The Keepsake (15 page)

“They came to ask about that girl again,” said Kimball. “The one who disappeared in New Mexico. That’s all.”

“But that was such a long time ago,” murmured Cynthia.

“Her body has just been found,” said Jane. “In Boston. We need to speak to your son about it, but we don’t know where he is.”

Cynthia slumped deeper into the chair. “I don’t know, either,” she whispered.

“Doesn’t he write you?”

“Sometimes. A letter here and there, sent from strange places. An e-mail once in a while, just to say he’s thinking of me. And that he loves me. But he stays away.”

“Why is that, Mrs. Rose?”

The woman raised her head and looked at Kimball. “Maybe you should ask my husband.”

“Bradley’s never been all that close to us,” he said.

“He was until you sent him away.”

“That has nothing to do with—”

“He didn’t want to go. You forced him.”

“Forced him to go where?” asked Jane.

“It’s not relevant,” said Kimball.

“I blame myself, for not standing up to you,” said Cynthia.

“Where did you send him?” asked Jane.

“Tell her,” said Cynthia. “Tell her how you drove him away.”

Kimball released a deep sigh. “When he was sixteen, we sent him to a boarding school in Maine. He didn’t want to go, but it was for his own good.”

“A school?” Cynthia gave a bitter laugh. “It was a mental institution!”

Jane looked at Kimball. “Is that what it was, Mr. Rose?”

“No! The place was recommended to us. Best of its kind in the country, and let me tell you, the price tag reflected it. I only did what I thought was best for him. What any good parent would do. They called it a therapeutic residential community. A place where boys could go to deal with…issues.”

“We never should have done it,” said Cynthia. “
You
never should have done it.”

“We had no choice. He had to go.”

“He would have been better off here, with
me.
Not sent to some boot camp in the middle of the woods.”

Kimball snorted. “A camp? More like a country club.” He turned to Jane. “It had its own lake. Hiking and cross-country ski trails. Hell, if I ever go off
my
rocker, I’d love to be sent to a place like that.”

“Is that what happened to Bradley, Mr. Rose?” asked Frost.

“He went off his rocker?”

“Don’t make him sound like a lunatic,” said Cynthia. “He wasn’t.”

“Then why did he end up there, Mrs. Rose?”

“Because we thought—Kimball thought—”

“We thought they could teach him better self-control,” her husband finished for her. “That’s all. Lotta boys need tough love. He stayed there for two years and came out a well-behaved, hard-workin’ young man. I was proud to take him to Egypt with me.”

“He resented you, Kimball,” said his wife. “He told me that.”

“Well, parents have to make hard choices. That was
my
choice, to shake him up a little, set him on the right track.”

“And now he stays away. I’m the one who’s being punished, all because of that
fine choice
you made.” Cynthia lowered her head and began to cry. No one spoke. The only noises were the crackling fire and Cynthia’s quiet sobbing, a sound of raw and unremitting pain.

The ring of Jane’s cell phone was a cruel interruption. At once, she silenced it and moved away from the hearth to answer the call.

It was Detective Crowe on the line. “Got a surprise for you,” he said, his cheerful voice a jarring contrast to the grief that hung over that room.

“What is it?” she asked softly.

“FBI has her fingerprints in their system.”

“Josephine’s?”

“Or whatever her real name is. We lifted the prints from her apartment and ran them through the AFIS database.”

“We got a hit?”

“Now we know why our girl ran. Turns out her prints match some latents that were lifted off a crime scene twelve years ago, in San Diego.”

“What was the crime?”

“Homicide.”

NINETEEN

“The victim was a thirty-six-year-old white male named Jimmy Otto,” said Detective Crowe. “His body was discovered in San Diego, after a dog dug up a tasty little snack: a human finger. The dog’s owner saw what Fido brought home, freaked out, and called 911. Dog led the police back to the body, which was buried in a shallow grave in a neighbor’s backyard. The victim had been dead for a few days, and wildlife had gotten at the extremities so they couldn’t get any usable fingerprints. There was no wallet on the body, either, but whoever stripped his ID missed a hotel key card that was tucked in his jeans pocket. It was for a local Holiday Inn, where the guest was registered under the name James Otto.”

“A hotel key card?” said Jane. “So this victim didn’t live in San Diego.”

“No. His address was here, in Massachusetts, where he lived with his sister. Carrie Otto flew out to San Diego and ID’d her brother’s clothing. And what was left of him.”

Jane tore open a packet of Advil, popped two tablets in her mouth, and washed them down with lukewarm coffee. Last night, she and Frost had not arrived home in Boston until two
AM
, and what little sleep she did get was repeatedly interrupted by one-year-old Regina, who demanded hugs and reassurance that Mommy really was home again. This morning, Jane had awakened with a monster headache. The twists and turns of the investigation were making that headache worse, and the glow of the fluorescent lights in the conference room made even her eyeballs hurt.

“You both with me so far?” said Crowe, glancing up at Jane and Frost, who looked as exhausted as Jane felt.

“Yeah,” she muttered. “So what did the autopsy show?”

“Cause of death was a single gunshot wound to the back of the head. The weapon was never recovered.”

“And whose backyard was he buried in?”

“It was a rental house,” said Crowe. “The tenants were a single mother and her fourteen-year-old daughter, and they’d already packed up and vanished. The police sprayed the house with luminol, and the girl’s bedroom lit up like Vegas. Traces of blood were all over the floor and the baseboards. That’s where Jimmy Otto was killed. In the girl’s bedroom.”

“And this was twelve years ago?”

“Josephine would have been about fourteen,” said Frost.

Crowe nodded. “Except her name wasn’t Josephine back then. It was Susan Cook.” He gave a laugh. “And guess what? The real Susan Cook died as an infant. In Syracuse, New York.”

“It was
another
co-opted ID?” said Jane.

“Ditto on the mother, who also had a fake name: Lydia Newhouse. According to the San Diego PD report, mother and daughter rented the house for three years, but they kept to themselves. At the time of the killing, the girl had just finished the eighth grade at William Howard Taft Middle School. Very bright, according to her teachers, work way above her grade level.”

“And the mother?”

“Lydia Newhouse—or whatever her real name is—worked at the Museum of Man in Balboa Park.”

“Doing what?”

“She was a salesclerk in the gift shop. She also volunteered as a docent. What impressed everyone at the museum was how much she seemed to know about the field of archaeology. Even though she claimed she had no formal training.”

Jane frowned. “We’re back to archaeology again.”

“Yeah. We keep returning to that theme, don’t we?” said Crowe. “Archaeology runs in the family. The mother. The daughter.”

“Are we sure they’re even involved with Jimmy Otto’s murder?” said Frost.

“Well, they sure behaved as if they did it. They left town in a hurry—only after they’d mopped the floor, washed down the walls, and buried the guy behind their house. That sounds pretty damn guilty to me. Their only mistake was not burying him deep enough, because the neighborhood dog sniffed him out pretty quick.”

Tripp said, “I say, good for them. The guy got the ending he deserved.”

“What do you mean?” Frost asked.

“Because Jimmy Otto was one sick fuck.”

Crowe opened his notebook. “Detective Potrero will be sending us the file, but here’s what I got from him over the phone. At age thirteen, Jimmy Otto broke into a woman’s bedroom, raided her lingerie drawers, and sliced up her underwear with a knife. A few months later, he was found in another girl’s house, standing over her bed with a knife as she slept.”

“Jesus,” said Jane. “Only thirteen? He got an early start as a creep.”

“Age fourteen, he was expelled from his school in Connecticut. Detective Potrero couldn’t get the school to release all the details, but he gathered there was some sort of sexual assault involving a female classmate. And a broomstick. The girl ended up in the hospital.” Crowe looked up. “And those are just the things he got
caught
doing.”

“He should have been thrown into juvenile detention after the second incident.”

“Should have. But when your daddy’s rich, you have a few extra get-out-of-jail cards.”

“Even after the broomstick thing?”

“No, that was the wake-up call for his parents. They finally freaked out and realized their darling son needed therapy. Bad. Their high-priced lawyer got the charges reduced, but only on the condition that Jimmy go into specialized residential treatment.”

“You mean a psych ward?” asked Frost.

“Not exactly. It was a very expensive private school for boys with his, uh, impulses. A place out in the boonies with round-the-clock supervision. He stayed there for three years. His doting parents bought a house in the area, just so they could be near him. They were killed in a private plane crash flying up to see him. Jimmy and his sister ended up inheriting a fortune.”

“Making Jimmy a very sick and very
rich
fuck,” said Tripp.

Specialized residential treatment. A place out in the boonies.

Jane suddenly thought about the conversation she’d had just the day before, with Kimball Rose. And she asked: “Did this private facility happen to be in Maine?”

Crowe looked up in surprise. “How the hell did you guess that?”

“Because we know about another rich sicko who ended up in a Maine treatment center. A place for boys with
issues.
”

“Who are you talking about?”

“Bradley Rose.”

There was a long silence as Crowe and Tripp absorbed that startling news.

“Holy shit,” said Tripp. “That
cannot
be a coincidence. If those two boys were there at the same time, they would have known each other.”

“Tell us more about this school,” said Jane.

Crowe nodded, his expression now grimly focused. “The Hilzbrich Institute was very exclusive, very pricey. And very specialized. It was essentially a locked unit out in the middle of the woods—probably a smart idea, considering what kind of patients they were treating.”

“Psychopaths?”

“Sexual predators. Everything from budding pedophiles to rapists. It just goes to show you that rich people have their own share of perverts. But they also have lawyers to keep these kids out of the justice system, and this facility was a rich man’s alternative. A place to enjoy fine dining while a team of therapists tries to convince you it’s not nice to torture little girls. The trouble was, it didn’t seem to work very well. Fifteen years ago, one of their so-called graduates kidnapped and mutilated two girls, and he did it just a few months after the institute declared him safe to return to society. There was a big lawsuit, and the school was forced to shut down. It’s been closed ever since.”

“What about Jimmy Otto? What happened after he left?”

“At eighteen, he walked out their doors a free man. But it didn’t take long for him to revert to form. Within a few years, he was arrested for stalking and threatening a woman in California. Then he was arrested and questioned right here in Brookline, about the disappearance of a young woman. Police didn’t have enough to hold him, so he was released. Ditto thirteen years ago, when he was picked up for questioning after another Massachusetts woman disappeared. Before the police could build a case against him, he abruptly vanished. And no one knew where he was. Until a year later, when he turned up buried in that backyard in San Diego.”

“You’re right, Tripp,” said Jane. “He got what he deserved. But what made this mother and daughter run? If they killed him, if they were just defending themselves, why did they pack up and leave town like criminals?”

“Maybe because they are?” suggested Crowe. “They were living under assumed names even then. We don’t know who they really are—or what they might be running from.”

Jane rested her head in her hands and began to rub her temples, trying to massage away the headache. “This is getting so damn complicated,” she muttered. “I can’t keep track of all the threads. We’ve got a murdered man in San Diego. We’ve got the Archaeology Killer here.”

“And the link seems to be this young woman whose name we don’t even know.”

Jane sighed. “Okay. What else do we know about Jimmy Otto? Any other arrests, any other links to our current investigation?”

Crowe flipped through his notes. “Some minor stuff. Breaking and entering in Brookline, Massachusetts. DUI and speeding in San Diego. Another DUI and reckless speeding in Durango…” He paused, suddenly registering the significance of that last detail. “Durango, Colorado. Isn’t that close to New Mexico?”

Jane lifted her head. “It’s right over the state line. Why?”

“It happened in July. The same year that Lorraine Edgerton vanished.”

Jane reeled back in her chair, stunned by this last piece of information.
Both Jimmy and Bradley were near Chaco Canyon at the same time.

“That’s it,” she said softly.

“You think they were hunting partners?”

“Until Jimmy got killed in San Diego.” She looked at Frost.

“This is finally coming together now. We have a connection. Jimmy Otto and Bradley Rose.”

He nodded. “And Josephine,” he said.

TWENTY

Josephine fought her way back to consciousness and came awake with a gasp, her nightgown soaked with sweat, her heart thudding. Thin curtains rippled in a ghostly film over the moonlit window, and in the woods outside Gemma’s house, tree branches rattled and fell still. She pushed off the damp bedcovers and stared up at the darkness as her heart slowed, as the sweat cooled on her skin. After only a week at Gemma’s place, her bad dream was back. A dream of gunfire and blood-splattered walls.
Always pay attention to your dreams,
her mother had taught her.
They’re voices telling you what you already know, whispering advice you haven’t yet heeded.
Josephine knew what this dream meant: It was time to move on. Time to run. She had lingered in Gemma’s house longer than she should have. She thought of the cell phone call she’d made from the mini-mart. She thought of the young patrolman who’d chatted with her in the parking lot that night, and the taxi driver who’d driven her to this road. There were so many ways she could be tracked here, so many little mistakes she might have made that she wasn’t even aware of.

She remembered what her mother once said:
If someone really wants to find you, he only needs to wait for you to make one mistake.

And lately, she had made so many.

The night had fallen strangely still.

It took her a moment to register just how still it was. She had fallen asleep to the steady chirp of crickets, but now she heard nothing, only a silence so complete that it magnified the sound of her own breathing.

She rose from bed and went to the window. Outside, moonlight silvered the trees and splashed its pale glow onto the garden. Staring out, she saw nothing to alarm her. But as she stood at that open window, she realized that the night was not entirely silent; through the thump of her own heartbeat she heard a faint electronic beeping. Did it come from outside, or from somewhere inside the house? Now that she was completely focused on the sound, it seemed to intensify, and with it her sense of uneasiness.

Did Gemma hear it?

She went to the door and peeked into the dark hallway. The sound was louder out here, more insistent.

In darkness she navigated up the hallway, her bare feet silent on the wood floor. With every step the beeping grew louder. Reaching Gemma’s bedroom, she found the door ajar. She gave it a push and silently it swung open. In the moonlit room, she spotted the source of that sound: the fallen telephone receiver, a disconnect signal issuing from the earpiece. But it wasn’t the phone that caught her gaze; it was the dark pool, glistening like black oil on the floor. Nearby a figure crouched, and she thought at first it was Gemma. Until it straightened to its full height and stood silhouetted against the window.

A man.

Josephine’s startled intake of breath made his head snap around toward her. For an instant they faced each other, features hidden in the shadows, both of them suspended in that timeless moment before predator springs on prey.

She moved first.

She turned and sprinted for the stairs. Footsteps pounded behind her as she scrambled down the steps. She hit the first floor hard, with both feet. Ahead was the front door, gaping open. She ran for it and stumbled out onto the porch, where broken glass pierced her skin. She scarcely noticed its bite; her attention was focused only on the driveway ahead.

And on the footsteps closing in behind her.

She flew down the porch steps, her gown flapping like wings in the warm night air, and ran headlong up the driveway. Under the moonlight, on that exposed gravel, her nightgown was as visible as a white flag, but she did not veer into the woods, did not waste time seeking the cover of trees. Ahead lay the street, and other houses.
If I pound on doors, if I scream, someone will help me.
No longer could she hear her pursuer’s footsteps; she heard only the rush of her panicked breaths, the whoosh of the night air.

And then, a sharp crack.

The bullet’s impact was like a brutal kick to the back of her leg. It sent her sprawling to the ground, palms scraping across the gravel. She struggled to stand, warm blood streaming down her calf, but her leg gave out beneath her. With a sob of pain, she collapsed to her knees.

The street. The street is so near.

Her breaths reduced to sobs, she began to crawl. A neighbor’s porch light glowed ahead, beyond the trees, and that was what she focused on. Not the crunch of footsteps moving closer, not the gravel biting into her palms. Survival had come down to that lone beacon winking through the branches and she kept crawling toward it, dragging her useless leg as blood left its slick trail behind her.

A shadow moved in front of her and blotted out the light.

Slowly, she lifted her gaze. He stood before her, blocking the way. His face was a black oval, his eyes unfathomable. As he leaned toward her, she closed her eyes, waiting for the crack of the gun, the punch of the bullet. Never had she been more aware of her own beating heart, of the air rushing in and out of her lungs, than in the stillness of this last moment. A moment that seemed to stretch on endlessly, as though he wanted to savor his victory and prolong the torment.

Through her closed eyelids, she saw a light flicker.

She opened her eyes. Beyond the trees, a blue light pulsed. A pair of headlights suddenly veered toward her, and she was trapped in the glare, kneeling in her pitifully thin nightgown. Tires skidded to a halt, spitting gravel. A car door swung open and she heard the crackle of a police radio.

“Miss? Are you okay, miss?”

She blinked, trying to make out who was speaking to her. But the voice faded and the headlights dimmed, and the last thing she registered was the slap of the gravel against her cheek as she slumped to the ground.

Frost and Jane stood in Gemma Hamerton’s driveway, staring down at the trail of dried blood that Josephine had left behind in her desperate crawl toward the street. Birds chirped overhead and the summer sun shone down through dappling leaves, but a chill seemed to have settled in this shady patch of driveway.

Jane turned and looked at the residence, which she and Frost had not yet set foot in. It was an unremarkable house with white clapboards and a covered porch, like so many others that she’d seen on this rural road. But even from where she stood in the drive way, she could see the jagged reflection of a broken porch window, and that bright shard of light warned:
Something terrible happened here. Something you have yet to see.

“Here’s where she first fell,” said Detective Mike Abbott. He pointed to the start of the bloody trail. “She made it pretty far up the driveway when she was shot. Landed here and started crawling. It took a hell of a lot of determination to move as far as she did, but she managed to get all the way to that point.” Abbott indicated the end of the bloody trail. “That’s where the patrol car spotted her.”

“How did that miracle happen?” asked Jane.

“They came in response to a 911 call.”

“From Josephine?” asked Frost.

“No, we think it came from the owner of the house, Gemma Hamerton. The phone was in her bedroom. Whoever made the call never got the chance to speak, though, because the receiver was hung up immediately afterward. When the emergency operator tried to call back, the phone had been taken off the hook again. She dispatched a patrol car, and it got here within three minutes.”

Frost gazed down at the stained driveway. “There’s a lot of blood here.”

Abbott nodded. “The young woman spent three hours in emergency surgery. She’s now laid up in a cast, which turns out to be lucky for us. Because we didn’t find out till last night that Boston PD had put out a bulletin on her. Otherwise, she might have managed to skip town.” He turned toward the house. “If you want to see more blood, follow me.”

He led the way to the front porch, which was littered with broken glass. There they paused to pull on shoe covers. Abbott’s ominous statement warned of horrors to come, and Jane was prepared for the worst.

But when she stepped in the front door, she saw nothing alarming. The living room looked undisturbed. On the walls hung dozens of framed photos, many of them featuring the same woman with cropped blond hair, posing with a variety of companions. A massive bookcase was filled with volumes on history and art, ancient languages and ethnology.

“This is the owner of the house?” asked Frost, pointing to the blond woman in the photos.

Abbott nodded. “Gemma Hamerton. She taught archaeology at one of the local colleges.”

“Archaeology?” Frost shot Jane a
Now, that’s interesting
look.

“What else do you know about her?”

“Law-abiding citizen as far as we know. Never married. Spent every summer abroad doing whatever it is that archaeologists do.”

“So why isn’t she abroad now?”

“I don’t know. She came home a week ago from Peru, where she was working at some excavation. If she’d stayed away, she’d still be alive.” Abbott looked up at the stairs, his face suddenly grim. “It’s time to show you the second floor.” He led the way, pausing to point out the bloody tread marks on the wood steps.

“Athletic sole. Size nine or ten,” he said. “We know these are the killer’s, since Ms. Pulcillo was barefoot.”

“Looks like he was moving fast,” added Jane, noting the smeared imprints.

“Yeah. But she was faster.”

Jane stared down at the descending tread marks. Though the blood was dry and sunlight slanted in through a stairwell window, the terror of that chase still lingered on these stairs. She shook off a chill and looked up toward the second floor, where far worse images awaited them. “It happened upstairs?”

“In Ms. Hamerton’s bedroom,” said Abbott. He took his time climbing the final steps, as though reluctant to revisit what he’d seen two nights before. The marks were darker up here, left by shoes still wet with fresh blood. The prints emerged from the room at the far end of the hall. Abbott pointed into the first doorway they came to. Inside was an unmade bed. “This is the guest room, where Ms. Pulcillo was sleeping.”

Jane frowned. “But it’s closer to the stairs.”

“Yeah. I found that strange, too. The killer walks right past Ms. Pulcillo’s room and heads straight up the hall to Ms. Hamerton’s. Maybe he didn’t know there was a guest in the house.”

“Or maybe this door was locked,” said Frost.

“No, that’s not it. This door doesn’t have a lock. For some reason, he bypassed it and went to Ms. Hamerton’s room first.” Abbott took a breath and continued to the master bedroom. There he paused on the threshold, hesitant to step inside.

When Jane looked past him, through the doorway, she understood why.

Though the body of Gemma Hamerton had been removed, her last moments on earth were recorded in vivid splatters of red on the walls, the bedsheets, the furniture. Stepping into that room, Jane felt a cold breath whisper against her skin, as though a ghost had just brushed past. Violence leaves its imprint, she thought. Not just in bloodstains, but on the air itself.

“Her body was found crumpled in that far corner,” said Abbott. “But you can see, from the blood splatters, that the initial wound was made somewhere near the bed. Arterial splashes there, on the headboard.” He pointed to the wall on the right. “And over there, I think those are cast-off drops.”

Jane tore her gaze from the soaked mattress and stared at the arc of angular droplets thrown off by centrifugal force as the bloody knife had swung away from the body. “He’s right-handed,” she said.

Abbott nodded. “Judging by the wound, the ME says there was no hesitation, no tentative slices. He did it with one clean stroke, severing major vessels in the neck. The ME estimates she had maybe a minute or two of consciousness. Long enough for her to grab the phone. Crawl to that corner over there. The receiver had her bloody fingerprints on it, so we know she was wounded when she dialed.”

“So the killer hung up the phone?” asked Frost.

“I assume so.”

“But you said the operator tried calling back and got a busy signal.”

Abbott paused, thinking about it. “I guess that is a little weird, isn’t it? First he hangs up, then he takes the receiver off the hook again. I wonder why he’d do that.”

Jane said. “He didn’t want it to ring.”

“The noise?” said Frost.

Jane nodded. “It would also explain why he didn’t use his gun on this victim. Because he knew someone else was in the house, and he didn’t want to wake her.”

“But she did wake up,” said Abbott. “Maybe she heard the body fall. Maybe Ms. Hamerton managed to cry out. Whatever the reason, something woke up Ms. Pulcillo, because she came into this room. She saw the intruder. And she ran.”

Jane stared at the corner where Gemma Hamerton had died, curled up in a lake of her own blood.

She walked out of the bedroom and headed back up the hall. At the doorway to Josephine’s room she stopped, gazing at the bed. The killer walked right past this room, she thought. A young woman is sleeping in there and her door is unlocked. Yet he bypassed her and continued to the master bedroom. Did he not know a guest was here? Did he not realize there was another woman in the house?

No. No, he knew. That’s why he took the phone off the hook. That’s why he used a knife and not his gun. He wanted the first kill to be silent.

Because he was planning to move to Josephine’s room next.

She went down the stairs and stepped outside. The afternoon was sunny, the insects humming in the windless heat, but the chill of the house was still with her. She descended the porch steps.

You pursued her here, down the stairs. On a moonlit night, she would have been easy to follow. Just a lone girl in her nightgown.

She walked slowly up the driveway, following the route along which Josephine had fled, her bare feet cut by glass. The main road was ahead, beyond the trees, and all the fleeing girl had to do was reach a neighbor’s house. Scream and pound on a door.

Jane paused, her gaze on the bloodstained gravel.

But here the bullet struck her leg, and she fell.