Page 59 of A Deeper Darkness
“Yeah. Just… No one deserves to go on like that, rotting in their bed. And I just saw her last week. And him, well, I mean…he got out. Why in the world would he come back to this? And kill your own mother? That’s just cold. She wasn’t a nice lady, God rest her soul, but she still birthed him.”
“We might never know the answer to that. Go on. Make that call,” Fletcher said. The deputy rose to his feet and went to his cruiser. Fletcher turned to Hart, who was fanning himself.
“This is a dead end.”
“No pun intended, of course.”
“Of course. He’d been dead at least a week, right?”
“I’d say so. If the deputy is accurate about seeing the mother in town last week, that absolutely would be before the Donovan murder. But murder-suicide?” Hart rubbed his chin. “I don’t know, Fletch. This case get’s weirder by the day. You realize Alexander Whitfield just became our prime suspect.”
Whitfield, the hermit, living up in the woods. Whitfield, the ex-soldier, who would most likely be armed to the teeth. Fletcher couldn’t think of a more dangerous wild card.
A wild card who may have four fresh bodies to his name.
Fletcher heard the thin wail of sirens bleeding through the air. The New Castle folks would arrive soon enough. The last thing he felt like doing was playing patty-cake with the locals, but it must be done. He needed as much information out of Everett’s house as they could dig up before they took off.
There was a funeral in D.C. tomorrow, and he planned to be there.
Chapter Thirty
Georgetown
Dr. Samantha Owens
Sam didn’t like funerals.
No one does, she knew that. But she’d developed a deep and abiding discomfort of wakes and processionals and graveside tears when she was a kid, at the funeral for a childhood friend who’d been hit by a car, and it had never gone away. Her job was to uncover the cause of death, not to see the person into the ground. Not experience the agony of the people left behind.
And yet here she was, one of the left behind.
With everything that had happened, she honestly didn’t know if she could manage to get through the afternoon. It was too soon. She wasn’t ready to face a hole in the ground. And she knew she wasn’t ready to bury Donovan, either.
But she didn’t have that luxury. Susan and Eleanor needed her. So instead of putting her head in the sand and waiting for the day after tomorrow, she was on M Street, walking into White House|Black Market to find an appropriate black dress to wear.
She’d rescheduled her flight home so she could stay for a few more days. Called work and told them she was taking a week of vacation. But she only had three days’ worth of clothes, and nothing appropriate for Arlington. Susan had offered to let her go through her closet, but she didn’t feel right about that. She and Susan were the same dress size, but there was something really creepy about wearing your ex’s wife’s clothes to his funeral. Sam had demurred, and set out for a walk down the hill, knowing she would amble by plenty of shops on the way.
Sam used to love to shop. That was another thing loss did to you, it stole your pleasures. But the day was sunny, the air filled with the scent of flowers, and she was surprised to find herself enjoying the outing. She found several pieces that she liked, along with some shoes that were more appropriate than her clogs or loafers.
Walking back up Wisconsin with her bags slung over her shoulder, she ran through the case in her head. She felt like everything had stagnated. She couldn’t break the code in Donovan’s journals. She’d left three unreturned messages with Detective Fletcher. Her cursory search into the whereabouts of Donovan’s friend Xander had turned up nothing. Short of driving up to the Savage River and asking around for him, she was at a loss for what to do next. And if this man was responsible for the death of two men, she couldn’t particularly go running toward him. Instead, she wanted to back away, away from everything going on, from her cruel emotions, the hurt she was digging up like pieces of shrapnel caught deep under her skin.
Think like a detective, like Taylor, Sam. What would Taylor do?
She wouldn’t back away. She’d charge forward, heedlessly even, and solve the case. But that’s why she was who she was, and Sam, well, that’s why she was a pathologist. Charging forward had never really been a part of her personal lexicon.
Sam was a cautious woman. To the point that she took pride in the fact that she always looked before she leaped. She thought things through, measured the cost, the impact, the consequences, before acting. Spontaneity was not her strong suit.
Yet here she was in D.C., forging through a murder investigation without a road map. Simon would have laughed at her. He was as cautious as she. It must have something to do with their chosen professions: she a pathologist, he a geneticist. There was comfort in the explained, the immutable constants of science, for both of them.
His death wasn’t explainable. The death of the twins wasn’t explainable. Her own miscarriage right before she lost her whole family wasn’t explainable.
So why did she keep trying to find answers in that which was utterly without reason?
Sam felt her breath coming fast.
Shit.
She dropped the bags on the street in front of her and pulled the antibacterial gel from her purse.
