In listening to that silence, she had a horrifying thought. If Richard had killed Andrea, where was he now? Had he been somewhere he could watch when she arrived home and the police responded? If he had, he’d know where she was—and he’d have seen Jacob. And that was assuming the private investigator who’d trailed her in Southern California hadn’t seen Jacob.
A dry sob escaped her. Who was she kidding? To know she had a child, Richard had only had to step inside her house. The high chair at the table alone would tell him.
Most of her desperation to escape him had been to ensure he never knew she was pregnant. There was no possibility that he was capable of being any kind of parent. He was the kind of man who lashed out without warning, both verbally and physically. He could smile, wish their dinner guests good-night, close the door and knock her to the floor because she’d done or said something earlier that had displeased him. Even with his housekeeper and a nanny as a buffer, an active boy would try his nonexistent patience. He’d search for her qualities in Jacob and determine to eradicate them, along with Jacob’s every memory of her.
This kind of terror was like being shaken by a vicious earthquake. Even though she’d been sure he had found them once before, she’d let herself get complacent since she moved to Lookout. She liked her job, and Jacob was a happy boy. Their little house had felt safe.
They would never be safe. She couldn’t forget again. He wouldn’t give up; she knew that. Monsters didn’t. The best she could do was stay a step ahead. Which meant leaving, as soon as she could figure out how.
Oh, dear God. What if Richard, too, was staying at the Lookout Inn.
With a muffled cry, she darted across the room to test the lock on the slider that led out onto a balcony.
* * *
SETH LAY AWAKE for long stretches that night. Every time he dozed off, he’d find himself starting awake, adrenaline firing through his body like an electrical shock.
Gritting his teeth and punching his pillow into a new shape, he had to convince himself repeatedly that there wasn’t anything else he could have done before morning.
Except, maybe, sleep in the hall outside Helen Boyd’s room at the inn to make sure she didn’t disappear—and that a killer didn’t get to her and that cute kid of hers.
He groaned and rested his forearm over his eyes. Damn it, the woman was right; his initial focus should be on the actual victim’s life, her character, her husband, friends and acquaintances. And it was—he’d talked to her husband for the first time this evening, but he’d go back as many times as he had to. Tomorrow, he’d talk to her boss and coworkers, get the names of friends. Find out if there was even a whisper suggesting she had a lover or might be up to something illicit.
But he’d always paid attention to his gut, and while Helen was trying hard to play the outraged innocent, she wasn’t a good liar. And she was lying; he had no doubt about that. All he had to do was look at the turmoil in her eyes that should be transparent instead of clouded with a darkness he didn’t think was entirely caused by her discovery today of a dead body in her house.
He couldn’t see her as a killer, but he had to be damn sure he was thinking like a cop, not a man drawn to a woman. He couldn’t afford to let himself have even a momentary thought about her as an attractive woman.
Damn. Seth sat up in bed and swung his feet to the floor. He remained there for a minute, head hanging. If he fell asleep with that picture in his head, he risked having an erotic dream involving a woman he would almost certainly interview again in a murder investigation. A woman who’d looked like she hated him by the time she insisted he leave her hotel room.
Not happening.
Even though he wasn’t hungry, he scrambled eggs and ate breakfast to fill the last dark hour before dawn. Then he showered and drove to Hood River to attend the autopsy.
The medical examiner didn’t come up with any surprises. Andrea Sloan was in good health generally. She had been killed by a blow to the head. The ME thought the weapon used was a short length of pipe, considerably fatter than the tire iron in the trunk of Ms. Boyd’s car. The victim had also taken a blow to her side that had broken ribs, probably postmortem. A kick, the ME suggested.