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His mom looks anxiously at him, and flashes a glance at his dad.
‘It’s complicated,’ his father says with a sigh, sitting down at the kitchen table.
Raleigh waits, his body tense. A wave of anxiety comes over him.
His dad says, ‘Those were the police detectives investigating the murder of Amanda Pierce, the woman down the street.’ He stops there, as if he doesn’t know what on earth to say next.
Raleigh can feel his heart thumping. He looks at his father, then at his mother. She’s silent, wary. He turns his attention back to his dad. He’s never seen him at a loss for words before. ‘Why were they talking to you?’ Raleigh asks. He’s not stupid. He wants to know what’s going on.
‘It’s just routine,’ his dad says. ‘They’re talking to lots of people who knew Amanda Pierce.’
‘I thought you didn’t know her,’ Raleigh says.
‘I didn’t, not really. She was a temp at the office sometimes, so I knew her, but not very well. She never worked in my department.’
Raleigh looks at both of his parents; he senses there’s more they’re not telling him.
‘Look, Raleigh, there’s something you should know,’ his dad says carefully.
Suddenly he doesn’t want to hear it. He wants to be a child again and run from the room with his hands over his ears and refuse to listen to what his dad has to say. But he can’t. He’s not a little kid any more. His father gives him a man-to-man look across the kitchen table and says, ‘I saw Amanda carrying on with someone at the office. It was improper. I warned both of them to stop it. Someone else saw me arguing with Amanda about it and put two and two together and got five. I’ve told the detectives the truth. I wasn’t involved with her in any way. We weren’t having a – relationship. I don’t know who killed her. We can leave that up to the police to figure out. Okay?’ He adds, ‘There’s nothing to worry about.’
Raleigh stares at his dad, disturbed by what he’s just heard. He’s pretty sure his dad’s telling the truth. He can’t think of a single time his dad has ever lied to him before. He sneaks a glance at his mom, but she’s watching his father, and there’s anxiety written all over her face. She doesn’t look like she thinks there’s nothing to worry about. He wonders if he can trust his dad.
Raleigh nods, frowns. ‘Okay.’
His mom says, looking directly at him, ‘I don’t think this is something anyone else needs to know.’
Raleigh nods and says hotly, ‘I’m not going to say anything.’ Then he retreats back upstairs to his room.
After driving in silence for a while, Webb turns to Moen and says, ‘He turned his phone off.’
Moen nods. ‘Right.’
Webb says, ‘We’ll get his phone records, but I bet we’ll find a call from his aunt that day – if she calls him every day anyway. She lives out that way. She lives alone and has a bad memory, she’s confused. What if he was relying on all of that, for his wife at least, and went out that night and met – and killed – Amanda? We can’t trace where he was if his phone was turned off.’
‘It’s possible,’ Moen agrees. ‘But we haven’t actually established that he was seeing her.’
‘But it’s possible. Becky Harris thought he was seeing her.’
Moen nods and says, ‘His wife looked worried. What is she so worried about if he just went to visit his aunt?’
‘We should get him down to the station,’ Webb says. ‘See if we can get anything else out of him.’
Chapter Twenty-three
WHEN THE DETECTIVES return to the station, there’s news.
‘We’ve got something,’ a young officer says, approaching them. He’s one of the uniformed cops sent out to canvass the city and its surrounding area. ‘We found a hotel where one of the clerks recognized Amanda’s picture. She came there occasionally with the same man. And then we looked at the security camera footage.’
‘And?’ Webb asks, feeling an uptick of excitement.
‘You have to see this,’ the officer says, and leads them to a computer.
They look down at the screen.
The quality is quite good. Webb sees Amanda first, flicking her hair over her shoulder. Then the man with her comes into the frame. He retrieves his credit card at the desk and then turns, his face caught squarely by the camera. Larry Harris.
‘Well, well,’ Webb says. He glances at Moen. ‘See how they’re coming along with the security cameras at the resort – we need to know if Larry Harris’s car ever left.’
Raleigh is no longer grounded. His mom couldn’t stand him moping around the house without his phone and the internet to keep him busy, so at least he’s allowed to leave the house again, not just for school and practice. He heads out on his bike, cycling around the neighbourhood, trying to work off some of his stress. Without the internet, there’s not much to do at home. And he had to escape the tension in the house. He cycles down the residential streets, past some of the houses he’s snuck into.
He almost got caught last night. That’s it – he has to stop. It isn’t worth the risk any more. Breaking and entering. Messing with people’s computers. Even though he’s not actually stealing anyone’s account info, or distributing malware or porn or anything – he’s not tampering – what he’s doing is still a crime. The cops won’t care that he’s just doing this stuff for fun.
He rides slowly past the Pierce place, glancing at it as he goes by. He remembers being inside that house, how clean it was, how orderly. Maybe because there were obviously no kids living there. While he was on the computer, he’d glanced through the desk drawers and found a cell phone at the bottom of one of them. It looked like a cheap, pay-as-you-go phone. Maybe it was an old one, or a spare. He’d turned it on – it had a charge – but it didn’t really interest him, so he turned if off again and tossed it back in the drawer and soon left.
Later, when he’d learned that the woman in that house had been murdered, it gave him a chill. The police must have found the phone when they searched the house. His one worry now is that his fingerprints are all over that phone, and in that house. He picks up speed, thinking uneasily about the woman, Carmine, and the letters.
Raleigh’s starting to understand that everyone has secrets – he’s seen what some people keep on their computers; nothing really surprises him any more. Raleigh has secrets, and his parents obviously have theirs, too. Perhaps he should be snooping in his own house.
It’s Saturday afternoon and the tension in the house is driving Olivia mad. Paul is upstairs in the office. Raleigh has gone off to his room. Olivia tries to talk herself out of going over to confront Becky. She’s worried about what exactly Becky might have said to the detectives about Paul. Does she know more than she admitted to Olivia? Did she make things up to take the attention off her own husband? Has Becky been completely honest with her? In the end, she can’t stop herself. She grabs a jacket and leaves the house without telling anyone where she’s going.
On the walk over, she has a crisis of confidence and half hopes that Becky is not in. But Olivia keeps going, even though it makes her sick that she’s left her own house and is going to see Becky to try to find out information about her own husband. She feels lately that everything she took for granted – her good son, her faithful husband – has to be re-evaluated.
