The Girl Who Survived(16)

Far better than for detectives who’d crossed that invisible professional line and gotten involved with a reporter. He closed his mind to that way of thinking. Turned his thoughts back to Jonas McIntyre, who, in Thomas’s opinion, was a merciless killer who had murdered his entire family. He flipped open the file, the folders and pages within yellowed with age and smelling of years gone by.

“This is all on computer, you know,” Aramis pointed out.

“Yeah, pulled it up.” He hitched his chin toward the screen, where Jonas McIntyre’s mug shot was visible: a gaunt kid of eighteen with sunken eyes as dark as night, mussed hair and pale skin. Traces of acne were barely evident in his thin beard shadow. More apparent was the attitude, visible in the tight, challenging set of his jaw and the compacted lips. Cruel thin lips.

“What motivates a kid like that?” she said, eyeing the monitor.

“Don’t know. Whatever he told to his psychiatrist, it’s privileged. Same with his lawyer, so we’re left to guess.”

“Is he dangerous?”

“You tell me.” He glanced up at her from his desk chair. “A teenager who murders nearly everyone in his entire family? You think he’s gotten better after spending half his life in the big house with convicts?”

She lifted a shoulder. “He found God.”

“Don’t they all?”

“Oooh,” Johnson said. “Bitter, my man.”

“Am I? I wonder why? This guy.” Thomas tapped the image on the screen with an index finger. “Hacked up his whole damned family with a sword. His father, his stepmother, his brother, and his stepbrother.”

“Not his whole family.”

“Okay, fine, one little girl survived.”

“And another went missing. The sister Marlie, right?” Aramis picked up the file and rifled through it. “She was what—? Oh, here it is. Seventeen. Jesus.”

“Stepsister.” Thomas turned away from the computer and the dead look in Jonas McIntyre’s eyes. “It was a Brady Bunch kind of family. The old man, Sam, came into the marriage with two kids. Sam Junior and Jonas. Zelda was wife number three. The first one was his high school sweetheart—

“Leona.”

“Yeah, that’s right. They had a son whom they named after Sam and a baby who died at two. A girl. Betsy.”

“Wow. Does this family ever catch a break?” she asked, her eyebrows drawing together.

“Not since that time—well, that I know of.” He didn’t have to look at the file again. He’d already tucked the information about Sam Senior’s family away. “So then, as that marriage is crumbling by the loss of the baby, Sam gets involved with Natalie, who becomes wife number two.”

“Before divorcing number one?”

“That seemed to be his MO. Both times.”

“Ouch,” she said. “I don’t imagine that went over well with the exes.”

“Probably not.”

“And Jonas? He was from the second wife?”

“Yeah, Jonas is Natalie’s kid.” Even saying the killer’s name left a bad taste in his mouth.

“What happened to the previous Mrs. McIntyres?” Johnson picked up the worn manila file.

“Remarried, I think.”

“Both of them?”

“Not sure.”

“So, Zelda Donner Robinson was number three.” Johnson was flipping through the musty pages of the file, her eyes skimming the notes, her hip balanced against the edge of his desk as the old furnace rumbled from ducts overhead. “And she came with her own kids.”

“Right. She was the mother of Marlie and Donner Robinson.”

“Along with Kara, the only kid they shared between them.” She glanced up as he nodded.

“Right. Zelda’s first husband was Walter Robinson.”

“And how did he take being tossed over for a new model?”

Thomas shrugged. “About the same as Samuel’s ex-wives did, I think. As far as anyone knew, they all got along.”

“Got along?” she repeated. “You mean as in they didn’t make waves, were cordial, but didn’t hang out and go on vacations or spend holidays together?”

“Right.” At the mention of holidays, he thought again of that final bloody Christmas but didn’t have to mention it. He suspected Johnson was on the same wavelength.

She scanned a few more pages. “In this blended family, all the kids were really close in age. Basically teenagers, it looks like.”

“Except for the littlest daughter,” he reminded her.

“The one supposedly locked in the attic.”

“Right,” he said, conjuring up the image of a small girl in the witness box, all blond curls, big eyes, and wan cheeks. Kara had answered each question in a tiny voice, chewed on her lip, and kept the courtroom rapt. Thomas remembered. The usually noisy chamber had been silent as a tomb, not so much as the rustle of a paper or a shoe scraping as that tiny waif of a girl had recounted what she’d seen in a thin, whispered voice, her answers prompted by the DA. Kara, white-faced, had stared at Jonas, her chin trembling, as if she was about to break down and desperately wanted his forgiveness.

Cole Thomas, himself, had been in the second row of the courtroom, a rookie cop who still believed that only bad guys were sent to prison, that the system never failed.