Esther’s eyes locked onto her like two cannons.
Now Andrea remembered the value of keeping her idiotic mouth shut. The judge did have some actual power here. She could demand Andrea be taken off her detail. She could screw up Andrea’s career before it even got off the ground. Andrea wracked her brain for a way to dig herself out of this hole, but all she could hear was the same word machine-gunning around her skull—
Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck.
“Well.” Esther’s lips were so pursed that every line around her mouth seemed to be dedicated to that single purpose. “That was very funny, actually.”
Andrea wasn’t looking at a woman who had found something funny.
“I’ll let you get to work.” Esther stood from the table, so Andrea did, too. “I imagine Cat’s in the library. That’s at the far end of the hall on the left. Don’t go up the stairs unless it’s life or death. I understand you’ve got a job to do, but Dr. Vaughn and I expect to retain a modicum of privacy. Understood?”
“Yes.”
Her spine turned to steel again. “Yes?”
Andrea caught the warning loud and clear this time. “Yes, ma’am.”
Andrea had slept so restlessly in the crappy bed at the Beach, Please Motel that she woke up feeling hungover. Twelve hours of walking the darkened Vaughn estate was akin to trying to find Waldo inside Dante’s first circle of hell. All she could do now was stare at the ceiling and pray that her headache would pass. She’d had a terrifying dream about sitting at the judge’s kitchen table while a large spider unfurled its long, hairy arms. Andrea had been incapable of moving as the spider pulled her toward its wet, multi-fanged monster mouth. She’d jerked herself awake trying to scramble away. And then she’d slipped off the edge of the mattress and hit the floor.
Day two of her Marshal career was already off to a fantastic start.
Her iPhone dinged with a text. Andrea ignored it, assuming her mother had found another jacket in Oregon. She turned up the music she’d been listening to. Andrea had downloaded all of the songs from Emily’s mixtape. She’d heard of some of the artists, but was mortified that her favorite was by a grown woman who went by the name Juice Newton.
Andrea closed her eyes, but she couldn’t force herself back to sleep. Judith’s collages floated into her brain. The newer one with the death threats against the judge, the earlier one that a teenage Judith had used to try to work through her conflicted feelings about her mother. The mixtape. The stray words—Keep working it out! You will find the truth!!! The group photo of Emily with three of the men who would later become prime suspects in her murder.
Chief Bob Stilton’s notes stated that the attack had most likely occurred between 6:00 and 6:30 p.m. He hadn’t explained how he had established that window, but Andrea had no other choice but to accept it. The weapon used to beat Emily was a slat from a shipping pallet in the alley, so it could be assumed that the attack was probably opportunistic or spur-of-the-moment rather than planned. Which tracked, because the attacker had obviously been furious.
Stilton had assumed that Emily’s body had been removed directly after the attack, but Andrea wasn’t so sure. The man’s own diagram showed the alley as forty-one feet long and about three feet wide. Both buildings were approximately fifteen feet tall with one-foot-wide overhangs. Even in broad daylight, there were probably a lot of shadows you could hide a body in, not to mention that the three large, black plastic bags of trash from the diner provided excellent camouflage.
Andrea had looked up the meteorological data for that Saturday evening. Clear with no chance of rain. The sun had set around 7:42 p.m. If Andrea was trying to dispose of a body, she definitely would have waited until it was dark.
Which gave every suspect on her list plenty of time to be seen at the prom before returning to dispose of the body. No one had an iron-clad alibi. Even Eric Blakely, who admitted to being the last known person to talk to Emily that night, had corroborating witnesses. Two classmates claimed that they had seen him inside the gym during the timeframe of the attack.
Medical records recorded that Emily had weighed 152 pounds in the seventh month of her pregnancy. Lifting that much weight would not have been impossible for an eighteen-year-old boy, but it would not have been easy. Automobiles were forbidden on the boardwalk. The wooden piers probably would not support the weight of a car. The suspect would’ve parked on Beach Road. Then he’d have to go to the end of the alley, pick up Emily, then walk back to the car and put her in his trunk.
From there, it was a fifteen-minute drive to Skeeter’s Grill where, as the statement from the boy who had found Emily in the Dumpster reported, most of the staff left around ten even though the restaurant closed at midnight. He had called in the body at 11:58 that evening. Emily was naked, probably because her teal satin prom dress would have been easily identifiable, or maybe because the killer was worried about leaving evidence. Either way, Emily’s face had been unrecognizable. She’d had no identification on her, no purse or wallet. One paramedic had pronounced her dead, but then another had seen her hand move and started CPR.
And then seven weeks later, Judith Rose had been removed from her body.
Andrea rolled onto her side. Her brain had started buffering. There was not enough room to download all of this. She tapped her phone to check the time. She had missed a text from Mike at 8:32 this morning. Andrea felt a quiver in her heart, then another quiver somewhere else.
He’d sent her a photograph of a small herd of animals drinking from a lake, then followed it up with three question marks.
“What the—” She squinted at the animals, trying to figure out what they were. And then she decided it was too early in the morning for sleuthing. She rolled onto her back. She closed her eyes. Her brain filled with Juice Newton for a blissful minute before she opened her browser and pecked out—
Animal that looks like water buffalo and gazelle
Wiki answered—
Wildebeest, also called gnu
“Gnu?” she mumbled. Then, “News.”
The read receipt had gone through, so Mike knew she’d seen his text. Andrea was trying to decide whether to respond or to throw her phone across the room when the three dots bounced, indicating Mike had more to say. She watched the text bubble pop up—
You forget my number again?
Andrea tapped the message space, but she didn’t type. She wanted to think about Mike watching the dots bounce on his end. She let Juice finish wailing about love being a little bit hard before she wrote back—
Still 911, right?
The dots bounced again. And again. And again.
All for a thumbs up.
Andrea closed the app. She held the phone to her chest and stared at the ceiling again. She wasn’t going to let herself get caught up in Mike right now. Instead, she focused her thoughts on the Vaughn family kitchen, summoning the gold chandelier and melamine counters, the spider-like judge unfurling herself across the table.
Andrea had been convinced last night that Esther Vaughn didn’t know anything about Jasper’s string-pulling or Andrea’s connection to Clayton Morrow. Now, she was second-guessing herself. A federal judge could get all sorts of information, and Esther Vaughn wasn’t exaggerating by much when she said she’d been around almost as long as the USMS. Considering the average age of a congressman was nine thousand years old, she probably had tons of friends in high places. Sure, it was illegal to search the Marshals’ private databases, but if the last few years had taught the world anything, it was that politicians did not play by their own rules.