They stepped up onto Morton’s stoop and knocked. Rachel had seen several buildings like these, offering temporary housing for people that were trying to get back on their feet after rehabilitation or jailtime. She knew that, for some, it was a little demeaning but it was also not quite as embarrassing as asking a friend or loved one to crash at their place for a while. She wondered what sort of mindset Max Morton might be in and how he was handling the situation.

  Twenty seconds passed without any answer, so Jack knocked again. The silence from the other side of the door indicated that Max simply wasn’t home. For further confirmation, the vaping man from a few stoops over spoke up.

  “He’s not home. He left here about half an hour ago.”

  Rachel took a single step down off of Morton’s stoop and regarded the man. The other was still scanning his phone, as if he couldn’t care less what was going on.

  “Did he say where he was headed?” Jack asked.

  “Nope. Just left. Had this sad little bunch of flowers with him.”

  “Flowers?” Rachel said.

  “Yup.”

  “Did he take a cab or drive?”

  “Drove,” the man said. “You cops or something?”

  “FBI,” Jack said, showing his ID. At hearing this, the man on his phone looked up at them for the first time. “What kind of car was he in?”

  “Don’t know the brand. It was an old beater, you know? Red. Had some wear and tear in the paint along the hood.”

  When Jack tuned to Rachel, she instantly saw the worry and excitement in his eyes. “Flowers,” he said.

  “Yeah, I heard. I think I have pretty good idea of where he might be headed. The question, though, is why?” But maybe she did know, answering her own question with a thought she’d landed on in Monique Helms’s office.

  Because he can’t let things go…

  Rachel hurried back to the car as Jack gave a little wave of appreciation to the men on the stoop. Jack got behind the wheel and didn’t even bother asking for confirmation as to where they were headed until he had backed out of the lot and pointed the car back toward the road.

  “Back to Emma Stern’s house, right?”

  “Yeah, I think that’s a safe bet,” Rachel said.

  As Jack drove back towards Murphy’s Crossing, Rachel wondered if there had even been any discussion along the line during Morton’s release concerning the fact that he was being placed in housing less than half an hour away from the woman he’d gone to visit with a knife while she was at work. She knew mistakes like that were made all of the time, but this one seemed especially foolish. Perhaps Morton’s psychiatrist and the parole board truly believed that he’d rehabilitated.

  As the familiar sights of Emma’s neighborhood started to pass by, Rachel felt a slight tension rising up within her. Was this case really going to be so simple? If so, she’d be right back at home this evening—maybe a little too late to tuck Paige into bed, but not by much.

  Jack was speeding significantly when he turned on to Emma’s street but started to slow almost right away. Slowly, her house came into view—as did the old, red car that was parked in front of it.

  “I’ll be damned,” Jack said as he pulled in behind it.

  Rachel glared ahead and was pretty sure the car was empty. At the same moment, Jack said. “See him? On the porch?”

  She looked away from the red car, redirecting her attention to the porch. Sure enough, there was a man sitting on the porch. Though there was a decorative chair just slightly to the right of the door, the man elected to sit in front of the door, his back against it. A small bouquet of flowers sat in his lap, the sort that was wrapped in cheap plastic and could be purchased at gas stations and grocery stores. He was looking at their car with great interest, sitting up a bit straighter as Jack brought the car to a stop.

  Rachel opened her door slowly, not liking the way the man was looking at them. When her door did open, the man quickly got to a knee as he continued to stare them down.

  “He’s going to run, isn’t he?” Jack said.

  He also opened his door, just as slowly as Rachel. When Jack’s left foot touched the concrete, that was all it took for Jack to be proven right. The man—presumably Max Morton—took off running before he even got fully to his feet. The flowers fell to the porch as he leaped down off the stairs and took off across the front yard, skidding hard to turn right and head towards the side yard.

  Rachel got out of the car and started running, surprised at how quickly Jack had already managed to get out of the car. Jack had always been fast, but he seemed to have an extra urgency to him as he rocketed across the front of the car, giving chase. As Rachel followed, there was a single little alarm bell tolling away somewhere in the back of her head. She knew that the two times she’d suffered any sort of setback or blackout since getting her diagnosis, it had come at times like these.

  On the other hand, she still felt better than she had in weeks and figured she’d be okay as long as she didn’t truly push herself. As she fell in behind Jack, barreling around the side of the house, she couldn’t help but wonder if that was where his extra burst of speed had come from. Maybe he knew that these were situations where she’d been having trouble, and he was trying to keep her from doing too much.

  As they came to the backyard, with Jack a clear fifteen feet or so ahead of Rachel, she saw that Morton had taken a hard left turn. He was rushing across Emma’s backyard, tearing through a tangle of bushes that crossed over into the neighboring yard. Jack followed suit, practically diving through the bushes.

  Rachel did the same just seconds later, twisting her body slightly and passing through a space where two of the hedges met. She came out in the neighbor’s yard just in time to see Morton now angling towards the back corner of this new yard. There, a little cove of trees cupped the yard and led back into a wooded lot with a larger, much nicer house than the others in the neighborhood.

  “FBI!” Jack yelled. “Freeze!”

  Morton did no such thing as he continued running into the trees. Jack was gaining on him and by the time he also reached the trees, he was nearly close enough to reach out and grab Morton. After a few more steps and nearly clipping a small elm tree, Jack was able to do just that. He reached out, grabbed Morton by the left shoulder, and yanked him backwards. Morton went spilling to the ground, waving his arms out wildly. His legs caught together, sprawling him into an awkward sort of dive. It also caused Jack to stumble, their legs tangling up and sending them both to the ground.

  Morton scrambled up right away, his feet kicking up fallen leaves as he tried to get traction again. But by the time he managed to start forward again, Rachel was there. She drew up behind him and applied a headlock, then falling to the ground and whipping him over so that Morton landed on his chest. Rachel went with him, never losing the headlock.

  Like a tight-knit unit, Jack was at her side and applying his handcuffs only seconds later. Max Morton struggled underneath them but the cuffs were on quickly and Rachel had her hold expertly applied. When Jack slapped the cuffs closed and stepped back, Rachel finally released her headlock and got to her feet.

  She took a single step back, using a moment to take an internal inventory. No headaches, no little flickering spots in her vision. Everything seemed to be perfectly fine. She caught Jack looking over at her, checking in on her without coming out and asking, and she nodded, giving a quick thumbs-up.

  Jack reached down and helped Morton to his feet. “Mr. Morton, do you want to tell me why you thought it was a good idea to r—”

  But the loud wail that Max Morton let out interrupted him. Morton was crying, tears streaming down his face. And when he let out another loud, boisterous cry, he stumbled forward as if he wanted Jack to hold him up. Jack caught him just in time as Morton’s cries filled the little wooded lot.

  And over his trembling shoulder, Rachel and Jack shared an uneasy look that seemed to say: What the hell is going on here?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “I know what you think,” Morton whimpered as Rachel and Jack led him from the car to the front of the Murphy’s Crossing police station. “I know you think I did it, right? Just because I was in jail? But no…I would never…”

  And that was as far as Max Morton could get before he’d break down into sobs again.

  As Rachel and Jack escorted Morton into the station, Rachel began to understand that even if Morton confessed right away, she was coming up to the point where making it home in time to tuck Paige in for bed was quickly disappearing. She accepted this with a passive indifference; nearly every case she’d taken outside of Richmond or the immediate area had kept her away from home for at least one night. A few cases had kept her away from her family for upwards of two weeks. Paige knew that when her mother left for a job, there was a very good chance she’d be gone for a few days.

  Still, given the situation back home, Rachel would much rather be with Paige when she went to sleep. It was a strange feeling that was very similar to how she’d felt going back to work after maternity leave—a strange sense that she was somehow abandoning her child.

  But she did her best to shake all of that off as she and Jack ushered Morton to an interrogation room. A local officer led the way, stone-faced and quiet as he led them down a hall on the far right side of the building and opened a door at the very end.

  “Just let us know if you need anything,” he said as he waited for them to all slip inside.

  When he closed the door behind them, Morton didn’t even need to be directed to the chair. He saw it and walked directly to it, on the other side of a long but thin table in the center of the bright, tiled room.

  Rachel opened her mouth to begin the interrogation, but Max Morton beat her to it.

  “What can I do? What can I say or do to prove I’m not the guy you’re looking for…that I’d love to help you catch the sorry son of a bitch that killed her?”

  “Easy,” Jack said. “If you’re innocent, why did you run like a bat out of hell when you saw us getting out of the car.”

  “I know, that was stupid,” Morton said. His words were coming out quickly and panicked. He was breathing hard, as if he might still be winded from the sudden sprint he’d taken through back yards and part of a wooded lot. “I know it was stupid and I knew it was stupid almost right away but by then I was panicking and scared and…and—”

  “Slow down, Mr. Morton,” Jack said. “Take a breath and slow down.”

  Morton nodded and took a deep breath, his entire body trembling a bit when he did. It did seem to calm him and when he let it out, he looked sincerely to both of them.

  “Now try again,” Rachel said.

  He took another steadying breath and continued. “I got out of prison seven weeks ago. And I’m assuming you know why I was there, right?”

  “We do.”

  “Well, I waited about three weeks. I knew I had to see Emma, just to properly apologize. I hate the man I was back then…pushy, overbearing, damn near abusive. I visited her house one time, knocked on the door, and she wasn’t home. So I left her a note. I told her I just wanted to apologize. I left my new number but she never called. I get it…I don’t think I really ever expected her to call. But…then this morning, I saw on the news that she had been killed. I…I don’t know. It broke my heart. So I got some flowers and a bottle of wine that she and I used to drink. The plan was to sit on her porch and drink the wine by myself. Maybe pass out, go to sleep. I just…it hit me hard. Harder than I thought.”

  “And you claim you ran because you panicked?” Rachel said.

  “Well, yeah. I had been there for about fifteen minutes before you showed up. I was starting to rethink things. With my history with Emma…I started to realize how messed up it might look if the cops came back by, you know? And that multiplied by about five hundred when you guys showed up. I mean…I’ve been out for seven weeks and the thought of going back…it just got me, you know?”

  Rachel looked to Jack, slightly raising her right eyebrow. He nodded and took a few steps away, leaning against the wall. This was his way of letting her run with the interrogation for a while. He, meanwhile, would cling to every word out of Morton’s mouth.

  “Mr. Morton, let’s say I believe you—that I believe every single word you just told me. I think I have more information that might be shocking to you as well.”

  “O…okay…?”

  “While you were in prison, you had a rather rough run-in with a corrections officer by the name of Dylan Tharpe, is that right?”

  “That’s right,” he said. He seemed relieved to be off of the topic of Emma, but also very confused.

  “And you made complaints about the way he handled you for a while after the original altercation, correct? Made formal complaints and wrote letters, correct?”

  “I did. And even now that I’m out, I still think he should have had some sort of punishment.”

  “Mr. Morton…three nights ago, Mr. Tharpe was also murdered. He was killed in the workshop behind his house.”

  She saw the color drain out of his face but she also saw the tight lines across his brow, the telltale physical signs of confusion. He looked back and forth between the two of them with an expectant look on his face, like he was waiting for one of them to tell him that this was just some sort of weird scenario to prove he was guilty.

  Rachel went on, slowly spelling it out for him. “Someone hung him from a rafter in his shed, and his wife found his body. As I said, this was three days ago. And now we have Emma turning up dead as well.” She hesitated a moment, wanting to let it all sink in. As Morton still looked confused and panicked, his eyes filling with tears as he stared at her, she added: “The only person we can find that links Emma Stern and Dylan Tharpe is you. You took a knife into a state building to meet with one and you made numerous complaints about the other after he accidentally fractured your wrist. So…you can see why we’re so interested in you, I hope.”

  “This is…I mean, yes, I understand why you would but…this is nonsense. I haven’t even see Tharpe since I got out of prison.”

  “Can you prove it?” Jack asked.

  “I didn’t…I mean, how would I prove something like that?”

  “We have a fairly accurate estimation of the window of time when Mr. Tharpe was killed. Emma Stern, too. Can you provide proof of your whereabouts over the last three nights?”

  “Yes!” he said excitedly. “I can! Last night, I was playing poker with a few of the guys that are living in the development I got stuck in.”

  “How long?” Jack asked.

  “I’m not exactly sure. But I know it was after midnight the last time I checked my phone.”

  “And when did you start?”

  “We didn’t start playing poker until about nine or so, I think. But I was over at his place long before that. We drank some beer and ordered some pizza.”

  “How many played?” Jack asked.

  “There were four of us. But Tom crapped out early. Got pissed and went home.”

  Rachel filed all of this away, pinning them as small details that could come back to nail him if he was lying. But she was already starting to doubt he was their killer, no matter how perfect the picture seemed for the case. If he was the killer, he probably wouldn’t give such random details like someone named Tommy being there and leaving early because he went broke. More importantly, if this story did turn out to be true, it had Max Morton in the middle of a night of poker while Emma Stern was being killed.

  “How about three nights ago?” Jack asked. “What were you doing then?”

  Morton took a moment to think about it and started to look worried. “I was sitting at home all night. Watched some TV, then some YouTube videos on my phone.”

  “What kind of videos?” Rachel asked.

  An embarrassed smile touched his lips, an eerie expression when mingled with the sorrow that had not completely abated. “I went down this rabbit hole…watching kids reacting to ‘80s hair metal videos. I watched far too many of them. And I also watched a how-to video on how to stop an old fridge from making a grinding noise.”

  “Have you cleared your search history since then?” Jack asked.

  “No.”

  Rachel looked over to Jack and saw that he was quickly coming to the same conclusion she was. All of these small details likely meant that he was not their guy. There were just too many traps he could fall into and he’d handed them over far too easily.

  “You going to give us any grief if we tell you we need to check the browser history on your phone?” Jack asked.

  “No, not at all. Whatever you need.”

  “And we’ll have someone talk to your poker buddies, too.”

  “That’s fine. And anything else you need. I have to…I have to know that the man that did this is caught.”

  “You said whatever we need,” Jack said. “What else can you tell us about Dylan Tharpe? Were there any other inmates in the prison that seemed to have something against him?”

  Again, he took a moment to think about his answer. It made Rachel all the more certain that he really was trying to give them honest, legitimate answers.

  “Everyone talked smack about wanting to beat up all of the guards and officers, you know?” he finally said. “But if you’re asking if I knew anyone that talked about wanting him dead…I really don’t think so. There were a few guys that would sort of joke with him here and there. Other than being careless and screwing up my wrist, Tharpe really was a decent guy. Didn’t talk down to us or look at us like we were pieces of shit like some of the others.”

  Rachel looked over to Jack and he gave a lazy shrug. Just like that, in the space of about ten minutes, she’d gone from feeling like they had the case closed and wrapped up with a pretty bow to now having no solid leads.

  “Mr. Morton, we do need you to stay here for a while, just until your alibis are checked out,” Rachel said. “Do you have any questions?”

 

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