Redemption Road(37)

Liz was sweating, but it was a thin, cold sweat. Beckett saw enough on her face to understand what she was feeling inside: childhood and betrayal, the hard turns of an ugly disbelief. This was her church. Adrian was her hero.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked.

“Because you’re not thinking straight. Because I need you to understand that Adrian Wall is a killer, and that your obsession with him is dangerous.”

“There’s no obsession.”

“Then stay away from him.”

“Or what?” There was the spark, the heat. “Why do you hate him so much? He didn’t kill Julia Strange. He didn’t kill this one, either.”

“Jesus, Liz. Listen to yourself.” Beckett frowned, frustrated by his inability to do this simple thing. Liz’s faith in Adrian Wall had burned a lot of bridges when she was a rookie. Cops distrusted her, thought her flawed and female and irrational. It took years for her colleagues to fully accept her, and longer still for her to walk the station without a chip on her shoulder. Beckett had seen it. He’d lived it. “Try to look at this like a cop. Okay?”

“As opposed to what? An astronaut? A housewife?”

He was making it worse. Same chip on her shoulder. Same bitterness.

“He didn’t do it, Charlie.”

“Damn it, Liz—”

“I was with him last night.”

“What?”

“He wasn’t interested in something like this. He wasn’t interested in people, at all. He was … sad.”

“Sad? Do you even hear yourself?”

“You shouldn’t have brought me here.” She turned and started walking. “It was a mistake,” she said, and Beckett knew she was right.

He’d played it ten kinds of wrong.

He’d lost her.





10

Elizabeth drove and tried to get her head around what had just happened in the church. Forget the body, the fact of another death. That was too big and too sudden. She’d need time to process what it meant, so she thought about Beckett instead. He wanted to help—she understood that—but she despised the church in a way he could never understand. It was old, that hatred, twined so deeply into Elizabeth’s soul that it was hard to stand before the altar of her youth and be objective about anything. She felt small there, and angry and betrayed. That was a tough combination; so, in the quiet of her car, she focused on the one thing that mattered now.

Was she right to believe in Adrian?

They’d never been close in any of the normal ways. He was the man who’d saved her life, a glow in the night of her bitter despair. Because of that, her feelings for him had never been rational. When she thought of him, she saw his face at the quarry, the steadiness and goodwill. Her faith in him only grew when she became a cop. He was bold and smart, cared about victims and their families. Yet, even when she was a cop herself, he’d maintained an aloofness. A smile here. A word there. The gestures were small and in passing, but she could not deny the feelings they’d stirred or the dangerous question such feelings raised.

Was she obsessed?

It was a difficult question, but only because she’d never asked it of herself. She was a cop because of Adrian; driven because he, too, had been driven. When his skin turned up under Julia Strange’s nails, Elizabeth had been the only one to doubt his guilt. Not his friends or peers or the jury. Even his wife seemed to fade at the end, sitting with her head down, unwilling to meet his eyes or show up for the sentencing. That thought bothered Elizabeth more now than it ever had. Why should she believe in Adrian when his own wife had not? Elizabeth disliked that kind of self-doubt, but her faith in Adrian had been blind. She’d been young, desperate to believe; and looking back, that all made sense. But was she blinded, now? Thirteen years had passed, but the murders looked the same. She could blink and lay Gideon’s mother on the same altar. What was different from one murder to the next?

She didn’t know. That was the problem. They didn’t have time of death on the new victim, but based on the body’s appearance, she most likely died after Adrian’s release from state prison. Elizabeth chewed on that for an hour and disliked the taste of such strong coincidence. She wanted to know if anything tied the new victim to Adrian—witness statements, physical evidence, anything beyond his being a convicted killer fresh off a thirteen-year stretch. Normally she could call a dozen people, but she was suspended, out of the loop; and Francis Dyer would fire her for real if she dug too deeply. She told herself to let it go. Her life was coming apart, and Channing’s was, too. Gideon was in the hospital. State cops wanted her for double homicide.

But, it was Adrian Wall.

Her father’s church.

She returned to it without conscious thought, parking on the verge to watch movement high above. The medical examiner was there. So were Beckett, Randolph, and a dozen others—techs and uniforms and somewhere, she thought, Francis Dyer. How could he not be there? Adrian had been his partner. His testimony helped bring him down.

Elizabeth lit a cigarette, then tilted the mirror to study her face. She looked drawn and bloodshot and unsure.

What if she was wrong about him?

What if she’d been been wrong all these years?

Twisting the mirror away, she smoked half the cigarette and stubbed it out. Something was not right, and it was not the church or the body or anything obvious. Was it the victim? Something about the scene? She watched the church for another five minutes and understood, suddenly, what felt so wrong.