The Perfect Stranger (Social Media #2)(34)

“What’s your gut telling you?”

She shrugs. “The guy is the picture-perfect image of a distraught, shell-shocked, bereaved widower.”

“Which means absolutely nothing to you.”

“Exactly.”

Last year, she interrogated a twenty-year-old mother who’d drowned her own baby in a toilet. The girl—her name was Diaphanous Jones—never stopped crying while they talked, heaving sobs, gasping for air—the picture of maternal devastation. Yet, chillingly—she’d confessed her crime immediately after she committed it, and never once tried to retract.

Grief, regret—normal reactions to any loss. Visible emotions don’t let you off the hook.

That Hank Heywood is, on some level, a bereaved husband is not in dispute. But there were a number of potent stressors in his life leading up to the murder. He was under a lot of pressure. Something might very well have happened between him and his wife that caused him to snap.

“Maybe he was seeing someone else,” Jermaine speculates.

“Or maybe she was.”

“You think?”

She shakes her head. “There’s not a shred of evidence pointing in that direction, but . . .”

She and Frank haven’t completely dismissed the idea that Meredith had a lover who might have been in the house with her in her husband’s absence. Maybe the lover had killed her. Or maybe her husband had found out about him—or her—and acted out of vengeance.

Meredith’s daughter had been adamant that her mother wasn’t living a secret life—which Crystal is now inclined to take with a grain of salt, given Rebecca’s husband’s illicit affair.

Keith Drover seems certain his wife is clueless about it—but then that, too, could be open for debate.

In any case, Rebecca had insisted that no one close to her mother—no one she knew, anyway—would have been capable of hurting her.

“Everyone loved her,” she said tearfully. Clutching a handful of sodden tissues, she answered all of Crystal and Frank’s questions about friends and individual family members . . .

Something flickered in her eyes, though, when she was first asked about her father.

A hint of . . . something, and then it was gone.

Her parents had a great, loving marriage, she said.

Right.

Diaphanous Jones’s family had told Crystal she’d been a great, loving mother.

She loved that baby more than anything . . .

“My mother and father worshiped each other,” Rebecca said.

Most kids are going to believe that about their parents, if there are no overt signs of marital trouble in the household. Especially adult children who have moved on. Crystal’s own son was stunned and bewildered when she called him at boot camp to tell him that she and his dad would be going their separate ways.

“But why?” he kept asking. “You guys never even fight.”

Not true, exactly—but damn, she and her ex were good at hiding the tension. Practice makes perfect.

Maybe Meredith and Hank Heywood really were happily married.

Maybe not.

Hell, some days she wonders if any marriage—outside of her own, of course—is entirely happy.

“The other thing we’re looking at,” she muses aloud to Jermaine, “is the Internet.”

“What about it?”

“The victim was a blogger. She put way too much of her personal life out there for anyone to read.”

“Yeah, well, we’ve seen more and more of that sort of thing. People go blabbing on social networking Web sites, not just about birthdays and their mother’s maiden names, but where they’re going, and for how long, and who they’re with. The next thing you know, they’re reporting that someone’s stalking them, or their identity’s been stolen, or their empty home was burglarized . . .”

“Or worse,” Crystal says with a nod.

She explains to her husband that Meredith Heywood was a breast cancer survivor who wrote a very public blog that had hundreds, maybe thousands, of followers.

“You think one of them killed her?”

“Could be. But if that was the case, it wasn’t necessarily a complete stranger. Not in the usual sense of the word.”

“What do you mean?”

She tells him about the last piece of evidence—the one that’s been nagging her from the moment she first saw the body.

Jermaine shakes his head. “So you really do think it was the husband, don’t you?”

She hesitates, remembering the raw pain in Hank Heywood’s face.

Remembering the flicker of doubt in his daughter’s eyes.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I honestly don’t know.”

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

How on earth did this happen—again?

It’s not like I’m someone who just goes around . . . killing people.

Meredith was the first, and she was supposed to be the last, the only.

But now look.

The crumpled figure lying on the ground moans, clenching and unclenching the hand that until moments ago held a puppy on a leash.

The puppy is running loose somewhere down the street, still dragging a length of leather and chain from its tagged collar.

The man’s hand is covered in blood, reaching for the knife sticking out of his stomach, reaching . . . reaching . . .