“Help you?”
He reeled to find a man standing at the garage in a flannel jacket and skull cap. He was holding an old rake. Bodie had been so haunted by the house, so drawn in, that he hadn’t noticed that the garage door was up or that there were garbage bags of raked-up leaves sitting on the driveway. The man looked to be in his midfifties. This was his house now, obviously. For a moment, Bodie stared at him. Did the man have any idea what he’d inherited? Bodie doubted it.
He smiled. It was the smile he’d seen his father give a million times—warm, friendly, fake, well-practiced. “Sorry,” Bodie said. “I used to live here as a kid. I was in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d come take a look.”
“A walk down memory lane, that it?” The man tossed down the rake and leaned down for a plastic garbage bag. “When’s the last time you saw it?”
Bodie scanned the house’s exterior again. “Almost fifteen years.” He pointed at the upstairs window on the left. “That was my room. That old hickory tree still in the back?”
“It’s partly to blame for me being out here. I hit the back this morning. Perks of home ownership, right?”
Bodie chuckled. “Right. How long you been here?”
“Me and the family moved in about ten years ago. It’s a great neighborhood. Not so busy. The neighbors keep to themselves.” He gave Bodie a playful wink. “And the school’s just up the way, but you’d know all that.”
He knew about the quiet neighbors. “I went to that school,” Bodie said.
“What’s your name?” the man asked.
“Dan. Dan Flynn.” The lie rolled off his tongue easily, but he doubted the man would check the house’s provenance to see if any Flynns showed up in the search.
“Frank Gibson.” Gibson gave him a good long look. Bodie was clean shaven, neat, nicely dressed. He didn’t look like a thief or a criminal. He looked normal, like someone the man would know and have a beer with. Safe. “You want to take a quick look inside? For old times’ sake?”
The thought alone made Bodie tense. Though the smile hid most of his unease, inside his head a Klaxon sounded. Seeing the house again was one thing, but he absolutely couldn’t step inside. “No. Thanks,” he said. “I remember it. Besides, what’s that they say? You can’t go home again?”
Bodie noted that there were flouncy yellow curtains hanging in his old room instead of the blue ones with stripes that he remembered having. He’d stood in that room on his last day, waiting for Tom Morgan to start the car. All Bodie had wanted to do was go. He and Am had lived with their basement discovery six years by that point without either of them talking about it. He couldn’t fathom now how they’d accomplished such a thing, how they’d managed to appear normal, act normal, say nothing, and continue to live in the same house with a murderer. The world beyond his room had felt like a giant trap. What if he slipped up? What if he told? Worse yet, what would he become if he didn’t?
That last day here, Tom Morgan stared at him with his warm brown eyes, not the cold ones Bodie had seen when Tom had discovered them in his private place, the ones that held not an ounce of humanity, the ones he feared at night. He’d wondered often which eyes his father’s victims saw when they realized they were going to die. Were they still alive when he disemboweled them or cut their hands from their wrists or their feet from their ankles? Some monsters didn’t look like monsters. No one would ever imagine the personable CPA who helped with homework and took his daughter to ballet class on Saturday mornings held such darkness, such a twisted soul.
There were no parting words of wisdom on that last day before they were driven off to college. He and Am just packed their things, got in the car, and were driven away. And Tom was gone. Phone number disconnected. House sold. He and Am had been on their own at eighteen. He knew Am had tried to find their father, but Bodie had never bothered. Why would he when he could finally breathe?
“You all right there?” Gibson asked.
His question brought Bodie back to the present. “What’s that?”
“Looked like you got lost there for a minute.”
Bodie smiled. “Guess so. Memories are funny that way. I won’t hold you up any longer. I was just curious and wanted to see.”
“No bother. It’s a good house,” Gibson said. “Feel free to stop by anytime.”
Bodie backed up a bit. He wouldn’t be back. “Thanks,” he said, already moving away, but he turned back. “My father set up a workshop in the basement.”
“That right?” Gibson said.
“He made wooden toys—little things.” It was the reason he had given them for spending so much time locked below stairs. There had been toy trains for him, dollhouses for Am, but not enough to account for all his time.
“I’ve never been handy like that. I converted it into a family room for the kids. Pool table, TV, sofas. My daughters spend half their time down there. You ever listen to a bunch of teenage girls giggling and squealing like little magpies? It’s an experience, let me tell you.”
“Right.” Bodie’s eyes swept over the lawn. “Well, good luck with the leaves.”
He could hear Gibson’s rake start its steady scraping behind him as he walked away. Family room, he thought. A pool table and television set, sofas. He picked up his pace.
“And daughters,” he mumbled to himself.
CHAPTER 9
“Not enough to hold him and have it stick, and you all know it,” Griffin announced. “The state’s attorney would have laughed in our faces.” The team had gathered around her to report what they had—or, more importantly, didn’t have.
“So instead, we sit on our hands and let him waltz out of here?” Lonergan said, having just watched Keith and his parents walk out the front door.
“Until we can match that blood to Birch or find that knife with his prints on it? Yeah.” Griffin glanced over at Foster. “What do we have?”
“We have Rosales’s preliminary report from the scene. We have Keith Ainsley’s fuzzy recollections of Sunday night. We have two names from Birch’s parents: Joe Rimmer and Wendy Stroman—her ex-boyfriend and her roommate at school. Since Peggy was living away from the house, her parents couldn’t account for her time day to day, but those two might have a better idea. If we can track her movements, maybe we find a point where she and Ainsley met somewhere.”
“What about Ainsley’s friends from the park?” Griffin asked. “Anybody talk to them?” She got nothing but shaking heads back as a response. “Right. That’s why Ainsley walked. We don’t have our ducks in a row. We have less than nothing.”
“Blood’s not nothing,” Lonergan groused.
Foster turned to him. “But he wasn’t covered in it. If he killed her, he would have been. It would have been under his nails, in his hair, on his shoes, socks.”
Griffin watched the two of them, still clearly assessing their viability as a team. “Right. So stop whining, Lonergan,” she said. “Him walking now gives us time to build a case. If we’d kept him, that would have started the clock on our forty-eight. Smarter not to waste it until we have something more than what we’ve got now.”