Page 44 of Girl, Accused

Eight hours of driving had turned Luca Hawkins' body into one continuous muscle cramp, but he'd made good time. When he'd arrived home, he'd spent a few minutes admiring the Townsend countryside that was pure New England, the sloping meadows that had witnessed his first steps, his first words, his first heartbreak.

Other than stopping off for toilet breaks and service station coffee, he’d spent the journey rehearsing his opening lines to his mother. He’d kept his return a surprise, because Mama Hawkins was of the generation where surprises were the best gift a mother could receive. Luca imagined the dropped jaw, the open arms, the insistence that she’d let him cook him an oversized dinner and stay for at least a week. She'd fuss over him, interrogate him about his work, his sleep schedule, his love life – especially his love life, now that Ella was in the picture. His mother had been asking to meet her for months.

It would have been the perfect homecoming – if anyone was actually home.

The place was deserted, and Mama Hawkins wasn’t answering her cell. So Luca had sat on the doorstep of their farmhouse, connected his laptop to the Wi-Fi and got to searching. The last CCTV camera to catch his mom’s license plate was the one outside Boston Logan Airport. And her passport was last scanned before a flight to Jamaica last Friday. Luca was no mathematician, but he could still put two and two together. The one time he drove eight hours to surprise his mother and she was on another continent. Typical.

So, with the absence of anyone to let him in his childhood home, he'd done the only thing he could. He'd found the loose panel on the porch floor, prized it up and grabbed the key that Mama Hawkins kept under there for emergencies. Luca grinned despite himself. The amount of times he'd used this thing to sneak in after curfew. Sixteen-year-old Luca had thought himself so damn clever, never guessing Mom probably knew all along. Probably why she'd been using this hiding place for thirty years.

And once he got inside, he’d texted his mom a picture of him standing by the kettle, with the caption:where do you keep the sugar?

That had been ten minutes ago, and since then, Luca had been re-familiarizing himself with his old haunt.

The farmhouse greeted him like an old friend with bad knees. Familiar, beloved, but always creaking. Luca ran his fingers along the notches in the kitchen doorframe where his father had marked his height every birthday until he was seventeen. The final mark – six feet exactly – sat just below the small gouge where his mother had thrown a plate at his father during their last big fight before his dad had passed away. The spoon had missed Gary Hawkins by inches but had left its scar on the house, just as the fight had left its mark on Luca.

He wandered into the living room where three generations of Hawkins men had watched three generations of televisions. The current model was a flat screen that looked comically modern against the faded floral wallpaper, which had replaced the bulky console TV that had dominated his childhood. That behemoth had weighed approximately two tons and received exactly four channels, one of which showed nothing but static and disembodied voices that five-year-old Luca had been convinced were ghosts trying to communicate from the other side.

Against the far wall stood his father's gun cabinet, meticulously maintained despite Gary Hawkins being nine years in the ground. Luca's mother, who had never fired a weapon in her life, had continued to clean and oil each firearm twice a year, a ritual that seemed equal parts memorial service and exorcism.

‘Your father believed a man should maintain his tools,’ she'd tell Luca whenever he suggested selling the collection. What she didn't say – what she didn't need to say – was that maintaining John's guns kept him alive in some small way, kept his fingerprints on their lives long after his heart had stopped beating.

Upstairs, his bedroom remained frozen in time. It was a museum exhibit dedicated to the boy he'd been. Basketball trophies. Science fair ribbons. The glossy poster of Larry Bird that had followed him from middle school through high school. His mother had preserved it all, allowing the room to evolve only in small ways that acknowledged his absence. A sewing machine in the corner, boxes of Christmas decorations stacked neatly in the closet.

It wasn't a shrine, exactly. More like a placeholder. As if Patricia Hawkins was keeping this space open for her son to reclaim whenever he was ready to admit that the world outside was too cold, too cruel, too complicated. Come home, the room seemed to say. Everything is simpler here.

Luca felt the pull of that simplicity now, standing in the doorway of his past. How easy it would be to close that door on the outside world. But real men didn’t walk away from their problems, and any problem of Ella’s was a problem of his.

Enough reminiscing, he told himself. It might have been midnight, but he had work to do. First, he would make a beeline for the fridge, because that was the rules. It was hardwired into human DNA. You came home, you raided the fridge. Mama Hawkins was annoyingly brand-loyal, which means she always had the good stuff.

After that, it was time to get to work. Someone was killing off the people close to Ella, and that same killer had made a big mistake – they’d assumed that Ella was working alone.

The killer might know Ella's routines, might have access to her DNA, but they didn't know about him. Didn't know that while Ella's perfect memory collected the pieces, Luca's mind assembled the puzzle in ways even she sometimes missed.

After all, the best profilers knew that every killer left two trails - the one they wanted you to follow, and the one they didn't know they were leaving.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Twenty minutes ago, Ella had been debating the merits of sleep versus caffeine. Now, she stood in an alley behind Granville City Hall with the body of Rebecca Torres at her feet. The crime scene techs hadn't arrived yet. Just three cops securing the perimeter while Ella, Ripley and Westfall stood in a loose triangle around the victim.

Rebecca Torres lay in a straight line across the path like a human speedbump, and the sodium lights emphasized the blood pooling beneath her head. The poor woman’s possessions – laptop, handbag, car keys – lay beside her.

And equally present was the killer’s ritual.

This time, it was a G, branded dead center on Rebecca Torres’ forehead.

‘People look smaller when they're dead,’ Ripley said beside her. ‘Ever notice that?’

Ella had noticed. Bodies contracted somehow as if death itself took up less space than life. Rebecca Torres had likely been five-foot-seven when blood pumped through her veins. Now she looked five-four tops, and her designer suit suddenly seemed too large.

‘We’ve got G,’ Ella said. ‘L, P, G.’

‘Maybe he’s trying to spell plug.’

Ella shot her partner a look. Now wasn’t the time. She spoke beyond Ripley to Westfall instead. ‘Who was this woman?’

‘Council President Torres. I literally spoke to her this morning. Told her about the murders and how we wanted to keep the details under wraps. She understood.’

‘Naturally. What was the general opinion of her?’

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