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Emma took the keys from the cop. She inspected the exterior of the car, looking for the tell tale blood the cops had found, but she saw nothing beyond a slight dent where Sutton had probably made contact with Thayer’s leg.
Perhaps they’d cleaned it off. Then she opened the driver’s door and plopped down on the leather seat. A strange sensation came over her. Something about this car felt so distinctly Sutton, as though her twin were suddenly present.
She shut her eyes and could almost picture her twin behind the wheel, tossing her hair, and laughing at something Charlotte or Madeline said. Emma toyed with a silver guardian angel charm that hung on the rearview mirror, swearing she could smell a trace of Sutton’s perfume lingering in the air. She knew how much it would’ve annoyed her twin for the car to be in the police department’s probing hands.
I’ll take good care of her for you, Emma thought as she tapped her fingers on the leather-wrapped steering wheel.
I smiled. She’d better.
Knuckles rapped the glass. Emma flinched and looked up to see Officer Moriarty. She slowly rolled down the window.
“Can I help you with anything else, Miss Mercer?” he asked gruffly.
“No, officer, I’m fine,” Emma said, forcing an innocent, trust-me tone into her voice. “Thanks so much for your help.”
“Then it’s best if you left the premises,” the officer said, his thumb hooked through a belt loop.
Emma nodded and rolled up the window, then eased the key into the ignition. She didn’t need to adjust the mirror or the seats—they fit her perfectly, just like they’d fit Sutton.
As she was pulling out of the lot, something on the seat next to her caught her eye. There was something lodged in the leather crease where the back of the seat met the bottom. It looked like a tiny piece of paper.
She drove down the road until the police station was out of view, then pulled over at the curb and put the car in park. Her attention turned to the paper wedged in the seat.
She pulled at it, her brow wrinkled. Finally, it broke free. It was a tiny scrap of paper with the words DR. SHELDON ROSE
scrawled across it. She recognized the angular writing immediately from the letter she’d found at the bottom of Sutton’s sports locker. It was Thayer’s.
Her heart pounded. She glanced over her shoulder just as a police car turned out of the parking lot, its sirens blazing. For a few agonizing seconds, she was sure the cops were coming for her—maybe planting this important piece of evidence in the car was a test, and she was in trouble for not volunteering it. But then the car zipped past her, the officer at the wheel staring straight ahead. She let out a long breath. The cops weren’t after her. They didn’t even know what she’d found.
I only hoped it led to an answer.
23
THE PSYCHOPATH TEST
Emma drove exactly one and a half miles before she pulled over again, this time in the parking lot of the Tucson Botanical Gardens. Brightly colored blooms could be seen behind the gates. Hummingbirds flitted to feeders. But the gardens were closed for the afternoon, and the lot was almost empty. It seemed like the perfect place to sit and think. There was no way she could wait to look up Dr.
Sheldon Rose until she got home. She had to investigate this now.
Grabbing Sutton’s iPhone from the passenger’s seat, Emma typed DR. SHELDON ROSE into the search engine. In seconds, the results appeared, listing dozens of doctors across the country. Gastroenterologists. Cardiologists.
Some guy who did “Chakra Cleansing.” There were client testimonials, locations, and telephone numbers. Papers authored by various doctors named Sheldon Rose popped up with titles like “The Brain in Motion” and “Healthy Liver, Healthy Life.” And then there were PhD doctors—a Sheldon Rose who taught Victorian literature at the University of Virginia, a Sheldon Rose who worked on smoking cessation therapy in New Hampshire, and one who headed up the MIT computer science department.
Emma clicked on the link to a primary care doctor; maybe Thayer had caught some kind of flu or infection while he was in hiding. The website showed six doctors who worked in a white brick medical facility called Wyoming Health. Dr. Sheldon Rose of Casper, Wyoming, stared back at her with a smug look on his pockmarked face. It didn’t seem like the right answer.
A car honked on the street. A bunch of kids rode by on BMX bikes. A shadow around the side of a gas station across the street caught Emma’s eye, but when she looked closer, she didn’t see anyone there. Calm down, she thought. No one followed you. No one knows you’re here.
She scrolled through the next page of search results.
She wasn’t sure exactly what she was looking for—or how long it would take to find it—but there had to be something, and she’d know it when she saw it. She clicked on link after link, dead end after dead end. After ten minutes, she was about to give up, when suddenly she came upon a website for a Dr. Sheldon Rose in Seattle, Washington. When she opened it, her breath caught in her throat. The home page featured an emblem of an eagle with its wings stretched wide and its head tipped up and to the left. There were tiny initials below its talons that read SPH. It looked like the very same eagle in Thayer’s tattoo.
Her pulse raced as she clicked on the links. A photo of Dr. Sheldon Rose gazed back at her with black eyes nearly hidden behind thick, red-framed glasses. His shaved head and wide jaw made him look more like a bouncer at a motorcycle bar than a doctor. A sick feeling slivered through Emma’s stomach as she scanned his bio: DR.
SHELDON ROSE IS A PSYCHIATRIST WHO SPECIALIZES IN
