Rachel nodded.
“Let’s go, Ms. Marin.”
Rachel began to walk. She was shivering uncontrollably. Her hands were tied in front of her. She stumbled among the drifts and fell forward, unable to brace herself, and came up coughing into the duct tape, her face covered in snow and dirt. She could feel a warm trickle seep down her cheek. Blood.
The snow was coming down harder now. By this time tomorrow, their tracks would be gone.
“Move,” George said.
She pushed forward, following his footsteps. They were heading deep into the wooded glen. The sky was growing dark. A flashlight popped on behind her, illuminating the snowy trail ahead.
After ten minutes of walking, Rachel’s feet were growing numb. Her hands were losing circulation. If they didn’t arrive soon, and she fell, she would be unable to pick herself up.
Then, up ahead, Rachel saw the final destination. A hole about six feet long, two feet wide, and four feet deep. A shovel lay beside the hole. She would be buried with it. At the foot of the hole were several bags of chlorinated lime, as she’d suspected. With this snowfall, by tomorrow her grave would be nothing but a part of the landscape.
Then, as Rachel stood at the lip of her own grave, she began to laugh. Lightly at first, then hysterically. She coughed and gagged but continued to laugh.
Lieutenant George walked up to Rachel and placed the knife against her throat, point first. She stared at him and continued to laugh. Then, through the tape, she said two words.
“Scuse me?” George said.
She repeated the words. And laughed.
“You scream, I make your children scream.”
He ripped the duct tape from her mouth. Behind it, Rachel was smiling. And she repeated the two words. Slowly.
“You’re fucked,” she said.
This time, George smiled. “That right?” he said. “Seems to me you’re the one in a bit of a bind here. You know, I was debating getting rid of you the moment I heard that you went to the Wickersham kid’s office. But I figured you were just a rubbernecker. Bark worse than your bite. But when you fingered John as a suspect? Well, I knew you might just be crazy enough to go to the media, create a big damn mess for me. And I couldn’t have people digging into the department. Not with so much at stake.”
“Because they’d eventually find out you were the father of Constance Wright’s child and that you killed her and Christopher Robles,” she said.
George looked down. Tapped the knife with his finger.
“We had a good thing, Connie and I. I cared about her. Truly did. But there was no way I could let that child be born. Of course, she was set on having it. She called it her second chance. And, well, if you knew Constance, there was no convincing her otherwise.”
“And nobody gets elected mayor having a love child with the disgraced former holder of that very same office,” Rachel said.
“Most folks don’t care about a man’s personal life if he can cut their taxes. Keep shooters out of their schools. But she wanted to go after Drummond and the Wickersham kid. Get back the money they swindled from her. And, well, between that and the kid, that’s just too much of a scandal for even me to clean up.”
“And yet here you are,” Rachel said. “Digging graves in the woods. What about Christopher Robles? Why did he have to die?”
“He was at the bridge that night,” George said solemnly. “I nearly had a heart attack when I saw his face on the news that morning. My guess is after the phone calls from Constance, he figured Drummond was stepping out on Isabelle. So I think he followed Constance, figured he’d catch her with Nicholas. I can’t say for sure that he saw what happened that night, but I couldn’t take that chance. And once he was in police custody, an opportunity presented itself.”
“And nobody questions an embolism in someone with a history of intravenous drug abuse,” Rachel said. “At the press conference, he was terrified. I think he knew you killed her.”
“Well, it’s just bad luck for Chris that you had to go and shoot him. You don’t shoot him, he’s not in the hospital, and who knows what happens. Funny, isn’t it?”
“What’s really funny,” Rachel said, “is that everything you did in my house today was recorded.”
George’s smile disappeared.
“Bullshit.”
“Look in my eyes, Lieutenant. Am I lying?”
George hesitated. He brought the knife back a millimeter.
“No way,” he said. “Only a crazy person videotapes their house.”
“Well, guess what?” Rachel said. “I’m damn near certifiable.”
“All right, enough. Time to go, Ms. Marin.”
George held the knife sideways across her throat, the steel colder than the air.
“Harwood Greene,” Rachel whispered.
George paused.
“What did you say?”
“I said Harwood Greene.”
George hesitated. “Harwood Greene. The Connecticut Carver. I’ve heard of him. What in the hell does he have to do with anything?”
“Harwood Greene killed my husband, Bradley Powell. My name is Olivia Powell.”
“You’re a sick woman, Rachel Marin. Or whoever you are.”
“Harwood Greene cut my husband into pieces,” she said. “Left his remains in a sack on our front porch. My son found it. I can still hear my boy screaming.”
George listened, the knife quivering in his hand, unsure what to believe.
“Harwood Greene was a home security installation technician,” Rachel said. “While installing a system for a Darien PD deputy named Jimmy Plotkin, Greene found a kilo of heroin under a kitchen floorboard. So Greene gave Plotkin a quid pro quo. Greene would keep quiet about the drugs, and Plotkin would use the police database to put together a list of homes that had recently been burglarized. Plotkin figured it was for Greene’s business, so he could sell them home security systems. But what it really did was tell Greene which houses weren’t monitored. He used it to case his victims. Find the blind spots in their homes. Our house was on that list. My husband, Bradley, was Greene’s seventh and final victim.”
Rachel could tell that George knew she was telling the truth.
“The cops found Greene by accident a few months after he killed Brad. He got pulled over for a busted taillight, and the officer decided to search Greene’s trunk. Didn’t like the cut of his jib, or something. Greene was smart. He knew the cop had no probable cause for the search. The traffic cop’s body cam clearly shows Greene reciting the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unlawful search and seizure. The cop found a spot of blood on the tire jack. It matched one of Greene’s victims. They got a warrant for Greene’s home, found blood and fibers from the other victims and dozens of horrific photographs. Including one of my son and I the moment we found my husband’s remains on our doorstep. He took photographs of the moments the victim’s families discovered what he’d done. But since everything they found on Greene was predicated on that traffic stop, there was a mistrial.”
“I remember that,” George said. “But they would have retried Greene.”
“They would have retried him,” Rachel said. “But some of Greene’s sick followers found out where three corrections officers lived and threatened their families. And so Greene disappeared somewhere between superior court and the Bridgeport Correctional Center. And so the monster was loose. We couldn’t stay in Darien. Not with him still out there. We moved to another town in Connecticut, but we needed to cut our ties to everything we used to know. I came here to keep my children away from that monster. I changed our names. Our lives. Now, tell me, Lieutenant George, am I lying?”