I skimmed the payments again, certain I was right. Two thousand dollars was a small sum for a high earner in these close-in suburbs of DC, an amount that might easily go unnoticed if a man’s wife quietly wired it from her personal spending account. Harris had been making a small fortune off of his victims—an amount that was probably growing every month, with every new woman he exploited—threatening them with photos, convincing them he would tell their spouses they’d been unfaithful if they didn’t comply with his demands. And why wouldn’t they? The photos painted a very different picture than the reality of what had been done to them. And they probably had no memory of their night with Harris to support their own account of what happened after the drugs had knocked them out.
Every single one of those women had a deeply personal motive for wanting Harris dead. And the MO felt like a perfect fit. But which one had actually done it?
Harris’s phone was probably already in the hands of a police detective by now. Without it, there’d be no easy way for me to trace the deposits back to individual accounts, but there might be a way to figure out who these women were and narrow down the list.
I grabbed a piece of paper from the printer, jotting down as many of those twelve first names as I could remember. Then I opened my browser and searched for Harris’s social networking group. Clicking on the membership page, I pulled up a roster. More than seven hundred thumbnail images filled the screen.
It was going to be a very long night.
CHAPTER 21
My mother had assured me when Steven and I first married that some dishes were impossible to screw up. Theoretically, no one should need a recipe to throw together a decent chicken soup or a simple meat loaf, but certain things about motherhood had always eluded me and cooking had been one of them. Apparently, marriage had been the other.
The pan in the oven was bubbling, browning at the edges. I cracked the oven door and gave it a cautious sniff. I’d found the casserole recipe online—which was more than I could say about my search for Harris’s victims—and the fact that I already had all the ingredients in my kitchen had felt like a small victory.
My search last night hadn’t gone as well as I’d hoped. With only first names and physical descriptions to go on, I’d spent hours combing individual profiles, narrowing possibilities. Some, I’d felt certain I’d managed to identify. And after a bit of hunting and pecking through other social media pages, I was able to weed them out as possible culprits. Some had moved. One was in the hospital. Some had posted photos of other family activities or events they’d attended that night. But a handful of names still eluded me. More than a few had deleted their networking profiles from the Facebook group altogether, which had made them impossible to find.
I set the table, put a load of clothes in the wash, made the beds, and scooped a mountain of toys off the living room floor. I’d given Vero the day off for her midterm exams and had spent the day scrubbing cake frosting stains out of the carpet, researching the names of Harris’s possible victims, and catching up on chores.
A car door slammed in the garage. I looked up from the dishwasher as Vero blew into the kitchen, dropped her purse on the counter, and kicked off a pair of black stilettos. I stacked a few clean dishes on my arm and set them on the table, taking in her sharp tailored suit and crisp white collar, her sleek French twist, and her bloodred lipstick. These were not Monday-afternoon-community-college clothes. These were not even Monday-hot-lunch-date clothes. These were high-dollar-accounting-firm-job-interview clothes. And a small part of me worried about where Vero had been all afternoon.
We hadn’t really talked since the day before Delia’s party. I hadn’t even had a chance to ask her about her date. I’d recapped my conversation with Theresa as we’d cleaned up after the party. Then we’d eaten cold pizza for dinner, Vero had studied for her exam, and I had shut myself in my office to write.
“How was your midterm?” I asked, hoping she wasn’t about to give me her notice and tell me she’d found a better job. One that came with health insurance and paid sick days and didn’t involve diapers. Or corpses.
She shrugged, peeling off her sunglasses as she wrinkled her nose. “What’s that smell?” She cracked open the oven and peered inside.
“Tuna casserole.”
She fanned at the billow of smoke that poured out. “Is it supposed to be black?”
Vero leapt aside as I flung open the oven door and ran to open the windows before the smoke alarms blared to life. I was standing on a kitchen chair, waving a dish towel at the detector on the ceiling, when Vero reached in her purse and slapped a brick of cash on the counter. “I’m not eating that. We’re ordering takeout.”