives on the line for other people.

The irony didn’t sit well with Sophie. Why was she still here, in her cheap, single-girl apartment where nobody needed her, while Becca Kincaid was sleeping in a house tonight without a mother?

Robert Kincaid had called this morning, just as Sophie had been turning her place upside down looking for the obituary she’d clipped from the newspaper.