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There’s a pause.
“I’d worked that out already,” Griffin says. “But it doesn’t prove anything.”
“Have you told your sister? What does she say?” Jess pushes.
Silence again. “I’ll mention it,” he mutters.
“And the link to …” Jess stops herself. “The earring,” she continues.
“I’ll mention it,” he repeats, and hangs up.
Jess listens to the empty handset for a second, then slowly lowers it from her ear. After the excitement of her discovery, Griffin’s response feels like a massive anticlimax. She stands there, alone in the cold, empty apartment, bare feet, dirty clothes. She feels the void. She misses her family, her daughter, her husband; and, the dead phone still clutched in her hand, she starts to cry.
CHAPTER
27
“TEN MINUTES,” THE voice on the end of the phone says; then the person hangs up. But Cara doesn’t need to know any more. She sighs, pulls her hair away from her face, then lets it down again, wondering what to do with it.
“You know what Mom would say?” Griffin says, standing in the doorway to her office.
Cara smiles. “Don’t rake it back?”
“Exactly—‘and put some lipstick on, you look a state,’” he mocks, then smiles, coming in and sitting on the chair in front of her desk. “Listen, Cara—”
“Enough of this shit between you and Deakin, seriously,” Cara interrupts.
“No, it’s not that.” He hesitates. “We need to talk about the fire from Monday. I think this is Lee—an arsonist from the late seventies.”
He hands her the file. Cara knows what he’s referring to. “But Taylor said this is different. Don’t they have a suspect?” she asks. “Didn’t the wife do it, then abscond? And how do you know about it?”
“I have an alert on the system. It flags up when there’s a suspected murder,” he says, and Cara rolls her eyes. “And you know what Taylor’s like. Couldn’t arrest the right person if the offender shat in her lap. And besides, I don’t think it was the wife. Look at the points of the case. You have paraffin poured through the letter box. Mia’s earring found on the doormat—another sign of the killer messing with us. And the evidence against the wife is circumstantial at best. Fingerprints on a watering can that even Taylor admits was probably taken from the garden shed.”
“So why has she run?”
“She doesn’t trust the police. She was scared, terrified they wouldn’t let her see her daughter again.”
“This is just conjecture, Griffin. How can you be so sure?” Then Cara realizes. “Oh, shit. Oh, Nate, you know where she is?”
“She didn’t do it, okay?” he whispers. “Please keep it between us.”
“Nate, you can’t be hiding a suspected murderer!” Cara glances out into the incident room. “Especially not with you back here. Where is she? Is she at your apartment?”
“No! How stupid do you think I am?” he says, but Cara sees a look pass across his face. Exactly that stupid, she knows. “Just include the case. And if it doesn’t fit, I’ll bring her in.”
“Haven’t we got enough to do? We have few enough resources as it is.” But Cara gives an exasperated sigh. “Fine. Just between us, look into it. But leave Taylor on it, too, for now. I don’t want to assume that everything’s linked.” Griffin goes to leave, but Cara leans forward and catches him by the arm. “Nate, keep me up to speed, okay?”
He nods and leaves. She groans quietly under her breath. She hasn’t got the energy for this, for her brother harboring a potential criminal. She decides that for now, she’ll let it go. She’ll pretend she doesn’t know.
She stands up and leaves her office, watching the rest of the detectives hard at work. This is the part of her job she loves, the buzz in the room—a shared purpose, everyone working together to bring in a result. For a brief moment, she allows herself to feel confident. They will catch him. Then another thought: they have to.
Deakin comes up next to her.
“What was that all about?” he says, watching Griffin.
“Just another case he thinks will fit.”
His gaze shifts to the far side of the room. “Roo’s here for you,” he says.
