Pretty Little Wife(87)
“On the front porch.” Ginny stepped closer. “Does it look familiar?”
“Maybe.” Definitely. “It was on the porch, out in the middle of nowhere?”
Ginny nodded toward the other cabin photos. The long rocky driveway. The green lawn made of low shrubs at the bottom of the porch steps.
“The house sits in a clearing, but yes.” Her eyes narrowed. “What are you thinking?”
That the matching chair was in her attic. It looked just like this one. Same age and same details. It meant something, but she didn’t know what. “It just seems weird for a serial killer to have a rocking chair.”
“Handmade. We think it’s a family heirloom.”
She knew that to be true. “What does Jared say?”
“No more than you do.”
Lila filed the photo in the back of her mind. She’d venture into the attic again and look at the chair. With the information tucked away, she flipped into defensive mode. She’d come too far to backslide now. “You can’t believe I had anything to do with the Karen or Julie—”
“No, but I think you knew more about your husband’s extracurricular activities than you admit to.”
Lila wasn’t sure what that meant, but the serious, unblinking stare told her Ginny was not done. FBI or not. “I told you I’d found the videos with the students. I handed them over to you.”
“I remember.” Ginny folded her arms across her chest. “My point is that I think you found out a lot earlier than you’re admitting and then killed him because of it.”
Very good, except for one thing.
“I didn’t stab him.” Lila could make the claim without one ounce of worry about giving herself away. She still didn’t know who had, but with the arrest and whispers about Brent, she guessed him. He’d tried to spook her, threatened her. If he was an accomplice, she hoped he never knew another minute of peace.
“That’s not what killed Aaron.”
Lila was sure she’d missed something. “What?”
“Forensics confirmed that he was dead before being stabbed.” Ginny watched her. Her gaze dipped up and down Lila’s body, as if waiting for her to blow it.
Lila forced her body to stay still. Her expression froze, and she did a countdown in her head until she could shift even an inch. She refused to give away her surprise.
She fought to swallow over the dryness in her mouth. “Who would stab a dead man?”
“No idea.” Ginny practically glowed with satisfaction. She’d stumped Lila, and she knew it. “There were high levels of gas in his blood and liver.”
“I don’t get it.” But she did understand that part. She’d put the gas there. The setup of the car as a suicide was supposed to do the rest to explain any adverse toxicology results.
“Murder often isn’t a rational act. It can be messy. Emotional. Spur-of-the-moment or planned.”
An alarm sounded in the back of her brain. Ginny could be lying or playing with the facts. Nothing she said made sense except the reasons for killing someone, and a few of those hit too close to the truth. “I feel like I’m back in law school.”
“My point is that you may not have stabbed Aaron, but I still think you killed him.”
Lila needed to know if that stemmed from common sense and good instincts or from a new and so far undisclosed piece of evidence. She could only fight one of those options. “Why?”
Ginny shrugged. “You tell me.”
“It’s your job, not mine.”
This time Ginny smiled. “I’d think you’d want to know who killed your husband.”
“You’d be wrong.” Because now she knew.
She killed him.
ABOUT FIVE MINUTES after Lila left her office, Pete wandered in. Ginny wasn’t ready for a conversation about protocol or arguments about how she’d handled the case. She kept mentally running through Lila’s reactions to the photos and the news about Aaron’s actual cause of death.
Lila finally had flinched. Subtle, but Ginny saw it. Some part of the news and a few of those photos shocked her. Threw her off her usual steady game. Ginny needed to know why.
Pete lounged in the doorway. “I saw Lila in here. Is it okay for her to see the board?”
She knew he wasn’t seeking the advice from a more experienced officer. This was Pete’s way of letting her know he thought she’d screwed up. She wasn’t interested in playing the game. “No.”
“So . . . why invite her in? I don’t get it.”
“Look at this.” Ginny grabbed the photographs of Karen’s bracelet and the older one they thought might have belonged to Aaron’s mother off the board.
“I ran a check. There are no photos of Aaron’s mother and no relatives to ask, so I couldn’t track it at all. The newer bracelet is from a company that services jewelry stores, clothing stores. They’re not expensive and can be found almost everywhere. It was a dead end.”
But it wasn’t. The pieces started coming together in the most horrible way.
“That’s not my point. Do we have other bracelet photos?” She could get the bags out of the evidence locker, but the photos might be enough.
Pete slipped out of the room and was back in a few minutes with an envelope in hand. He opened it and spilled the photos on the desk, shifting through until he found alternative angles of the bracelets. “What are we looking for?”