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“Are you all right?” he exclaimed. “Look, I’m sorry for bringing you here. I didn’t stop to think about the effect it might have on you.”
She looked up at him, her eyes unfocused and her expression woozy. She slowly came around and then managed to stand without his assistance.
“We can go back,” he offered.
She looked at the open field and shuddered. “No, I’m here now. Let’s get this done.”
As they entered the path she seemed normal again, even walking with spirit. He wondered why that was, since they were getting closer to, not farther away from, where her sister’s body had been found.
He led her to the edge of the land, and they gazed down at the rocks and the ocean.
“Is this where she was killed?” she said.
“It appears so.”
She shot him a perplexed look. “What do you mean ‘appears’?”
“I meant it exactly as I said.”
She indicated the rocks. “But her body was found down there.”
“Yes,thatis a fact. Everything else is speculation.”
“You’ve lost me.”
Devine didn’t answer. He was thinking about possibilities that he would need to parse through if he was going to get to the truth.
Jenny had been shot in the forehead, and the round exited out the back of her skull and apparently vanished into the ocean. That meant she was looking landward. But if you went to the edge here, wouldn’t you be looking at the ocean? Since that was the whole point of coming to this spot. The casing had been found more than three hundred yards away from where Jenny had fallen. At night she wouldn’t have even been able to see her shooter from that distance. And if she had turned to leave before she was shot squarely in the forehead, would she have been close enough to the edge to topple over it?
“Why did you want me to come here?” she asked, pulling him from these thoughts.
“I need to know if this spot had some special significance for Jenny.”
“None that I know of. Do you think she might have come here to think?”
“In the pouring rain late at night? No, I doubt it.”
“Then you think she came here with someone? Her killer?”
Devine didn’t answer because he was the one doing the questioning, not her. “Did your sister ever talk to you about her work?” “No. Wasn’t it confidential?”
“Did she say it was?”
“No, and I didn’t ask. I was used to our father being unable to talk about political stuff.”
“Right. He served on the Senate Intelligence Committee.”
“I was never interested in any of that. And he and I—”
“—weren’t close?”
“Jenny was his favorite. And I was a distant third behind Dak.”
“Jenny was interested in politics?”
“Jenny was interested in everything,” she said wearily.
“And you? What are you interested in?”
