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“Immortality?” Harris couldn’t hide the disbelief in her voice.
“Look, I know how it sounds.” Bradley ran a hand down his face. “Trust me, I know. He sounds crazy. He is crazy.”
“Why do you think he’s behind these murders?”
“About a year ago, Dad started inviting me out to dinner once a month. I didn’t want to go, but Mom said it would be good for him. Maybe good for me, too. He wouldn’t live forever, despite him saying otherwise and she thought it would be a good idea to bury the hatchet and make peace with him while I could.”
“Your mom sounds like a good person.”
“One of the best,” Bradley said. He smiled, but after a few seconds, it faded. “Dad told me about going to India and finding some shaman or priestess or something that told him how he could fix his heart. How he could cure himself. I don’t pretend to know everything and there’s a lot of ancient forms of medicine that we’re still trying to understand to this day, but I’ve seen the kinds of people he was describing. Some of them are con artists. If you pay them enough money, they’ll tell you a very convincing lie and by the time you figure out you’ve been duped, your pockets are a lot lighter.”
“Did you tell your father this?” Harris asked.
“It didn’t go over well.” He rolled his eyes. “We had another fight, and I didn’t talk to him for another two months. But then he reached out again, said he wanted to go to dinner. I figured he was trying in his own way and I figured I should try, too.”
“Did he talk to you about the shaman again?”
“He didn’t bring it up. Things were normal for a while.”
“Until?”
“Until he started asking about Langford.”
Harris sat up straighter. “How did he know about Langford?”
“I’d talked about him over dinner on more than one occasion. For a while I couldn’t figure out what to talk about, so I talked about work. A lot of weird stuff happens in a hospital, a lot of funny things. I complained about Langford’s arrogance, about how I didn’t think he cared about people. At first my dad’s questions about him were normal. I could tell he was trying to engage, you know? And later, the questions got rather specific.”
“Specific how?”
“He’d ask what I thought about his technique as a surgeon. If he was skilled or not. He’d ask if he’d ever done heart surgery. I thought maybe he was looking for a recommendation for a new doctor, so I answered all his questions.”
“When did you realize that’s not why he was asking?”
“It took me too long.” Bradley’s gaze drifted between them, a thousand-yard stare in a hundred-fifty-square-foot room. “Way too long.”
Harris reached out and put a gentle hand on Bradley’s arm. “Hey, you couldn’t have known, okay? About either one of them. Nobody suspects that of the people in their lives. But you’re doing the right thing about talking to us now.”
“I didn’t put two and two together until a few days ago.” Bradley was angry with himself despite Harris’s words. “Something clicked. I thought back to what he’d said about the shaman. I investigated places he’d gone and did some searching online. There are a lot of articles out there about modern ritualistic sacrifices. Human sacrifices. They believe in this eye for an eye thing. Is your kid sick? Kill another kid and bury them under your house. Your kid will get better. And if he doesn’t, you performed the ritual wrong.”
“Bradley, I believe you—” Harris started.
“But?” he said.
“But we need evidence. I need to be able to issue a search warrant for his arrest.”
“I don’t have anything,” Bradley said. “I wish I did, but—”
“Handwriting,” Cassie spoke for the first time in what felt like hours. “Would you recognize your father’s handwriting?”
“Uh, sure, I think so. Why?”
“On it.” David rushed out of the room. A moment later, he came back with a few different letters and laid them out in front of Bradley. But David didn’t come back alone.
Elizabeth was right behind him.
Cassie closed her eyes and took a deep breath. When she opened them again, Elizabeth was standing in the corner of the room as a silent observer. Cassie wanted to tell David that Elizabeth was there, but with Bradley in the room, she didn’t dare.
Cassie looked down at the letters on the table. She didn’t recognize two of them, but Harris gestured to all three.
