“Oh, yes. You go. I’ll take care of everything,” Anne says.
“I’ll be seeing you, Sarah,” Eleanor calls from behind and then all I hear are the clicks and the clacks of her heels.
An hour later, I’m pulling up to the lake house. Sheriff Stevens’s vehicle is parked in the driveway, and he’s leaned up against the side of it, dressed in his sheriff’s uniform up top and blue jeans. He’s wearing a pair of aviators and carrying a folder, and when he sees my vehicle, he smiles. I park behind him and get out of the car.
“Good morning, Mrs. Morgan.” It’s all formalities today. I still wonder why he’s being nice. Does he think Adam is innocent? Does he feel sorry for me? Or does he have some other motive for this nice guy act?
“Good morning, Sheriff Stevens.” He shakes my hand, and I notice he is sweaty despite the cool weather. What is he nervous about? Does he know something?
“We’re just going to take a look around, and you tell me if you notice anything out of the norm,” he says leading the way. I follow, a bit apprehensive. I wouldn’t notice anything out of place even if it were. I rarely came here. This was essentially Adam’s home. I don’t say a word though. I’m sure there’s stuff the police missed, and I bet I can at least help with that.
Sheriff Stevens turns back to me and hands over the folder he was carrying.
“Almost forgot, here are the results of the autopsy as well as DNA. We’re still pulling phone records and running additional tests on some of the evidence we collected here.”
I nod, opening the folder as I walk. I trip on the first step of the wraparound porch because I’m face deep in the autopsy report. Sheriff Stevens catches me and pulls me up onto the porch. We lock eyes, inches apart from one another. My breath is a bit ragged. His breathing is steady. He asks me if I’m all right and I tell him yes. I step back from his embrace and straighten my skirt, while he bends down picking up the papers.
“Do you want to take a seat and read that over before we go inside?” He points to the bench on the porch. I nod, knowing I should look over the report before trying to assess the crime scene. I take a seat and begin flipping through the papers.
“Kelly Summers had Rohypnol in her system?”
“Yes.” Sheriff Stevens paces back and forth on the porch. He’s not one to sit still.
“Odd. What about Adam?” I ask looking up at him. “Did he have the same drug in his system?”
“No,” he says without hesitation.
“Did you test for it?”
“I believe so, but I’ll double-check with the lab.”
I flip through a few more pages and then stop when one catches my eye. I scan the text quickly and let out a breath of frustration.
“She was pregnant?” I look up at Sheriff Stevens. He shuffles his feet a bit and instantly he is visibly upset. He seems to collect himself almost quickly enough not to notice that this news bothered him. I supposed it would bother anyone. A woman and her unborn child stabbed to death. He finally nods.
“About four weeks along. The D.A. is now looking at a double homicide, and given the brutality of the crime as well, they’ll push for the death penalty.” He thinks he’s breaking the news to me, but any competent attorney would put that together quickly.
“Was Adam the father?”
Sheriff Stevens breaks eye contact. He doesn’t want to tell me, but he already has.
“Yes.” It looks as though he’s going to say something else, but he doesn’t. He sucks back in the words and begins to pace again. He wants to be anywhere else in the world right now. I can’t fucking believe Adam got this woman pregnant. Did he know? Was he hiding it from me? Did she want money out of him or was she going to tell me? One minute, I’m confident Adam would never do this and the next, I’m not so sure. What the hell was he thinking?
Sheriff Stevens stops pacing and puts one hand on the porch post, leaning up against it. I can feel his eyes on me. “Listen, I’m going to go grab a quick coffee, and give you time to digest and finish reading over those. Would you like one?”
I don’t look up. I keep reading. “Yes, black, please.” My attention is solely focused on the task at hand.
“Okay. I’ll be back in a minute. Please don’t go in there without me.”
“In my own house?” I say with a bit of sass.
He lets out a sigh and goes down the porch steps. I look up from the paper and watch him walk away. I hadn’t really noticed how good he looked before. Tall, broad shoulders, a freshly starched shirt. Despite his shortcomings and worn-down visage, he really does have a commanding attraction to him.
“I won’t go in my house without you.”
He turns back with a slight grin, trying to force the uncomfortableness out of this conversation. “Good, I wouldn’t want to have to arrest you too. It seems to run in the family.” He chuckles and then shakes his head as he catches the awkwardness of his attempt at humor. I continue flipping through the pages, rolling my eyes at him.
Sheriff Stevens is gone no more than twenty minutes, and by the time he returns, I’ve gotten through all the information. Kelly Summers died as a result of her stab wounds. She had Rohypnol and a BAC level of .16, twice the legal driving limit. She had bruises on her back, shoulder, and hip that were caused at least twenty-four hours before she was murdered. The skin underneath her fingernails is a match with Adam. Semen was found in her vagina, anus, and mouth—and according to the DNA results, the semen is a match with Adam as well. However, there were two additional sets of DNA found in her vagina that do not match Adam.
Sheriff Stevens walks up and hands me a cup of coffee. He casually sips at his own while he takes a seat on the bench inches from me. He’s taking in the view from the porch, glancing around at squirrels running to and fro and the mass of fall-colored leaves, just barely holding on.
“What’d ya learn?” He takes another drink of his coffee.
I close the folder and place it beside me, sipping at my own drink. “There were two other sets of DNA found in her. Have you run any tests on those?”
“We’ll get Scott’s back later this afternoon, and I’m going to assume he’ll be a match with one of them, but that just proves he had sex with his wife.”
“What about the other set of DNA?”
“We’re hoping the phone records give us more insight into that. Maybe she was seeing someone else. Maybe she was raped, and that’s the real murderer. We’re not sure.”
“Seeing someone else?”
“That third set of DNA caught us by surprise too.” He turns to me raising one of his eyebrows.
“What’s your theory?” I lean back into my seat.
He leans back too, getting a little more comfortable. “Well… before finding the third set of DNA I thought we just might have our man. But now Adam as the murderer doesn’t sit well for me. I’ll be honest, Adam didn’t make sense before the DNA results.”
“Why?”
“It’s too easy.”
“What do you mean it’s too easy?”
“It’s just too easy. Adam, a well-educated and well-established author, kills his mistress in his own house. It doesn’t make any sense. Unless, of course, it was by accident. But I don’t see how someone could stab another person thirty-seven times by accident.”