She looked at him. She didn’t say the words, but she hoped her look was clear enough. Let’s talk about this later.
Jason got the point. He looked back at Steffi.
“Are you going to be all right?”
“Yeah. I guess so. I feel bad about Mr. Crawford.”
Emily nodded. “If he’s innocent, he’ll be let out soon enough.”
She told Steffi that Gloria would take her statement, but that she and her deputy had to leave.
“Donna’s waiting for me at Miller’s Marsh Pond. I’m going there. She texted me an hour ago.”
Jason stood and put on his coat. “Not without me, you’re not.”
Emily smiled, a forgiving smile. She wished that she’d been a better mentor. Jason Howard was a great deputy and had always deserved her respect. “Of course not. But you’ll take your own car and keep a distance away.”
“Emily, I don’t know about this,” he said.
“I do. I think she’s about to tell me what’s really going on and I want to hear it.”
“You’re making it sound personal.”
“It is. But not about me. This is for Mandy and her baby.”
“You think she’s behind the threat to Samantha Phillips? The payoffs to Tricia?”
Emily smiled. “You’re good. Those things crossed my mind about ten minutes go.”
“Right behind you,” he said.
Chapter Sixty-eight
Miller’s Marsh Pond, outside of Cherrystone
It was early March and the snow had finally gone. Spring had begun to emerge. Cattails were sending up new green spikes and the willows along the edges of Miller’s Marsh Pond where Dan Fletcher and his kids had discovered Mandy Crawford’s body just after Christmas were popping with green buds. Emily had felt a shudder of horror at the sight of a half-frozen corpse wrapped in a sleeping bag, but the chill had faded now with the realization that she’d been wrong the entire time.
Mitch Crawford probably wasn’t the killer. She edited her thoughts. Mitch Crawford was innocent.
Emily parked the Crown Vic next to Donna Rayburn’s BMW.
She recalled how Steffi had said the man had a pickup the night he came in for coffee.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jason’s cruiser as he parked fifty yards away.
As she walked down the path, the light dipping low behind a grove of alders draped with new catkins, Emily wondered how she could have been so stupid. How she had wanted to believe something about Mitch Crawford so onerous, so unforgiving, that she’d trapped herself. Camille had pushed hard, of course, but the blame wasn’t hers alone. Emily was the investigator. She had been in pursuit of a killer to avenge a woman’s and a baby’s deaths.
This case went too far too fast. It was like we just wanted it to be Mitch. So neat. So much easier.
It wasn’t Donna she saw at the water’s edge. When she saw him, everything crystallized. Emily remembered the monograms on the guest towels in his mountain cabin in Idaho, at his big house in Cherrystone. She remembered how she shopped for a tie tack with the letter M because Cary hadn’t wanted any jewelry unless it was personalized in some way.
“Why wear anything if it doesn’t say something about you?” he asked her back then when they were dating.
All of it was from a time she wished she could sift from her memory.
Cary McConnell was facing the water. He turned around when he heard Emily approach, as her steps echoed softly on a boardwalk weekend fisherman had laid over the sodden path. She kept one hand close to her gun, its cold barrel reminding her of the danger of the moment.
“There’s nowhere for me to go, Emily,” he said. His eyes were red. He might even have been crying before she got there.
“You can come clean, Cary.”
He turned away from her and looked at the water, dotted with ripples of gold. “No. No, I can’t.”
“You can. Tell me. What happened with you and Mandy?”
He answered, with his back still toward her. “It isn’t so hard to figure out. You are pretty smart. Not smart enough to avoid getting involved with me, though.”
She chose her words carefully. “That was awhile ago.”
But I was smart, she thought, I dumped you.
“What happened with Mandy?”
“It was stupid. She was the wife of my biggest client. She was lonely. I was lonely. It was wrong, I know that.”
“This is more than an ethical violation, Cary. Mandy’s dead. What happened?”
Cary looked over the water, now cast in the yellow light of a very late afternoon. “She wanted to tell her husband. She wanted to be with me. Jesus, I didn’t want that. I told her to stick with Mitch. Let him think the baby was his. She kept telling me that she didn’t love him, that she could make a life with me. Right? Like I could give up my biggest client for her and that baby.”
It was the first time he mentioned the baby.
Emily inched a little closer. She wasn’t afraid. “What did you do, Cary? Tell me what happened.”
“It was stupid. She made me mad. I don’t like to be pushed. She kept pushing. She even started to call Mitch and tell him. I couldn’t have that. I put my hand around her neck. She clawed at me. But I had to shut her up.”
For the first time, Emily noticed the barrel of the gun that Cary pulled from his coat pocket. She hadn’t expected that and she took a slight step backward. She pulled her own gun.
“Drop it,” she said. “You don’t want to do that.”
“You don’t know what I wanted. I wanted you, remember that? I loved you, Emily. If you hadn’t broken up with me, none of this would have happened.”
“I’m sorry. I wish things could have been different.”
It was such a hollow lie that she was sure he could see right through it. But it was the first thing that leapt to her mind. Promise the potential suicide anything. Stall for time. Time might save a life.
“You’re a good man,” she said. Again, another lie, one so egregious she nearly choked on her words.
The barrel of the gun moved slightly.
“I’m garbage. Everyone says so. I couldn’t even manage to cover up my own mess.”
“But you did a good job. You paid off Tricia, didn’t you?”
A near smile came over his face. “That was pretty good, wasn’t it?”
“Brilliant. Now, please set down the gun.”
A flock of ducks flew overhead, and for a second, Emily moved her eyes from Cary. In that very instant, he pulled his arm from his body and in one rapid move pointed the weapon at his face.
“No!” she screamed.
A gunshot sounded, and blood spatter sprayed over a stack of firewood someone had assembled like a giant Jenga game. Cary slumped to the muddy ground.
“You shot me!” he said.
Jason was right behind Emily, a curl of smoke drifted from the nose of his Cherrystone Sheriff Department issue.
Cary writhed in agony. His shoulder had been pierced by Jason’s bullet. A cleaner shot had never been fired. Emily picked up Cary’s gun, its handle gleaming with engraved lettering: CAM. She put it out of reach.
“Where’s Donna?” she asked. She was cool, direct. She meant for the son-of-bitch coward slumped in front of her to give her an answer. “Tell me. Now.”
Cary’s eyes were ice. “You think I will tell you?”
“Don’t mess with me, Cary! Where is Donna?”
Cary put his left hand on his right shoulder as blood oozed through his wound. He struggled to pull himself together as if he’d just been stung by a bee.