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Paul must be thinking along the same lines she is, because he says, ‘What for?’
‘Where do you keep them?’ Webb asks, avoiding the question.
Without answering, Paul leads them outside to a small shed, not far from the cabin. It’s full of firewood, plastic lawn chairs, a lawn mower, and other accumulated junk. Olivia peers around Paul as he opens the door to the shed, and points. Webb pulls out his flashlight and flicks it on, playing the light over the interior of the shed. There’s a hatchet leaning up against the wall. The light lands on a battered red metal toolbox. The detective steps inside and squats down and opens it. He uses an index finger to search inside the toolbox, his blue gloves stark and clean against the dusty interior. Olivia wonders what the hell he’s looking for. She can see the tension in Paul’s shoulders.
‘Do you have a hammer?’ Webb asks.
‘Yes,’ Paul says, ‘it should be there.’ He bends down to look inside the toolbox.
‘It doesn’t appear to be here now,’ Webb says, and turns his attention to Paul. ‘When was the last time you saw it?’
‘I have no idea,’ Paul says. ‘I don’t remember.’ The two men stare at each other for a long moment.
Olivia feels her stomach drop. She’s been telling herself that the detectives are on a fool’s errand, that they won’t find anything, and then they’ll leave them alone. But there it is again, the doubt niggling at the back of her mind – Do the detectives know something that she doesn’t?
Webb looks up at Moen and says, ‘I think we need to get the crime team out here.’
‘You’re going to need a warrant for that,’ Paul says angrily.
Olivia stares at her husband, her heart pounding.
‘I can do that,’ Webb says, ‘with a phone call. And I can have a forensic unit out here within a couple of hours.’
Webb watches Paul Sharpe, standing by the shed in the sunlight filtering through the trees, his hands down by his sides.
‘What’s going on?’ his wife blurts out suddenly, her face ashen. ‘Paul had nothing to do with Amanda Pierce! Why aren’t you after her husband – he’s probably the one who killed her!’
‘Olivia, you’re not helping,’ Sharpe says. ‘They’ve obviously made up their minds. Let them search. There’s nothing to find.’
While they wait for the crime scene team to arrive, Webb and Moen explore the area outside the cabin, while the Sharpes stand by mutely and watch. Finally they all turn as a couple of police cars and a white crime scene van pull up to the cabin.
Webb knows that if this cabin is a crime scene, it has already been compromised. But they must search it regardless. Webb points out the suspicious stains on the kitchen curtains – the stains that look like blood – to the technicians. If it is blood, they will be able to get DNA from the stains. Webb and Moen watch silently while the technicians close all the blinds and curtains to darken the room. A tech begins to spray luminol in the kitchen. The kitchen floor lights up near the back windows and shows a path from there to the sink on the opposite side of the room.
The tech gives the detectives a meaningful glance.
‘What’s that?’ Paul asks.
‘The lit-up areas show the presence of blood,’ Webb says, ‘even when it has been cleaned up and is invisible to the eye.’ He looks at the couple standing at the edge of the kitchen. Webb doesn’t know who looks worse. Olivia Sharpe looks like she’s about to faint. Paul Sharpe is standing completely still, staring at the floor, his face slack with incomprehension and shock.
The tech then sprays the area around the sink and it lights up, too. But as they proceed, the biggest area where blood has been scrubbed clean – at least to the human eye – is at the back of the kitchen on the floor in front of the windows that face the lake. There is evidence of wiped-up blood spatter on the walls and even the ceiling as well. The luminescence fades after a few moments, but they have all seen it.
With the help of the chemical, it has become obvious that Amanda Pierce – or somebody – was attacked in the kitchen near the back windows, and that something – probably a weapon – was carried from where the attack occurred to the kitchen sink. The evidence of blood spatter arcing on the nearby walls and ceiling indicates that she was struck violently and repeatedly with something hard. The missing hammer.
Webb steps forward and says to Paul Sharpe, ‘You are under arrest for the murder of Amanda Pierce. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense. Do you understand these rights?’
Olivia Sharpe slides to the floor before anyone can catch her.
Chapter Thirty
OLIVIA IS SO disoriented that she can barely function. She hardly remembers the drive back to the city. Her husband went in the police car – handcuffed – on his way to the police station. She followed in the back of the detectives’ car, her mind numb, Webb driving, while Moen drove the Sharpes’ car back to the station and the forensic team was left behind to finish processing the scene.
Now she’s sitting at the station, waiting for someone to come out and tell her what’s happening, and what will happen next. She couldn’t bring herself to meet Paul’s eyes when he was arrested. She keeps seeing the lit-up areas where the blood had been in their cabin. She has to fight down the bile that’s rising in her throat. That stain had been there, but invisible, since Amanda was murdered. Olivia had stood on it a couple of weekends ago, the last time they were at the cabin, looking out at the water in the morning, holding her coffee, thinking that everything was right with the world. The last normal weekend. The weekend before she found out Raleigh had been breaking into places. The weekend before Amanda’s body had been found. But nothing had been right at all. These things had already happened, and she had simply been unaware of them. It seems like a lifetime ago. She’s appalled at her own monumental ignorance. She’d had no idea that a murder had taken place where she stood. She can’t get it out of her mind, can’t stop seeing it, the lit-up pattern on the floor, the evidence of blood spatter on the wall and all the way up to the ceiling. She thinks about their missing hammer – heavy and familiar, its old wooden handle with layers of white paint on it. Did Amanda know she was going to die? She must have screamed. Out there, no one would have heard her. Olivia imagines the hammer coming down on the woman whose face she knows only casually, and from that one photograph they keep showing online. When Olivia closes her eyes, she sees the trail leading from where she was murdered to the kitchen sink. Her sink, where she washed the dishes two weekends ago, while Paul stood beside her and dried, making idle chatter, knowing all the while what had happened there the week before, what he’d done. Thinking he’d cleaned it all up.
She remembers Paul’s face, pale as chalk, as they took him away, and he said to her, ‘I didn’t do this, Olivia! You must believe me!’
She wants to. But how can she believe him?
What will she tell Raleigh?
Suddenly she needs a toilet, but there’s no time – she throws up all over her own lap, the chair, the floor.
