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“I need to see,” Remmi insisted. “At least a photograph.”
“It’s not a good idea,” Settler said.
“I still want to see.”
Martinez was shaking his head, but Settler seemed to finally get it. “Okay.” She opened her phone, found the images, sat in the vacant seat next to Remmi on the couch, then said, “But I’m giving you fair warning. These aren’t going to be easy to see.”
And she was right. There were shots of the car and items that had been located inside, including Didi’s clutch purse, a once sparkly pink cigarette case, and the car seat, all of which brought back memories.
But the reddish-brown stains on the driver’s seat were horrifying.
Oh, Mom, what happened?
She must have blanched because Settler, who had been showing each of the pictures, stopped. “You want to go on?” she asked.
No. “Yes,” she heard herself say, and then recoiled at the first shot of the corpse, a grisly skeleton with an obscene grin and black holes for nose and eyes.
Her stomach clenched. Could this horrid, lifeless, desiccated body really be the once-vibrant woman who had been so full of life? The woman who had danced with her babies, laughing and throwing her head back in delight, only to plot and scheme and even sell those very infants? She forced herself to keep her eyes on the picture, taking in the macabre image. How could anyone know . . . and then she saw it, noticed the slight flair of one of the skeleton’s eye teeth. Remmi remembered Didi at her makeup mirror, tilting her head and studying that tooth.
“I’m gonna get that fixed one of these days,” she’d promised, catching a nine-year-old Remmi watching her in the mirror.
But, of course, Didi never had fixed the tooth.
Remmi swallowed. “It’s Didi,” she said, pulling herself together as she handed the phone back to Settler. Noah’s arm tightened around her. “She was murdered, wasn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“Then we have to find out who did it. And you might want to start by talking to her sister.” She had to bite her tongue to keep from spilling the beans about what they’d seen and overheard on the tiny spy camera.
“Vera Gibbs. We were going to visit her next,” Settler said.
“Good,” Remmi said with feeling.
CHAPTER 31
As Settler drove away from the Emerson home, navigating the steep streets of the Mount Sutro neighborhood, she sensed they were closing in, the pieces of this fragmented puzzle starting to fit together. But she wasn’t quite there yet. It was almost as if she was trying to force a piece that was in the wrong spot, and she would have to shift around her thinking and figure it out.
Finding Didi Storm’s body had been a lucky coincidence. Who would have guessed that, at the very time the book about her was being published, twenty years after her disappearance, her body would be discovered?
Or had someone planned that, too? How?
“Ready for some overtime?” she asked Martinez, who was riding shotgun again. Once more, it was raining, pouring, and her wipers were having trouble keeping up with the onslaught, the city lights a blur.
“Sure. I’m already on the clock.”
“What about Maria and the kids?”
He shrugged. “They’re used to my hours.” He slid her a look, “And it’s getting near Christmas, so Maria will appreciate the overtime.”
“So let’s go have a visit with Gibbs.”
“In Walnut Creek? It’ll take a while to get there.” He checked his traffic app. “Well, about forty-five minutes, maybe less. Traffic’s not that bad on 80. But it’s pretty late.”
“All the better,” she said, her hands gripping the steering wheel as the Bay Bridge came into sight, its thousands of LED lights illuminating the spans and cables. “Maybe the whole family will be there, and we can have a chat with Milo, Billy, and Jensen. Four for the price of one.”
He grunted. “Fantastic.”
“You’re in?”
