Chloe stepped away from the table. She eyed Hughes, considering the story and his answers. Even a poor liar could concoct a story like that. But it took a true sociopath to be able to get down the little details like trembling and having their expression soaked in genuine fear. Based on her experience and her gut instincts, she knew he was telling the truth—and he was terrified of what the consequences might be. The fact that he had even offered up a small personal detail like the vitamins sealed the deal for her.
And given that, she was quite confident that this was not the man who killed Viktor Bjurman. Which meant the deaths were not linked at all. Sure, it felt rather good to be right, but it was equally frustrating as they were now back to square one on Bjurman’s murder.
“Mr. Hughes, we’re going to have the local PD work with you to draw up a timeline of where you’ve been and the things you’ve done over the course of the moment you inadvertently killed Mr. Fielding and the moment you were arrested. If you do it well enough, the bureau won’t have to get involved. Do you understand?”
He nodded, still looking like a confused kid in math class. “I just don’t understand how all of this happened. I don’t…”
“Anything else, Agent Rhodes?” Chloe asked.
“Nothing.”
The agents left Hughes where he sat, with a scared and now quite confused look on his face. As soon as they were back out in the hallway, Cooper came rushing back down the hall toward them. There was another officer with him now and they both looked just as confused as Hughes had when they’d walked out.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
“No,” Chloe said. “You and your men have done some great work. He’s your guy for sure, just not the one we were looking for. If you could find out where he’s been the last few days so we can rule him out as Viktor Bjurman’s murderer, that would be great.”
“Yeah…I didn’t think he did that one, too,” Cooper said. “As shaky and terrified as he is, I don’t even see him being capable of doing what he did to Fielding. I mean, Christ…did you see the pictures?”
Not wanting to sway the officers one way or the other, Chloe only nodded. She handed Cooper her business card and said, “Please, once you get some sort of timeline down, would you mind giving us a call?”
“Of course,” Cooper said, though it was clear he had not yet wrapped his head around why they were already leaving.
“Thank you for your time,” Rhodes said as they passed by him and back toward the front of the building.
Chloe hated that they left in a borderline rude fashion, but there had truly been no point in them sticking around. Chloe racked her brain as they headed back for their car, trying to think of even the smallest thing they could do to one hundred percent verify that Carol Hughes had not killed Bjurman—even though any law enforcement agent worth his salt would be able to tell by just spending two minutes alone with the guy.
“Good for the Colin PD,” Rhodes said as she got behind the wheel. “I doubt these guys ever really get that kind of action.”
“Yeah, good for them,” Chloe said. Then she added: “You saw it, too, right? He was terrified of what he had done…almost like he still didn’t even believe it.”
“Yeah, I saw it. Not exactly the way you’d expect a man that has brutally killed two men to react to being questioned by federal agents.”
“Still, we should try to find an alibi. See what Cooper and his men come up with.”
“Agreed,” Rhodes said. “But what do we do until then?”
Chloe thought about it for a moment and finally gave a shrug. “Lunch?”
It was admitting defeat without actually admitting defeat. Chloe hated to think of a killer being brought to justice as a defeat but the seemingly cut-and-dry case of Carol Hughes did put something of a damper on the Bjurman case. Chloe knew that without any link between Bjurman and Fielding, she and Rhodes would be called off the case, leaving Bjurman’s death as an unsolved murder to be handled by local law enforcement.
And it was that fear that revealed something else to her: the fact that she was so hard pressed to keep this case because she was not ready to return to the drama waiting for her with Danielle back home.
Lunch consisted of a greasy yet delicious pizza at a local pizza joint, and side salads. They ate in relative silence, certain that Johnson or one of his underlings would be calling any minute now to tell them to come on in. Rhodes had called bureau headquarters after leaving the Colin PD to update the case and even in that, things had felt rather final. Chloe had no doubt that their visit to Pine Point was already coming to an end.
“Anything still pricking you the wrong way?” Rhodes asked.
“Why do you ask?”
Rhodes shrugged and wiped her hands on a napkin that had already accumulated a lot of the grease from their margherita pizza. “You look bothered….like you’ve lost something.”
“Maybe a little,” Chloe admitted. “I have no doubt that Hughes did not kill Bjurman. But the whole Bjurman thing…something about Theresa Diaz seems off to me. Even if she had come out and admitted to sleeping with Bjurman—which I’m pretty certain of, by the way—I think there might still be something to her…something she might be hiding.”
“If they were sleeping together, maybe it was more than an affair,” Rhodes suggested. “Maybe they were in love?”
“Possibly.”
They fell into silence again, mulling it over. About a quarter of the pizza remained, though both agents had had their fill.
Chloe felt a slight shift inside of her as returning home became more and more of a possibility. While she was indeed happy to be away from all of the Danielle drama—even if only an hour and a half removed—she was still very much worried about how her sister was going to react when (more than likely if, Chloe figured) the FBI contacted her. The entire ordeal created a boiling knot of worry within her, so she did her best to push it to the side.
When Rhodes’s phone rang while they were waiting for the check, they both jumped a bit. They both figured it would be Johnson, and Chloe did her best not to feel slighted that he had opted to contact Rhodes over her.
Chloe listened closely, trying to act as if she really wasn’t all that interested in what was being said. But in listening to Rhodes’s side of the very brief call, Chloe heard all she needed to. When Rhodes ended the call, the expression on her face confirmed it. It was an expression of mild irritation and a faded sort of relief.
“He wants us to check in with the Colin PD before we leave, and then come on home,” Rhodes said. “And if you ask me, that should put us back in DC at the perfect time to go grab a few drinks before calling it a day.”
They settled up the bill and headed back to the Colin Police Department. On their way back into Colin, they drove directly past the curb where Viktor Bjurman had been murdered. With no patrol cars or crime scene tape to section the area off, it looked like any normal corner on any city in America. Something about that unnerved Chloe, knowing there were answers on that corner that may never be found—answers that, as of now, would forever remain out of Chloe’s reach.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Danielle was balancing on the very thin line between buzzed and totally drunk when someone knocked on her door. She had been drinking to put a nail in this chapter of her life, to keep it closed like a treasure chest buried at the bottom of the ocean. Her work had not allowed her to come in last night, or tonight for that matter. But she started back tomorrow, pulling both the afternoon and night shifts. She never thought she’d be happy to see the strip club again, or to smell the scents of spilled liquor and cheap cologne of the men around the bars.
But she could not wait to get back. First, though, a small bender of