She found the vacuum in its usual place and checked the filter, finding that she had another few uses before it needed to be changed. While she had the vacuum out, she decided to roll it into the master bedroom. It was a huge room, complete with a fireplace, built-in bookshelves, and an adjoining bathroom that was larger than the living room in Rosa’s apartment.
The bedroom door was open, so she stepped in without knocking. She often didn’t know whether Mrs. Fairchild was home or not but had learned to knock whenever there was a closed door in the Fairchild home. She rolled the vacuum in but stopped after she took three steps into the room.
Mrs. Fairchild was on the bed, sleeping. This felt odd, as she was pretty sure Mrs. Fairchild woke up early and went for a run on most days. She nearly left the room, not wanting to wake her. But then she noticed two peculiar things at once.
First, Mrs. Fairchild was dressed in her running attire. Second, she was lying on top of the sheets, the bed freshly made.
Alarm bells started sounding in Rosa’s head and instead of backing out of the room as she had originally intended, she felt herself stepping forward as if pushed by an invisible hand.
“Mrs. Fairchild?” she asked.
There was no answer. Mrs. Fairchild didn’t even move in response.
Call the police, Rosa thought. Call nine-one-one. This is not good…she’s not just sleeping, and you know it.
But she had to know. She took two more steps forward until Mrs. Fairchild’s face came into view.
Her eyes were staring open, looking toward the window—unblinking. Her mouth was partially open. A pool of blood, still relatively fresh, stained the sheet just above her head. A grotesque slash mark was plainly visible along her neck.
Rose felt a little moan rise up in her throat. Her knees buckled a bit, but she managed to take a few steps backward. When she collided with the vacuum, she let out a shriek.
It took a considerable amount of effort to tear her eyes away from Mrs. Fairchild, but when she did, she quickly ran out of the room. She went to the kitchen bar where she had set down her phone, and called 911. As the dispatcher answered, Rosa was so horrified by what she had seen that she didn’t stop to think about the utility sink in the mudroom, filling and filling by the second, close to overflowing.
CHAPTER ONE
Chloe had heard many cautionary tales about trying to keep a very broad fence between her personal life and her career. As a federal agent, things tended to get very sticky when the two worlds collided. But honestly, she had been living with the constant collision of those two worlds ever since she had graduated from the academy—thanks to her father’s mental cat-and-mouse games.
She knew she spent far too much time speculating on her father and what he may or may not have done to her mother nearly eighteen years ago. Thanks to Danielle’s discovery of her mother’s journal, Chloe had been living the past few weeks in a haze of confusion. She now felt fairly confident that their father had killed their mother all those years ago. She had given him every benefit of the doubt up to this point—going so far as to try pinning her mother’s murder on a scapegoat, Ruthanne Carwile.
But now she had it written in her mother’s handwriting. Now she had more than enough evidence to truly feel her father was not only a killer—but that he had killed her mother.
It had hit her quite hard. While Chloe had done her best not to let it affect her work, it had consumed almost every free moment she had. She’d spent the first two weekends after the discovery dodging calls from everyone—from Danielle, from her partner, Agent Rhodes, and from her father.
All I have to do is make it public, she thought to herself time and time again. Just go public, take it to the bureau, and take him down. Wrap up this sordid chapter of my life and put the bastard back behind bars.
But that was risky. It could affect her own career. And, more than that, there was the little girl still defiant inside of her, a younger version of herself who insisted maybe there was something she was missing…that there was no way her father was really a murderer.
It was an internal fight that had her going into work with a hangover a few times. It had been just twenty days since she’d made the discovery in the journal. And even at work, though she remained professional and did not let her own personal demons interfere with her job, entries from the journal would pop up in her head.
He strangled me tonight… and he slapped me in the face. Before I knew what had happened, he pushed me against the wall and strangled me. He said if I ever disrespected him again, he’d kill me. He said he had something better lined up, some better woman and some better life…
The journal was on her coffee table. She left it there so she would always be reminded…and so she could not give herself the convenience of having it out of her sight. She kept it there as a reminder that she had been a fool—and that her father had been pulling the wool over her eyes for a very long time.
It was twenty days in, almost three whole weeks since she and Danielle had finally come together to the conclusion that their father had killed their mother, when Chloe considered just going to his apartment and killing him. It was a Saturday. She’d started drinking at eleven that morning, staring out of her apartment window as DC traffic trickled by beneath her.
She knew enough about how the system worked to make it look like a suicide. Or, if nothing else, she knew how to hide her tracks well. She could make sure he died without having anything traced back to her.
She had thought it out quite carefully. She had the stirring of a plan in her head, most of which was solid.
But that’s lunacy, isn’t it? she asked herself.
But then she thought of how thoroughly he’d had her fooled. She remembered how loyal she had been to him even when Danielle had tried warning her that their father was not the man she thought. And when all of that weighed on her brain, no…the idea of killing him did not seem so drastic after all.
She was daydreaming of pulling the trigger on her father and starting on her third beer of the day when a gentle knock sounded on her door. She cringed; her father had come by four times in the past twenty days but she had always stayed quiet on the other side. This knock was different, though—the heartbeat-like drumming pattern from the intro to “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails, one of Danielle’s favorite songs. It was the telltale knock they had agreed upon so that Chloe would know it was her sister on the other side of the door.
With a weary smile, Chloe answered the door. Danielle was waiting on the other side, in mid-beat. She lowered her hands and offered her sister a smile. It felt weird; Danielle was usually the gloomy one that Chloe tried to cheer up. It had been that way for most of their lives, especially ever since Danielle had discovered what absolute jerks boys can be.
“Not sleeping well?” Danielle asked as she stepped inside and closed the door behind her.
“Not particularly,” Chloe said. “Want a beer?”
“What time is it?”
“Noon? Or close to it…”
“Just one,” Danielle said, eyeing her sister suspiciously.
Chloe was very much aware of how the roles had basically turned completely around for them. As she popped the top on a bottle and handed it to Danielle, she saw the concern in her sister’s face. Which was fine…it showed that Danielle had grown. It showed that in the face of what they had discovered together, she could stand on her own two feet without her sister there to support her like she’d usually done.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Chloe said.
“No, you don’t. I hate to say that I sort of like the Chloe that drinks before noon. I like this moody fuck-the-world Chloe. But I’d be a bad sister if I didn’t tell you that I’m worried about you.