Page 127 of Not a Word

But it was Holden who answered. “Alicia was part of it,” he said, his voice shaking. “I’m trying to figure it out, can’t see the whole picture yet. I think I’ve almost got it and then it slips away. Sorry about everything. Sorry for dragging Gage into it.”

“What’s this got to do with Alicia?” I asked.

“Evelyn Corby was her aunt.”

Diana and I exchanged looks.

I said, “We’ll meet you at Mom’s.”

Forty-Six

Crane waited a couple of minutes after Reece and his wife left the house, wanting to be sure they were really gone and not coming back, before sliding back the louvered closet door in Holden’s bedroom and stepping out.

He’d listened carefully to the entire conversation. Everyone was heading to the same place. Made things a lot easier for him.

He smiled to himself.

To Grandmother’s House We Go.

Forty-Seven

It wasn’t hard to figure out which room to go to.

There was a cluster of police officers in the hallway outside the apartment where the landlord of this apartment building had found a body. What McCabe had learned on the way over was that a tenant from down the hall had noticed blood seeping out from under a door, put in a call to the landlord, a Mrs. Harper, who used her key to open the place up. When she saw the dead woman on the floor, she immediately called the police and did not enter the room.

As McCabe came down the hallway, an officer she’d encountered at the Chartwell house the day before approached. The cop who’d been dumb enough to let Reece Chartwell leave the scene.

“Williams,” she said.

The uniformed cop nodded.

“What do we know?”

“Not much.”

“Neighbors on either side hear anything?”

“Away on that side, and woman on the other side’s in her eighties, needs hearing aids, didn’t have them on. So, no. Here’s the landlady.”

Williams introduced McCabe to Mrs. Harper, a sixtyish woman with short gray hair who barely topped out at five feet.

“Nothing like this has ever happened here before,” Harper said. “This is a good building. I mean, we get the odd neighborly disagreement, but they’re not killing each other.”

“You got a look at the victim?”

“I didn’t get close. She wasn’t moving.”

“But you recognized her.”

“Yeah, she’s the one who lives there.”

“Alone?”

“Yeah. No husband. Saw a guy here occasionally, but he didn’t live here.”

McCabe had her pad out, pen at the ready. “What’s her name?”

“Zane. Alicia Zane.”