Jeffery Deaver: The Lesson of Her Death

"Now."

When Sarah saw her plan wasn't going to work she walked toward Corde's squad car. Corde watched, half expecting her to bolt into the forest. She paused and scanned the woods intently.

"Sarah?"

She didn't turn her head. She climbed into the car and slammed the door.

"Kids," Corde muttered.

"Find yourself something?" Slocum asked.

Corde was tying a chain of custody card to the bag containing the newspaper clipping he had found. He signed his name and passed it to Slocum. The brief article was about last night's killing. The editor had been able to fit only five paragraphs of story into the newspaper before deadline. The clipping had been cut from the paper with eerie precision. The slices were perfectly even, as if made by a razor knife.

Auden Co-ed Raped, Murdered was the headline.

The picture accompanying the story had not been a photo of the crime scene but was a lift from a feature story the Register had run several months ago about a church picnic that Corde had attended with his family. The cut line read, "Detective William Corde, chief investigator in the case, shown here last March with his wife, Diane, and children, Jamie, 15, and Sarah, 9."

"Damn, Bill."

Slocum was referring to the words crudely written in red ink next to the photograph.

They read: JENNIE HAD TO DIE. IT COULD HAPPEN TO THEM.

They climbed the stairs slowly, one man feeling the luxurious carpet under his boots, the other not feeling a single thing at all.

Outside the wind howled. A spring storm enveloped this lush suburb, though inside the elegant house the temperature was warm and the wind and rain seemed distant. Bill Corde, hat in hand, boots carefully wiped, watched the man pause in the dim hallway then reach quickly for a door knob. He hesitated once again then pushed the door inward and slapped the light switch on.

"You don't have to be here," Corde said gently.

Richard Gebben did not answer but walked into the middle of the pink carpeted room where his daughter had grown up.

"She's going to be all right," Gebben said in a faint voice. Corde had no idea whether he meant his wife, who was in the downstairs bedroom drowsy from sedatives, or his daughter, lying at the moment on a sensuously rounded enamel coroner's table two hundred miles away.

Going to be all right.

Richard Gebben was a crew-cut businessman with a face troubled by acne when young. He was Midwestern and he was middle-aged and he was rich. For men like Gebben, life moves by justice not fate. Corde suspected the man's essential struggle right now was in trying to understand the reason for his daughter's death.

"You drove all the way here yourself," Gebben said.

"No, sir, took a commuter flight. Midwest Air."

Gebben rubbed the face of his Rolex compulsively across his pocked cheek. He touched his eyes in an odd way and he seemed to be wondering why he was not crying.

Corde nodded toward her dresser and asked, "May I?"

"I remember when she left for school the last time she was home, Thanksgiving… I'm sorry?"

"Her dresser. I'd like to look through it."

Gebben gestured absently. Corde walked to the bureau but did not yet open it.

"Thanksgiving. She'd left the bedclothes all piled up. In a heap. After she'd gone to the airport, Jennie's mother came up here and made the bed and arranged it just like that…"

Corde looked at the three pink-and-white gingham pillows on top of the comforter, a plush dog with black button eyes sticking his head out from under them.

"My wife, she took a long time to arrange the dog." Gebben took several deep breaths to calm himself. "She… The thing about Jennie was, she loved…"

What was he going to say? Loved life? Loved people? Loved flowers kittens poetry charities? Gebben fell silent, perhaps troubled that he could at this moment think only of the cheapest clichés. Death, Corde knew, makes us feel so foolish.

He turned away from Gebben to Jennie's dresser. He was aware of a mix of scents. She had a dozen bottles of perfume on the mirrored dressing table. The L'Air du Temps was full, a bottle of generic cologne nearly empty. He lifted it, looked at the label and set it down. His hand would retain for days the sharp spicy smell, which he recalled from the pond last night.

The bureau contained nothing but clothes. Above it a hundred postcards and snapshots were pinned to a corkboard. Jennie's arm twined around the waists of dozens of boys, faces different, poses similar. Her dark hair seemed to be darker in summer though that might be a trick of Kodak convenience photography. She often wore it pinned back. Her sport was volleyball and a dozen pictures revealed her playing the game with lusty determination on her face. Corde asked if he could have one of these, a close-up of Jennie, pretty face glossy with sweat. Gebben shrugged.

How Corde hated this part of the job, walking straight into the heart of people's anguish.

Corde touched several recent snapshots of the girl with friends. Gebben confirmed that all of them were away at other schools – all except Emily Rossiter, who was Jennie's current roommate at Auden. Corde saw: her high school ID card. Ticket stubs from a Cowboy Junkies concert, a Bon Jovi concert, a Billy Joel concert, a Paula Poundstone show. A greeting card with a silly cartoon rabbit on the front offered her congratulations on passing her driving test.

Corde pulled the chair away from her desk and sat. He surveyed the worn desktop in front of him, nicked, scratched, marked with her doodlings. He saw a bottle of India ink. A framed picture of Jennie with a scruffy cocker spaniel. A snapshot of her coming out of church one recent spring, maybe at Easter, blue crocuses at her feet.

She died on a bed of milky blue hyacinths.

In a lopsided clay cup was a chewed yellow pencil, its eraser worn away. Corde lifted it, feeling beneath the thick pads of his fingers the rough indentations and the negative space of Jennie Gebben's mouth. He rubbed the wood, thinking that it had once been damp from her. He replaced the pencil.

He went through her desk, which held high school assignments, squares of wrapping paper, old birthday cards.

"No diaries or letters?"

Gebben focused on the detective. "I don't know. That's where they'd be." He nodded toward the desk.

Corde again looked carefully. No threatening letters, no notes from spurned boyfriends. No personal correspondence of any kind. He examined the closet, swinging aside the wealth of clothes and checking the shelves. He found nothing helpful and closed the double doors.

Corde stood in the middle of the room, hands on his hips, looking around him.

"Was she engaged? Have a steady boyfriend here?"

Gebben was hesitating. "She had a lot of friends. Nobody'd hurt her. Everybody loved her."

"Did she break up with anybody recently?"

"No," Gebben said and shrugged in such a way that Corde understood the man had no idea what he was saying.

"Anybody have a crush on her?"

"Nobody who knew Jennie would hurt her," Gebben said slowly. Then he added, "You know what I was thinking? Since I got the call I haven't told anybody. I've been working up courage. For all those people – her grandparents, her friends, my brother's family – Jennie's still alive. For all they know she's sitting in the library studying."

"I'll leave you now, sir. If you can think of anything that might help us I'd appreciate a call. And if you find any letters or a diary please send them to me as soon as you can. They'd be very important." He handed Gebben one of his cheap business cards.

Gebben studied the card. He looked up, sloe-eyed and earnest. "It's going to be all right."

He said this with such intensity that it seemed as if his sole purpose at the moment was to comfort Bill Corde.