A Killer's Mind (Zoe Bentley Mystery #1)(91)

Zoe was startled by a firm knock on the door. Andrea coming to check up on her, probably. Her sister didn’t hide her concern over Zoe’s frame of mind. The only thing that reassured Andrea was that Zoe’s sick leave was almost up. Once she was back in the office, Zoe had told Andrea, she would probably stop obsessing about this case she was no longer assigned to. She was far from sure this would actually turn out to be true. She muted the radio and went to the front door. Looking through the peephole, she sighed, then opened the door.

Tatum stood in the doorway. He held a bag in his hand. Zoe felt as if they’d been there before.

“Hi,” she said. She didn’t intend for her voice to convey any sort of warmness, but to her surprise, it came out as an actual happy-to-see-you voice. Perhaps it was because of the time she spent cooped up alone with her research. It was nice to see another human being who wasn’t her worried sister.

“I brought some food,” he said. “Not from the 7-Eleven this time.”

“Okay,” Zoe said. “What is it?”

“Hummus.” Tatum grinned.

“What?”

“They opened this Middle Eastern place in Woodbridge. And they make deliveries to Dale City. And they include two pitas with each meal.”

“You didn’t strike me as the Middle Eastern food type of guy,” Zoe said, moving aside to let him enter.

“There was a great Middle Eastern place near where I lived in LA,” Tatum said, walking inside. He glanced at the coffee table in the living room, and Zoe spotted a flicker of relief on his face. The coffee table was empty, no research files scattered about. What would he say if he walked into her home office right now?

“Come on,” she said, leading him to the kitchen. His timing was perfect; she had been about to make something for herself. He put the bag on the table, taking out several small boxes and a plastic container with the pasty beige hummus. Zoe grabbed a bottle of Coke from the fridge and poured two glasses. Then she set the table. The pitas’ aroma made her stomach rumble in anticipation, and she flinched, praying Tatum didn’t hear it. If he did, his face didn’t betray anything.

They sat down, and Zoe put a dollop of the hummus on her plate. She tore off a piece of the pita, dipping it in the hummus thoroughly, and put it in her mouth. It was warm, and the taste—so different from what she was used to—was wholesome and delicious. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then allowed herself a small smile.

“Good, huh?” Tatum said. He ate a big piece of pita and sipped from his Coke.

“It’s great.” She nodded. “You say they deliver to Dale City?”

“Yeah. It really improved the way I feel about living here, I gotta admit.”

Zoe prepared herself another piece of pita and hummus. This, at least, was something they could talk about without arguing.

“So,” Tatum said. “Guess where I was for the past two days?”

“You weren’t here?”

“No.”

“Where?”

“You don’t want to guess?”

“Not particularly.”

“I was in Maynard,” Tatum said, sounding like a magician who just announced there was a rabbit in the previously empty hat. It was a tone of voice that anticipated shock or applause.

“Really,” Zoe said dryly. She wasn’t about to give him any satisfaction, though she was curious.

“The officer who used to be the lead detective on the serial killer case is now the chief of police,” Tatum said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Yeah. Anyway, you know that alibi that Rod Glover had for the Clara Smith murder? I managed to break it.”

This time, Zoe could not help letting the surprise widen her eyes. “How?” she demanded. How could he so easily have done what she’d failed to do for years? Had he located a witness who saw Glover leaving the search party? Perhaps there was a man whose body was similar to Glover’s and in the darkness—

“You were focusing on the wrong profile,” Tatum said. “You should have been profiling the investigators.”

“What do you mean?” Her palms were shaking. She quickly hid them under the table.

“The police were desperate to implicate Manny Anderson,” Tatum said. “He had an alibi for Clara’s time of death, so they convinced the ME to rethink her estimated time of death.”

“And it provided Glover with his alibi,” Zoe said, numb with shock.

“That’s right.”

How could she have missed it? She always looked at every angle, searched for every crack, went through every—

“You couldn’t have figured it out,” Tatum said softly. “Not when you were fourteen.”

He was right. At fourteen, she would never have even considered the possibility that the cops might mess with the evidence to implicate someone. The thought would have been completely alien to her. Though they angered her and she often thought of them as incompetents, it would never have occurred to her, at fourteen, that they might actually hurt their own investigation that way. It would be years before she would learn anything was possible.

But when thinking of the Maynard killings, she was always fourteen years old. Always picking at the same ideas, deepening the grooves the thoughts left in her mind.

“I should have picked up on that,” she said, frustrated. “You have no idea how many times I’ve turned the facts of this case over in my head. It should have been obvious.”