Luke didn’t care about his clothing. He was stalling while deciding whether to tell the cops about the mysterious package, including the photograph that he was still holding in his left hand. If he told them, O’Reilly would almost certainly assume the worst and conclude that he’d had the e-mail all along. The detective would reason that Luke was telling them only to preempt the more incriminating scenario of their discovering the items during their search.
Luke thought back to the attorney’s advice—keep your mouth shut—and decided to wait until later, when his disclosure wouldn’t seem suspect.
“This is your copy of the warrant.” Groff tapped Luke’s chest with the papers. “Now, please step outside.”
Luke took the papers with his right hand while lifting his left hand and placing the photograph against the bottom of the stack. He used Groff’s body to conceal his maneuver from the other cops.
The lieutenant turned and gave a hand signal to the uniformed cops. One of them trotted down the driveway toward the backyard, while the other loitered at the front of the property with her thumbs hooked around her gun belt.
Even before Luke was completely through his front doorway, Groff disappeared inside. O’Reilly and the female detective from his interrogation session followed behind their boss.
An overly muscled detective with spiked blond hair remained on the small landing with Luke.
“Mind if I sit?” Luke asked.
Muscles let his eyelids droop and cracked a knuckle.
Luke slid down against the stucco wall and flipped through the search warrant. Some of the listed items told him things about the killer’s methods:.338 caliber rounds, rifles with barreling that was visually compatible with.338 ammunition, sighting scopes, and so on. A few of the items, like “athletic shoes” and “hiking boots,” suggested that they might already have some forensic evidence that could ID the killer.
Good. Maybe this would end here.
Nothing on their search list gave them a reason to examine his desk, and he remembered slipping the e-mail back into its envelope. He could tell O’Reilly about Kate’s e-mail later.
Luke stared out through the decorative iron balustrade. Spanish-tile rooftops on the hillside below him crept into view as the sky turned from black to gray.
No one said anything to him for the next ten minutes. The monotony was broken only occasionally by his hardwood floors creaking under the weight of a footstep, or the murmur of clipped conversation.
O’Reilly appeared in the entry, huddling with Groff. The two men spoke in a muted tone with their backs turned to Luke.
A minute later O’Reilly came through the front door, holding up Kate’s e-mail message. “This was sitting in the open, next to your computer,” he lied. “Were you planning to tell me about it at some point?”
“It showed up on my doorstep this morning, in a plain envelope.”
“I see.” The detective looked at the paper. “Just like that, it showed up on your—”
“Chocolate fan, huh?” Groff shouted at Luke from the entry hall.
The female detective was holding a plastic bag with several Mr. Goodbar wrappers.
Luke struggled not to shiver in the morning air while wondering what possible interest his candy bar wrappers could hold for them.
“I have a whole drawerful,” he said. “You can have them if you bring me a jacket.”
Groff called O’Reilly back inside. For several minutes they stood in a cluster. Groff held up one of Luke’s running shoes by the tongue while O’Reilly and the female cop studied the rubber sole. Their gaze went back and forth between the bottom of his shoe and what looked like a photograph that Groff had pulled from his briefcase.
Luke slipped Kate’s photograph into the back pocket of his scrub pants while Muscles was leaning over the railing to sneeze.
When the three detectives came outside again, both of Luke’s shoes were sitting in plastic bags. “These yours?” asked Groff.
Even in the dim light, Luke could see that his shoes were streaked with mud. Something was wrong. He didn’t wear those shoes when the ground was wet; he had another pair he used on rainy days. “I’m not sure.”
“Take a good look.” Groff turned the bags in front of Luke’s face. “Nike. Size eleven. These look like yours?”
The laces were untied. Luke always kicked his shoes off after a run. He never bothered to untie the laces.
“C’mon,” Groff said. “This shouldn’t be too hard. Don’t make us look for DNA traces in your dried sweat. Be a sport.”
Old habits kicked in. Luke studied each detective as they fanned out around him — how their eyes responded to the environment, where they carried their weapons, how their bodies moved — sizing each threat while his senses took in the smallest details of each movement and sound.
“I think I want to talk to an attorney,” he said finally.
“Well, you’re gonna get that chance because you’re under arrest for suspicion of murder. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say…”
Luke didn’t hear most of it. His mind was busy fighting a war of its own.
He was being framed. Hardened reflexes screamed at him to evade and escape. His intellect reminded him of the absurdity of that choice.
“…you have the right to speak to an attorney, and…”
This was insane! Someone was setting him up and he had no idea why. He’d never find out if they locked him away in a cage.
“If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be…”
Who was doing this? Did this have something to do with Kate’s murder?
“Please place both hands behind your head.”
Primal instincts took over. Luke’s foot plunged into Groff’s midsection. The detective tumbled down the stairway, carrying Muscles with him.
An instant later Luke was on his feet. He swept the woman’s legs before her gun had cleared the holster. She went sprawling as he head-butted O’Reilly. The detective melted into a puddle.
Luke ran through his front door and down the short hallway into his bedroom. He grabbed the blanket from his bed and threw it over his head before plunging through the closed window.
Glass shattered. He tried to pull the blanket off and extend his arms before the ground came up to meet him.
He didn’t quite make it, and the ten-foot drop sent a bolt of pain through the left side of his body. Shattered glass rained down on him.
He expected a shouted command — or gunshot — as he came up onto his feet in the backyard. Instead, he saw no one. The uniform must have sprinted back up the driveway.
Luke hurtled toward the bushy hillside at the rear of the property.
Megan listened to the jungle awaken as she sat behind a thin barrier of reeds and ferns along the bank of the murky green river. A shaft of sunlight broke through the canopy overhead, and birds began squawking at one another in rhythmless pulses.
She hugged her legs and rested her chin on a pair of wobbly knees. A wet T-shirt sagged over her shoulders, and her shivering legs struggled to hold their purchase on the sloping riverbank.
She had remained in the river far too long. Her body was battling hypothermia. For what seemed like an hour, she had bobbed around in total darkness, bouncing off unseen rocks and scraping past low-hanging branches that reached out and speared her. Eventually, exhaustion had overtaken her resolve and she blindly clawed her way onto the river’s edge.
For the second time in as many hours, she wondered whether she was going to die in this wilderness. The Callahans were cursed, it seemed, but she had always pictured her life as having some purpose. The thought that her life, its work unfinished, might be extinguished in this alien place carried her to a desolate corner in her soul. That she might die alone, her death as inconsequential and unnoticed as a fly caught in a spider’s web, uncovered a loneliness that scraped at her soul with a dreadful indifference.