After Caroline (22 page)

Joanna pulled her car off the road and parked near the structure. For a few minutes she wandered around outside, studying the area without looking for anything in particular. The place had a deserted feel to it, and it was very quiet except for the rumble of the surf. A very unlikely place to meet someone, she thought at first. But when she walked around it, it appeared to her that there was an ideal parking place on the far side of the barn where a car—or even two—wouldn’t have been seen from the road, and it looked as if it might have been used for that purpose. A favorite parking place for teen lovers, perhaps?

Perhaps. She had known a few every bit as unlikely during her own teen years.

The warped door opened easily, and inside, Joanna found that the building was being used to store hay. Bales were stacked high, leaving only a relatively small space roughly in the center of the building clear. The air was thick with the slightly musty but sweet-smelling scent of hay, and the interior was perfectly dry.

She didn’t hesitate to explore, recalling from childhood visits to hay barns how small “rooms” and chambers could
be made by arranging bales of hay. And sure enough, she found one. The entrance wasn’t obvious, and it didn’t appear to her to be an accidental arrangement of the bales, especially when a short “corridor” led her to one of the back corners of the barn where an eight-by-eight-foot-square room had quite obviously hosted more than one secret—or at least secreted—meeting.

It was a dim, shadowy place with barely enough light to see, the slight illumination provided by what little sunlight could find its way in between the warped boards of one outside wall. The loose hay on the floor was thick enough to provide a fairly comfortable bed, and Joanna found a rather luxurious plaid blanket folded neatly on a high shelf of hay bales. On the same shelf, she also found a shoe box containing an economy-size pack of moist towelettes and a varied selection of condoms.

“All the modern conveniences,” she heard herself murmur aloud. Practical if not terribly romantic.

Common sense told her this was indeed a try sting place for teenagers, but the expensive quality of the blanket prompted faint uncertainty. It seemed to her more something an adult would have brought out here. She supposed a boy or girl could have brought it from home, but it didn’t seem the sort of thing that wouldn’t be missed from an average house, and why take the chance? A cheap blanket or throw bought new would have done just as well.

Possibly
, her inner voice mused,
but that’s just a guess. There’s no evidence at all that sixteen-year-old Suzie didn’t filch the thing from her mother’s linen closet because all this hay was just too damned scratchy against her tender bottom
.

No evidence.

But somebody like Caroline, a fragile and dignified older woman, would certainly have thought of a blanket if this was her place to meet a lover. And she would have wanted to be prepared, to use protection and to have the means at hand to wipe away the damning evidence left by a lover. So a husband would suspect nothing.

And she might well ask that lover to meet her here on a warm July afternoon. A meeting that somehow went terribly wrong…

The possibilities were worse than disturbing; they made something inside Joanna tighten in pain. She couldn’t be sure who Caroline might have met out here, but Griffin claimed she asked to meet him the day she died, and it seemed to Joanna that a woman wouldn’t invite a man into her secret place unless it was a place he knew. A place he had visited before.

She left the box and blanket where she’d found them, turning away with even more uneasiness clawing at her. She didn’t immediately leave the little room. Instead, she stood looking down at the thick hay underfoot for a moment. She couldn’t have said what prompted her to begin scuffing her shoe through the stuff, and it was only after several minutes that she realized she was looking intently for … something.

No sooner had the awareness of her own actions penetrated than she caught the glint of light on something metallic, and she realized that her foot had uncovered a delicate piece of jewelry. It was a necklace, a fine gold chain with a small heart-shaped pendant.

Joanna knelt there in the hay and held it, squinting a bit in the dimness as she tried to make out the engraving on the front of the heart. Then she turned it slightly, and the words
I love you
seemed to jump out at her. After a moment, she turned the heart completely over, and saw more engraving on the back. This was more difficult to read, but finally she made it out. Two words only, engraved in script.

Love, Regan
.

“
T
ALK TO ME
, D
OC
.”

Doctor Peter Becket pushed his chair back as far as he was able in the tiny cubicle he used for an office whenever he was forced by circumstance to work in the basement morgue of the clinic. He rubbed his thin face with both hands, the gesture one of sheer weariness, and then peered up at Griffin standing in the doorway.

“We just brought her in a couple of hours ago. I haven’t even opened her up yet, Griff.”

“I know that. But you’ve done the preliminary exam, haven’t you?”

“Yeah.”

Griffin shifted impatiently. “Well?”

“Why’re you pushing on this?” Becket asked, his voice mildly curious. “I mean, hell, I know she was just a kid, and I feel as bad about it as anybody else—but why does this matter so much to you?”

“It’s my job. On my office door, on a shiny brass sign, it
says Sheriff. Says the same thing on my employment contract. The fine citizens of the town of Cliffside pay me to care when a tourist winds up smashed on the rocks.”

Becket waited him out, then repeated, “Why does this matter so much to you, Griff?”

Leaning a shoulder against the doorjamb, Griffin muttered a curse under his breath and then sighed. “It matters because I’ve got a sick feeling that kid had help going over the cliff. Tell me I’m wrong. Please.”

“I thought it was just an automatic question when you asked this morning,” Becket said slowly. “What did you see out there that I missed?”

“The ground was a bit churned up, that’s all.”

“It had to be more than that. You wouldn’t assume murder on the strength of something that vague.”

Both his job and his nature made Griffin unwilling to lay all his cards on the table, even for a colleague and friend, so he merely shrugged and returned an evasive answer. “I’m not assuming murder now. It could have been an accident, an argument that ended in the girl being pushed over the edge. I just want to know if I should be asking a different set of questions, that’s all.”

After a moment, Becket let out a little snort. “Yeah, right. Which is why you haven’t even given me time to do the post.” He gestured slightly, waving away anything Griffin might have said in response. “Never mind. I’ve got enough worries on my plate without adding yours, thank you. Look, the preliminary exam didn’t show anything conclusive. I found bruises on her wrist that
might
indicate somebody handled her roughly just before she died, and a few more on her shoulder I can’t really explain. But nothing to say with any certainty that she wasn’t alone out there last night. I expect the post to confirm she died from injuries sustained in the fall.”

“Can you tell me if she had intercourse before she died?”

“We found her fully clothed,” Becket reminded him.

“I know. But can you tell me if she had sex sometime in the hours before she died?”

Becket shrugged. “Possibly. Definitely if she did and her partner didn’t wear a condom. You don’t suspect rape?”

“Not really, since we found her clothed. But if you find any evidence of rape—”

“You’ll be the second one to know.”

“Thanks, Doc.”

“Just go away for a while, will you? Except for the tox screen, I’ll have a complete report for you late this afternoon.”

“The tox screen—”

“In a few days, Griff. Go away, huh?”

Griffin went away. He chose not to leave by the rear entrance of the morgue, or “loading dock,” where bodies were delivered for autopsies if death had occurred outside the clinic and were taken away to mortuaries afterward; even in a small town, death from accident or disease was a fairly regular occurrence, and there was something inherently depressing about those big, featureless double doors. Instead, he went upstairs and out the front of the clinic, waving to the nurse on duty at the desk but not pausing.

He didn’t get into the Blazer immediately, but stood breathing in the crisp morning air and gazing around with the automatic attention of a cop. The small clinic was situated one street back from Main Street, one block over and behind the library, and had the entire block to itself. Beside and slightly behind it was the piece of land Caroline had bequeathed for expansion; Scott hadn’t wasted time in carrying out his wife’s wishes, having already cleared the land in preparation for the new wing even before her will was probated.

Griffin didn’t think much about that. He absently noted that the bulldozers had apparently finished their part of the job, then got into the Blazer and headed back toward his office.

It had been a hellish morning, and the sick feeling in his gut wasn’t getting any better. He’d felt as if a fist had
punched him there when he had first glimpsed blond hair streaming over the rocks, when in that first terrible instant he had thought the dead girl was Joanna. The relief of discovering it wasn’t her had been curiously numbing, and it had taken seeing her, touching her, and talking to her, to convince him she was all right and to make him feel less paralyzed.

But that sick feeling hadn’t gone away. From behind, Amber might easily have been mistaken for Joanna, especially on a dark night. She might even have sounded like her if she’d cried out during the final seconds of her life. A scream such as the one she might have screamed would have no drawling accent, no expressive music, no unique personality—it would just have terror.

The only thing worse than being cursed with a vivid imagination, Griffin decided grimly, was to be cursed with an educated and experienced imagination. Amber had died violently; she might well have been mistaken for Joanna; and Griffin could see how it might have happened all too clearly in his mind.

That was one of the drawbacks of being a cop, this inability to sugarcoat anything. He had often wondered what quality of the mind or emotion was required to deliberately choose to be suspicious on a daily basis and to subject oneself to sights most people would have the good fortune never to see. Like torn and battered bodies. What made cops?

He knew the answer for himself, could easily pinpoint the place and time in his life when the urge to become a cop had taken root inside him. A summer he’d never forget as long as he lived had shaped him, he knew that. It had shaped him to hate evil, to mistrust more often than he trusted, to be suspicious of things that didn’t add up, and to loathe unanswered questions. That summer had turned him into a cop, even though he had been a kid of fifteen.

He pushed the haunting memories out of his mind and forced himself to concentrate on what he had to do in the here and now. The first step, of course, was to gather information,
as much information as he could. Then he would have to weed through everything, examine every minute detail of Amber Wade’s life and death.

Asking Becket to check for any sexual activity prior to death was no more than a shot in the dark; Griffin didn’t believe Cain had been sexually involved with her, and she’d seemed too fixated on him to have been having sex with another man. Rape seemed very unlikely, not in the least because rapists didn’t normally dress their victims afterward. Though it was, of course, possible that she had been attacked, raped, and killed, then dressed and pushed over the cliff in an effort to make her death appear accidental. Still, given the weather last night, that seemed unlikely.

But even if she
had
had sex sometime last night, where would the information get him? Her partner
might
have been a secretor, which would give them a blood type from semen left in the body—but so what? Without an admitted or suspected lover in custody, what good would that knowledge be?

Brooding, Griffin parked the Blazer in its accustomed spot at the Sheriff’s Department and went inside. He was met outside his office door by Gwen Taylor, one of his deputies, and she followed him inside with her usual doleful expression.

“I’ve got most of the statements here if you want to go through them, boss.”

“Any surprises?” he asked, hanging up his jacket.

She smiled. “That’d be too easy, wouldn’t it? Mark and Megan are beginning to fan out from The Inn just for the hell of it, knocking on doors and asking if anyone knew the girl, if anyone saw her yesterday or last night, but considering the weather—”

“Yeah, I know.” Griffin took the statements from her and sat down behind his desk. “Did Neal find anything down on the beach?”

Gwen shook her head. “Nada. If there was anything to find, high tide washed it away.”