Dead Wrong

“So what are the odds that, just coincidentally, we have a second killer with the same idea?”

She didn’t have to answer.

“Are you going to talk to Mendoza?”

“Maybe. We’ll concentrate on her movements yesterday first.”

“She told me where she worked.” But, damn, he couldn’t remember.

“She was a hairstylist. She had a chair at Mountain High Salon.”

Beth made a sound. They all turned.

“Was she tall and blond? With a mole on her cheek?” She looked from one of them to another. Pressed her hands to her cheeks. “Oh, no! She cut my hair the last time. And Steph’s been going to her. I should have recognized the name! I hate to tell Steph. Oh, that poor girl.”

“I’m sorry,” his mother said, uselessly.

“Does Jack know yet?”

“No. He hasn’t called, and I figured there’s nothing he could do, not tonight. I’ll page him in the morning.”

Will’s mother and Detective Giallombardo ate then, both gobbling as if they couldn’t remember their last meal. He knew from experience that his mother would be lucky to snatch a few hours of sleep tonight. She’d spend tomorrow talking to everyone who’d know anything about Amy’s last day. Meg Patton was dedicated. Just…sometimes soft, in his opinion. Wanting to do the opposite of whatever her bastard of a father would have done. She and Aunt Renee both had seemed to spend their careers trying to bury their father’s legacy as Elk Springs police chief.

The two women left, Will’s mom promising to keep him informed. Then, he and Beth rehashed what they knew, Beth clearly upset.

“That poor, poor girl,” she kept saying. “She was your age?”

“A year younger.”

“Twenty-eight, then. Only twenty-eight.”

He finally persuaded her to go to bed, in part by heading for his own. With the house quiet and dark, only his bedside lamp on, Will sat up against a heap of pillows and tried to read, but kept finishing the same page without remembering a word.

He was tired, but at the same time wide awake. Antsy. Feeling as if he should do something. Fight or flight. Will recognized that he was in shock, reliving the hours after Gilly’s body was found, when a thousand, if onlys and I should haves had run crazily through his mind as if he were on crack. Replay, replay. Change the ending. He’d kept trying, over and over, until he was crazy and slammed his fist into the wall. He hadn’t even noticed he’d broken bones for a while, the pain nothing, nothing, compared to the agony in his chest.

His book fell to the bedcovers, forgotten. He couldn’t shut out the memories, the horror.

Amy, face alight when she saw him, waving in delight. “Will! Over here!” Gilly laughing up at him, staring at him with hate that in his imaginings became terror. Her face, Amy’s face, one and the same.

Pulling himself back from the abyss, Will tried to remember how well Gilly and Amy knew each other. They hadn’t become friends—nothing like that, but Amy was certainly part of the crowd he’d introduced Gilly to. They had looked a little bit alike. Both five-eight or -nine, leggy, boyishly slim, naturally blond. Neither blue-eyed. Gillian had had pale, almost sea-green eyes, Amy… He couldn’t quite picture them. Brown? He flashed on Trina Giallombardo’s brown eyes, assessing, accusing, judging, because he’d lost it with his mother. Angry at her intrusion, he shook his head and returned doggedly to his struggle to see Amy Owen. No. Not brown. Flecks of yellow and green.

Dead. Because, like Gillian, she was tall and blond and willowy? But their killers weren’t the same man. Couldn’t be the same man. Mendoza was guilty, guilty, guilty. Scum who had no business hitting on Will’s girlfriend in the bar, becoming enraged because she’d rejected him, raping, murdering, taunting.

Had Amy been chosen precisely because she looked like Gillian? A copycat crime required a copycat victim. But who in hell would imitate something like this? Could Elk Springs really have spawned two monsters? Copycat monsters?

It made no sense. None of it made sense. Gilly’s murder by a man who’d hot-wired cars and fenced stolen goods but never committed a violent crime. This one now, six years later. Why six years? Why now?

Why two women Will had known? A stranger, killed exactly like Gillian, would have been bad enough, but Amy! Less than a week after they met again, talked about old times, flirted a little.

He went cold. Was that why she’d been chosen? Because he knew her? Because he’d flirted with her? Because, like Gilly, she’d once meant something to him?

But that made no sense either. He’d dated her a few times. Kissed her. Had sex with her once—after they’d both had too much to drink at a party. So what? He’d dated and kissed a dozen girls or more in high school. Slept with several. Had a couple of girlfriends who lasted months. One nearly a year. He knew Nita and Christine both were still around. Why not one of them? Why Amy? Opportunity? Just because in a small town there were only so many look-alike blondes?

Why? God, why? he begged, even as he knew he’d get no answer.

CHAPTER THREE

LIEUTENANT PATTON HAD somehow kept word of the murder out of the morning papers, but they all knew it would be on the five o’clock local news.

The downside was that Trina had to be the one to tell many of Amy Owen’s friends and co-workers about her death. The task was made worse by the fact that Amy was apparently liked by everyone. No secret delight, no affected shock.

This particular friend, a plump, freckled redhead, turned milk-pale. “Dead?”

Seeing her sway, Trina said, “Please. Sit down.”

“Murdered?”

Gently taking her upper arm, Trina backed her up to the couch and pushed. Marcie Whittaker never took her stunned gaze from Trina’s face.

“How can she be?”

How did you answer that kind of question? It implied that there was a rational order, a why for every action, a series of logical consequences. It suggested that if you took to heart all of your parents’ warnings, you’d be safe, loved, prosperous. Trina had been a cop long enough to know that things didn’t work that way.

She and Lieutenant Patton had divided up names. Amy had had dozens of friends. After talking with the crew at the beauty salon, they’d each taken a list and started contacting anyone who might have spoken with Amy in the days leading up to her death, or who might have been with her yesterday. Since her vehicle had not yet been located, finding out where she might have gone that night was critical.

Trina remembered Marcie from high school. She and Amy had been part of a pack of popular girls—cheerleaders, homecoming princesses, stars of the spring musicals. As remote from Trina’s world as Will Patton had been. They’d walked down the hall in groups of three or four, laughing and tossing their long, shining hair, their clothes always perfect, their complexions glowing from a weekend on the ski hill. Money was never a problem for any of the popular kids, Trina had believed then.

In the intervening years, Marcie had put on weight. She’d gotten married right out of high school and had two school-age children as well as a toddler. Trina had expected a fancy house and found her instead in a modest rambler on a street of mostly rentals. Marcie had invited her in with surprise and said, “My youngest is down for a nap. You want to talk about Amy? Why?”

Now, in answer to the unanswerable, Trina said, “Amy may just have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s what we’re trying to determine.”

“Was she…”

“Raped?”

Marcie bit her lip and nodded.

“Yes, I’m afraid so.” They’d decided to admit that much.

“Oh God, oh God.”

“Did you speak to Amy in the last couple of weeks?”

Tears oozed from Marcie’s eyes. She nodded. “Excuse me. I need to—” She leapt to her feet and bolted from the room.

Trina used the time to study the framed photos on the mantel. Most were presumably of Marcie’s children, redheads all like their mother. Trina recognized the man who appeared in many only because Marcie had taken the last name Whittaker. In high school, Dirk Whittaker had been one of the swaggering jocks, a state All-Star tackle. Like a lot of brawny guys, he’d put on serious weight in the ten years since he’d graduated.

What interested her most was that, displayed with the family photos, there were three framed snapshots, probably taken at several year intervals, of Marcie with her old crowd, including Amy Owen. In the first, all were recognizably the same people they’d been in high school—still slim, stylish, confident. By the next photo chronologically, although all were posing jauntily and laughing, some of the crowd had changed: begun to put on weight, quit expending so much effort on their appearances. Perhaps half were still sleek and beautiful. By the most recent photograph, the distinction was obvious. Some, like Amy, still looked beautiful, privileged and entitled, while others in the crowd showed the toll taken by jobs that didn’t allow for hours at the gym, by scrimping financially, by the exhaustion of raising children.