Тесс Герритсен - I Know a Secret

Jane looked at those glistening eyes and trembling lips and she thought: Goddamn it, this gal’s good. While Jane wasn’t buying the act, others might be convinced. They had no recording of the phone conversation between Holly and her father, no proof that Holly actually knew what Earl planned to do. In court, this eerily poised young woman would easily sail through the toughest cross-examination.

“I need to be alone right now,” said Holly. “This has been so hard, losing Daddy. Please, can you just go ?”

“Of course,” said Frost, and he stood up to leave. Was he actually buying this performance? Frost had always been a pushover for damsels in distress, especially if those damsels were young and attractive, but surely he could see what was going on here.

Jane held her silence as she and Frost left the apartment and walked out of the building. But as soon as they climbed into her car, she blurted, “ What a load of crap. And what a hell of an actress.”

“You think that was acting? She really did seem upset to me,” said Frost.

“You mean those cute little tears she produced on command?”

“Okay.” Frost sighed. “What’s bugging you?”

“There’s something not right about her.”

“Care to be more specific?”

Jane considered what it was about Holly that bothered her. “Two nights ago, when we told her that Earl was dead, do you remember how she reacted to the news?”

“She cried. Like you’d expect a daughter to do.”

“Oh, she cried, all right. Loud, honking sobs. But it felt staged to me, as if she was doing what we expected her to do. And I swear, just now she cried right on cue.”

“What is your problem with her anyway?”

“I don’t know.” Jane started the car. “But I feel like I’ve missed something important. Something about her .”

Back in the homicide unit, Jane scanned all the file folders piled up on her desk, wondering if they contained some detail she’d overlooked, some explanation for why she felt so unsatisfied. Here were the case files she’d already combed through, covering the Boston murders of Cassandra Coyle and Timothy McDougal, the Newport death of Sarah Basterash, and the disappearance of Billy Sullivan in Brookline. Four victims in three different jurisdictions. Their deaths were so dissimilar that the decades-old connection between them could easily have been missed. Cassandra Coyle, her eyeballs scooped out and displayed in her hand like Saint Lucy. Tim McDougal, his chest pierced by arrows, like Saint Sebastian. Sarah Basterash, burned to cinders like Saint Joan. Billy Sullivan, almost certainly buried and moldering in his grave, like Saint Vitalis.

Then there was the child who was still alive, the one who’d been first to accuse the Staneks of abuse twenty years ago: Holly Devine, birthdate November 12. On that day, the church honored Saint Livinus, Apostle of Flanders, who died a martyr after being tortured by pagans. His tongue had been ripped out to stop him from spreading the word of God, but even after his death, according to legend, the amputated tongue of Livinus continued to preach. Did Holly ever lie awake at night, haunted by the bloody fate that was preordained by her birthdate? Did she shudder at the thought of her mouth being forced open, her tongue sliced away with a knife? Jane remembered her own fear when she’d been targeted by the killer called the Surgeon. She remembered startling awake in panic, drenched in sweat, imagining the killer’s scalpel sinking into her flesh.

If Holly had ever felt such terror, she hid it well. Too well.

Jane sighed and rubbed her temples, wondering if she should reread the case files for these four victims.

No, not four victims. She sat up straight. Five.

She shuffled through the stack of folders and found the file for Lizzie DiPalma, the nine-year-old girl who’d vanished twenty years ago. Lizzie’s disappearance was still classified as unsolved, but there’d been little doubt in the minds of investigators that Martin Stanek had abducted and killed her. Two decades later, the girl was still missing.

Frost returned from lunch, saw the files spread out across Jane’s desk, and shook his head. “You’re still going through those?”

“It’s not settling right with me. It feels too neatly tied up, complete with a pretty bow. Our prime suspect conveniently ending up dead.”

“Doesn’t seem like a problem to me.”

“And we never found out what happened to this little girl.” She tapped on the folder. “Lizzie DiPalma.”

“That was twenty years ago. It’s not our case.”

“But it feels like the beginning of everything. As if her disappearance was the first domino to fall, setting off what followed. Lizzie goes missing. Her hat turns up on Martin Stanek’s school bus. Suddenly the accusations start flying. The Staneks are monsters! They’ve been molesting kids for months! Why didn’t any of that come out earlier? Not even a hint of it?”

“Someone had to be the first to speak up.”

“And the very first kid who did speak up was Holly Devine.”

“The girl you keep insisting is strange.”

“Whenever I talk to her, I feel like she’s calculating every word. Like we’re playing a chess game and she’s five moves ahead of me.”

Frost’s phone rang. As he turned to answer it, Jane paged through the Lizzie DiPalma documents, wondering if any progress on the case was possible after so much time had passed. The grounds of the Apple Tree Daycare had been thoroughly searched for the girl’s remains. While microscopic traces of her blood were found on the bus, it was explained by an injury a month earlier, when Lizzie had cut her lip. The most powerful evidence against Martin Stanek was Lizzie’s beaded hat, found on the school bus. The hat she’d been wearing when she vanished.

The killer had to be Martin Stanek.

And now he’s dead. End of story . With a sigh of finality, Jane closed the folder.

“You’re not gonna like this,” said Frost, hanging up the phone.

She turned to him. “What now?”

“You know that glass of wine that Bonnie Sandridge sent to Holly in the pub? The lab says there’s no trace of ketamine.” He shook his head. “We have to release her.”

Only two days ago, Bonnie Sandridge had been handcuffed and booked as an accessory to murder. Now she swaggered into the Boston PD interview room as if she were the one in charge. Although her red hair was streaked with silver and decades of sun exposure had freckled her skin and etched wrinkles around her eyes, she carried herself with the athletic confidence of a woman who had always been handsome and knew it. She sat down at the interview table and regarded Jane and Frost with a look of scorn.

“Let me guess,” she said. “That glass of wine turned out to be nothing but a glass of wine.”

“We need to have a little chat,” said Jane.

“After the way I was treated? Why should I cooperate?”

“Because we all want to know the truth. Help us figure it out, Bonnie.”

“I think I’d rather expose your incompetence.”

“Ms. Sandridge,” Frost said quietly. “At the time of your arrest, we had every reason to think you were a threat to Holly Devine. The killer had already established a pattern, and when you sent Holly that glass of wine, it fit the pattern.”

“What pattern?”

“On the night Cassandra Coyle was murdered, a waitress at a nearby cocktail lounge thought she saw Cassandra having drinks with a woman.”

“And you thought I was that woman? Oh, dear, but you can’t prove it, because that waitress couldn’t ID me. Am I right?”

Jane said, “Still, you can understand why we arrested you. The night we saw you with Holly, we had to move in fast. We believed she was in imminent danger.”