Hold Back the Dark (5 page)

Remembering that she’d meant to run Dr. Gannon’s familiar name through the computer, Elise typed in some searches and started to scroll through the results.

She switched the screen to a report as she heard Josh hang up the phone. He stood up and leaned over the cubicle wall. “We can see Jenna this afternoon. With her dad.”

Elise made a face. “We’ll get more if she’s by herself.”

“We’ll get nothing if we don’t let Daddy sit in. He made that clear.” Josh stretched. “Looks like Gannon and Phillips want to go get some stuff for Taylor over at the house. I’ll take them, unless you want to.”

“Be my guest,” Elise said.

Josh nodded and headed downstairs, where the staff social worker had been talking to the aunt and the shrink. Elise gnawed on the end of her pencil and considered the fact that the kid had needed a shrink.

So Taylor had already been mentally unstable. Aimee Gannon could call her fragile or any other euphemism she wanted; it meant the same thing. The kid was a few tacos shy of a full combination plate. But was she unstable enough to fly into the kind of rage necessary to bash in her father’s head and strangle her mother?

It didn’t feel right to her. Especially the strangulation. She’d told Josh it was a man’s crime and Doc Halpern had agreed with her, but now they knew that Taylor had a boyfriend and a drug habit. Teenagers revved up on hormones and rebellion and drugs had committed murder before.

Yet something about the girl screamed “victim” to Elise. Not perpetrator. Not instigator. With any luck, she’d start talking soon. She’d responded to the aunt a little bit. She’d reached for her hand and stopped rocking for a while. Supposedly that was great progress. Elise had asked Gannon how long she thought it would be until Taylor spoke again, and Gannon had been less than committal.

“Later this afternoon, or not for a month. I wish I could be more specific, but there’s really no way to predict how long it will take Taylor to feel safe enough to speak again,” she’d said in that smooth contralto.

Elise didn’t want her fellow cops to know how often she used hunches to decide whether or not to trust someone. Cops didn’t want to hear about someone’s aura. They wanted facts, evidence. Things that can be presented in court. Bad mojo pouring off someone like poisoned syrup? Not a thing the district attorney could do with that in front of a judge. But her gift served Elise well from time to time, and she’d gotten a reputation as a cop with good instincts. That carried some weight with her fellow officers. Go figure. How exactly were good instincts different from the energy she felt emanating off of people? She guessed presentation was always half the battle.

Elise’s instincts told her that Aimee Gannon was okay. There was some private pain under that smooth, calm surface that Elise could sense. She had a hunch that Josh would have more luck in that department. It would take a little heat to melt that icy veneer, but she had faith in her partner. She was pretty sure he could bring the heat when he wanted to.

And she was pretty sure he wanted to. It wasn’t like Josh to be willing to take a babysitting run. He could have sent a uniform with Aimee and Marian to the Dawkin home.

The phone on her desk rang. “Hey, Elise,” Clyde Owen said.

“Yeah?” she answered the crime lab tech. “What you got?”

“The duct tape on your victims? It’s all contiguous.”

Another un-surprise. Most murderers didn’t stop to patch up the air-conditioning unit between binding up their victims. “Thanks, Clyde.” She started to hang up.

“Here’s the interesting part, though,” Clyde said. “The first piece of tape off the roll matches a piece that was used to patch the desk chair in the victim’s study.”

Elise stopped. “Really?”

“Yeah. So I figure the duct tape must have already been in the study, and the murderer used what was handy. Same way he used the lamp and the cord. They were there, right? He didn’t bring the lamp with him.”

“So you’re saying it was spontaneous. He didn’t plan it.” Was it possible that whoever had done this hadn’t thought it out first? That something or someone had suddenly enraged them enough to suddenly turn unspeakably violent? What could possibly do that? Money and sex were generally the first two answers on the list. What had been going on in that house under its placid suburban exterior?

“But that doesn’t fit with the glove thing,” Clyde continued.

“I didn’t realize there was a glove thing.” Elise waited for Clyde to finish processing his thoughts. It didn’t pay to rush him. With Clyde, it was best to let the choo-choo train go all the way around the track without interrupting its journey.

“Yeah. There were no fingerprints on the tape, except for the victim’s fingerprints on the tape that patched his chair. Whoever taped those people up like that had to have been wearing gloves. Halpern told me that the stuff he found under the female vic’s fingernails was latex. It could be consistent with her trying to get away from someone wearing latex gloves. Not much of a lead—you can buy those things in any drugstore in town.”

“You never know what might help. Thanks, Clyde.” Elise hung up and pondered that particular conundrum. If the murderer came to the house not intending to do any harm, why did he have gloves handy? Maybe it was somebody with some weird germ phobia? It definitely was something that they should keep in mind.

Elise stared at the photos of Stacey Dawkin lying facedown on her living room floor. Whoever had killed her hadn’t come to her house planning on murder. That seemed pretty certain. But from those multiple ligature marks on Stacey’s throat, Elise was pretty sure that the murderer had started to enjoy it.

She hoped they found the bastard before he decided to throw himself another little party where the guests would never go home.

J
osh parked in front of the Dawkins’ house. The television crews had trampled the hell out of the lawn, but except for that and the yellow crime scene tape across the front door, it looked like all of the other single-family homes in the neighborhood—big, solid, and costly. He got out and Marian Phillips and Aimee Gannon stepped onto the curb next to him.

Gannon’s dark hair was down today, lying thick around her shoulders. Her eyes, no longer shielded by the black-framed glasses, looked as weary as they had the night before. Josh doubted that she’d slept much. She had on a pair of trousers that had Josh wondering just how long her legs were, and a white blouse with a camisole damnably shielding her cleavage. He couldn’t say what Marian Phillips was wearing. He could hardly tear his eyes off Aimee long enough to watch the road while he was driving.

“I have to ask you ladies to touch as few things as possible,” Josh said.

Marian Phillips nodded, her mouth pressed into a tight thin line. Dr. Gannon placed her hand gently on Marian’s back and asked, “Are you okay with this? Do you want to wait outside?”

“I’d love to wait outside, but I need to do this for Taylor.” Her voice caught. “I need to do this for my sister.”

Gannon put her arm around the smaller woman’s shoulders. “Okay, then. Let’s go in.”

Josh opened the front door and stood aside to let them in. He saw Gannon flinch at the vomit by the bushes near the front door, and wondered what her reaction would be to the scene inside. He knew it was harsh, but he wanted to see her response unfiltered by any warning.

Marian walked in and stopped short. Her hands flew to her mouth; her shoulders hunched as if she might be physically ill. Behind her, Gannon put an arm around Marian and steadied her. Then she looked around and gasped at the blood-covered walls.

Her face drained of color and she swayed on her feet. He couldn’t blame her. He’d been repulsed even before he found out that Taylor had used the broken shards of a wine bottle to cut herself, then used her own blood to paint the walls with those weird geometric shapes. And it wasn’t as if this was his first homicide.

Aimee felt her gorge rise. “What does that mean?” she asked, unable to look away from the blood-smeared walls.

“We’re not sure,” Wolf said behind her. “I was hoping you might know.”

“Why would I know?” Aimee turned to look up at him. His dark eyes were trained on her face and gave her the disturbing impression that he saw way more than what was on the surface.

“Because you know Taylor better than we do,” he said, looking from Aimee to Marian.

“You think Taylor did this?” she asked.

“They’re pretty sure about that.” Wolf gestured to the wall with his chin. “It’s her blood and her fingerprints all over the walls.”

“Her own blood?” Aimee echoed. Of course—the cuts all over Taylor’s body. The room wavered around her, graying at the edges.

“You okay, doc?” Wolf reached out a hand and placed it on her arm to steady her.

She focused on the warmth of his hand, big and strong on her arm. The rest of her felt so cold. “Fine,” she said. “It’s just shocking.”

Wolf rubbed a hand over his face. “True that.”

Apparently it hadn’t been easy for him to see this room, either.

“Any idea what it means? Why she would paint that same symbol over and over again?” Wolf asked.

Aimee steeled herself and looked back at the wall. “I have no idea.”

She looked over at Marian, who stood stock still, her hand over her mouth with tears coursing down her cheeks. Realization dawned on Aimee and a fire sparked in her belly. Josh Wolf had known what they were walking into. He’d known precisely what they were going to see, and he had brought them in here unprepared so he could watch them like bugs under a microscope.

She shook his hand off and put her arms around Marian, turning her away from the gory scene. “You don’t have to look. You don’t have to think about it.”

Marian began to sob. “Oh, my poor sister. Who would do such a thing? Who could even think of it?”

Aimee patted Marian’s back and glared at Detective Wolf. “I don’t know, Marian. There’s no telling what goes on in some people’s minds.”

It took nearly a half hour to calm Marian Phillips down. It didn’t help that under the calm Aimee was trying to project, she was seething at Detective Wolf. Could he
be
more callous and insensitive? He might be tall and hot, but that didn’t mean he was on the side of the angels.

How could she have forgotten everything she’d learned about dealing with cops? Their goals were not her goals. Their methods weren’t hers, either.

Aimee distracted Marian by asking questions about the framed photographs lining the hallway that led to the bedrooms. There were several of Orrin Dawkin and a handsome taller man with thick, sandy blond hair. In one photo, they were wearing jumpsuits and parachutes. In a second one, they wore scuba gear. A third showed the two men halfway up a cliff face.

“Who is the man with Orrin in these photos? Is it his brother?” Aimee asked.

Marian shook her head and smiled a little, although fresh tears pooled in her eyes. “No. Not his brother. Although he might as well have been, as close as those two were. That’s Carl Walter, Orrin’s business partner.”

“Quite the adventurers, aren’t they?” Aimee said, then winced. Orrin would no longer be an adventurer. His opportunities had been crushed along with the back of his skull.

“That’s how they met,” Marian said. “On some desert adventure trip. Orrin used to take them alone. Stacey was never one for much risk-taking, but Orrin got a real thrill from it. That whole opposites attract thing really worked for them. Anyway, he met Carl and the two hit it off. They came up with a way to go into business together about a year after that.”

“How old was Taylor in this photo?” A grinning pigtailed Taylor stood on top of a picnic bench, mugging for the camera. It was hard to imagine her little black cloud of a client in the denim shorts and tie-dyed T-shirt she wore in the photo.

“Let’s see. That was the summer we all went up to Lassen together.” Marian closed her eyes for a moment. “They had just moved here. Taylor was maybe seven? Eight?”

There was a light in little Taylor’s eyes that Aimee had never seen while she’d been treating her. “She looks happy.”

Marian smiled. “She was then. Things didn’t change until later.”

“How much later?”

It was always interesting to get another perspective. People lied to their therapists, as counterproductive as that seemed. More often, they lied to themselves. Even if they didn’t lie outright, they reframed things in different contexts to make them more palatable; to make themselves seem better, truer, more heroic. One more person’s viewpoint meant one more possibility of seeing the truth—or as close to the truth as anyone could ever come.

“Not all that long,” Marian murmured, a crease furrowing her forehead. “Maybe a year later.”

Aimee’s head snapped up. She’d expected to hear about recent problems, not a behavior change at seven or eight. None of the Dawkins had mentioned that. “Really. What happened then?”

Marian shook her head. “I never did figure that out. Maybe it was the move. That can be hard on a kid.”

“But it sounds like it didn’t start until well after the move.” Aimee turned back to the picture, the wheels turning in her head. “How exactly did she change?”

Marian chewed her lip. “It was like she turned inward. Suddenly she went all clingy. Never wanted to let go of Stacey’s legs. Even wet the bed a few times.” Marian blushed, clearly feeling that she was violating a confidence. “Stacey didn’t like to talk about it too much. She worried, but I think she thought if she acted like everything was okay, it would be okay. Orrin wasn’t too sympathetic about people being weak. He was such a strong man. So definite. He didn’t always understand when other people couldn’t be the same way.”

The hairs on the back of Aimee’s neck rose a little. There weren’t many clearer signs that a child had been traumatized than that. Regressing to the behavior of a younger child was a classic symptom. She’d have to go back to her notes and see if there was anything else that would point to something that might have happened when Taylor was seven or eight. “And you have no idea what happened, what might have brought this on?”

“I always figured it was something at school. Kids can be so cruel.” Marian turned away from the photo, tears spilling down her cheeks again.

True that, as Detective Wolf would say. Aimee glanced over her shoulder. He was standing in the kitchen, but she had a feeling that everything they said was being analyzed.

Aimee looked back at the photo, at the joyful, laughing child so sure of herself and her place in the world. It was nearly impossible to connect this image with the blood-covered, wordless girl in the emergency room. Her heart sped up a bit. Knowing when whatever had happened to Taylor had occurred was a first step in figuring out
what
had happened.

Then Aimee’s heart sank. She wouldn’t have the opportunity to try. By the end of the day, Taylor would be safely ensconced in the Whispering Pines Center and Aimee’s services would no longer be necessary.

Aimee looked again at the carefree little girl in the photo, wishing she could ask that sweet, open face who had hurt her. When, and how? There would be no answer to why; there never really was. At least not enough of a reason to rob someone of their innocence, of their trust.

“I’m sure it was nothing at home,” Marian went on. “My sister…my sister was a wonderful mother. Orrin was a wonderful provider. He always wanted the very best of everything for Stacey and Taylor.” Her voice shook. “Top of the line for his girls. Nothing less. Ever.” She wiped her eyes. “Taylor’s room is this way.”

Aimee followed her down the hallway, Detective Wolf at their heels. Aimee ignored him.

Taylor’s bedroom was a testament to how recently her personality had changed and how desperately someone—most likely her mother—had been clinging to whom she had been before. The centerpiece of the room was a confection of a canopy bed, the top still covered with a flowered and eyeleted flounce of fabric. The desk was white and pink and the dressers were candy-colored, too. The light lavender walls with the orchid stencil motif around the ceiling, however, had been covered with posters of bands. My Chemical Romance. Death Cab for Cutie. AFI. Aimee recognized most of the names. Taylor had often come to therapy with her arms covered with elaborate ballpoint pen drawings with the names of those bands as the centerpiece. Stacey had actually been relieved when she had started writing on herself instead of cutting; she had felt it was great progress.

The rumpled bedspread on the unmade bed and the curtains were clearly new additions. The bedspread was red satin with a black velvet lining. The curtains were lacey with a spider motif worked into them. The bookshelf had books with titles like
Everything That Creeps
and
Amphigorey
, although the book on the nightstand was
Be Your Own Best Friend
. Another book, a graphic novel about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, sat on the dresser. Aimee picked it up. There was a yellow Post-it note attached to it that read, “Thought you might enjoy this. Sean.”

“Very goth,” Aimee said, looking around.

“More emo, actually,” Marian said.

Aimee raised her eyebrows in a question.

“My Margot is five years older than Taylor. That’s what she said when Taylor started acting this way. She said she’d gone emo. You know, emotional rock. Sort of like punk but with more feeling.” Marian was already opening drawers and taking out clothing.

Detective Wolf, standing in the doorway, nodded toward the posters. “Those bands are all emo bands.” When Aimee turned to him, he shrugged. “I’ve got nieces and nephews.”

Marian tried to smooth the bedspread out to stack the clothing and encountered a lump under the covers. She fished underneath and pulled out a battered stuffed dog. “Oh,” she said, sinking down on the bed. “It’s Sammy.”

Aimee sat down next to her. “Is Sammy special to Taylor?”

Marian hugged the dog to herself. “He went everywhere with Taylor for years. I had no idea she still had him, much less slept with him.” She frowned. “I’m pretty sure she didn’t have him with her when she came up to stay with us last summer. Maybe she just kept him here on her bed. Do you think I should take him with me?”

“I think anything that might comfort Taylor right now is a good idea,” Aimee said.

Wolf’s phone buzzed in his pocket. “Wolf here.”

He listened for a moment. Something about the change in his posture—a new alertness, tension—made Aimee watch him intently.

“Good,” he said and shrugged his big shoulders a little. “I think we’re almost done here. I should be back soon.” He snapped the phone shut, then said, “We have a lead, ladies. Can we wrap this up quickly?”

“I got a hit off one of the fingerprints from the Dawkin place.” Clyde motioned Josh and Elise over to the computer. Josh had dropped Marian and Aimee off with the staff social worker at police headquarters to do the rest of the paperwork to release Taylor, and picked up Elise. He’d hoped to glean some information from eavesdropping on them in Taylor’s room, but that hadn’t gone as he’d planned. He kept getting distracted every time Aimee Gannon leaned over the bed, imagining her spread on top of it, imagining those long legs wrapped around him, his lips against hers.

Imagining was all that was going to happen with that. Dr. Gannon had been pretty pissed off at him after they’d walked into the Dawkin home.

Clyde, bless his nerdy soul, had some actual evidence. He clicked a few buttons on his computer and a mug shot came up.

“Lois Bradley,” Elise read off the screen. “Identity theft. Check fraud.”

“I’ll call Ed in financials and have him start checking the money trail. See if there’s anything hinky going on.” Josh pulled his cell phone from his pocket.