Page 22 of Not a Word

“If she doesn’t turn up here soon, and you find her before I do, let me know immediately,” she said. “What occurred here might seem straightforward, but I’ll still need to speak with her. We’ll be looking into Leah Kennard’s death as a homicide and I’d like to find out what your mother can tell us about her.”

Dad died a murderer. We could put something on his headstone. Loving father, indifferent husband, mistress killer.

“If I hear from her, I’ll tell her to get in touch,” I said.

McCabe nodded solemnly. “You can go,” she said.

This time, I followed orders. I headed for home, still in a daze from the events of the morning. Before I got there, Diana called me.

“Gage hasn’t come back,” she said.

Nine

Galen was a dead-end street. Detective McCabe slowed to a stop out front of 231, the address that was on Leah Kennard’s driver’s license. It was a semidetached, the middle of five connected, two-story homes, none more than twenty feet wide, and each with a driveway about half that size. Of the lot, the Kennard address was the most well-maintained. No flaking paint, a small flower garden below the front window.

There was no car parked out front, but that wasn’t a surprise. She’d found the dead woman’s Toyota Corolla down the street from the Chartwell home and had used the key from her purse to unlock it.

The car yielded no useful information. No discarded fast-food wrappers, nothing in the ashtray, the floor mats free of gravel and dirt. Even the trunk was empty save for a spare and a couple of reusable grocery bags.

McCabe didn’t yet know whether Leah lived alone or shared this place with others, so she rang the bell, steeling herself to deliver bad news to next of kin. Waited ten seconds and rang it again. Finally, she tried knocking, hard. No one came. She peered through a narrow pane of glass in the door, shielding her eyes with her hand. No movement inside.

With one of the other keys from Leah’s set, McCabe was able to open the front door and step inside.

“Hello!” she called out, just in case. Her voice echoed through the house.

She opened the front hall closet. There were half a dozen light jackets or heavier coats in there, all sized for someone of Leah’s build. No men’s coats. On the floor, three pairs of shoes, including one pair of Reeboks, and some boots. McCabe was betting the woman lived alone.

The furnishings in the small living room were simple and functional, the stack of magazines on the coffee table perfectly stacked and lined up with the edge. The kitchen counters were free of clutter, not unlike Leah’s Toyota. The stainless steel sink was empty and clean. The dishwasher’s light was on, indicating a completed cycle. Many items in the refrigerator or cupboard were labeled low-fat, sugar-free, or made without artificial preservatives.

You try to live a healthy life, McCabe thought, and then someone comes along and shoots you in the head. The poor woman should have treated herself to a dozen Krispy Kremes the day before.

McCabe slowly worked her way through the first floor, looking for anything that jumped out at her, and came up empty. She climbed the stairs to the second floor, where there were two bedrooms and a bathroom, although one of the bedrooms appeared to be a combined exercise and storage room. Business boxes were stacked neatly along two walls, and in the center of the room was a basic treadmill, without a screen or other fancy electronic gadgetry.

She went into the bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet, and found, mostly, what she would have expected. Various over-the-counter pain medication and ointments. One antianxiety drug that was also used to treat depression. McCabe made a note of the doctor who’d prescribed it.

McCabe entered the bedroom, opened the top drawer on the bedside table. There was a plastic jar of fruit-flavored Tums, some earplugs, an eye mask, a charger cable for an iPhone. Nothing much out of the ordinary, except for a small photo album.

About the size of a paperback novel turned sideways, she opened it and found, on the inside cover, three words, done in calligraphy. Maybe that had been one of Leah’s hobbies. The words were: My Boy Tom.

What followed were several pages of snapshots of a white male over what appeared to be a span of several years. In some, he looked no older than a teenager, while in others he was, McCabe guessed, in his midthirties. There were a couple of him when he was probably no older than ten. Unmistakably the same person, although in some his hair was long, or he was sporting a beard. In others, shorter hair, clean-shaven. In the later pictures, he was thin, with lank brown hair.

All the pictures appeared to have been professionally processed. The older ones undoubtedly were shot with an actual camera, the roll of film taken to a retailer to be printed. But some of the pictures looked more recent, the cars in the background more current. Those, McCabe guessed, were taken with a phone, then emailed to a photo shop to be printed out on the proper paper.

In all the pictures, this young man was alone. Some of the snapshots were smaller, oddly sized, suggesting the rest of the picture, which presumably had featured other people, had been discarded. At least a dozen of the pictures had been edited with a pair of scissors.

In her pocket was the phone she’d found in Leah’s purse. Having broken the passcode, she brought up the home screen and tapped on the photos app. Up popped hundreds of pictures. McCabe started scrolling through them quickly but found none of the person whose images filled the album. That led McCabe to think these pictures had been taken by someone else and given to her. That, or she’d taken the pictures with a device other than this phone.

McCabe took the album with her—it was small enough to tuck into her purse—and exited the residence, locking the door on her way out. She went first to the house on the right, rang the bell twice, but no one answered. She tried the place on the other side of Leah’s, figuring her closest neighbors would be the most likely to know anything about the woman.

At the second door, someone answered.

It was a curly-haired girl, no more than six or seven years old.

“Hi,” McCabe said, looking down at the child. “Your mom or dad or any adult home?”

The girl said nothing, turned and walked back into the house. A moment later, a thin woman in her late twenties in a Springsteen T-shirt and frayed jeans appeared. She brushed some hair away from her face as she eyed McCabe with curiosity.

The detective displayed her badge, introduced herself, and asked the woman for her name, which was Elaine Turcotte. McCabe said, “I’m seeking information about your neighbor, Leah Kennard.”