Page 157 of Everything She Feared

“Sara, no. I don’t believe it.”

“Believe it, Mom. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about who I am and what they did. And how no one will ever forget. I will always feel the pain and shame. I can’t help bearing some of the responsibility for their acts.

“That’s why, like you and Dad, I always guarded against being found out and persecuted for being the child of monsters. That’s why—” Sara held up her wrist “—as soon as I was old enough, and you said you understood, I got this tattoo to hide the mark that ties me to them. I can’t change who my biological parents are any more than I can wash away the awful shame.”

“No, no, Sara. You and Katie are innocents. What they did has nothing to do with who you are. You have a right to live free of their crimes.”

“Do we? My God, look at Katie, Mom.There is an evil in us!”

“No, Sara, don’t say that.”

“It’s why I never wanted to have children. I never wanted to pass on their vile bloodline. Then I met Nathaniel and he had such a good heart. He filled me with hope.”

“Nathaniel was so good.”

“But after that first time I looked at the news photos of their victims—I don’t know how old I was then—but I imagined myself being one of them, feeling their terror, their pain. It haunts me because...”

Sara caught her breath.

“Because they brought me with them. I was there. They used me to lure those poor innocent people.” Again, Sara looked at the tattoo covering her scar. “They cry out to me in my dreams. I can still feel the woman clawing, gouging into my arm—I can hear her screams.”

“Sara,” Marjorie said. “You must listen to me. There is a line between good and evil and you never have crossed it, and you never will because we raised you right. You might have your thoughts, but I know you have a moral spine that will not bend to evil. Nathaniel had a good heart, and Katie has his goodness and your goodness in her. She may be struggling, but she’s not evil. You have to believe that.”

“But what if some kind of strong force in her blood has pushed Katie across that line?”

They both shot a look to the door and a noise that sounded just outside. Sara opened the door, glancing both ways down the empty hall.

Nothing.

She’d just returned to her mother’s side when her phone vibrated with a text from Rose Aranda.

A friend in the prosecuting attorney’s office tells me they are poised to charge Katie. We need to prepare.

Sara covered her mouth with her hand.

“What is it?” Marjorie asked.

“Police are getting ready to charge Katie. I have to go.”

78

Seattle, Washington

A soft cheerfloated across the forensic section to where Erik Foy was working, drawing him to the analysts gathered at his supervisor’s worktable.

Kelly Jensen had succeeded in recovering fingerprints from the rock used in Anna Shaw’s death. Developing prints from a stone was no small feat, Foy thought. This was significant on several levels.

“Thank you. Alright.” Jensen smiled a little, keeping her eyes on her monitor, the screen spilt, displaying large clear images of fingerprints from the rock on one side and Katie Harmon’s prints on the other. “I still have comparison to do. So, everybody back to work. Erik, we really need you to finish on Carl Benton’s tablet, so we can wrap up this case.”

“I’m on it.”

Encouraged by Jensen’s achievement, Foy returned to his effort to get a single clear usable fingerprint from Benton’s tablet.

It wasn’t easy but he eventually recovered something from the area where fingerprints had overlapped. He enlarged the image on his monitor. Now his challenge was to separate the entangled impression into two distinct prints and compare them.

Foy had to locate the endpoints and real-branch points of the overlapped image. Enhancing it would involve several steps, including image binarization, ridge thinning and minutiae extraction. He was making progress, but it was meticulous work.

He’d lost track of time when he saw Jensen stop working on comparing the prints she’d recovered. She left her worktable and hurried out of the section with a grave expression.

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