The Girl Who Survived(17)

Now, years later, he wasn’t sure.

Johnson was still reading. “Kara insisted her older sister locked her on the third floor and she somehow escaped only to find her family slaughtered.” Johnson’s eyebrows drew together. “She said she thought the intruder came back into the house, so she took off through the kitchen, ran out the back door, and down a path that dead-ended at the lake. She tried to cross the ice, ended up falling in, and the intruder she’d been running from turned out to be a cop coming to see what all the screaming was about.”

“Edmund Tate. Off-duty. A good one. Had been a marine. Hero type.” Thomas nodded. “Saved the kid.”

“And ended up having a massive heart attack himself and dying.” She was slowly pacing in front of his desk, absorbing all the information in the old file, the wheels in her head obviously turning.

“Uh-huh. Despite what the paramedics did, he was DOA at the emergency room.”

“Sweet Jesus.” She shook her head, dark hair glistening under the light. She looked up, skewering him with those near-black eyes. “So no intruder?”

“None found.”

Aramis fingered her cross again as she skimmed through the reports. “Kara always claimed her brother was innocent.”

“But no one bought it.”

“Because of her testimony?” Her eyes narrowed and she chewed on her lip.

“Yup, that’s the conundrum. What she witnessed and testified to didn’t jibe with what she felt or thought about Jonas.”

“Probably she just couldn’t believe her brother could be so savage and brutal.”

“And a murderer.”

“Right.” She quit fiddling with the cross and stopped pacing. “His prints were all over the murder weapon.”

“Uh-huh.” Thomas leaned back in his chair until it squeaked in protest. “You see the motive?”

Frowning more deeply, she nodded. “Jealousy.”

“Of his older stepbrother. Donner.”

“Dear God. Testosterone at its worst,” she muttered with a long-suffering sigh. “So Donner was involved with Jonas’s girlfriend?”

“Apparently.”

“How involved?”

“Intimate.”

One eyebrow arched a little higher. “Let me guess: Jonas was not cool with it.”

“Who would be?”

“Lord Almighty . . .” And it seemed a prayer, barely audible over the sound of air whooshing through the vents and conversations in the outer hallway.

Thomas knew what she was reading because he had nearly memorized the case file, and as she skimmed the documents they played over in his mind:

Jonas McIntyre, who miraculously survived the deadly assault, swore to this day that he is innocent of any homicides that were pinned on him. Yes, he’d admitted when the cops had arrived, he had picked up the old sword mounted in the wall of his bedroom. Jonas claimed that he’d been “messing around” with the weapon earlier in the day and had left it on the floor of his room. According to Jonas, Marlie had even walked past the bedroom earlier and had spied him with it. That’s why his fingerprints were all over the hilt.

Of course, she had conveniently gone missing, so that fact couldn’t be proved.

In his telling of it, Jonas had asserted that later that night he’d been in his room again when he heard something going on in the living room. A “ruckus,” that’s what he’d called it in the single statement he’d given police before his attorney had shut him up for good. Jonas told the cops he’d “sensed something bad was up,” so he’d hauled the sword with him and followed the noise to investigate, because, he’d said, he planned to scare his older brothers if they were up messing around or, alternately, ward off an intruder, “a bad dude,” if he discovered a burglar in the dark. Which he did.

And then all hell broke loose. Startled by the guy, Jonas had swung the heavy weapon and missed his target as the intruder spun away. Instead, Jonas had struck the mantel and cut a chunk out of it. The intruder got the better of him and he was injured. Cut and conveniently knocked out. When he woke up, his family was slaughtered, Kara was screaming, and a man he didn’t recognize, probably the killer, he’d thought, chased her out of the house.

When the cops arrived at the scene, they’d immediately zeroed in on Jonas. His story didn’t ring true, and later they discovered that the fingerprints on the hilt were his and his alone.

As for motive, Johnson had hit on it. The running theory had been that Jonas McIntyre had been royally pissed at his parents for grounding him—he’d been caught earlier in the week by the police for getting into a fight with his stepbrother, Donner Robinson. The parents had declined to press charges, but Donner, like Jonas, had been grounded.

Not good enough. Jonas, a troubled, violent eighteen-year-old had been furious and smoldering in the days following the fight with Donner, so he decided to kill his father and stepmother, along with his stepbrother, whom he’d learned had slept with Lacey Higgins. Whether Jonas had been just trying to threaten and scare Donner or if he’d really intended to harm Donner, the upshot was that things went horribly, murderously wrong, and Jonas, in a fit of rage, ended up killing everyone who walked into that room on Christmas Eve. Only he and Kara had survived, while Marlie had vanished into thin air.