“Did he tell you why I called?”
“Yes, and I couldn’t believe it. So it’s true, then. Sofia was murdered?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Have you caught him yet? The person who did it?”
“No. Which is why I need to talk to you.”
“I wish I could help you, but it’s been years since I saw her.”
“When was the last time?”
“It was at a nursing conference in Dallas, maybe five years ago. We hadn’t seen each other since her wedding to Tony, so we had a lot of catching up to do. We met for dinner, just the two of us, and she seemed so happy. She talked about the cruise she and Tony went on to Alaska. How they planned to buy an RV someday and see the country. Then last December I got a card from her that Tony died. Oh, that was awful. And now this.” She sighed. “It’s so unfair, how anyone can be that unlucky, especially Sofia. She was such a good person.”
On that point, everyone agreed: Sofia Suarez did not deserve such a terrible fate. That could not be said for every victim; more than once in her career, Jane had caught herself thinking: This one had it coming.
“Do you have any idea why she reached out to you?” Jane asked.
“No. I work as a traveling nurse for a tour company and that month, I was with a group in Peru.”
“Sounds like a pretty cool job.”
“It is. Until you have to deal with octogenarians with high-altitude sickness puking on the bus.”
Oh. Never mind.
“When I got home a few weeks later, my husband told me Sofia had left a voicemail. I tried calling her back, but she didn’t answer. By then, I guess, she was already…” No need to finish the sentence. They both knew why Sofia never answered.
“Do you remember what was on the voicemail?”
“Unfortunately, I’ve already deleted it. She said she wanted to talk to me about some patient we had in Maine.”
“Which patient?”
“I have no idea. We worked for years together and we took care of maybe a thousand post-op patients. I have no idea why she’d be calling me about one after all these years.” Katie paused. “Do you think this has anything to do with what happened?”
“I don’t know,” said Jane. Three words she’d been saying a lot lately.
She hung up, frustrated by yet another loose thread. This case had so many of them and as much as she wanted to, she could not see how to weave them together into a bigger picture. Maybe this was the face on Mars that Gabriel had talked about, just random hills and shadows that she’d transformed, with wishful thinking, into a pattern that did not exist.
She powered down the laptop and snapped it shut. Common things were common, and burglary was one of the most common crimes of all. It was easy to envision the most likely sequence of events: The burglar breaking in. The sudden return of the homeowner. The panicked thief attacking her with the same hammer he’d used to shatter the window. Yes, it was all perfectly logical except for that shard of glass she’d found against the fence, glass that the crime lab confirmed was from the broken pane in the kitchen door. Was it kicked there when the killer fled in panic? Or was it propelled there because the window was broken from the inside?
Two different possibilities. Two very different conclusions.
No matter how hard she tried to remember his face, the image kept slipping away from her, like a reflection that disintegrates when you plunge your hand into water. There and gone. There and gone. She knew that face lurked somewhere deep in her memory, but she could not reach it. Instead, when she closed her eyes and thought about him, she saw cornflowers. Faded blue cornflowers on wallpaper that was streaked with mold and stained an ugly yellow from years of cigarette smoke.
Even all these years later she could still picture that bedroom, scarcely larger than a closet, with one small window. A window that might as well not even have been there, because the house was tucked up against a hillside, which blocked all the sunlight. Her room was a grim little cave that her mother had tried to dress up and make cheerful. Julianne had hung curtains she’d made herself from remnant lace bought at a yard sale. From that same yard sale, she’d also bought a painting of roses that she’d hung over Amy’s little bed. It was an amateurish painting—even at eight years old, Amy could tell the difference between the work of a real artist and that splotchy attempt, signed on the bottom by someone named Eugene. But Julianne was always thinking up ways to brighten their lives in that cramped house, where the walls themselves reeked with the accumulated odors left by countless previous tenants. Her mother always tried her best.