The Watcher (31 page)

Slater moved down the hall through the bedroom to the bathroom without speaking. Kate followed him and watched from the doorway as he splashed water on his face. When he spoke to her through the mirror’s reflection, he looked like he’d aged five years in the last hour. “I’m sorry. I should’ve told you. You told me your worst fears and secrets and I – I just couldn’t. I’m so sorry, Kate. Please forgive me.”

Kate felt the pain of Slater’s loss like the opening of a wide chasm in her chest, a deep sorrow that choked the life out of her. She thought she knew how much he was suffering. It was the way she’d felt years ago when she finally realized her twin sister was lost to her forever.

She understood, but steeled herself against Slater’s grief because it didn’t matter that she understood his loss. She could forgive him, but she didn’t know if she could ever trust him again.

Chapter Thirty-four

Kate awoke early, a kink pinching her neck. She thought of the secrets Slater had unburdened before he left late last night. It must’ve been devastating to lose his son so horribly and then find out the child wasn’t biologically his.

She’d sent him home because she needed to put distance between them, to decide if they could have any kind of life together when both of them harbored dark and heavy secrets. Each of them had deceived the other in one way or another. She wasn’t sure they could recover from this latest blow.

While her sister’s killer was still loose, she couldn’t – wouldn’t – concentrate on a personal relationship. She’d find refuge in work like she always had.

During her morning shower some small idea hidden in the recesses of her subconscious niggled at her. At first, she ignored it, but it continued to nag at her. She had the feeling she’d overlooked an important fact, something she might’ve read during her research, or something she’d seen recently that she hadn’t considered significant at the time.

The detail lay at the edge of her memory, but danced away whenever she tried to grab hold of it. Even as she ticked off the major points of the case in her mind, it eluded her, almost rising to the surface, but never quite forming a concrete idea.

She knew instinctively that it was important.

She also knew that conscious memory was likely to return when least expected, so she let her mind drift as she dressed. Even though it was barely six in the morning, she decided the best remedy for her sleeplessness was to return to the office and start pouring through her notes and reports. She kept the notes she’d collected throughout the years in a loose-leaf binder, worn with her constant flipping of the pages. She thought of it as her personal murder book on the serial killer who’d nearly destroyed her life. It was now five inches thick.

She made her way outside to sit in the chilly interior of her car while she waited for the heater to warm it. The purchase of her spiffy yellow convertible, so useful in sunny southern Cal, seemed foolish here, where she hadn’t yet lowered the top.

The early morning sky was overcast westward toward the ocean, and the sun hadn’t yet risen from behind the Sierra Nevadas when she pulled into the empty court-house parking lot. The sergeant on duty gave her a cursory greeting, but otherwise the empty corridors lay in eerie silence. Kate’s footsteps echoed on the polished floor as she passed deserted rooms that swung off the long hallway. The custodians had already finished their cleaning and left. Only a few others were in the building at this early hour.

Turning on the light switches, she crossed the squad room to start the coffee brewing for the work ahead. She was determined to search until she found what she was looking for, even if it took all day, and she’d need to fortify her caffeine addiction.

By six forty-five Kate was ready to admit that she was looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. It was hopeless to presume that reading through endless pages of the murder book would jog her memory. She glanced at the clock. The task force would come in first, type up their interview reports, and post an abbreviated version of their findings on the large dry erase board in the incident room.

Initially, Kate had entertained the idea that Marconi’s absence was a puzzle piece in the case, but the Sheriff’s email message put that conjecture to rest. Apparently his being gone had nothing to do with the murders in Bigler County and everything to do with the man’s selfishness in taking personal vacation days. Marconi was an odd duck, ostensibly lackadaisical and apathetic, but sharp enough to gain the popular vote. Kate suspected his good-old-boy routine was an act.

Nonetheless, it seemed odd to her that the Sheriff of a small town would disappear without notifying his lieutenant, especially on the heels of the disappearances and subsequent murders of two young girls in his community. Young girls from prominent families.

Early on she’d hoped Marconi was following a separate lead of his own, but now she wasn’t sure he was ambitious or astute enough. That elusive idea jiggled in her brain again.

Something about Marconi.

Shaking her head in exasperation, Kate mused over the idea that coincidence was a strange thing that happened more often than police thought and less often than the general public believed. She meandered to the coffee machine to refill her cup for the second time. Or was it the third? She’d lost track.

To her left Marconi’s office door stood ajar. Slater had officially assumed most of the Sheriff’s responsibilities, but everyone knew that it was the Lieutenant who’d carried the real load of running the department for several years now. Kate didn’t particularly like Sheriff Marconi. He was the stereotypical transplanted redneck, “clampers” they were called around here. He was definitely old school in his attitude toward women and modern forensics, but she knew he played by the rules and wasn’t one for breaking protocol.

As she returned to her cubbyhole of a room, she paused to glance into Marconi’s office. The lights were off, but she could see files and scraps of paper scattered over the desk as if the Sheriff had left in a hurry without tidying up.

Odd, she thought.

She checked the time. Nearly seven. Soon the other officers would report for duty and Slater would arrive. By then it would be too late for her to take a look around Marconi’s office. Was she justified in committing a gross breach of privacy?

Going with instinct, she hesitated only an instant.

The first thing Kate noticed was how out-of-character the Sheriff’s office was. She’d never seen it in such disarray. The few times she’d been in this room, she’d observed the careful way Marconi stacked his file folders in the “in box,” and his outgoing mail to be metered in the “out box.” She remembered thinking that for all his slovenly work habits and lazy speech, he was strangely tidy at work, even to the point of stacking papers and envelopes, pencils and pens, so they all pointed in the same direction.

Marconi was a strange paradox.

But the last time he’d been in the precinct, the last time anyone had seen him, he’d left his workplace in a mess, almost as though he hadn’t been leaving the office, but was taking a break from which he intended to return shortly.

Almost like he’d hurried away on unplanned, but urgent business that overrode his usual sense of order.
Not at all like he’d left on an extended vacation.

Kate’s intuition kicked into overdrive. If the Sheriff
hadn’t
gone on vacation, where was he? What had happened to him? And what the hell did his absence have, if anything, to do with her case?

#

Slater’s mouth and eyes felt as though someone had dropped wet cement in them. Yet, he couldn’t remember when he’d slept so soundly. In spite of the dark clouds hovering from the west and the certainty that they were headed for a storm by this afternoon, he felt like the weight of a thousand worlds had been lifted from his shoulders. He felt an urgency to see Kate, to look at her and know everything would be all right between them. Last night she’d said she needed to think about their situation, but he’d seen the look of betrayal in her eyes. Was his deceit unforgiveable?

In the bathroom he showered, shaved, brushed his teeth, and then fortified himself with a large mug of coffee. After dressing he drove to Kate’s apartment, but she’d left already. He turned onto Eureka Lane and headed for the courthouse.

Before he reached the end of the street, he passed a gray van parked at the curb, its muffler drifting smoke into the brisk morning air. The vehicle seemed vaguely familiar, but Slater was in a hurry to see Kate again and brushed the thought aside.

#

The watcher had dozed in his van for a few minutes, trying to catch up on the sleep he’d missed from sitting outside the woman’s apartment all night. He knew he couldn’t use the same ploy as the last time, pretending to solicit funds for the local school, but he wanted to scout for an unopened window or door that would be easy to jimmy. There was always a way to get into a first-floor apartment.

When
K. Myers
left her apartment before daylight, he’d been tempted to snatch her then, but he hadn’t counted on the man in the truck returning. He didn’t even try to go inside the apartment when he glimpsed the dark giant swerve his vehicle through the parking lot.

Smith got another good look at the man. It’d be much harder to get the woman with the dark giant in the way.

#

Kate stared at the list which she’d found lying in Marconi’s “in box,” the final list Brad Escobar had made of residents moving into the county in the last twelve months. It ran nearly six pages. A small influx for the county in a twelve-month period. The Sheriff’s copy was lying at the bottom of his “in box.” The list was unmarked and Kate couldn’t tell if the he’d already looked at it, or put it aside and forgotten it.

Sitting in the ample chair, Kate riffled through the scraps of paper on his desk blotter, being careful to replace everything exactly as she found it. The silence of the squad room unnerved her and added to her guilt.

After perusing the stacks of papers in both boxes and flipping through the papers and file folders on his desk, she’d found nothing that seemed significant or caught her attention. She removed the pink message slips from the pointed holder that stabbed through the center of each sheet. There were nearly fifty messages. She began to sift through them one at a time.

Near the bottom of the pile Kate found a slip that piqued her interest:
call attorney re: probate of will.
She recognized the cramped handwriting of John Sanderson, who must’ve been on duty that day. The message was dated Monday, July 21, this year.

A will usually meant family and a death.

Kate wondered what relatives Marconi had around here. She hadn’t been in Placer Hills long, but she understood that he had no family in the area and lived alone, his only companion an old German shepherd. His ranch house sat on several acres of land in the southeastern part of the county.

Looking around surreptitiously, Kate removed the message from the stack and stuck it in her jacket pocket. Then she flipped through the appointment calendar, beginning with July 1.

On July 24, a Thursday, Marconi had written in his sprawling scrawl:
4:30, Shawn Fraley, will.
She found nothing more until she reached August 4, a Monday. The Sheriff had penciled a notation:
contact the boy.

Who was the boy, Kate wondered, and what if anything, did it mean? Suddenly she felt like a real snoop. Which she was, she thought. Who was she to pry into Marconi’s personal business? Was she making mountains out of molehills as her mother always claimed?

Driven by gut instinct, she kept looking.

She almost missed the next notes, tiny penciled notations at the edge of the date’s square box, written almost as though Marconi hadn’t really tried to conceal them, but wasn’t eager to have anyone know his business either. The August 11 note read:
call boy again!!!
The series of exclamation points pierced the page. Were they expressions of irritation, anger, or urgency?

August 15 simply read:
take boy up to N.H.
She would’ve rushed right over the note except for Marconi’s cryptic reference to “the boy” throughout his appointment book. He could be referring to any male person between three and forty, given Marconi’s age, but why didn’t he simply write down the name? Was he hiding something?

There wasn’t another note until the end of September. In the Friday, September 19, square was written:
talk to boy about M.
Who was “M”?

On a sheet of lined paper ripped from the back of her murder book, Kate carefully wrote down the July and August dates, with their respective days of the week and the approximate times she guessed Marconi had intended to complete the task he’d noted. She added the name of Shawn Fraley and simply “the boy,” and then tucked the half-folded sheet in her pocket with the pink message slip.

Returning to her desk, she removed the tri-county area phone directory from her bottom drawer. It included Sacramento, Bigler, and El Dorado Counties. Kate looked under
Attorneys Guide
in the yellow pages. Half-way through the listings she found the name Shawn Fraley, attorney-at-law, along with the claim to specialize in living trusts and wills, probate, will contests, and estate planning. A small photo showed a middle-aged balding man with what was evidently meant to be a kindly, but serious expression on his face.