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“My point is that you may not have stabbed Aaron, but I still think you killed him.”
Lila needed to know if that stemmed from common senseand good instincts or from a new and so far undisclosed piece of evidence. She could only fight one of those options. “Why?”
Ginny shrugged. “You tell me.”
“It’s your job, not mine.”
This time Ginny smiled. “I’d think you’d want to know who killed your husband.”
“You’d be wrong.” Because now she knew.
She killed him.
ABOUT FIVE MINUTESafter Lila left her office, Pete wandered in. Ginny wasn’t ready for a conversation about protocol or arguments about how she’d handled the case. She kept mentally running through Lila’s reactions to the photos and the news about Aaron’s actual cause of death.
Lila finally had flinched. Subtle, but Ginny saw it. Some part of the news and a few of those photos shocked her. Threw her off her usual steady game. Ginny needed to know why.
Pete lounged in the doorway. “I saw Lila in here. Is it okay for her to see the board?”
She knew he wasn’t seeking the advice from a more experienced officer. This was Pete’s way of letting her know he thought she’d screwed up. She wasn’t interested in playing the game. “No.”
“So... why invite her in? I don’t get it.”
“Look at this.” Ginny grabbed the photographs of Karen’s bracelet and the older one they thought might have belonged to Aaron’s mother off the board.
“I ran a check. There are no photos of Aaron’s motherand no relatives to ask, so I couldn’t track it at all. The newer bracelet is from a company that services jewelry stores, clothing stores. They’re not expensive and can be found almost everywhere. It was a dead end.”
But it wasn’t. The pieces started coming together in the most horrible way.
“That’s not my point. Do we have other bracelet photos?” She could get the bags out of the evidence locker, but the photos might be enough.
Pete slipped out of the room and was back in a few minutes with an envelope in hand. He opened it and spilled the photos on the desk, shifting through until he found alternative angles of the bracelets. “What are we looking for?”
She saw it now. Had no idea how she missed it before. “Seventeen.”
“Right, but Karen’s parents said they’d never seen the bracelet before. I’ve asked two friends, and they say the same thing. She never wore it, and no one remembers her having it.”
“Right.” Ginny picked up the clearer photos of the older bracelet. The one with the “A” charm on it. “What if the long scratch on the back of this charm isn’t actually a scratch?”
“I want to be excited, but you’ve lost me.”
She put the photos of the bracelets side by side and the truth jumped out. “What if that scratch is a number one? As in, number one and number seventeen.”
“You mean victims?”
“Yes.” The more she studied the two, the more convinced she became. The first would have been scratched into theback of the metal decades ago, when the Payne brothers were young, and probably with a knife. The engraving in the more recent one was done by a steadier hand. Possibly an older hand, one more comfortable with killing.
That meant there should be bracelets out there for Yara and Julie, too.
“Seventeen victims?” Pete shook his head.
“Possibly.”
“Holy shit. Are we really going to stop working on this case and just turn it over?” He looked appalled by the idea.
So was she, but she hid the excitement that came with unraveling a case better, thanks to years of practice. “There’s a chain of command and—”
“You can’t be serious.”
