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“You claimed to wear it every single day,” I remind her. “It was your special friendship thing. But in the week after Holly’s death, you couldn’t wear it—because you broke the clasp the night you beat Holly to death.”
“It broke when I accidentally tugged on it.”
“It broke when you swung wide and smashed your best friend’s head in!” I boom. “Pathologists pulled Holly’s blood off the grooves of your locket.”
“What?” Henry’s hand comes up to rest over his own chest. “What is—”
“Holly found out she was pregnant,” I seethe when Fletch closes the second cuff. “She was getting everything she ever wanted. Everythingyouever wanted,” I sneer at Hillary, “so you snapped.”
“If I killed her, then how did she drive her car into that truck?” she smarts. “You’re wrong! Because it wouldn’t be possible for her to drive while she’s dead.”
“Could have been helped along by the brick found in the back of her car,” I counter calmly. “You placed it on the gas pedal. You closed the car and let it go wherever it may. You didn’t care if she hit a truck or the damn ocean, you just needed her gone.”
“Why did none of this show up in the first investigation?” Henry demands. “A-a brick?”
“Because Holly was already an enemy to Detectives Thomas and Kavanagh. She was everyone’s hero, remember?” I turn my attention back to the killer. “She spoke up for victims of sexual abuse. She spoke up foreveryone—and we all know Thomas and Kavanagh enjoyed victimizing people. So when they landed her case and realized who she was, the trouble she had stirred up for them in the past, they had less than a single fuck to give. So brick or not, unless it was Gorilla Glued to the damn gas pedal and a judge was standing over their shoulders, they weren’t putting effort into her case.”
“But the brickwasthere,” Fletch inserts. “After the car and the truck collided, it bounced around a little. But it was there. You got lucky,” he growls for Hillary. “You landed shitty cops and a medical examiner who didn’t care about who was on her table. She didn’t look or give a shit that Holly might be pregnant. She went back to bed that night, and the next day, she took Kavanagh’s call, and he told her to run it as a suicide.”
“It was so long ago.” Hillary cries. “It was a lifetime ago.”
“Stillthislifetime,” I insist. “Which means you owe a debt for the damage you caused. If it had been an accident,” I add, “or even a spur-of-the-moment thing, I could find a little more sympathy for the fact you’ll spend the rest of your life behind bars. But you planned it from the start. You found her a shitty psych and had her put on meds she never needed. You played the long game. Until things changed and you had to improvise.
“And for thirty-six years, only one person on this planet advocated for Holly.” I look across to Henry and shake my head. “Yet, it wasn’t you, her husband who’d sworn his life to her only weeks before.”
“I didn’t…” His breath catches with grief. “I didn’t know.”
“Now you do. Hillary Wade,” Fletch starts. “You’re under arrest for the first-degree murder of Holly Wade thirty-six years ago.” Tugging her around, he starts toward the door. “And don’t worry. We’re gonna talk to the DA about the murder of Holly and Henry’s unborn child, too.”
EPILOGUE
We take Holly’s pictures off the war room wall. The newspaper clippings. The paltry notes on the death scene, and the bullshit toxicology report that picked up low level traces of lithium in her blood, but not the hCG that would have indicated pregnancy.
I take down the photograph of a young Henry, and right beside him, a woman who was supposed to be grieving, but who had Holly’s blood on her hands, and a broken, blood-stained locket in her purse.
She knew what happened. She committed the crime herself and stole two lives at once. But days later, she cried at the woman’s funeral.
“Imagine being so fucking twisted.” Fletch drops our case notes in a storage box. “Being so jealous of someone else’s life that you’d kill for it. Then a year later, you’re married to their guy and sleeping on the dead woman’s side of the bed.”
“Some folks are just weird.”
Stopping on the final image of a beautiful, young Holly on her wedding day, I study her full-length gown and the stomach that gives no hint of a baby growing inside.
Did she know she was pregnant that day?Is that why she went off her meds?Was she trying to protect her baby in those final weeks? And when her time was up, did she grieve the child she would take with her?
“It’s really fucking messed up,” I sigh, setting the photograph in the box and looking to Fletch. “But Henry’s only crime was not seeing that Holly needed a different kind of help. She didn’t need meds and a psychiatrist… she needed to get away from her jealous best friend.”
He nods. “We’ll have to tell Lacey soon.” Placing the lid on his box, he steps to the wall and takes down the two sheets of paper we wrote on less than twenty-four hours ago; passing the note he wrote, he keeps mine for himself and smirks as he places it in his back pocket. “She deserves to know she was right all along.”
“And Holly deserves to be known as brave and strong.” I look down at my folded note. “What did you write?”
He laughs. “Open it and read. What did you write on yours?”
“Hillary.” Slowly, I begin unfolding the paper in my hands. “I figured it was her the moment we got the chain from the grave and Mayet told us Holly had been attacked.”
“Then it’s lucky we’ve got Mayet on side, Cotton Brain. Read mine.”
“You obviously wrote the same name I did.” I roll my eyes. “If you got it wrong, you wouldn’t be telling me to open it.”
