She settled at the small table in the center of the room. “How do we start?”
He joined her at the table, taking the chair opposite her. “There are certain aspects of the case that we should cover first. The detective reopening the investigation will be moving quickly—if he’s any good at all. If we can prevent it, we don’t need to let him get ahead of us.”
“Makes sense.” She sipped her coffee.
He sure hoped she would understand the necessity of what he was about to propose. “It’s important that our first move is a visit to where the murder happened.”
Her eyes widened with something like disbelief. “We have to do that now? Today?”
“It’s imperative, yes,” he confirmed. “I wouldn’t ask otherwise. And although the agency has rented the cottage for the week, we can’t be sure at what moment the police will step in and reseal it as a crime scene for the purposes of their investigation. If that happens, it will be difficult—maybe impossible—to get in.”
A slow, vague nod, then, “Okay. If that’s what it takes, then I can get through it.”
There was that determination he’d noted in what he’d read about her background. “Good.”
She studied him a moment, her face clouded with uncertainty as if trying to articulate what was on her mind. Finally, she said, “I don’t want to sound as if I’m doubting your decisions about how to proceed, but it’s been a little over two years. Really, what do you expect to find? If the police didn’t find any evidence in the days immediately following what happened, how can you expect to at this point?”
He wasn’t sure his explanation would set her any more at ease. “It’s not as much about what we might find as far as physical evidence as it is about what you might remember by being in the place where it happened.”
She drew back a little. “I told the police everything I remembered. The drug those…men used left me in sort of a brain fog. In and out of consciousness.” She shook her head. “I can’t imagine recalling anything new now.”
The drug, Rohypnol, used the way it was—injected—could have killed them both. During trial, the prosecutor had gone so far as to suggest Rory had a drug problem and that maybe shehad drugged her husband. It was possible, they had claimed, that it was the drugs that caused the night to turn violent. The scenario had been presented as if the husband had realized what his wife had done and grown upset, and she may have lashed out more violently than intended. Not impossible, Chance mused, but highly unlikely.
“But you might,” he countered, shifting his thoughts back to the here and now. “All it takes is one little thing to turn the case around.”
She closed her eyes, drew in a big breath, then let it out. “You—” she opened her eyes once more “—don’t understand. I have dreamed about what happened nearly every night for the past two years. It is always the same…always exactly what I told the police back then.”
“The mind has a way of protecting itself,” he explained. “Sometimes there are things our brains hold back to prevent the pain we might not be able to tolerate. Other times, that hidden thing only needs a little prompt or a little time to push it out where we can see it. Going there, walking in the room…touching the things you touched that night might trigger a memory you buried so deep that it has never surfaced even in your dreams.”
She held his gaze for a long moment, and he was startled all over again by the barely there shade of blue. “As much as I wish it didn’t,” she admitted, “what you say makes sense.”
“We can grab breakfast en route,” he offered, “if you’re prepared to go now.”
“Sure.” She finished off her coffee and took the cup to the sink.
He checked the back door and secured the dead bolt, while she gathered her phone and went to the front door. He met her there, waited for her to go out first. Once they were down the porch steps, she surveyed the damage to the house.
She winced. “God, that’s pretty awful.”
“We can clean it up when we get back. We’ll need to stop for a few things, but it shouldn’t be that difficult.” He turned his attention to the window. “The window will be a little more complicated. We’ll have to find a shop that can cut the glass to the proper size. A little glazing putty, and that’ll do it.”
“Sounds like a good plan.” She turned and headed for his car.
She wasn’t convinced that any amount of work woulddo it, he suspected. Not when it came to her life. He got how she would feel that way. It was really hard to put your life back together when others kept knocking you down. She had been knocked down at every turn after her husband’s murder.
Just maybe, he could change that. For today, he would settle for a single glimmer of tangible hope she could grab on to.
In the end it would take more than hope to turn this situation around. Especially when logic dictated there was no doubt someone out there who didn’t want the story to change.
CHAPTER FIVE
White Cottage
Scenic Drive
Hollywood, Alabama, 8:50 a.m.
Rory’s skin felt as if ants were crawling all over her. She needed to move…to do something. But all she could do was stare through the windshield at the chalet-style cottage in front of her.
