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Griffin shakes his head. “Nothing until I got a call last night—one dead in a house fire. Suspected arson. Suspected murder.”
A knot forms in her stomach. That’s her house. Her husband. She starts to feel sick. Jess knows she didn’t start the fire, but she’d assumed it was something random. A teenager on a dare that went wrong. A revenge attack in a case of mistaken identity. She didn’t think the attack could be connected to something as widespread as this.
“It can’t possibly be linked,” she stutters.
He pulls his phone from his jacket pocket, thumb scrolling, then shows her an image. She shies away, but this time it’s innocuous—an earring, a crescent moon, flashes of green and blue in the silver.
“That yours?”
She shakes her head.
“You sure?”
Jess looks again. “Yes.” She pauses. She hardly dares to ask.
“It was found just inside your front door.” Jess opens and closes her mouth. Griffin looks at her. “It belonged to the last rape victim. I believe it was placed there deliberately.”
“But why?”
“That I don’t know.”
He reaches forward and starts the engine again. And she realizes what the phone call was about.
“There’s been another one?” she asks. “We’re going to a murder scene?”
“Me, not you. You’re staying in the car.”
And without waiting for agreement, he guns the engine and they’re back on the road.
* * *
The road turns into a divided highway, then leads into a town. Jess still has the photographs in her hands, and she goes through them again as they drive. Flickering images in the street lights. Death. Destruction. Murder. What could this possibly have to do with her?
Fear takes hold, and she quietly starts to cry again. Who wanted her family dead? There’s nothing exceptional about the three of them that might mark them out as a target. Patrick’s job is dull and desk bound, and she’s no more than a housewife.
She feels disoriented. She’s read more books, watched more TV about this stuff than she can count: documentaries, forensic psychology, the strange and macabre, but right now it’s not helping. Everything she’s heard from Griffin could be torn straight out of the pages of one of those true crime accounts.
And her head is a problem; if she moves too quickly, she still feels dizzy. It’s obvious there’s something not right in there. But she can’t worry about that now.
Less than twenty-four hours ago she was at home with her daughter and her husband. And now she’s cold and wet in a grubby Land Rover with someone she knows nothing about, driving toward another murder.
She’s never seen a dead body—not in real life. But she’s doggedly hanging on to this man as if he holds the solution to the hell that has become her existence.
* * *
They drive for about an hour, until Griffin pulls up in a suburban street. It’s a nice area: big faux art deco houses with gates, and Discoveries and Evokes in their sprawling driveways. Jess looks at him: he’s squinting out the windscreen, obviously searching for someone. He opens his car door as a man walks down the road toward them. He’s older, with a bald head, a round tummy, and a hangdog expression.
Griffin glances back to Jess. “You stay here.” He sees her about to reply. “No argument. Stay here.”
He climbs out of the car and stands with the man, who glares at Griffin. They’re close enough that Jess can still hear their conversation.
“This has got to stop,” the man says. “You can’t hold one mistake over me forever.”
“When this is over, Alan, I’ll stop.”
The man looks at Jess through the windscreen of the Land Rover.
“She’s staying here,” Griffin reiterates, as much for her benefit as for the man’s.
