Page 48 of In Her Path

“We’re concerned,” Jenna said evenly. “Given the circumstances.”

Meredith looked at the ice pick on the desk again. Then back at Jenna. Something shifted in her expression.

“Come to my desk,” she said. “I’ll pull up the security footage.”

They gathered around Meredith’s monitor, the three of them crowding slightly in the smaller office. Meredith typed on her keyboard. The building’s security system was cloud-based, the footage organized by date and camera position.

“What time are you looking for?” Meredith asked.

Jenna thought for the moment, trying to assemble a hypothetical chronology.

“Start after 3:30 a.m.,” Jenna said.

Meredith pulled up the interior corridor footage and the lobby camera for that hour. The building sat empty and dark as she started to scroll through it.

Then, at 4:15, the lobby camera picked up a figure entering through the front door.

Jenna leaned closer. The footage was grainy—standard definition, the kind that was fine for general deterrence and not much more. But the figure was clearly a woman, wearing a navy pantsuit with brass buttons and a broad-brimmed hat that obscured most of her face. She had a handbag slung over her shoulder. Even in the poor resolution, Jenna recognized the outfit. She’d seen it the previous evening, on the steps of City Hall, and also on the Holts’s security footage a little while ago.

Beside her, Jake went very still.

On screen, the figure moved down the corridor toward the Mayor’s office. She was inside for less than four minutes. Then she re-emerged and walked back through the lobby, the brim of the hat angled just enough downward that the camera caught nothing useful. She was gone before 4:20.

Jenna straightened up.

“That’s the Mayor’s outfit,” Meredith said. Her voice had gone thin. “She wore that to the meeting last night.”

“Yes.”

Meredith turned in her chair to face Jenna. “What does this mean? Do you think …” She swallowed hard. “Do you think Mayor Simmons is a suspect? In the murders?”

As Jenna struggled to decide what to tell her, Meredith clearly interpreted her silence in the worst possible light.

“Oh God,” she said. She pressed one hand over her mouth. “Oh God, I think I’m going to be sick.” She stood up abruptly, squeezed past Jenna, and walked quickly away.

“Meredith, wait,—” Jenna said.

But Meredith continued on her way down the hall toward the restrooms.

“She’s upset,” Jake said.

“Understandably,” Jenna said. “But I wish I knew the answer to her question. What does this mean? We don’t know for sure that it’s really Claire Simmons we’re looking at.”

“She could be our killer,” Jake said, “or someone went to a lot of trouble to make her look like one.”

“Either way, that ice pick was left on her desk deliberately. Why would Claire do that? And she’s missing.”

But before either of them could decide on the next step, the front door of the office swung open, and Frank Doyle came through it with Piper one step behind him. Frank’s eyes made a quick circuit of the room the way they always did—old habit from thirty years on the job. He took in Jenna’s expression and said, without preamble: “What happened?”

Jenna replied, “I need to show you something.”

She led them into the Mayor’s office and kept her distance from the desk, letting Frank and Piper approach at their own pace. Frank saw the ice pick immediately.

“Identical to the one used on Paige?” he asked.

“We’ll need forensics to confirm. But it looks that way.”

Meanwhile, Jenna’s sister had stopped a few feet from the desk, and her attention wasn’t on the ice pick itself. Her gaze had gone slightly unfocused, the way it sometimes did—not absent, but turned inward, tuned to a frequency no one else in the room could hear.