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‘How many are there?’
‘Just two. Raleigh said he only broke into two houses. I made him show me which ones.’
‘Whose was the other house?’
Olivia hesitates. ‘The Pierces’.’
‘Seriously?’
Olivia nods. She feels sick about it. What if Robert Pierce is a murderer?
‘Do you believe him?’ Glenda asks after a moment.
‘I did. To be honest, I don’t know any more. Maybe Zoe’s right, and he didn’t tell me about all of them. I never would have thought Raleigh capable of such a thing.’ They’re quiet for a moment, walking down the sidewalk in the dark, Olivia imagining Suzanne, Becky, Jeannette and Zoe all getting on to their computers as soon as they can and checking their sent messages looking for emails they hadn’t written. After a while Glenda asks, ‘Do you think Robert Pierce murdered his wife?’
Olivia glances at her uneasily. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘What do you think?’
‘I don’t know either.’
‘I didn’t even know her,’ Olivia says, ‘but she was a neighbour – she was one of us. It seems awfully close.’
Carmine Torres has decided to go door-to-door on her street, telling her neighbours that she’d been broken into and showing them the letter. This morning, she’d spoken again briefly to Zoe next door, who told her that no one in her book club the night before had heard anything about it. Then of course they’d started talking about what had been on the news: a woman from this supposedly quiet neighbourhood – just one street over – had been found brutally murdered.
Carmine also plans to go up and down Sparrow Street, the street the murdered woman lived on, and see what she can learn about this woman in the boot. Carmine loves a good gossip.
Before she goes, she wanders around the house uneasily, touching things, studying them, straightening pictures. She looks inside her medicine cabinet. Has anything been moved? She can’t tell for sure. She feels a bit creeped out now, alone in her own house, which she never was before. She hates being a widow; it’s lonely. And she hates the idea of someone – even if only a teenage boy – rifling through her things. Reading what’s on her computer. Not that there’s anything on there that shouldn’t be. What kind of kid would do something like that? There must be something wrong with him.
Raleigh finds himself avoiding Mark at school on Tuesday morning. He doesn’t want to talk to him about the meeting with the lawyer. He’s decided this is it – he’s not going to break into any more houses. Ever.
Webb and Moen are back at the medical examiner’s office for the autopsy results on Amanda Pierce. The large room is freshly painted, and lots of natural light floods the space from the large windows all along the upper half of the room. The smell is still bad, though. Webb sucks on one of the mints that Moen has brought. His shoes squeak on the spic-and-span tiles. Along the wall beneath the windows is a long counter with sinks and sterilized instruments neatly laid out. Weigh scales hang over the counter – they look just like the scales in the supermarket where one might weigh a paper bag of mushrooms, Webb thinks.
John Lafferty, a senior forensic pathologist, says, ‘Cause of death is blunt force trauma. She was struck on the head repeatedly with an object, most likely a hammer, by the looks of it.’
Webb focuses on the body lying on the steel table. The sheet has been peeled back. It’s a gruesome sight. The decomposing body is bloated and the skin has a hideous, greenish cast. She looks much worse than she did the day before.
‘Sorry about the smell, but bodies tend to deteriorate rapidly once they come out of the water,’ Lafferty says.
Undeterred, Webb moves in closer to study the corpse. The autopsy has been concluded, the organs studied and weighed, and she has been sewn up again. Her head is a pulpy mess. One of her eyes is mashed out of her face.
‘It’s almost impossible to estimate time of death under the circumstances,’ the pathologist says. ‘It’s very difficult to determine time of death from post-mortem changes more than seventy-two hours after death, and the fact that she’s been in the water – sorry.’
Webb nods. ‘Understood.’
‘No obvious evidence of sexual assault or any other injuries,’ the pathologist continues. ‘She was definitely dead before she went into the water. No defensive wounds, nothing under her nails. No obvious signs of a struggle, even though it appears she was struck from the front. Perhaps she knew her killer. Most likely the first blow came as a surprise and incapacitated her. She was hit several times, with great force. The first couple of blows probably killed her. The repeated blows indicate uncontrollable fury.’
‘So it was personal.’
‘Looks like it.’ He adds, ‘She was a healthy woman – no signs of any old fractures that might indicate ongoing domestic abuse.’
‘Okay,’ Webb says. ‘Anything else?’
‘She was pregnant. About ten weeks. That’s about it.’
‘Thank you,’ Webb says, and he and Moen head out. ‘We know she was alive and at work on Friday, September twenty-ninth,’ Webb says. ‘She must have been killed sometime that weekend. She was probably dead by the time her husband reported her missing on Monday.’
They walk to the car, both of them inhaling deep breaths of fresh air. Moen says, ‘Not every man is happy to learn he’s going to be a father.’
‘A bit drastic, isn’t it, murder?’ Webb counters.
She shrugs. ‘We’ve only got Robert Pierce’s word for it that she told him she was going away with Caroline,’ Moen points out. ‘No one’s corroborated it – she didn’t mention going away for the weekend to anyone she was working with.’
Webb nods. ‘Maybe she wasn’t going anywhere. Maybe he made that up, after he killed her. We haven’t found any record of her booking a hotel.’
‘He could have killed her and packed her bags and sunk her car and hoped she would never be found. So that it looked like she planned to leave him.’
‘We’d better talk to Caroline Lu,’ Webb says.
Olivia is having an unproductive week. She blames Raleigh – and the shocking news about Amanda Pierce – for her inability to concentrate. It’s early Tuesday afternoon and she’s accomplished almost nothing yet today. She turns away from the file open on her screen, gets up, and goes downstairs for a fresh cup of coffee. The house is quiet – Paul is at work and Raleigh is at school. But she can’t stop thinking about things other than her current editing project. She’s worried about Raleigh.
What if Raleigh isn’t telling her everything? She didn’t like the way his eyes shifted away from hers when she asked him. He seemed genuine when he said he wasn’t taking drugs, but she still feels there’s something he is keeping from her.
And Olivia can’t put her finger on why, but she can’t help feeling that Paul is keeping something from her, too. The last few weeks he’s seemed to have something on his mind, something he’s not sharing with her. When she’d broached it with him, he’d brushed her off with a comment about being overloaded at work. Of course, now he’s upset about Raleigh, too.
