Chapter Forty

Sam woke up at seven the next morning, thinking about Aaron. She called the hospital and confirmed that he was in stable condition. The doctor wasn’t available, so she left a message to have him call her at home. A minute later the phone rang.

“Chase.”

“It’s Nick.”

She half smiled when he didn’t say Thomas. “I heard you got your man.”

“That’s what they’re telling me. Did Corona tell you that we verified Gerry Hecht’s story?”

“No.”

“Records show he was attacked in San Francisco, just like he said.”

“Why was he close to my office?”

“Been following you, I guess.”

“Where is he now?”

“Been living in Martinez. Then early last week he was attacked in the alley right outside your office. Broken ribs, fingers, bruised kidney, lacerations—you know the drill.”

“Williams.”

“Yep. I guess a car interrupted the attack and Williams made a run for it. Hecht called the police department after he called you. He said he thought the guy who killed the others and framed you had tried to kill him.”

“How would Gerry know it was the same guy?”

“Something the attacker said. And when he talked to the police, he told them he’d caught Williams in your car. We think Williams went back and replaced whatever he took or got out whatever he’d put there. We haven’t found anything incriminating yet.”

“That’s how he could have gotten the gum and the flashlight. Although the timing is wrong. He’d have had to do that sooner.”

“I know,” Nick agreed. “We’re working him for the murders, but we need to get our hands on Hecht again.”

Sam felt her blood start to rush. This was good news. “Where’s Gerry now?”

“That’s the unfortunate part. We sent a couple of cars up to his place this morning. Gerry’s gone. His stuff’s still in the apartment, but no one’s seen him since he was released from the hospital. We’re trying to see if there’s any contact information with the doctor, but it’s not looking good.”

Sam rubbed her eyes. “Damn. There’s no way to track his call to the house?”

“No. I wonder why he called you there. And how the hell did he get that number?”

She shook her head. “It’s listed under the boys’ names. Maybe he somehow got that.”

“Right. ‘Austin’ is on the mailbox.”

“Jesus, you think he was out here?”

Nick didn’t answer. “We’ve got guys checking through his things, looking into his background—see if he left us any clues.”

“Williams still won’t confess to the murders?”

Nick sighed. “Not a peep. We found snapshots of you in his desk, and he’s starting to squirm on the brakes, but nothing on the killings.”

“You think it’s possible he didn’t do them?” she asked.

“Shit, I don’t know. Be a lot to swallow, you know?”

She didn’t know what to say.

“You doing okay?” he asked.

“Not great.”

There was an odd silence.

“I want us to talk, Sam, about everything. Can I come by tonight?”

“I don’t know, Nick. I’m not really ready to think about that now.”

“But we need to talk. I want you to understand why I did what I did.”

Her mind went back to the other night, to his body, the scars. His touch. She shook her head, trying to shake the thoughts free.

“Sam. Please.”

“I’ve got another call coming,” she lied. “I’ll call you later.”

She hung up quickly. How could she trust him again? He was good with Derek and Rob, and she believed he cared about them. And probably about her, too, but was she willing to risk that? She pushed it aside and shifted her thoughts back to Williams.

She shuffled the pieces around, trying to get them to fit. He’d almost killed Aaron. He was certainly capable of murder. Was he simply holding off the inevitable by denying his involvement?

She pulled herself out of bed and dressed for her run, then started the coffeemaker. The boys were still asleep, and she tiptoed through their rooms, gathering laundry. Rob’s room, as always, was a mess. Most of his clothes were already on the floor, and it was impossible to tell what was clean and what was dirty. She did her best guesswork, even finding some dirty-looking sweatpants and a couple of T-shirts tucked in the back corner of his closet. She took the load to the laundry room and dropped it on the floor to be sorted.

One of her first lessons as a parent had been to check pockets. When the boys had first arrived, she’d loaded their clothes in the washer on hot without realizing that one pair of pants had a pocket full of chewing gum. Everything in the wash, including some of her own clothes, had been ruined.

She started her own load first and then went to the living room and pulled down the first of two binders of case notes she kept on the top shelf. She was surprised the police hadn’t confiscated them when they searched her house, but maybe they had missed them. Settled into a chair, she opened the binder and turned it right side up, wondering how she’d managed to put it back upside down when she’d last used it. She flipped to the beginning of the binder and paged slowly through her early days in homicide. Before she’d kept her daily journal, her most detailed notes had been taken on lined notepads and three-hole-punched into the binder. She had fit five years of notes into one three-inch binder. It had been, and still was in many ways, her bible.

She’d meant to go through the notes earlier, but things had gotten away from her. Paging ahead, she looked for the section on Charlie Sloan’s murder of Karen Jacobs, but didn’t find it. She frowned. Had Williams somehow gotten hold of her notes on the Karen Jacobs case? Would this prove he was involved? She stood up and had started for the phone to call Nick when something on the bookshelf caught her eye. Standing on a chair, she pulled out a book on victimology from her coursework and flipped it open. Tucked inside the book were folded pages. She opened them up and found her notes on Karen Jacobs.

How had her notes ended up in another book? Had Williams been inside her house? It wasn’t possible, was it? Putting the book back, she unfolded the notes on Jacobs. She sat down on the couch and stared at the bookshelf, thinking. But she couldn’t come up with an explanation for why her notes were out of the binder and in another book.

Turning her attention to the notes, she reviewed what she had on the Jacobs case. Her first notes included the site and layout of the victim’s body. Karen had been Sloan’s first. The detailed study of her victimology—her background, how she’d been lured to the site of the attack, what clues were found at the scene, the six-leaved branches. Flipping onward, she read about Karen.

The next five victims followed within seven months. Each one had an extensive description like Karen’s. None of them had stood out as Karen had. Somehow that first victim of any serial murder case, like Sandi Walters now, always remained the freshest in her mind. None of the other pages appeared to have been disturbed.

She thought about the woman who cleaned the house twice a month. Perhaps the binder had fallen while she was dusting and the pages had come loose. Maybe the cleaning lady had tucked them in the other book because she didn’t know where they went. Or one of the boys could have knocked it down or even looked through it. It wasn’t as though she kept it locked up. The buzzer sounded on the washer, and she went to forward the wash into the dryer.

The wet clothes hung heavy in her arms as she lifted them toward the dryer. The smell of detergent filled her nose, and she thought how nice it would be to take a hot shower after her run was over—maybe even a bath. She loaded the dryer, added two softener sheets, and set the timer for an hour. Then, turning to Rob’s pile, she began the process of sorting through his pockets.

She tossed the whites in one corner to be washed with Derek’s and pulled the darks into the washer as she emptied the pockets. She found seventeen cents in one pocket, two bottle tops in another—one for a beer. She frowned and set them on top of the dryer. In a shirt pocket, she found a felt-tip pen without a top. Thankfully, the shirt was dark denim. She set the shirt aside to soak before washing so it didn’t stain the rest of the clothes with black ink. In one pair of jeans she found an unused condom.

“Jesus.” She wished she knew what to do with Rob. If the alcohol wasn’t enough . . . She stopped herself. At least he was being safe. He was sixteen. A lot of kids probably carried condoms. It didn’t mean he was using them—or so she told herself.

She felt around in his sweatpants and pulled out something small and sharp. Catching it in her fist, she shook it and then opened her palm. In her palm was a broken piece of metal from a mechanical pencil or something and a couple of leaves. She wondered how on earth the boys collected things in their pants like that. She pulled it all out and dropped it on top of the dryer. As she pushed her bangs off her face, she caught a subtle smell on her hand. It made her flinch.

Eucalyptus. She wondered how long it would be before that smell stopped representing this case. She knew she would never forget it. It was always that way. She turned back to Rob’s laundry and lifted a flannel shirt off the pile. As she did, she caught sight of something on the sleeve. She pulled it closer and saw that the sleeve was ripped. But there was something else. On the rim of the tear, she saw a dark spot. She rubbed it between her fingers and the red stained her skin. Blood. She looked back at the eucalyptus leaves and then down at the blood.

“Holy shit.”

She ran for the phone.