Page 52 of You Know Why

“You’re bleeding,” he says. She looks at the cloth, bright red, like a cardinal in the snow.

“Yeah, I cut myself. Don’t worry about it, I’ll deal with it later.”

“Don’t drip it in the crime scene,” he says practically, handing her a handkerchief from his pocket. She winds it around the already soaked cloth, wincing against the pain.

She is going to murder that bastard when she finds him.

Theresa reenters the house, pauses in the grand foyer. Upstairs, or garage?

Something draws her to the door that leads to the garage. It’s a later addition to the house, something Locke built thirty years ago when he started collecting expensive vehicles. There is a hallway that leads to the space, and as she traverses it, she notices speckles of blood on the floor and walls. The droplets get larger closer to the door.

She levels her weapon at the door and opens it. It pulls inward, and she steps through into darkness. She slides a hand along the edge to the left of the doorframe and finds the switch. The room lights up with a small crack. She has to bite her lip not to scream aloud.

Andrew’s father is hanging from the steel beam that supports the garage-door-opening system, face red and congested. There is a yellow cord around his neck. His body drifts ever so slightly in the draft she’s created by opening the door. She doesn’t see the copious amounts of blood like there were in the kitchen, but his shirtfront shows stains, like he had a nosebleed.

A picture is forming in her mind. Lucy Locke was killed first. God knows what sort of horrors they’re going to find on her body. Then the colonel was beaten, marched out to the garage, and hanged. Or there’s more than one perpetrator, and it was done simultaneously. Or maybe they knocked out the colonel . . . Hell, she doesn’t know.

It’s hard to do that to another human being. If Andy Locke was alive when he went up, he would have been struggling, and even though he’s in his early eighties now, he’s a big man; she has to assume that he was at the very least unconscious. She can’t rule out the possibility that he killed Mrs. Locke, then killed himself. But murder/suicide, the night your son shows up a decade after disappearing from his life, feels like too much of a coincidence. Plus, her psycho gentleman caller tells her more is afoot.

Andrew. What have you done? How could you let this happen to them?

Damn it. She should have come calling last night, when she had the sense that something was wrong. She shouldn’t have waited until the morning. She might have interrupted the killer—killers?—before they had a chance to act.

She should have done so many things.

Logic dictates she consider her visitor as a suspect, too. Was he chasing Andrew after the murders? Or looking for answers? She has to think that her visitor stopped here before he came to her house. Brazen asshole. Didn’t get what he wanted from the Lockes and came searching in her kitchen.

It puts Andrew’s culpability in question, and her instinct is to lean toward the masochist who violated her space as the primary suspect here. But what if she’s wrong? What if Andrew is responsible? Could a son do such a thing to his parents? Their relationship was fraught, and then, after Chloe’s death, completely fractured. But why now? Why deviate from the course of taking his young family to Italy and instead make his way to his hometown to murder his parents?

She can’t rule it out. People do insane, inexplicable things all the time. They think they are above the law. That they will get away with it. That the codes of humanity don’t apply to them.

She makes her way carefully back to the front door and exits to the concerned faces of Joe and the first responders of truck twelve.

“Call the coroner,” she says. “They’re both dead.”

Rock You Like a Hurricane

Theresa has barely had time to register the reality of the double homicide when Captain Armstrong pulls into the drive, cutting his siren as he sees them all standing there, faces set and pale. He is a big man with a freshly trimmed fade, calm, gentle, and fair, not suited for the gritty police work on the Atlanta streets where he trained. Malogen is much more his speed. They’ve not had a murder in ten years. He gets out of the cruiser tentatively, as if slowing down might stop the horrible news from reaching his ears.

Theresa fills him in, then, after a warning that he’s about to witness something that will rock him to the core, walks him through the scene and into the kitchen. She steadies him when he gasps in horror.

“My God, who could do this?”

“I don’t know,” she says, honestly, because even if it was the stranger who cut her, she has no idea who he is. And if Andrew is responsible, then he’s as much a stranger as the visitor. But it doesn’t look good for him, regardless. His first wife was murdered. Ten years later, his second wife is hit by an SUV and might be dead. That same evening, his parents are slaughtered, and Theresa herself is threatened.

Something huge is happening, and she has no idea what it is.

“What the hell did you do to your hand?” Armstrong asks, reaching for her wrist. She pulls her hand back to her chest.

“Uh . . . it’s nothing. I was cutting an apple, and the knife slipped. A few stitches and I’ll be fine.” It’s as good a lie as any. She knows in her gut not to mention the caller. If this carnage is his handiwork, she’s lucky to still be breathing.

“Get it stitched up before you do anything else, you hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Theresa? You know you can talk to me, right? Don’t bottle this up.”

“Heard, sir. We should go to the garage now.”