The Perfect Stranger (Social Media #2)(33)

Still a tragic scenario, but that one would undoubtedly sit a hell of a lot easier with the three kids who lost their mother.

The rest of the family has fairly solid alibis for Saturday night. Both of the sons were home with their wives and kids. The daughter was at a party for a colleague. Her husband wasn’t with her—he was with someone else, Keith Drover finally admitted after hemming and hawing when they interviewed him today.

“Another woman?” Frank had asked—probably recognizing a kindred philanderer, Crystal thought at the time.

Turned out that wasn’t the case—exactly.

Drover begged them not to tell his wife the truth—especially after they said they’d need to talk to his lover to confirm his alibi.

Assured that they weren’t going to turn around and tell Rebecca, on the heels of losing her mother, that her husband was in love with another man, the poor sap looked relieved. But only until Frank reminded him that this was an active homicide investigation.

“When you’ve got a high profile case, the dirty laundry sometimes tends to come out before all is said and done,” he warned Keith. “You might want to think about coming clean to your wife before she hears it from someone else.”

Poor Rebecca. She’s managed to hold it together so far—in fact, she was doing much better today than she was when Crystal first met her at the scene on that rainy Sunday afternoon. She can still hear the young woman’s anguished screams; can still feel Rebecca clutching her sleeve, asking who had done this to her mother.

“We’re going to find out,” she promised her then, and again today, before she and Frank left the house after questioning the family members again. “Our job is to make sure justice is served.”

That’s what it’s all about. You can’t turn back the clock and bring the loved one back to the family, and Lord knows you can’t take away the agony of loss.

All you can do is try to give them closure.

“So how’s it going? What do you think?” Jermaine asks now, stroking Crystal’s hair.

“Same thing I thought this morning, and yesterday, and the day before.”

“Which is . . . ?”

“That Meredith Heywood wasn’t killed by some stranger she’d surprised when he was robbing her house.”

“You sure? There have been an awful lot of breakins around here lately. That’s nothing new.”

She nods, well aware national statistics show that Ohio cities have a disproportionately high number of burglaries, with Cincinnati near the top of the list.

But—statistics again—stranger homicides are extremely rare. Victims—particularly female victims—usually know their killers.

She doesn’t have to remind Jermaine of that.

But he’s a cop; he’s trying to remind her that sometimes, in an investigation, what you see really is what you get.

Not in this case, though.

She updates her husband about the rest of the evidence they’ve been gathering. It indicates that Meredith Heywood had been killed almost instantly with a blow to the head.

“What was the weapon?”

“Probably a household object. Could have been a baseball bat, a hammer, an andiron—not sure.”

“From her household? Or did the perp bring it with him?”

“Again—not sure. We didn’t find the weapon.”

She goes on to tell him that the victim’s body was found on the floor, which was clearly meant to indicate that she’d been hit while she was standing or moving.

But Crystal is fairly certain she’d been killed in her bed—maybe even while she was sound asleep—and then moved to the floor postmortem.

The bedding was spotless—too spotless. The spatter pattern surrounding the body on the floor indicated that it should have extended up onto the bedspread, but it didn’t. The bedspread was pristine, and lab tests turned up no sign of blood.

Beneath the spotless sheets, the mattress gave off a faint bleach smell, and is still being tested for evidence of blood that may have been cleaned up by the perpetrator.

Nearby, the bedside table was overturned, a lamp broken, a water glass spilled.

“So it looked like there was a struggle,” Jermaine says.

“Right. But there wasn’t. It was staged, just like everything else.”

The house appeared to have been ransacked. The family was able to pinpoint a few things that were missing—an envelope of cash kept in a desk drawer in the den, a small bureau-top chest filled with the victim’s costume jewelry, the victim’s laptop and cell phone that had probably been sitting out in the open.

But a professional burglar wouldn’t have missed the coin collection on the shelf of a basement closet whose door was left ajar as if it had been ransacked. Nor would he have overlooked the relatively valuable jewelry stashed in several padded cases tucked into the back of a drawer that was found open, its contents rumpled to look like someone had gone through it.

It was all for show, to cover up the real motive for the breakin: murder.

Whoever did it was a novice.

A more seasoned killer—or a pro, a hit man—would have made the fake burglary more convincing, and wouldn’t have been so clumsy about moving and repositioning the body.

“So who did it? The husband?”

“I’m not sure.”