Seeing her dad again after so long, especially with the panic in his face and voice, made her question everything she believed. Stop that. She knew her father was guilty. There could be no other explanation. Her mother was having an affair and her father snapped. It happened all the time throughout the world.
But would it hurt to find Oliver Maddox? Talk to him? Learn what he knew? Maybe the kid had proof of her father’s guilt, and that’s why he hadn’t shown up. If that was the case, Claire would call the Feds and set up a meeting to put her father back in prison.
At least then she could tell her father he had nothing to hold on to. Maybe she could get him to turn himself in. She didn’t want him to die, gunned down by an overzealous cop.
Who was she kidding? His execution date was six weeks away. If not for the earthquake, his days would have been numbered anyway. Why had he foolishly returned to Sacramento when he’d managed to stay under the radar successfully for the last four months? He should have kept on hiding. He was obviously good at it.
Still. Oliver Maddox had told her father he knew something about her mother’s lover Chase Taverton. Taverton had been a Sacramento County prosecutor who, from what Claire remembered from the trial, was successful, charismatic, and well liked. Still, prosecutors acquired enemies-criminals they put in prison, victims who didn’t get the justice they deserved. Or maybe it was personal.
Her heart twisted at the thought of turning in her father, and she doubled her focus on Pete Jackson’s comments as they walked through the burned-out warehouse.
Why couldn’t you have just stayed away, Dad?
TWO
Tom O’Brien was grateful when Nelia didn’t say anything on the drive back to the motel. He needed the time to think.
He’d unintentionally manhandled Claire. Though she hid her fear well behind those suspicious blue eyes, he’d scared her.
He squeezed his eyes shut, the hot burn of unshed tears reminding him of everything he’d lost on that horrific day fifteen years ago.
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” Tom whispered. If Nelia heard him, she didn’t comment, her eyes focused on driving in morning commuter traffic, knuckles white as she gripped the steering wheel. He’d tell her everything-they had no secrets-but now, he had to regain control over his past, over his emotions.
Fifteen years was a long time, but when you lived day in and day out remembering every minute of the hour that destroyed your life, you didn’t forget a detail.
He remembered exactly what he had felt when Claire called him that day about Lydia and Taverton. Pain. Anger. And a deep, soul-shattering sadness that his marriage was, in fact, over.
But he’d never imagined Lydia dead.
It wasn’t the first time Lydia had cheated on him. Tom had learned of another affair five years before. That time she’d been screwing another cop. From his own division. He’d told Lydia he could forgive her if she promised never to stray again.
“If you don’t love me, tell me,” he’d said. Divorce was foreign to him-his parents had been happily married for forty years before his dad died-but he wouldn’t live in a loveless house. He wouldn’t keep her trapped just because they had a life together, a child together.
That first time, Lydia had cried and begged for Tom’s forgiveness. She’d met the cop at the hospital where she worked as an emergency-room nurse. It was the adrenaline of the moment, she claimed, she didn’t know why she had let it continue. Tom forgave her. Lydia had seemed so sincere.
But that horrible day, knowing she was in his bed with another man, the insidious self-loathing returned. That voice that said, “You’re a sucker. She cheated on you once, Tommy Boy, you knew she’d do it again.”
Was she fucking another cop? How many had there been? Had everyone been laughing at him behind his back? Poor Tom O’Brien, his wife was a whore.
He went to the house that day not only to confront her, but to see the truth for himself. That his wife had spat on their wedding vows again, that they meant nothing to her, that his forgiveness had meant nothing, that their eighteen years of marriage meant nothing.
Maybe if Tom was the only one who knew of Lydia’s infidelity, he could have lived the lie until Claire went off to college. Quietly gotten a divorce. But their fourteen-year-old daughter knew. Had known for weeks. It had all spilled out when Claire called him in tears.
“I’ve seen the car before, two months ago. I asked Mom who was at the house and she said just a friend, and then I saw her kissing a man at the park last month. Mom didn’t see me. I wanted to tell her to stop, but. .” Claire’s voice trailed off. “I saw the same blue car then.”
Tom was ill with the thought that Claire had been living with this knowledge, that it hurt her.
“Mom brought him home today,” Claire sobbed into the phone to her dad.
“Why aren’t you in school?” he’d asked.
“Missy and I came home for lunch.”
He’d learned later that was a half-truth. Claire and Missy had come home during lunch, but had planned on cutting classes the rest of the day.
“Daddy, I hate her!”
Claire didn’t hate her mother. It had been a statement born of anger and frustration. Nor did Tom hate Lydia, but any love he’d had was a diminishing memory. Tom told Claire to stay at Missy’s house and he’d talk to her after he spoke to Lydia. “Don’t worry,” he’d said. “Everything is going to be fine.”
He didn’t believe it. Claire didn’t, either.
He parked his police-issue motorcycle down the street from their bungalow in South Land Park, not wanting the copulating occupants to hear the sound of his bike. He walked up to the front door rather than using the garage-door opener. An unfamiliar blue car-an older-model BMW-was parked in the narrow drive.
Tom inserted his key, but locked instead of unlocked the door. Claire hadn’t said whether she’d gone into the house, only that she recognized the man’s car. Why would the door be unlocked? Had Claire seen more than she wanted to admit?
Tom turned the key again and went inside, knowing instantly that something was very wrong.
He reached for his gun, its weight comforting as fear-laced adrenaline rushed through his veins. It was the acrid smell-not of sex, but of death. Blood mixed with the lingering scent of gunpowder.
His rubber-soled boots made no sound on the worn wood floor of the narrow hall. The mirror over the living room mantel reflected his profile-hard, chiseled, tough. A cop. If he dared look at his eyes, they would have been a wild, fearful blue.
Every door was closed. The bathroom. Claire’s room. The linen closet. The small guest room that Lydia used as an office. And the door at the end of the hall. Their bedroom.
Not closed, he noticed while approaching, but ajar. Pushing it open with his shoulder, Tom stepped over the threshold.
The queen-size bed, lit by the midafternoon sun oddly filtering through the half-closed blinds, was in disarray from a rowdy session of sex. Both victims were naked, the male lying facedown on top of the female. Both bloody, the attack so quick and efficient that the male victim didn’t have time even to think about a defense.