Page 43 of Listen to Me

“When I got home a few weeks later, my husband told me Sofia had left a voicemail. I tried calling her back, but she didn’t answer. By then, I guess, she was already…” No need to finish the sentence. They both knew why Sofia never answered.

“Do you remember what was on the voicemail?”

“Unfortunately, I’ve already deleted it. She said she wanted to talk to me about some patient we had in Maine.”

“Which patient?”

“I have no idea. We worked for years together and we took care of maybe a thousand post-op patients. I have no idea why she’d be calling me about one after all these years.” Katie paused. “Do you think this has anything to do with what happened?”

“I don’t know,” said Jane. Three words she’d been saying a lot lately.

She hung up, frustrated by yet another loose thread. This case had so many of them and as much as she wanted to, she could not see how to weave them together into a bigger picture. Maybe this was the face on Mars that Gabriel had talked about, just random hills and shadows that she’d transformed, with wishful thinking, into a pattern that did not exist.

She powered down the laptop and snapped it shut. Common things were common, and burglary was one of the most common crimes of all. It was easy to envision the most likely sequence of events: The burglar breaking in. The sudden return of the homeowner. The panicked thief attacking her with the same hammer he’d used to shatter the window. Yes, it was all perfectly logical except for that shard of glass she’d found against the fence, glass that the crime lab confirmed was from the broken pane in the kitchen door. Was it kicked there when the killer fled in panic? Or was it propelled there because the window was broken from the inside?

Two different possibilities. Two very different conclusions.

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