Page 62 of I'm Watching You

Zack tossed his keys to Warwick. ‘Mind driving? I’d like to look at the file.’

‘Sure.’

They got in the car.

Zack opened the file and studied the color photos of the murder scene. The victim lay on her back, her face discolored and swollen from the brutal beating. Her wide-eyed death stare reflected the panic she had to have felt those last few seconds of her life.

‘My God,’ Zack said.

Warwick glanced at the map. ‘Never gets easy.’

‘No, it doesn’t.’ His problems with alcohol abuse this past year had been a bitch, but through it all he’d had a solid family behind him. Lindsay had been alone when she’d lived her nightmare.

‘The less personal you make this,’ Warwick said, ‘the easier it will be.’

His partner’s sudden empathy surprised Zack. ‘Autopsy reports on Lindsay’s mother show that she’d suffered multiple factures over the years – nose, right arm, left hand.’ He flipped over a page and discovered a medical report on Lindsay. ‘Lindsay’s doc reported that she was in a state of shock. He also stated that she’d suffered a spiral fracture of her right wrist.’

‘Someone twisted her hand so hard her wrist broke.’

Zack tamped down his anger. ‘Yeah. Doctors reported that her and her mother’s breaks occurred a couple of years before the murder/suicide.’

‘What does the report say about Frank Hines?’

‘Died of a single gunshot wound to the chest. A forty-five.’

‘Like Turner,’ Warwick said.

Turner and Hines shared similar fatal wounds made by the same caliber gun. Another coincidence. Things weren’t looking good for Lindsay. ‘Yeah. Autopsy reports show advanced liver disease, a by-product of excessive drinking.’

Warwick shook his head. ‘Lindsay ever tell you this stuff?’

His wife had hidden her darkest secrets even from him. ‘Only the barest details. I tried to talk to her about it, butshe always changed the subject. She said she’d put her past behind her and didn’t want to discuss it.’

Warwick tightened his hands on the wheel. ‘This is the kind of stuff that can really fuck with someone’s head.’

Zack flipped to a picture taken of Lindsay when she was a junior in high school. Challenge radiated from her eyes. ‘That doesn’t mean she killed Turner.’

‘Turner smacked around his wife. Lindsay knew it. Maybe she’d had enough of bullies.’

Zack stared at the more than decade-old crime scene photos. And then he noticed the date. ‘Shit.’

‘What?’

‘Yesterday was the twelve-year anniversary of the Hines murder/suicide.’

Warwick tightened his jaw and turned down a country road. ‘This is a little too connected to be a coincidence.’

‘Yeah.’

Another right and another left and they arrived at the Hines’ driveway. As Graves’s map indicated, it was marked by a tall oak tree that had been split down the center by lightning. The rusty mailbox had long fallen from its post and lay on the side of the road covered in weeds.

They drove down the rutted driveway until they reached the end. Before them stood the charred remains of the home Lindsay had grown up in. The only part of the structure left standing was the brick fireplace and the foundation.

They got out and walked toward the foundation.

‘Who owns the land?’ Warwick said.

‘Lindsay said the county took it for back taxes about eight years ago. They tried to sell it to a developer, but thewell water in the area turned up contaminated from one of Hines’s underground storage tanks. Remediation was too expensive so the land has just been sitting.’

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