“You found him.”
“I have. I agreed with your conclusion that someone so obsessed would have to use his mother’s name, or some derivative of it, but found nothing there. Then it occurred to me,” he continued, rising to set up the screen, “that someone like him, as you all just described, might be clever enough to hide that. An anagram. I ran for anagrams of his mother’s birth name.”
“Anagram? Mixing up words to make other words?”
“And Lisa McKinney becomes Cami and Ken Snily—so a couple, rather than a single.” He brought up the map. “Cami and Ken Snily are the owners of record, as the property transferred into those names on September twenty-fifth from a trust held by the law firm of—ha—McKinney and Son.”
“He did the anagram, and one of them made up the name of the law firm—likely him again.” Eve studied the map. “Highlight the other areas—crime scenes, residences. She wanted to make it up to him, somehow. She came to New York, bought the house for him, and sent him the paperwork before she took the pills. I’m betting Cami and Ken also have a fat bank account, opened around the same time. She’d want to give him money to maintain the house, to make up for all those years.”
“Already looking for that,” Feeney told her. “Didn’t want him to have to pay estate taxes,” he continued as he worked, “or wait to claim the house until the estate settled. That’s my guess.”
“And didn’t want her other children to know,” Eve finished. “Couldn’t face that, even at the end. Can you get blueprints?”
Roarke sent Reineke a put-upon look. “And listen how she insults me after we’ve had such a pleasant meal.”
“No permits applied for,” Jamie said, “not for that property. Roarke probably hit that one. He slid around permits.”
Moments later, the blueprints flashed on-screen.
“Fucking A, look at the size of that basement! What’s the date on these?”
“March of last year, when they were generated for a rehab. A house sale, I’m thinking. And on the market, I’ll wager we’ll find, just in time for his mother to buy it. You see there’s a small kitchen on the basement level, and two full and two half baths as well. One of the baths to make a master’s suite. No windows but for this eastmost wall in that suite area—must have that for code, you see. There’s your way out in case of fire, for instance—and I expect your way in.”
“He may have blocked it off, or it’s something she can’t reach, something she can’t get to. Blocked off, maybe, privacy screened absolutely. Don’t want anyone getting nosy enough to look in. Stairs leading up, almost center of the big-ass basement. Doors on the main level, front, back, both sides, another door second level to a porch thing, deck thing, stairs down to what looks like a little walled-off courtyard.”
“Yes, it’s a very nice property.”
“Okay, okay, he’s going to have cams, solid security. He’s crazy, but he’s not stupid.”
She stood a moment, hands in pockets, studying the blueprints, working it out in her head.
“All right, here’s how we take him down.”
20
BEFORE
She couldn’t sleep, not with the bed so empty beside her.
She was a doctor’s wife, and had often slept alone when Joe’s duties had kept him late into the night.
But he’d always come home, and she’d always waked, at least enough to turn to him, to reach for his hand.
He’d always come home.
Until that horrible night.
How could she sleep knowing he’d never come back to her?
Everything about her had been wrong before Joe, she knew that now. Everything wrong, everything bad, every mistake—so many, too many—had rushed back into her. And all of it so raw, so real, flooding over her like the waters of the lake where she’d tried, and failed, to end her own life.
She’d left her little boy. She’d actually thought to kill him, to take him with her into the dark. Oh God, oh God, what did that make her?
The sweet, sassy baby darling she’d failed in so many ways.
No, in every way, she thought yet again as she stared out the bedroom window at the gardens she and Joe, then their children with them, had tended for so long.
So many years among the flowers, under the Spanish moss, in the beautiful old house. Breakfasts in the kitchen. Off to school now, learn something today!
Sweet tea on the veranda, picnics on the lawn.