Chương 2
“Come on. You know that.”
Laura said nothing.
Derek looked around at the other relatives as though searching for someone who would give him the old response—a grin, a shrug, a reasonable explanation waiting to be accepted.
Nobody did.
Emma shifted behind Rachel.
Rachel turned enough to see her face.
Her daughter’s chin was lowered. She was staring at the concrete, not at Derek.
“You okay?”
Emma nodded automatically.
Rachel crouched.
“Look at me.”
Emma raised her eyes.
They were dry.
That frightened Rachel more than crying would have.
“Do you want to go inside?”
Another nod.
Rachel took her toward the house.
Behind her, Derek said, “Rachel.”
She stopped.
Michael immediately said, “Don’t.”
“I just want to explain something.”
Rachel looked over her shoulder.
“Explain it to the police.”
Derek’s jaw tightened.
That was the first flash of anger she saw.
It disappeared quickly.
Laura saw it too.
Rachel knew because Laura stepped away from him.
Only six inches.
But she stepped.
Rachel led Emma through the sliding patio door into the brick house.
The kitchen smelled like hamburger smoke and potato salad. A bowl of watermelon sat under plastic wrap on the counter. Someone had left the mustard out with the cap open.
Emma released Rachel’s hand for the first time.
Her fingers had left pale crescents in Rachel’s skin.
Rachel found her purse on a kitchen chair, took out the card the responding officer had given her eleven days earlier, and called the non-emergency number printed beneath his name.
Her hands were shaking.
She pressed the phone to her ear with both hands so Emma wouldn’t see.
Outside, the first argument started.
Michael’s voice rose.
Derek answered.
Rachel closed the patio door.
Emma climbed onto one of the kitchen stools.
“Mom?”
Rachel turned.
“Yeah?”
“You believed me.”
It wasn’t a question.
Rachel sat beside her.
“I did.”
Emma looked down at her knees.
Rachel wanted the statement to be true without qualification.
It wasn’t.
She had believed that Emma had seen someone.
She had believed someone had frightened her.
She had believed the bent lock and muddy print near the side door meant a man had probably entered the garage.
But when Emma had said the intruder’s arm looked familiar, Rachel had asked whether she might have seen the tattoo on television.
When Emma said she thought the person moved like somebody she knew, Rachel had told her frightened brains sometimes connected things that were not connected.
She had thought she was protecting her daughter from certainty.
Maybe she had been protecting herself.
“I should have listened better,” Rachel said.
Emma picked at a loose thread on her dark leggings.
“You listened.”
“Not as well as I should have.”
Outside, something scraped across the patio.
Emma’s shoulders jumped.
Rachel touched her knee.
“You’re safe.”
The dispatcher answered.
Rachel gave the address.
By the time a patrol car pulled into Michael’s driveway nine minutes later, Derek was gone.
He had left in Laura’s SUV.
Laura was still sitting in the backyard.
She had moved away from the grill and was on a patio chair with both hands around a red plastic cup she had not drunk from.
Michael was standing near the fence.
Jenna and the other relatives had quietly begun collecting their children and leaving.
Nobody asked for leftovers.
Officer Ben Ortiz was the same officer who had taken Rachel’s original burglary report.
He was younger than Rachel had first thought, probably not much past thirty, with an expression that seemed permanently skeptical but not unfriendly.
When he saw Rachel, he nodded once.
“Recovered video?”
She held up the phone.
“About twenty minutes ago.”
“Don’t send it around.”
“I haven’t.”
“Good.”
Michael came toward them.
Ortiz looked at him.
“You live here?”
Michael glanced at Rachel.
“My brother does. I used to.”
It was a strange answer, and they all knew it.
The backyard belonged to Michael’s aunt, who had insisted on hosting the family barbecue because she thought family events should continue after separations “unless somebody’s dead or in prison.”
Rachel had almost refused to come.
Emma had wanted to see her cousins.
Now Ortiz took Rachel through the story while another officer spoke to Laura.
Emma stayed inside with Jenna, who had come back after putting her own children in their father’s car.
Rachel described the break-in again.
The side lock at her home had been damaged.
Nothing obvious had been taken.
A storage box had been disturbed.
The camera recording had failed.
Emma had been awake because of a thunderstorm and had seen a figure crossing the driveway from her bedroom window. She had later heard the garage door scrape.
She had told Rachel the man had something dark on his arm.
That detail had been written into the original report.
Ortiz checked his notes.
“You never named Derek?”
“No.”
“Your daughter?”
“No.”
“Did Mr. Carter know she mentioned an arm marking?”
Rachel looked toward Michael.
He heard.
“No,” he said.
Ortiz studied him.
Michael rubbed the back of his neck.
“Rachel told me Emma saw someone. That’s it.”
Rachel said, “I sent him the photo of the damaged lock.”
“That’s all?”
“Yes.”
Michael looked irritated.
“At the time, you told me the police didn’t have anything.”
“They didn’t.”
“I’m not accusing you.”
“You did eleven days ago.”
Michael exhaled.
Officer Ortiz looked between them.
“This is probably not the conversation to solve right now.”
Michael turned away.
It was one of the few useful things anyone had said all afternoon.
Ortiz asked Rachel to open the recovered clip without forwarding it. He watched the footage twice.
Then he asked her to place the phone on the patio table.
“Do you have the login information for the security account?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll want the original file if the company still has it. Not a screen recording. Not a copy sent through messages.”
Rachel nodded.
May you like
“What happens now?”
“We document what we have. We talk to people. The detective assigned to the original report will likely follow up.”
