Page 87 of She Didn't See It Coming
And when he turned his back, she smashed him over the head with a sharp rock.
She perhaps should have stopped there, but she hit him again, and again. She waited until she was certain he was dead, and then she emerged onto the road, where she was spotted, and went into hysterics.
What happened next was nerve-racking. She told her story to the police, over and over again. She told it well, without deviation. But three things worried her. The detectives were banging on about“overkill”—apparently the first blow had been enough to kill him. And it’s true that he’d dropped like a stone. They questioned her repeatedly about why she bashed his head twice more rather than run away when she could. Secondly, the man, Richard Dunbar, was a respectable businessman, with no known history of attacking women. And lastly, her best friend, Susan Cleeve, knew she’d been seeing an older man on the sly. She even had a vague description. And Alice had let her lover’s first name, Rich, slip once when she was talking to Susan. So she’d told Susan that it had happened exactly the way she’d told it. He’d grabbed her and dragged her into the ravine because she’d refused to see him anymore. He told her that if he couldn’t have her, he was going to kill her with his bare hands, so she had to fight back. Susan believed her and was persuaded to say nothing about their relationship.
Susan might still be out there, and it makes Alice uneasy. What if she sees the news stories about Bryden Frost, and Alice’s mother? Alice doesn’t like loose ends. She doesn’t want to go after Susan to cover her tracks. She’d liked Susan. And she doesn’t want to ask for Derek’s help to find her, because Alice doesn’t want to tell him that she bashed her lover’s brains in when she got tired of him.
She’d much rather Detective Salter make an arrest and stop looking into her and Derek. Or else she might have to get creative.
•••
Late Sunday night,Jayne arrives home completely exhausted. All she wants is to get into her pajamas and go straight to sleep.
As she undresses in her bedroom, she has the strange sensation that something isn’t quite right. She glances around her bedroom, but there’s nothing specific she can put her finger on. She calls Michael to wish him good night, waking him from sleep.
“I’m sorry, I just wanted to hear your voice,” she says.
“No problem. I’m glad you called,” he assures her.
She talks to him as she wanders around the apartment in her pajamas. She’s in the kitchen, glancing around. Something feels different, but she can’t determine what it is. She pauses in her conversation.
“You all right?” Michael asks.
“Yes, I’m fine,” she says, though she’s a bit rattled.
She quickly sweeps her eyes around the rest of the kitchen. She has that feeling again, her hair prickling at the back of her neck. Instinct, Michael called it. An awareness of danger, in the service of survival. She returns to the bedroom, where she opens her drawers. She can’t tell if anything is different. But the books on her bedside table—surely one was stacked on top of the other? Now they lie side by side.
“What are you doing?” Michael asks on the other end of the phone. “It sounds like you’re cleaning or something.”
She’s already in the bathroom and opening her medicine cabinet. Then she knows for sure. Things have been moved, she’s certain of it. “Michael, I think someone’s been in my apartment.”
59
On Monday morning, Kilgour greets Jayne with, “You look like you hardly slept.”
Jayne gives him a tired grimace. “That’s because I haven’t.” She confides, “I think someone broke into my apartment yesterday.”
“Are you serious?”
“Nothing is missing. Just—some things were moved.” She sighs wearily. “Poor Michael ended up getting out of bed and coming over.” She glances at Kilgour. “He’s changing the locks and putting up a security camera for me later today.”
“Good idea.”
Jayne pretends to be unaffected by the break-in, but the truth is, it’s rattled her. Nothing like this has happened to her before. She has to ask herself, why now? Is it connected to the case? She thinks of Alice, the coldness behind her eyes, remembers Michael telling her to trust her instincts.
Jayne puts Alice out of her mind and together she and Kilgour make their way to the incident room, where she faces the team for the morning briefing.
“We have too many suspects, and so far, no evidence,” she begins. “We’re waiting for forensics on the clothes and the plastic bag they were found in. Maybe we’ll get lucky. But if we find trace evidence on the clothes from Sam Frost, he’s got an explanation—he says he hugged her that morning. And if we find evidence of Sam Frost on the plastic bag, he could argue that the plastic bag could have been taken from the kitchen drawer, and that he’d touched it previously. Of course, if we don’t find anything, that doesn’t mean he didn’t kill her.
“We haven’t been able to confirm alibis for either Sam Frost or Derek Gardner, so they remain viable suspects. Either one of them could have been buzzed into the underground garage by Bryden that day. Either one of them could have killed her and used the suitcase in the apartment and gotten away without being seen at all. The killer would almost certainly have been wearing gloves. We have the vague witness, Francine Logan, who claims to have seen someone with a suitcase in the elevator at the relevant time but has no description whatsoever. It’s just as likely the killer used the stairs. Both men had motive.
“Alice Gardner also has motive—jealousy. She, too, has no alibi. But it’s less likely that Bryden would have buzzed in someone from the underground parking that she didn’t know and wasn’t expecting, and we know Alice didn’t show up on the CCTV on the ground floor.”
She reviews what they’ve discovered on the Facebook group over the weekend. “I want to look into Lizzie Houser. She doesn’t have an alibi either. I want to know everything about her. Full background—mental history, work history, everything.”
•••
Paige had goneto Sam’s condo this morning to take Clara to day care. He’d asked her to do it; he didn’t want to face the people there. She got the sense that he wanted some space, so she dropped Clara at Dandylion and is now heading back to her own place. She has taken some vacation days, but she wonders if it’s time she went back to work.
