Bleeding Through: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) (4 page)

Kevin took his time, and when he finally replied he sounded reluctant to speak the words. “I’m…I’m not sure. I’m just not sure.”

***

Tom had never seen a grown man cry the way Daniel Beecher did, unashamed among other men, making no effort to keep up a stoic front. In the month since Shelley disappeared, he’d been the strong one in the family, going to work every day, refusing to give in to despair. Now, with Shelley lying dead in the ravine below him, sobs convulsed his body, and he leaned a hand against a tree trunk as if he needed the support to keep from collapsing.

The rain clouds had drifted off, and Tom and Dan stood in a splash of pale sunlight at the top of the slope. Below them, Dr. Gretchen Lauter looked on as two young men lifted Shelley’s body onto a stretcher and secured it with straps for the climb to the road and the waiting mortuary van. Several men wearing the brown uniforms of the Mason County Sheriff’s Department formed a motionless line along the road. Waiting for orders, struck dumb by the naked grief of the victim’s father. Some of them watched Dan with fear in their eyes, and Tom knew they were thinking of their own kids, imagining themselves in Dan’s shoes. Tom felt an answering wrench in his own gut, and for once he was glad he didn’t have children to worry about. To lose.

In Dan’s eyes Tom saw a boiling stew of rage, barely controlled, and the force of it made him wonder if he’d be able to keep the grieving father at a distance from the investigation. He pulled a clean handkerchief from the back pocket of his jeans and pressed it into Dan’s hand.

Swiping the handkerchief across his mouth and nose, Dan drew a deep breath and made an effort to calm himself. “I keep thinking we should have taught her to be more careful, not to be so friendly to everybody. She thought bad things only happened to other people, not to her.”

“You can’t raise kids to be afraid of the whole world,” Tom said. “You cripple them if you do.”

“And look what happens if you don’t.” Dan’s face contorted and fresh tears filled his eyes. “Can’t you get that plastic off of her?”

“It’ll be removed in the hospital mortuary so Dr. Lauter can take a look at her before she goes to the medical examiner in Roanoke.”

“Do they have to do an autopsy? Does she have to be cut up?”

“We can’t investigate Shelley’s death without an autopsy.”

To Tom’s relief, Dan accepted that. He pulled in a shuddering breath and said, “I want to see her before they take her off to Roanoke.”

“We’ll go to the hospital. I need you to give me a formal identification. Do you want to pick up Sarah so she can be with you?”

Dan shook his head. “She’s not in any shape to go through that. I’ll do it.”

“She’ll want to see her daughter.”

“No. Not like this.”

Tom doubted Dan was doing his wife a kindness by keeping her away, denying her the finality of seeing Shelley’s body, but he wouldn’t argue the point. Families had to live with the emotional fallout of mistakes they made at times like this. Tom had learned to recognize situations where his interference would only add to the turmoil.

The two mortuary attendants started up the slope, carrying Shelley’s body on the stretcher between them.

“I want to ride with her,” Dan choked out. “I don’t want her to be alone.”

“We’ll be following right behind all the way.” Tom laid a hand on Dan’s shoulder. “We’re going to need your help to find out who did this. I’ll want to talk to you and Sarah both, probably more than once.”

“You gonna ask us a lot of stupid questions about her boyfriend and her teachers? Like that detective from Fairfax County did when she went missing?”

“They’re reasonable questions, Dan.”

“It’s a goddamn waste of time. I can tell you exactly who killed my daughter.”

Chapter Four

Rachel paused in the hallway outside the bedroom, her hand on the doorknob, transfixed by the images that rose up in her mind. Her blond, blue-eyed sister Michelle. The blond, blue-eyed Shelley Beecher. So much alike. For one awful second she envisioned her sister staring through a plastic shroud with lifeless eyes.

“Oh my god,” she gasped, bile rising in her throat. She swallowed. Why had her mind made that crazy connection? She shook her head, banished the terrible sight, and pushed open the door to the bedroom that had belonged to Tom’s parents.

The cat and bulldog scooted past her, grabbing the chance to explore a space usually off-limits to them. Rachel had no choice but to put Michelle in here, since she and Tom occupied the only other bedroom. Their recent paper-stripping and painting binge hadn’t extended this far, and they’d had no reason to change the room’s contents either. Wallpaper splashed with red and yellow flowers. Braided rug. Early American furniture. Michelle would be appalled.

Well, that’s just too bad,
Rachel thought.
Welcome to my world, baby sister.

The attempt to buoy her spirits lasted a split-second before she leaned against the door frame, overcome again by the anxiety the phone call had stirred up. Michelle had sounded desperate. Terrified. She was convinced someone was stalking her, breaking into her office. Yet the police refused to help, and her own husband seemed
to doubt any of it was real.

Could it be possible Michelle had imagined the stalker? She’d always been emotionally fragile. She had never squarely faced the truth about their identity, about Judith Goddard, the woman who had raised them and pretended to be their mother. Rachel was also living a lie, but at least she had confronted the reality behind the facade of their privileged childhood. For a long time she had feared the past would catch up with her sister
someday and crack the pretty glass bubble she lived in
.
Was it happening now? Was the stalker imaginary, representing the truth Michelle wanted to deny, destroying her equilibrium?

Rachel shook her head in disgust.
Psychobabble.
Michelle had her flaws, but she wasn’t suffering from psychotic hallucinations. Rachel had to take her sister’s account seriously. Some nut case was tormenting Michelle, and god only knew what he might do to her if he wasn’t stopped.

Frank, the cat, leapt to the top of a small bookcase and watched the brown and white bulldog, Billy Bob, snuffle his way around the bedroom, probably taking in the lingering scents of Tom’s parents. Billy Bob had been little more than a puppy when John and Ann Bridger died in an auto accident, but Rachel doubted the dog had forgotten his former owners.

Leaving the animals to their explorations, she walked down the hall to fetch clean sheets from the linen closet.

Tom had no idea yet that Michelle was coming. Rachel hated springing it on him at the worst possible time, at the start of a time-consuming, energy-draining murder investigation, but what else could she do in the face of her sister’s distress?

Back in the bedroom, she dropped the linens onto a chair and pushed up a window to let in a fresh, cool breeze. The room hadn’t been opened in so long the air smelled stale, and dust covered every flat surface. After she made the bed, she’d have to clean. She shook out a sheet over the mattress at the same time Frank jumped onto the bed. When the sheet descended on him, he wiggled around underneath, inviting Rachel to play. She tickled the cat through the cloth, her mind still on her sister.

She wouldn’t bet on Michelle and Tom getting along. And Michelle did not enjoy the countryside. What if she suddenly decided after a day or two that she couldn’t stand it here and wanted to go home? Kevin was driving her out, but if he couldn’t come to retrieve her during the work week, Rachel would have to juggle her own schedule so she could take Michelle back to Bethesda.

Maybe I’ll drop her off at the Trailways station.
Rachel had to laugh at the idea of her fussy sister riding back to Maryland on a bus. Then she sank onto the unmade bed and caught her head in her hands. Frank popped out from under the sheet and butted her elbow. “She’s not even here yet,” Rachel told the cat, “and already I’m getting snarky.”

Frank replied with one of his rusty-hinge meows.

After all this time, nothing had changed in the prickly relationship between Rachel and her sister. They still circled the ghost who stood between them, unable to lay Judith Goddard to rest, unable even now to talk about what she had done to them. Rachel could see the sad irony in a clinical psychologist’s refusal to face childhood trauma, but she had suffered enough emotional pain herself to know she had no right to force it on Michelle. She wasn’t willing to let her sister drop out of her life, so she’d accepted Michelle’s rules, maintaining occasional, undemanding contact, skating on the surface while all the important things remained unsaid.

Now Michelle needed her again. She’d turned to Rachel the way she had when they were children and nightmares drove her from her bed and across the hall to seek safety and comfort with her big sister. How could Rachel say no? She was grateful that, unlike Megan Beecher, she still had her sister. She would do whatever she could to help. But she felt a deep apprehension and resistance building inside her as the weight of Michelle’s problems settled on her, and she took it as a warning that they couldn’t easily slip back into their childhood roles.

***

Tom dropped a file folder on the conference room table and flipped it open. Inside lay three sheets of paper and a photo of Shelley Beecher, twenty-two years old, first year law student at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

“The Fairfax County police have all the records on suspects and interviews, and they’ve never shared any of it with us,” he told Dr. Gretchen Lauter and the two deputies seated at the table. “I asked a few people here some questions when she disappeared, but I didn’t have any reason to think somebody in Mason County was responsible.”

“Until now.” Sergeant Dennis Murray, a lean deputy with close-cut dark hair and wire-rimmed glasses, sat directly across from Tom.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Brandon Connolly said, “that somebody would snatch her in Fairfax County and bring her body down here. What could be behind that?” The young sandy-haired deputy often acted as Tom’s partner in investigations and Tom wanted him in the loop from the start.

“Damned if I know,” Tom said. “Whether the killer lives in Mason County or not, he—or she—was taking a chance on getting caught by bringing her body all the way from Northern Virginia. It would make more sense if she was brought here alive and killed here. But that would have been a risk too, at a time when everybody was looking for her and her picture was posted everywhere.”

“There has to be a reason the body was dumped here,” Dennis said. “I can’t even guess what it might be, though.”

“Gretchen?” Tom said. “What do you think about cause of death?” After Dan Beecher’s anguished identification of his daughter’s body, Tom had hustled him out of the hospital morgue and driven him home rather than staying to learn what Dr. Lauter’s preliminary examination revealed.

The medical examiner, a woman in her late fifties whose short curls were more gray than black these days, looked up from the batch of photos she’d been studying. “The autopsy may prove me wrong, but I’d say she died of strangulation with a leather belt or something similar, an inch or so wide with hard edges. Something that held its shape when it was pulled tight.”

She handed Tom a close-up photo she’d taken of Shelley’s neck. With her hair pulled out of the way, the ligature bruise was unmistakable.

“Did she have any other injuries? A head wound?” Tom couldn’t help hoping Shelley had been knocked out before she was strangled. “Could you tell whether she was sexually assaulted?”

“I didn’t undress her. I didn’t want to disturb the body any more than I had to before it went to Roanoke, but I can say that her clothing was intact, nothing was torn. She had no head injury, and there’s no blood on the body that I could see. She did have obvious injuries to her hands, though.” She offered Tom a close-up photo of Shelley’s hands, laid on her chest.

Tom slid the first photo across the table to Dennis and Brandon and took the second.

“Some of her fingernails were ragged, as if they were torn off while she was scratching something or somebody,” Dr. Lauter said, “The bones in two fingers on her right hand were broken. Snapped, as if—I shouldn’t be speculating, but what came to mind was somebody bending the fingers back until they broke. I’m inclined to think she put up a good fight. Unfortunately, the nails are so clean that I doubt the crime lab will find any tissue from the killer under them.”

Tom stared at the mottled blue-green of Shelley’s skin, the two fingers on the right hand that were twisted together like a pretzel. He could imagine the pretty young woman he’d known fighting, kicking, clawing while the belt tightened around her neck and stopped her scream, stopped her breath. Stopped her life.

Tom pulled himself back to the moment and slid the photo across the table to Dennis and Brandon. “What about time of death? She doesn’t look as if she’s been dead long.”

Dr. Lauter hesitated before answering. “I’m not going to make any assumptions about when she died. She could have been killed in the last few days, but it’s also possible she’s been dead longer than it might appear at first glance.”

“The body’s in good condition,” Tom said. “To keep it that way any length of time—”