“Or someone with a sword had done the damage? Someone out of his mind with rage?”
“Yes,” she said meekly, as if she were seven again. “Out of control and”—she licked her lips—“with a bloodlust.” In that moment she reverted to her younger self, a small girl padding barefoot along the runner feeling the sticky dampness along the railing. “I knew something was wrong, really wrong.”
She viewed the living room as it had been then. “I saw them,” she said, her voice a whisper. “The three boys. And . . . and all that blood.” Her voice cracked and outside the wind moaned. Overhead floorboards creaked, the sound of the old house settling, or protesting its intrusion.
“I thought they were all dead,” she said, “And then Jonas, like a man coming out of his grave, raised up one elbow and croaked at me to get help. To run.” She was staring into the living room, seeing it as it had been with the fallen Christmas tree, the glowing embers in the fireplace, the broken mantel and all that blood. So much blood. “Run, he’d yelled,” she whispered, and spun toward the door. “And then there was this huge person in the doorway, like a monster, his face covered in a mask. I ran, oh, God, I ran through the living room and the kitchen and out the back door.” She took two steps to follow that path but felt a hand on the crook of her elbow and stopped, her hand on the door handle.
“You don’t have to go,” Tate said, and she snapped back, no longer a child, but a woman again, creeping around the old house where so many she loved had been butchered. She felt tears on her face and before she knew what was happening, Tate folded her into his arms. “Let’s stop this. Now. Bad idea.”
She melted into him, her whole body shuddering, her knees buckling, his strength keeping her on her feet. She teetered between wanting to go forward and to run away, to close the door behind her and never look back.
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not, Wes. You know it and I know it. It will never be okay. Never.”
*
“Got him!” Johnson said as she strode into Thomas’s office. She spread a series of 8 × 10 photos on his desk. Different pictures of the crowd that had gathered around the hospital when Jonas had been a patient at Whimstick General.
“That was fast.”
“I had someone in the tech department help me with facial recognition, and we were able to match anyone close to the original investigation to people in the crowd at the hospital. It was pretty easy.” She was proud of herself. “Also, I grabbed a lot of shots off the Internet, under the Facebook fan page where a lot of Jonas’s followers, if you’d call them that, anyway, his fans, where they posted selfies and pictures of the crowd that had gathered. That’s how I got so many different angles and perspectives. Take a look.”
Thomas leaned in closer as Johnson said, “The thing is this, quite a few of some our nearest and dearest suspects were there.” She shifted the pictures on his desk. “Let’s start here with dear old ‘Auntie Fai.’ ” She pointed out Faiza Donner, who stood separately from Roger Sweeney, parted by a sea of people so that it appeared Faiza didn’t know Sweeney was there, and vice versa.
“Now, let’s move on. Take a look at this.”
In the picture he saw Brittlynn Atwater again, and he recognized Sheila Keegan holding a microphone near to Mia Long. “Right here.” Johnson touched another image, of the man in the baseball cap, standing beneath the tree and staring at the woman in the long coat who looked so much like Marlie Robinson. In this picture, from the opposite angle of the first, he stood still hanging back from the crowd, but now he stood in front of the tree, his face in clear view.
Water Robinson.
Staring at the woman who was a dead ringer for his missing daughter.
And he didn’t look the least bit surprised.
“What the hell was he doing there?” Thomas said, the wheels spinning wildly in his mind. Walter Robinson? Joining the crowd rallying for Jonas McIntyre and staring at his daughter or a dead ringer for her?
“Check out his hat.”
She showed him an enlarged print of Walter’s face and cap. Not a baseball cap as he’d originally thought, but a cap emblazoned with the emblem for the United States Marines.
“Not ‘simplify’ or ‘send her Fi,’ ” he said aloud.
Johnson was nodding and smiling grimly as he rolled his chair back and reached for his jacket. “Semper fi. Walter was in the Marine Corps.”