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Something bad is about to happen. I opened my mouth to say it aloud, to warn Eddie or Rose, or maybe to warn myself. I had the urge to turn and run out the back door of Rose’s house, to make for the trees and keep running as fast as I could until I was so deep in the darkness that no one would see me. But I gripped the counter and stayed still.
There was a knock on the front door.
“I’ll get it,” Rose grumbled, crossing the room.
I looked at Eddie, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was throwing out the napkins, then turning toward the door.
Rose opened the front door, and her tone was disdainful. “Oh. It’s you.”
“Good evening, Rose,” Detective Quentin said. “Can we come in?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Detective Quentin sat in one of the fussy chairs in Rose’s living room, one with curled arms and upholstery of pinkish-brown flowers on a cream background. He was wearing dark blue dress pants that were cut close to his slim figure, in contrast to the boxy, pleated suit Detective Beam wore. Once again, Quentin had skipped the jacket and tie for only a crisp, white shirt, the top button at the throat undone. The entire effect should have been dandyish, but it only made Quentin look otherworldly, as if he had been ported to Coldlake Falls, Michigan, from some other place and time. He regarded me steadily with his eerie blue eyes and ignored the Diana portrait behind his shoulder. The fear roiled in my stomach as I looked at him.
Detective Beam took a seat on one end of the sofa, and I took the other. Rose sat in one of the chairs turned away from the abandoned kitchen table. Eddie had declined to sit and instead stood by the entrance to the kitchen, his arms crossed over his chest.
“My apologies for the disturbance,” Quentin said. “My partner and I have come across some information in our investigations, and we have questions.”
“We’re done with your investigation,” Eddie said. “We already established that.”
Quentin raised a hand, the movement oddly graceful. “The questions aren’t for you, Mr.Carter. At least, the first questions aren’t. The first questions on our list are for your wife.”
I went still as he turned his dark blue eyes to me. On the other end of the sofa, Beam fidgeted. I had never seen him fidget before.
“We’ve learned,” Quentin said, “that a long-distance call was placed from this house this afternoon. We traced the number to the Central California Women’s Facility.”
There was silence in the room.
“Luckily for us,” Quentin went on, “phone calls placed to prisoners are logged in the CCWF system. We cross-referenced the time the call was placed with the calls that came in, and we found a match. The call was placed to a prisoner named Diane Cross, who is currently incarcerated for the murder of her husband, Ron, in 1981.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Eddie said.
For the first time I could remember, I couldn’t look at him. Diane Cross. It had been years since I’d heard that name; it wasn’t the one Mom was using when she was arrested. Diane Cross had been left for dead a long time by then. I dropped my gaze to my knees.
Think, April. Think.
“That’s an excellent question, Mr.Carter,” Quentin said. “What connection could the Diane Cross case have to the people in this house? The answer was easy to find when we looked at the case itself. After Diane bludgeoned her sleeping husband to death in his bed with a baseball bat, she set the bed on fire and fled with their twelve-year-old daughter.”
Stupid. It had been so stupid of me to call Mom—I should have known that Quentin would have some way to find out. But I had needed that money, and my feelings had been hurt. My mother could still do that to me after all this time.
I raised my gaze and locked it with Quentin’s. “I called my mother,” I said clearly. “She’s in prison for murdering my father. Is that all you have to ask?”
Quentin’s hard, blue eyes flicked to Eddie. He’d gambled that Eddie didn’t know, that I’d lied to my husband. He’d gambled correctly. He looked back to me. “You were interviewed by us at length, Mrs.Carter. You never mentioned this.”
“Because it has nothing to do with what happened to Rhonda Jean.”
“Leave the question of what’s relevant to us,” Quentin said.
“Our job is to gather information.” This was Beam, speaking for the first time. He sounded angry. I didn’t look at him. “We can’t do our jobs if the people we interview withhold information.”
“Do you think I’m a serial killer?” I asked Quentin, my voice snapping with anger. “Do you think I’ve been lurking on your stupid road since the seventies, killing hitchhikers, because of my mother? I was a toddler when the first murder happened. Do you think I did it?” The anger had me now, and I was in its grip, unable to stop. “You don’t even know whether there’s one killer or ten. You don’t know why the murders are happening, or what will make them stop. You can’t find a pattern. You don’t know who will be next, or when. You’re chasing me and my mother, and you don’t know anything.”
“How did you get my phone records?” Rose added angrily. “That’s violating my privacy.”
Quentin gave her barely a look, as if her question was beneath his notice, before he turned back to me. “The FBI had some interesting information about Diane Cross,” he said. “They got involved once it was clear that she had left California. Murderers who cross state lines become their concern. It took some time, but they tracked down several of Diane’s aliases. There were likely more.”
I was silent.
