Redheads by Jonathan Moore Page B

kneel at her side and take her into his arms. Instead he stayed in his chair and looked at a blank space on the table. Julissa raised her head, wiped her nose with the back of her hand, and pushed her hair out of her eyes.
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “Talking with them—it made it real again.”
    Chris nodded and Westfield murmured something too soft for Chris to hear.
    “I’m still with you guys,” she said. “I think I can probably help on the FBI hacking angle. At the very least I might narrow it till we can say for sure whether the files are getting erased from inside the FBI or from somewhere else.”
    “What would you need to do that?” Chris asked.
    She bit her lower lip.
    “A computer I pay for in cash. A dedicated Internet connection, nowhere near Austin. That’s about it.”
    “All right,” Westfield said. “So I’ll follow up on the swimmer. Julissa’s going after the FBI angle. Mike, what’ll you take?”
    “I can get the IDs and background of everyone who works in the VICAP unit. It might be hard, but with some careful footwork I can probably do it in a week.”
    Westfield nodded. “Chris?”
    “I’ll follow up on the evidence I collected from Allison’s apartment.”
    Mike looked up and raised an eyebrow in question.
    “What evidence?” Julissa asked.
    Chris nodded. It was time to tell them.
    “The thing I know about him, that I didn’t write on the board yet, is sometimes he comes back to where he killed a woman. He did it with Cheryl. I didn’t realize at first. After the murder I didn’t go back into my house for three weeks. I stayed at a hotel in Waikiki through the funeral and until everyone in our families left. The police were finished with the house after four days. A detective told me I could call a cleaning service if I wanted, because they were through with the forensics. I called the next day, but it still took weeks before I went in the house. Even that was just to get a few things and leave again.”
    “What’d you find?” Julissa asked.
    “Nothing. I didn’t realize it until maybe a month later. I only saw the crime scene for a couple of seconds before they pulled me out. But I saw it in dreams. The dream was like studying a photograph with a magnifying glass. Every awful detail, a bit at a time. And then one morning I woke up and realized when she was killed, the countertops were bare. We had these new granite counters. Cheryl would polish them until they were like black mirrors. Except for the blood, they were like that. Bare and empty. But when I went into my house finally after three weeks to get some clothes, there was no blood anywhere, but there was a plate on the counter, and a frying pan on the stove and a fork and steak knife in the frying pan.”
    “Jesus Christ,” Julissa whispered.
    “I know. I didn’t put it together when I saw it. I just left with my clothes. Maybe a month later, I decided to get rid of the house. At first I was going to sell it, and I had a realtor list it. She probably washed everything and put it away, thinking she was going to show the house. But she never showed it. Instead I called a friend at the Department of Planning and Permitting and got a permit to have the house demolished.”
    Westfield looked up. “How do you know it had anything to do with him? It could’ve been one of the cleaners, even a sloppy cop, who cooked something from your freezer and didn’t clean up.”
    “It came from the freezer all right,” Chris said.
    Thinking about it again made him feel cold all over. What chilled him most was the idea he’d been sharing the small island of Oahu with the killer for days. They might have passed each other on the street, or stood next to each other in the hotel elevator. Maybe they’d looked into each other’s eyes.
    “I don’t know why I even found it. Movers were supposed to pack everything and put it in storage before the demolition. But there were some things of Cheryl’s I wanted to get myself, so