Cold feet(29)
Author: Brenda Novak

But he didn’t want to use Madison. After last night, he knew that much.

"So what are you thinking?" Caleb asked.

"I don’t know," Gibbons said. "Maybe we were wrong about Purcell. Maybe he wasn’t the strangler, after all. Or maybe someone else has picked up where he left off. Someone close enough to know how he worked."

"Like who?" Caleb asked.

"Remember that license plate you had me run? The car you said Purcell’s son was riding in a couple of nights ago?"

"Yeah?"

"It came back as stolen."

Caleb scrubbed a hand over his jaw. "You don’t think Johnny’s somehow involved, do you? He was in prison when some of those women were murdered."

"Well, he’s not in prison anymore," Gibbons said. "They let him out three days before Susan disappeared."

CHAPTER NINE

THEY’D LEFT THE VIEWING room fifteen minutes earlier. Caleb and Holly had stared at Susan’s body through a small window; they’d been separated from her by a wall and a glass panel, so Caleb knew he had to be imagining that he couldn’t rid himself of the sweet, cloying scent of death. But he still would’ve headed directly home, stripped off his clothes and taken a long hot shower–with plenty of suds and vigorous scrubbing. Except he couldn’t leave Holly. She was in no condition to be on her own, and her parents’ flight from Phoenix wasn’t arriving until later this evening.

"You okay?" he murmured as they sat on a bench in the hallway of the morgue. Holly had wept since he’d told her about Susan, but she seemed to be coming to the end of her tears. Her skin was splotchy, her eyes red and puffy, her hair somewhat tangled, but her face had taken on a stark expression that conveyed the depth of her grief far more effectively than simple crying.

She didn’t answer him. She just wrapped her jacket more tightly around her.

"Hol?" He gave her shoulders a gentle squeeze.

"How can you even ask me that?" she said dully, her voice barely a whisper. "Of course I’m not okay."

"You have to get through this," he said. "Susan wouldn’t want you to fall apart."

"Susan." Tears welled in her eyes again, but she didn’t curl into him as she had before. She sat on her hands and stared blankly at the floor.

Down the hall, Detective Gibbons stepped out of the autopsy room. "You’re still here?" he said when he saw Caleb.

Caleb hadn’t been able to get Holly to leave. She couldn’t bear the sight of Susan as she was now. But the battered and badly decomposed corpse was all that remained of her sister. For Holly, walking away would sever that one last tie.

"You got a minute?" Gibbons asked. Though Gibbons’s language and manner were pretty rough, he did wear a suit. It was a rather cheesy, three-piece affair–a throwback to professional fashion in the seventies–but it was a suit. And the way he straightened and buttoned his coat told Caleb that Gibbons wanted to talk to him alone.

Caleb was reluctant to abandon Holly. She seemed so fragile. But when he hesitated, she lifted her gaze to his and the tears that had pooled in her eyes brimmed and rolled down her cheeks. "Go. I want this bastard caught."

With a nod, Caleb got up and followed Gibbons into the coroner’s office, where the smell of fresh-brewed coffee heartened him. He’d received Gibbons’s call so early, he hadn’t showered or shaved, and he felt rumpled and dirty, as though he’d been sleeping in his clothes.

Turning the bill of his ball cap to the back, he glanced around the empty room before propping himself against the coroner’s desk. "Tell me you’ve found something," he said.

Gibbons sighed. "Autopsies take time–you know that. And they haven’t even started yet. But judging by the injuries to her forearms, this young lady put up a good fight."

Susan would, Caleb thought; she had Holly’s spirit. "Which means we have a chance of finding biological evidence under her nails, right?"

"Or on the sheet in which her body was wrapped. The forensics team has found a drop of blood that definitely doesn’t belong to Susan."

"What can I do to help?" Caleb asked.

Reaching into his breast pocket, Gibbons pulled out a copy of the picture that had been taken at the pizza parlor, and handed it to him. "Take this and go back to the pizza place tonight," he said. "Show it around and see if you can find out who was driving that truck. And who was arguing with Susan."

"So you’re officially on the case?" Caleb asked.

"Because Susan was killed in the same way as the victims of the Sandpoint Strangler, I’m not only on the case, I’m lead detective. The department doesn’t want to waste resources by rebuilding everything I’ve already put together."

"No one knows more about the Sandpoint Strangler than you do."

Gibbons raised his brows. "Except maybe you. You’re the one practically living with Madison Lieberman. Think you can get hold of Purcell’s truck?"

Caleb let his breath seep slowly between his teeth as he considered the question. He hated the thought of embroiling Madison and Brianna in another painful investigation, this one centering on Johnny. She’d already been through more than enough. But he couldn’t let whoever killed Susan get away with it. Especially when chances were likely that the sick bastard would strike again. "I’ll figure something out," he said.

Gibbons clapped him on the back. "Good man."

MADISON LEANED CLOSE to the window to peer out at the dark drive as she finished drying the pans she’d used to make dinner. She knew Caleb was still gone. She’d been listening for his car for several hours and hadn’t heard anything beyond the wash cycle of her dishwasher.

Where was he? It was getting late. He’d indicated that his work schedule wasn’t especially grueling, yet he’d been gone from dawn until ten or eleven at night four days in a row. He hadn’t even wanted dinner. He’d left a brief message on her answering machine Monday through Wednesday saying that he had to work late and not to expect him.

It wasn’t until this morning, when she’d bumped into him as she was leaving to take Brianna to school, that she’d actually spoken to him. He’d been dressed in a dark suit, seemed far more somber than the man she’d thought she was getting to know, and had very little to say, except that he didn’t want dinner again tonight.

Maybe he was avoiding her. Maybe that kiss had bothered him even more than she’d assumed. That you, of all people, could do this to me. What had he meant by that? Was he as afraid of intimacy as she was? Was he worried she might fall at his feet and try to extract some kind of commitment–over one silly kiss?

She shook her head. If so, he didn’t understand that she wasn’t open to the possibility of falling in love. She couldn’t deal with the hope, the effort, the risk. Too much was riding on the next few years, for her business and her daughter.