CLAUDIA
One Day Earlier
Every time I ask Deputy Scott Dwyer a question he has one of three answers:
I don’t know. I can’t say.
Why don’t you go home and I’ll call you when we know something?
I find the third one especially maddening. If your baby sister were missing after her husband was found in a pool of blood in their kitchen, would you just go home and chill until the incompetent deputy got his head out of his ass? No, I didn’t think so. Unfortunately, the police chief is out of town on vacation and won’t be back until Monday. God knows how badly Scotty will muck everything up by then.
“Mrs. Delaney,” Scotty says to me as we stand in the freezing rain outside my sister’s house. His freckles have faded from when he was in high school and he’s bulked up enough to fill out his blue uniform—he used to be passably cute when Quinn was dating him, but now he’s grown into someone the housewives love to ogle. “You should go home. We’re handling this.”
“Handling this?” I stare at him. “The same way you handled it when you came here a few hours ago, after getting a call from a neighbor that they heard screaming. And instead of looking inside the house, you just walked away? Handle it kind of like that?”
Scotty’s cheeks are pink. It could be because of the cold, but it could also be because he knows he royally
screwed up. He was here. He was at this house, when my sister was still here and possibly in terrible danger. And he didn’t even check it out.
I was the one who discovered the body in the kitchen. It was much later. Too late.
I knew something was wrong when I spoke to her on the phone.
“She looked fine when I came to the door,” he says. “She said the neighbor just heard a movie.”
I don’t even know what to say to that. My sister opened the door for the police officer, and God knows if there was somebody pointing a gun at her head while she gave all the right answers. If Scott had only stepped inside…
“You’re sure you don’t know who those messages were from?” Scott asks.
“If I did, don’t you think I would tell you?” I snap at him.
That’s yet another piece in the puzzle. Besides Derek’s iPhone, he also had a burner phone in his pocket. Scott claimed that just prior to his death, he was texting with another woman. Planning to meet her for a rendezvous at his house while he believed Quinn to be at work.
“She could be a witness,” Scott points out.
“Or she could have killed my sister.” I glare at him. “You’re examining that possibility, aren’t you?”
“Of course,” he says. “We’re examining every possibility.”
There is one thing on Quinn’s side here, and that’s the fact that I’m pretty sure Scott is still in love with her. It’s been a decade since they dated in high school, but he still hasn’t gotten married. Doesn’t even have a serious girlfriend, from what I’ve heard. I remember the year after Quinn left for college, Scotty looked like a sad puppy dog every time I saw him. I stopped going into his father’s store because every time I did, he would be there sweeping the floor or working the cash register, and he would ask me about Quinn in that hopeful voice.
He was almost obsessed with her.
Another officer is calling to Scott from inside the house. He glances behind him, then back at me. He tries to blink away the frozen raindrops on his pale eyelashes. “I’ve got to go, Claudia.”
“You’ll call me if you find out anything?”
“I will. I promise.” He pauses. I’m sure it’s a lie. “And you’ll call me if you hear from Quinn?”
“Of course,” I say. But that’s also a lie.
As he walks away, I reach into my purse and pull out my phone for the hundredth time. I select Quinn’s number from my favorites list. I let it ring.
And ring. And ring.
Pick up, dammit. Please, Quinn. It’s me. It’s your sister.
“Hi! You’ve reached Quinn’s phone! Please leave a message at the beep.”
I grit my teeth. I didn’t expect her to answer, but I’d been hoping. I’m not sure if she even has her phone anymore. If she had it, she would have picked up by now. Even so, I leave another message.
“Quinn, it’s Claudia.” I grip my phone tighter with my freezing hand. “Please call me back if you get this. Please. Whatever happened, we’re going to figure it out. I promise you. Just… call me back. I love you.”
I hang up the phone. I stare down at the screen, willing it to ring. But of course, it doesn’t.
Right now, Quinn’s husband is dead. Murdered. Quinn is gone and so is her car.
In my mind, there are two possibilities:
The first is that whoever killed Derek also did something to Quinn. When Scotty showed up at her house, there was somebody hiding behind the door with a gun, ready to shoot her if she said the wrong words. And she’s currently tied up
in a trunk or in some underground dungeon without access to her phone.
The second possibility is that Quinn is the one who killed Derek.
It’s hard to imagine the second possibility. No, Quinn and Derek did not have an ideal marriage. She complained about him a lot, to the point where I wasn’t sure why she stuck around. But my sister isn’t the murdering type. Even when she was a teenager, she couldn’t even bear to smash a beetle she found crawling in her bed—she would make me capture it and set it free. Hell, she didn’t even like throwing the ball at people during dodgeball when we were kids. I can’t picture her stabbing her own husband in cold blood and leaving him bleeding to death in the middle of her kitchen. The same kitchen she and I spent hours flipping through magazines together in our attempt to make it into The Perfect Kitchen. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t.
Maybe Quinn wasn’t that crazy about Derek, but she
had a good life. The idea that she would stab him to death… I just can’t imagine it.
So by process of elimination, that means she’s being held captive somewhere. And we’ve got to find her.
I’m going to find you, Quinn. I triple dipper promise with a cherry on top.
My phone rings and my heart leaps. But then I pull it out of my purse and my face falls when I see the name on the screen. Rob. I jab at the green button to answer the call.
“Claudia.” His voice is tight. “Are you coming home?”
I glance over at Scott, who is lingering in the entranceway of the Alexander household. “Not yet.”
“The police are handling it. You should come home.” “Everyone here is incompetent.”
“Claudia, you’re a masseuse! Can you please leave this to the police?”
I may be a masseuse, but I was majoring in criminal justice in college. I might have gone to law school if I had
finished. If my parents hadn’t lost control of their car that afternoon at the end of my freshman year.
“I want to find my sister,” I insist. I’m not going to sit around and let the police screw this up any more than they already have.
At first, I think Rob is going to say something insensitive, but then he redeems himself by instead saying, “Do you want me to meet you over there?”
“No. It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine, Claudia. The rain is coming down hard, and it’s turning to snow. All you’ve got is the Chevy. If you’re going to stay, at least let me pick you up in my truck.”
Rob and I have been married for almost six years now. Things have gotten kind of stale between us lately, and he’s always working—always running out to unclog a toilet somewhere. Sometimes I think Rob and I don’t care much for each other anymore. But then he goes and says something like that.
I glance up at my sister’s house. The doorstep is slick with ice. Rob is right. It’s really coming down.
I see the outline of Scott Dwyer in the window. He’s talking to another officer, and it seems to me he is far too calm considering he’s investigating a murder. I still can’t figure out what he was thinking. He heard screaming coming from my sister’s house. Why didn’t he go inside and investigate? What kind of police officer doesn’t investigate screaming? It’s strange.
But either way, there’s nothing we can do about it now. “Fine,” I say. “I’ll come home.”
