“Got along?” she repeated. “You mean as in they didn’t make waves, were cordial, but didn’t hang out and go on vacations or spend holidays together?”
“Right.” At the mention of holidays, he thought again of that final bloody Christmas but didn’t have to mention it. He suspected Johnson was on the same wavelength.
She scanned a few more pages. “In this blended family, all the kids were really close in age. Basically teenagers, it looks like.”
“Except for the littlest daughter,” he reminded her.
“The one supposedly locked in the attic.”
“Right,” he said, conjuring up the image of a small girl in the witness box, all blond curls, big eyes, and wan cheeks. Kara had answered each question in a tiny voice, chewed on her lip, and kept the courtroom rapt. Thomas remembered. The usually noisy chamber had been silent as a tomb, not so much as the rustle of a paper or a shoe scraping as that tiny waif of a girl had recounted what she’d seen in a thin, whispered voice, her answers prompted by the DA. Kara, white-faced, had stared at Jonas, her chin trembling, as if she was about to break down and desperately wanted his forgiveness.
Cole Thomas, himself, had been in the second row of the courtroom, a rookie cop who still believed that only bad guys were sent to prison, that the system never failed.
Now, years later, he wasn’t sure.
Johnson was still reading. “Kara insisted her older sister locked her on the third floor and she somehow escaped only to find her family slaughtered.” Johnson’s eyebrows drew together. “She said she thought the intruder came back into the house, so she took off through the kitchen, ran out the back door, and down a path that dead-ended at the lake. She tried to cross the ice, ended up falling in, and the intruder she’d been running from turned out to be a cop coming to see what all the screaming was about.”
“Edmund Tate. Off-duty. A good one. Had been a marine. Hero type.” Thomas nodded. “Saved the kid.”
“And ended up having a massive heart attack himself and dying.” She was slowly pacing in front of his desk, absorbing all the information in the old file, the wheels in her head obviously turning.
“Uh-huh. Despite what the paramedics did, he was DOA at the emergency room.”
“Sweet Jesus.” She shook her head, dark hair glistening under the light. She looked up, skewering him with those near-black eyes. “So no intruder?”
“None found.”
Aramis fingered her cross again as she skimmed through the reports. “Kara always claimed her brother was innocent.”
“But no one bought it.”
“Because of her testimony?” Her eyes narrowed and she chewed on her lip.
“Yup, that’s the conundrum. What she witnessed and testified to didn’t jibe with what she felt or thought about Jonas.”
“Probably she just couldn’t believe her brother could be so savage and brutal.”
“And a murderer.”
“Right.” She quit fiddling with the cross and stopped pacing. “His prints were all over the murder weapon.”
“Uh-huh.” Thomas leaned back in his chair until it squeaked in protest. “You see the motive?”
Frowning more deeply, she nodded. “Jealousy.”
“Of his older stepbrother. Donner.”
“Dear God. Testosterone at its worst,” she muttered with a long-suffering sigh. “So Donner was involved with Jonas’s girlfriend?”
“Apparently.”
“How involved?”
“Intimate.”
One eyebrow arched a little higher. “Let me guess: Jonas was not cool with it.”
“Who would be?”
“Lord Almighty . . .” And it seemed a prayer, barely audible over the sound of air whooshing through the vents and conversations in the outer hallway.
Thomas knew what she was reading because he had nearly memorized the case file, and as she skimmed the documents they played over in his mind:
Jonas McIntyre, who miraculously survived the deadly assault, swore to this day that he is innocent of any homicides that were pinned on him. Yes, he’d admitted when the cops had arrived, he had picked up the old sword mounted in the wall of his bedroom. Jonas claimed that he’d been “messing around” with the weapon earlier in the day and had left it on the floor of his room. According to Jonas, Marlie had even walked past the bedroom earlier and had spied him with it. That’s why his fingerprints were all over the hilt.
Of course, she had conveniently gone missing, so that fact couldn’t be proved.