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Rachel followed Jack over to the body. There was also a member of forensics on the scene, standing over the body and taking notes. She was all business, her jaw tight and her brow furrowed as she typed notes into a smart pad. She glanced upat the newcomers for only a moment and spoke as if on an automated loop.
“Donna Newsom, aged thirty-two. Married to Chris Newsom, a surgeon employed at the hospital and with two specialist organizations.”
“Where is he right now?”
“In the back bedroom with a cop.”
“You mind if we have a look?” Jack asked.
The woman shook her head, still not looking up from her pad. Jack and Rachel stepped in a bit closer. Rachel had seen plenty of violent crime scenes before. Near the beginning of her career—her fourth case, in fact—she had walked into an apartment to find a woman that had been shot in the head with a shotgun from point-blank range. What she saw in the Newsome’s hallway was on that same level.
The right side of Donna Newsom’s head had been caved in. To say her skull had been dented was an understatement. Blood oozed from at least three different wounds on her head, still flowing lightly and adding to the copious amount already on the hardwood floors. The indentations were too small to have been created with a bat and too blunt and wide to have been a hammer. Maybe a club of some kind or—
Her train of thought was derailed by a loud wailing from the back of the house. She assumed this was the husband. She couldn’t begin to imagine what it must be like to come home, walking through your front door to find such a sight.
Rachel stepped away from the body and made her way through the kitchen and den area, looking for anything that might lend some clues. There was an unfinished dinner on the coffee table in the den. The television was on, showing old re-runs of a 90s sitcom. She made her way back to the front door, looking closely at the frame and the door’s edges.
A cop slowly approached her from behind.“Yeah, I didn’t see anything, either. We’ve checked the windows and the back doors, too.”
“And no signs of forced entry?”
“None.”
She finished her check and then looked back to Jack. He was now speaking to the forensics woman and peering back to the rear of the house. She knew they were going to need to speak with the husband. It was a duty she typically didn’t enjoy; trying to get answers out of someone that has just learned within the last few hours that a loved one had been murdered was heart-wrenching. But given that, Rachel knew she was on borrowed time and wasn’t even supposed to be here made her a bit more grateful for eventhatopportunity.
“Agent Rivers, I’m going to take a look around the exterior,” she announced.
He nodded as the husband once again cried out from the back. This time, it was followed by a clattering noise—likely something being thrown across the room.
As she made her way down the porch stairs and into the immaculate lawn, she ran over the scant facts of this scene that had already presented themselves. Based on where the body had fallen, she assumed the killer had come in through the front door. There was no way to prove this without a doubt, but Rachel's experience with scenes like this indicated that it was very much the case. That would mean the killer knocked on the front door, and Donna had answered it. Did this maybe mean she knew the killer? Or was it simply that they lived in the sort of neighborhood where answering a knock on the door in the evening wasn't automatically seen as dangerous?
She walked to the car and grabbed the small flashlight out of the glovebox. She spent the next several minutes canvassing the yard, specifically along the edges of the house. Everything about the lawn was well-maintained and perfect. The grass was lush and had some give to it, almost like a cushion. That meant if someone had been walking around the house looking for a way in, they would have certainly left prints.
But she saw none. She also checked every window she had easy access to, including two on the large back deck. But just as the police officer had told her, there were no signs of a forced entry. The killer had walked directly to the front door and brazenly knocked, fully intending to kill Donna. Rachel assumed he'd wasted no time. Her body had been only slightly halfway down the entryway hall, headed toward the kitchen. Rachel assumed the killer had attacked the moment the door was opened.
He came to this house intentionally, knocked on the door, and killed a nurse, she thought.She had to have known him to let him in, right?
She wasn’t sure. And the only way to get more answers was going to be to talk to the husband. She made her way back around to the front porch, where a cop held the glass screen door open for her, and the wails of a bereaved husband seemed to usher her inside.
Awake, but to piece together
CHAPTEREIGHTEEN
Rachel wasn’t at all surprised that the husband refused to speak with anyone as soon as the coroner arrived. Rachel and Jack stood aside as the body was removed from the house. The husband, Chris Newsom, roared with age for a moment but then collapsed to his knees not too far away from where his wife had died. He buried his head in his hands and wailed. He could barely process his own grief, much less speak intelligibly to two FBI agents.
The cop that had been speaking with him and trying to keep Chris under control over the last hour and a half came out of the hallway and into the kitchen, where Rachel and Jack were standing. The cop, an older African American gentleman with a thick mustache, looked worn out and unbearably sad. He saw Rachel and Jack and came over to them, his sorrowful eyes briefly wandering in the direction of where Chris Newsom was grieving on the floor.
“Does he have any friends or family to call on?” Rachel asked the cop.
“A sister in Boston that is catching a flight in the morning. He says he has a close friend—a doctor at the hospital—but he doesn’t want to call him. Not yet.”
“We really need to talk with him,” Jack said.
“Based on what he’s told me, I think he’ll be up for it. Just… give him a second while they take here out of here.” He sighed and then said, “Just give me a second while I get him away from all of this damned blood. Wait for us back in the bedroom.”
Rachel and Jack did as they were asked, venturinginto the hallway. It was wide, each hall adorned with pictures of Chris and Donna Newsom. There were pictures from their wedding, pictures of them smiling at the beach, and a shot of Donna in front of a waterfall. The bedroom was in the back, an enormous room with a king-sized bed, built-in bookshelves, and an attached master bathroom. A set of French doors led out to the back deck.
“The coroner said blunt force trauma to the head is the clear cause of death,” Jack said. “With what, though, we don’t know.”
