“No one had any idea. They had seemed close, with no problems that anyone at the school could see. We interviewed students, faculty, and family members. Every person we spoke to was shocked. I went back to their room a week after the murder, and it was just like on the boat. The light was different. I glanced at one of the windows and saw something traced in the glass—the letters ‘NW.’”
“Northwest?” Tom asked.
“We didn’t know at first. I didn’t know if it had any bearing on the case, and I had no idea who had written it and how they’d done it. I assumed a glass cutter. But the writing could have been done anytime during the last two centuries, so even though it piqued my interest, I didn’t really think of it as evidence. At first.”
“But it was?”
“Yes,” Conor said. “Abby Jenkins—the victim—was wearing a diamond ring when she died. It was the middle finger of her right hand, soapparently not an engagement ring. I asked her parents where she had gotten it, and they didn’t know—they had never seen it before. It didn’t come from the family. Helen Wagner, the roommate ...”
“And suspect?” Tom asked.
Conor nodded. “She wasn’t talking to us. Her father was a lawyer in Hartford, and he’d immediately gotten her a top defense attorney. The murder was so brutal, the prosecutor had requested no bail. I was in court the day of her bail hearing, and I noticed a clear hostility between Helen and her father. Helen practically spit at him when he leaned toward the defense table to talk to her.”
“So that caught your attention,” Tom said.
“Yes. It was extreme. It was more than ‘if looks could kill.’ Another thing—her mother was there but not sitting with her father. I checked, and they were not divorced, but they had recently separated. Like a week before. And Helen wanted her mother—that was obvious. She was crying, reaching out her arms toward her as the marshals led her out of the courtroom.”
“Did you talk to the mother?” Tom asked.
“Tried to, but she wouldn’t see me at first. A few weeks went by. I had gone back to the girls’ dorm room and seen the scratched glass. I’d reexamined everything we’d collected from the room, including schoolbooks, papers, letters, clothes, everything. Abby had a book of poems by Pablo Neruda—it was calledLove Poems. Inside the front flap was an inscription:For you, always.Nicholas.”
“N from NW on the window?” Tom asked.
“Yeah. It took me a while to put it together. I kept thinking about that family dynamic in the courtroom, the way Helen had been toward her parents. And I’d found out about a big fight they had all had a few weeks earlier—very loud and public, at parents’ weekend. Helen’s mother had started screaming at Abby.”
“What did Abby do?”
“It was more like, what did Helen’s father do? His name was Nicholas Wagner, and he had been having a sexual relationship withAbby for over a year. He gave her a diamond ring that had belonged to his grandmother, and she’d worn it all that time. It had been in a safe-deposit box, and Helen had never seen it, but when his wife went to parents’ weekend, she spotted Abby wearing it.”
“And she flipped out.”
“Yep. It was a bad scene. After the parents left, Helen confronted Abby in their room, and Abby admitted it. Helen saw her family breaking apart, blamed Abby for it, and she killed her. Hit her over and over with a crystal paperweight,” Conor said, remembering the trail of blood from where Abby had tried to crawl away.
“Abby was just a kid, though,” Tom said. “It wasn’t her fault. That ‘relationship’ was sexual assault.”
“Yes, it was. And we charged Nicholas with it. Meanwhile, Abby had thought it was love. He had convinced her it was. Now Abby is dead, and Helen is serving a sentence for first-degree manslaughter,” Conor said. “I don’t know if I’d have solved it if Abby hadn’t used the ring to scratch his initials in the window glass. NW.”
“Wow,” Tom said. “So she was in love, but she wound up leaving a clue that revealed who her killer was.”
“Unwittingly, yes,” Conor said.
Tom leaned closer to the computer screen. “Do you think we have something similar here? A victim writing something that might identify her killer?”
“That’s a possibility,” Conor said.
“And what, he gave her a diamond ring before chaining her up?”
“It tracks with the part of him that wants to treat her like a queen.”
“I’m starting to see double,” Tom said, rubbing his eyes and pushing his desk chair back. “You take a look.”
Conor was glad to, anything to take his mind off Kate heading to Mystic without him. They were independent, they had always done their own things. As much as they loved being together, they each had work and separate interests. Kate knew that he was investigating theviolence onPsyche, and it made sense for him to stick with it and for her to go there alone.
He was thinking of Kate, but as he stared at the window markings, he suddenly saw clearly, and letters came into focus.
“Hey,” he said, pointing.
“What?” Tom asked.
