The Murder Rule(80)
“I’m so sorry to bother you. My mom asked me to drop something off at the Pierce house? I was sure I wrote down the address but now I can’t find it. I know it’s on Lafayette Road but I can’t remember . . .”
He didn’t wait for her to finish, just directed her to number 129
and told her to be sure to tel Mindy hel o from him. Hannah smiled her thanks and returned to her car. She drove down the road, found the house, and drove on a little before parking and returning. She pul ed her clothes out of her backpack, replaced them with the crowbar, put the backpack on her back, and set off in the direction of the house. Her hands were shaking. She didn’t al ow herself to slow or hesitate or even think too much about what she was going to do.
When she reached number 129 she stepped over the low fence and walked into the property, hugging the fence line between 129 and number 131. She watched the house. Jerome Pierce would be at the courthouse. His children were grown and moved away, but his wife might be there, watching. There were no cars in the driveway, no sign of movement in the house. Hannah kept walking. Sam had mentioned a workshop. There was a garage, to the front of the property that she’d already passed, but that didn’t feel right. She kept going around the back and spotted it. A smal building at the rear, off to the left of the pool, that looked like a purpose-built studio. It had a pitched roof and weatherboard siding, like a mini-version of the main house. This had to be Jerome Pierce’s man cave, the place where he sat and plotted and admired his good work.
Hannah tried the door but it was locked. She tried the crowbar, but the dead bolt wouldn’t give. Okay. Fine. Hannah took a chair from a nearby patio, put it alongside the building, stood on it, and used her crowbar to break the window. One good strike and it shattered. She used the crowbar to clear the glass as best she could, then climbed inside, cutting her left hand a little in the process.
She left a smear of blood behind her.
The shed was expensively decorated, with a custom-built desk and bookshelves along one side of the room, a smal wood-burning stove, and a beer fridge. The other side of the room was lined by three large, metal filing cabinets. Hannah had to climb over the cabinets to enter the room. Hannah glanced uneasily toward the door, very aware that if someone came through it suddenly she wouldn’t have time to climb back out the way she had come. She looked around for cameras, didn’t see any, and tried to slow her breathing. She’d gotten this far.
The filing cabinets were unmarked, unlabeled. The drawers were locked, but these at least were no match for the crowbar. She popped the second drawer of the first cabinet and pul ed it out. She real y didn’t know what she had expected to find. Sam had said blackmail material, which might be anything and nothing. A fever dream of his friend Teddy, even. Inside the drawer she found a mix of police case files and plain manila folders, each one neatly labeled with a case name and number, or on the plain manila folders, a name alone. Hannah took a random selection to the desk, sat down, and started to read.
The police folders seemed to be copies of old case files. She leafed through a couple, saw copies of investigative reports and witness statements, police forms, but nothing that struck her as unusual. The manila folders were different. The first one she opened was marked with the name Carole Anne Saunders and contained handwritten notes and photographs. According to the file, Carole Anne was a married mother of three who lived on Nelson Road.
Carole Anne was a member of the Yorktown School Board. She had also been having an affair with the high school principal for at least eight months, and the photographs were there to prove it. Hannah closed the file, turned it over in her hands, and looked again at the filing cabinets. This file, the Saunders file, was an old one. The information in it was out of date. Maybe Carole Anne Saunders had moved on, left her husband, left Yorktown. Or maybe she stil lived here, stil sat on her place of minor power on the school board.
Maybe Pierce had already used this information to lean on Saunders for whatever smal favors she was in a position to deliver or maybe he held it over her head. None of that mattered to Hannah. The point was that Teddy and Sam had been right. Pierce used these cabinets to store the information he stockpiled against his enemies and, presumably, given his character, his friends. She had come here looking for evidence of that blackmail. Something that could take him down.
Hannah abandoned the files on the desk and returned to the cabinet. Everything appeared to be filed alphabetical y. She hunted through until she got to E and looked for a file marked Jackson, Engle. Bingo. She pul ed it out, then went back and went through the D’s and the F’s. She found a copy of the Sarah Fitzhugh police file, and a manila folder with Michael Dandridge’s name on it. She put both in her backpack along with the crowbar, and made for the door.
At the last minute she scooped up the Carole Anne Saunders file and took that with her too. She’d trash it at the first opportunity. She wished she could light a bonfire with the contents of those filing cabinets. Was there a file in there on Sophia Prosper? Her husband?
How many other lives had been blighted by Jerome Pierce? Hannah went straight back to her car, unlocked her door with shaking hands, swung her backpack inside, and drove away. She pul ed in outside the York Pub, where she’d had crab cakes with Camila only a few short days ago. She felt safer here, with people coming and going, than she would parked down a quiet side al ey.
She opened Dandridge’s file first. More handwritten notes, recording the life Dandridge had been leading at the time of his arrest, his known associates, his drug habit, the fact that he was cut off from his once-wealthy family who had, according to the file, lost money in a real-estate investment. There was information about Prosper in the file, but it was al general stuff—again, where he lived, who he spent time with. Nothing that would prove Pierce had leaned on him or why. Damn. Damn damn damn. Hannah blinked back tears of frustration.