Paranoid(79)

“Have the crime scene guys come up with anything?”

“Not that we didn’t already know. Maybe we’ll find some clues in the victim’s car. It’s already been towed to the garage. We’re pulling phone records,” Nowak said.

“And I’ll check the victim’s home once we’re through at the hospital.” Voss was patting the pockets of her jacket, then came up with her keys. “I’d better get moving if I want to beat Clint Cooper to the morgue. God, I hate this part of the job.”

“Don’t we all,” Nowak agreed as she headed toward her vehicle. He slipped his phone from his pocket to check a text. “Aw shit, Elvin Atkins is at it again. Visibly drunk and banging on his wife’s door, despite the restraining order.” Sighing, he said, “I guess we’re done here anyway. Time to wrap it up.”

“I want another look,” Cade said.

Nowak nodded. “Go for it. Right now, it’s the crime team in control, and once they leave, O’Neal will lock things up.”

As Nowak departed, Cade and Kayleigh walked through the gate to the yard, where lights cast an eerie pall over the landscape. Two technicians combed the area, searching for trace evidence.

“Your kid discovered the body?” she said as they signed into the scene and put on protective shoe covers before picking a path to the chapel.

“She and a friend, Xander Vale, but the victim was still alive. They called nine-one-one. Couldn’t save her.” He glanced her way as they slipped inside the church, now illuminated by harsh temporary lights as another investigator went over the pews.

“Is Harper okay?”

“Hope so,” he said, not sounding nearly as confident as he had when he’d been trying to bolster his daughter. They made their way to the bell tower, where a technician was finishing, just leaving the area where the victim had been discovered.

“Looks like the victim was attacked by the school,” Kayleigh said. “Then once the killer had subdued her, she was brought here to the bell tower and hung upside down.” She kneeled down to eye the dusty floorboards of the bell tower, then looked up to the ceiling of the steeple, now dark, where once bells had been suspended. Cade remembered hearing those chapel bells peal as he grew up, the sound carrying through the town just before mass. He also remembered hearing the shouts and laughter of the kids who attended the private school. He’d been in this chapel only a couple of times when he was a kid. His mother had been a nonpracticing Catholic, his father an atheist, so visits to the chapel had been rare.

Cade studied the scene and wondered about the killer. How had he met his victim? Did he know her? Had he lured her here? Why was she at St. Augustine’s—an abandoned property—so late at night? And why would the killer take the time to drag her into the chapel? As if to stage her death. Why take the risk?

Somehow, he thought, the little church was significant.

“Are you really trying to connect this to the Hollander murder?” Kayleigh asked, dusting her hands as she straightened.

He shook his head. “Not really.”

“The case was closed. They had a confession.”

“It was an accident,” he said sharply, feeling a need to defend Rachel. Which was ridiculous.

“Then what’s the connection?”

“Too many coincidences.”

They walked out of the church and back along the fence to the gate, where they discarded their shoe coverings and signed out. A thin fog was rolling in from the west, oozing through the parking lot, blurring the sharp lines of the buildings.

Cade checked his watch. It had been a long night already and dawn was still an hour off, not a hint of gray light to the east. “Let’s talk this out,” he said. “I’ll buy you coffee at Abe’s. Breakfast if you want.”

“Coffee’ll do,” she said and climbed into the passenger side of his truck.

For a second he remembered another time, when they were still partners and the night had closed in on them. There had been one kiss, then another and . . . they’d stopped, both breathing hard, rain drizzling down a windshield that had started to fog. “I can’t do this,” he’d said, and she’d stared hard into his eyes. “Neither can I.” That had been the end of something that had never truly begun. They’d never stepped across that frail boundary of his disintegrating marriage, not before he’d signed the divorce papers and not after. Almost as if they’d known then it was a bridge too far.

He drove to the all-night diner situated on the highway at the western edge of town, a spot long-haul truckers used to spend the night in the oversized parking lot, beyond which fields stretched out to the old cannery site. The restaurant itself was a 1950s cinder block building with a high peaked ceiling and globe lights suspended over a counter that ringed a central kitchen. From behind a half wall, bacon sizzled, coffee perked, and dishes rattled.

They settled into one of the booths near the back of the building, though it still seemed like they were in a fishbowl, with the floor-to-ceiling windows that rimmed the restaurant. At this time of day, the place was nearly empty.

A skinny blond waitress who was far too perky for five in the morning appeared with a pitcher of steaming coffee in one hand. “Hey there. I’m Livvie. I take it you two need some good hot coffee right off the bat. And how about some breakfast?”