The Next Accident - Lisa Gardner [66]
“Kimberly . . . Rainie, get me out of here.”
She did.
17
Greenwich Village, New York
They drove toward New York City in silence, Rainie at the wheel, Quincy leaning against the passenger-side window. His eyes were closed, but she knew he wasn’t asleep. They would arrive at his daughter’s apartment in about an hour. She didn’t like to think about how that conversation would go. Poor Kimberly, who had just buried her older sister. Poor Kimberly, who would now learn that her mother had been savagely murdered, and that most likely, she was next in line.
Quincy needed to regain his composure, Rainie thought, for the clock was ticking now and in this kind of game you couldn’t afford a time-out.
“Talk,” he said shortly.
“We found Mandy’s SUV. I was going to call you in the morning with the news.”
“The seat belt was tampered with.”
“Yes. And someone else was in the vehicle at the time of the crash. We found warping on the passenger’s seat belt that proves it. In the good news department, Officer Amity recovered hairs from the cloth visor on the passenger’s side. If we can find the man, we can use the hairs to tie him to the crime.”
“What crime? Sitting in the passenger’s seat of a sports-utility vehicle?”
“We’ll work on it, Quincy. Officer Amity is a good guy; he can build a case. Now tell me this: Why did you go to your ex-wife’s house on tonight of all nights?”
“I was worried. Elizabeth . . . Bethie never went out much. It was unusual not to be able to reach her all day.”
“I wonder if he knew that.”
“Probably.” Quincy finally turned in his seat. His face bore the stamp of freshly etched lines. In a matter of hours, his dark pepper hair seemed to have gained more salt at the temples. He was an experienced FBI agent, a man who made his living seeing the most horrible of horrors. Rainie wondered if that helped at a time like now, when he was desperate to save his remaining daughter, or if the intimate knowledge of what men could do only made things worse.
“It’s obvious this Tristan Shandling is trying to frame you,” she said quietly. “The car purchase in your name. Disguising himself to look like you when he showed up at Bethie’s house. And there’s more, isn’t there? Things you and Dour Chic have already picked up on, but aren’t volunteering to the local boys.”
“The scene was staged. When the crime-scene techs examine the broken bathroom window, they’ll discover it was broken from the inside out.”
“But the broken glass was on the inside of the house, on the bathroom floor.”
“True. But if you fit one of the broken shards back into the window, the angle of the break reveals the blow came from the inside. Moving glass is easy. You can’t, however, disguise the fragments. The UNSUB was already inside the house when he broke the window. And I’m sure when the police get the report back from the alarm company, they’ll find it was properly disarmed.”
“He entered with Elizabeth,” Rainie murmured. “The man fitting your description the neighbor saw at ten.”
“That would be my guess. Then there is the crime scene itself. The level of destruction is out of proportion with the crime. Each room appears destroyed, but the blood trail is actually extremely contained. My guess is the initial struggle was fast, focused. The rest of the damage occurred postmortem.”
“He wanted it to look bad?”
“He wanted it to look horrific, terrifying, demoralizing. He’s very good at what he does.”
“The body,” Rainie whispered.
“The body,” Quincy repeated, his voice detached again, overly analytical. “When the medical examiner finishes with the autopsy, he’ll know the victim was killed fairly quickly—at least on a relative scale. There won’t be any evidence of rape, despite how he posed the body. There aren’t any abrasions on the wrists and ankles, indicating that hog-tying occurred postmortem. I suspect the disembowelment and other mutilation occurred postmortem as well.”
“But why?”
“To make it look like a sexual-sadist attack. But a posed sexual-sadist attack. Such as what an expert in violent crimes