I See You (Criminal Profiler, #2)(74)

“Sure. Sisters fight. But Marsha didn’t instigate the trouble. Hadley did.”

“I have three sisters. My sister Kendra was always the one stirring the pot.” He sipped his coffee. “But Kendra would never kill any of our other sisters.”

Foster’s brow tightened with a frown as he stared into his cup. “And Hadley wouldn’t have killed Marsha. I always believed that deep down she loved Marsha. Hadley was never the same after Marsha vanished. She carried tremendous guilt over all the fights she picked with her sister.”

“It must have thrown her off after our visit,” Vaughan said.

“She was a mess. I couldn’t get her to calm down. I was supposed to go back to the office and offered to stay home, but she insisted I go. She wanted to be alone.”

“But she wasn’t alone that night, was she?”

He frowned and blinked, as if trying to remember. “No, I guess not.”

“When you got home that night, did you realize she’d been with Roger Dawson?”

He shook his head. “No. She was home when I got home. We didn’t speak until the morning.”

Vaughan reached for a memory, hoping it would appeal to Foster. “When my marriage went south, it didn’t happen right away.” The sincerity of his own words surprised him, and it wasn’t lost on him that he was having this conversation with a suspect in front of Spencer. “It was a slow and steady downhill slide.”

Foster’s hand trembled a little when he took a sip of coffee. “It sneaks up so slowly you don’t see it coming.”

Again he let the silence simmer. “Is that when you reached out to Veronica Manchester?”

He looked up, his gaze earnest. “Yes, but I broke it off.”

“Did you? Your phone records recorded multiple conversations recently, and we found no text that suggested a breakup.”

“Maybe it wasn’t a text. Maybe I called her from the office phone. I just don’t remember.”

“Where is she now?” he asked casually.

“Vacation. In France.”

“She kept in touch with her friends while she was traveling?”

“Not that I heard of.”

Vaughan tapped a finger on the table, trying to figure out if this guy was telling the truth or playing him for a fool. DNA, surveillance tapes, and possible new eyewitness testimonies would eventually tell the story, but what he needed now was to find Skylar.

“Tell us about yesterday. How did it start?” Vaughan asked.

“Like it always does.” Foster sipped his coffee. “It was very ordinary. I got up, and Hadley wasn’t in bed but out for a run. She likes to get up early and get a workout in before she sees her clients.”

“She’s dedicated.”

“More likely, obsessed.”

“Did that bother you?” Vaughan asked.

“Not when we first married. I knew she was carrying the guilt over Marsha. I thought it would get better, but it only got worse, and after a while, it bugged the hell out of me.” The frown lines on Foster’s face deepened, and he looked as if he was ready to slip back into his brooding silence.

Vaughan scratched his chin. “You wake up. She’s out running.”

He dropped his gaze to the coffee. “I went downstairs to make coffee. I checked email on my phone, and when the pot was brewed, I took a cup up to Skylar. She’s always slow to wake up.”

“You were downstairs having your coffee?”

“Yes, and then I went upstairs for a shower and to get dressed for work. I had an early morning. While I was putting on my tie, I heard Hadley come upstairs.”

Vaughan sensed the truth was thinning and the lies growing. “What happened next?”

Foster swallowed more coffee and, for a long moment, stared at a deep scratch in the wooden table. “After I gave Sky her coffee, Hadley called out to me. She was pissed about something, and I chose not to answer. It only fueled her anger, and she blurted out that she loved Roger and was leaving. I don’t remember much after that. I was angry because we were supposed to be trying to fix our marriage for Skylar’s sake. I saw white and barely remember going to the kitchen and getting the boning knife. I came back, and I stabbed that bitch in our bedroom.”

“Where was Skylar?” Vaughan asked.

Mention of his daughter’s name made him stiffen. He closed his eyes, as if trying to block out the image of her.

The pain crimping the man’s face felt genuine. His pain was real. But murder and regret often went hand in hand. Lashing out in the heat of the moment often led to a lifetime of regret. Murderers were people. They did suffer guilt. But that sense of remorse did not exonerate them from punishment.

“Skylar screamed. She was standing behind me and saw what I’d done to her mother.” Foster pressed his fingers to his temples and rubbed slowly in clockwise circles. “Hadley was making the worst gurgling sound. She was struggling so hard to breathe. The look in her eyes.” He swallowed. “She was shocked.”

“What did Skylar do next?”

“Nothing. She kept screaming. I had to stop the sounds. I didn’t think, but I reacted. I told her to help me get her mother in the car. I told her we had to get to the hospital.”

None of the neighbors he’d spoken to had reported screaming. “Did you intend to go to the hospital?”