“That does seem pretty cut and dry,” Chloe said.
“If you need to see the watch, it’s just now been bagged up and is in evidence. Dusted it for prints and it looks like there are two sets on it. I’d bet my house on them belonging to Fielding and our suspect.”
“That’s not necessary,” Chloe said. “I think speaking to the suspect will be enough.”
“Help yourself. And let me know if you need anything.”
With that, Cooper unlocked the door to the single room by the holding cell. As Chloe had suspected, it was what served as an interrogation room. There was the cliché table near the center of the room, to which Carol Hughes’s right wrist had been handcuffed. When Chloe and Rhodes entered the room, he looked like he might jump straight out of the chair.
He was a very plain-looking man. He was in need of a haircut, as his sideburns were bushy and his brow was covered by a mess of sweaty hair. He looked up at them with wide eyes and then a confused look dawned on his face. Chloe was beginning to wonder if she and Rhodes had been paired up to experiment with a line of thought that suspects would often find themselves baffled that two petite women had been sent in. She wondered if such befuddlement might be disarming to criminals. If the bureau was looking for evidence that this was the case, Hughes would have been a great study.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked.
Chloe showed her badge and ID as she approached the table. There was no chair on her side, so she and Rhodes simply stood. They stood by the table, making sure Hughes felt closed in and trapped.
“What was your relationship with Steven Fielding?” Chloe asked.
“None. I’d seen him at the bar. Seemed like he might have some money.”
“Seems pretty stupid to wear a watch you stole from his home. Especially after you killed him. Wouldn’t you agree?”
A flash of anger crossed Hughes’s face, but it was temporary. Apparently, the anger had been quickly drowned out by the realization of just how much trouble he was in.
“I didn’t meant to do it,” he said.
“To do what?” Rhodes asked.
Hughes struggled with something for a moment. Chloe had seen it before; even when presented with their guilt and knowing full well that they had been caught, it was often very hard for humans to admit that they had crossed that mortal line.
“Look, I know it was wrong, but I just needed some extra cash, you know? I lost my job three months ago and bills…man, they just keep adding up. And my woman, she won’t…she won’t even think about marrying me until I’m stable…”
“So burglary seemed like the appropriate answer?” Rhodes asked.
Chloe had been thinking the same thing, but she had never seen the point in antagonizing a suspect. It usually just caused the suspect to delay things a bit more. Honestly, in the case of Hughes, she had also been biting back a comment about how if he had been out of work for the past three months, it probably wasn’t the best idea to keep frequenting bars.
“Walk us through what happened,” Chloe said.
“I’d been following him for a few days, getting to know his schedule. I didn’t think he’d be home. I was going to get in, get out, and that would be that.” He paused here for a moment and at first, Chloe thought he might start crying. But what she had seen as fear slowly dissolved into terror. Hughes was realizing the gravity of what he had done and it was finally starting to sink in, to drag him down.
“But when I came in through the front door, he was right there, on the couch. I had a crowbar in my hand because I was expecting to have to break into the house. When he came at me and we started fighting, I just…I lost it. I was surprised and scared and I just…I started hitting him with the crowbar. And I couldn’t stop…I couldn’t…”
“What did cause you to stop?” Rhodes asked.
“I heard the garage door opening. I guess it was his wife coming home. I had that part down, too. I wanted to be in and out before she got there, you know? I never wanted to hurt or kill anyone…but I heard that garage door and I stopped. I saw what I had done and…”
He stopped here, still unable to bring himself to say it.
“Go on,” Chloe prodded.
“I knew he was dead and I felt like I had to take something. I saw the watch, though it was gold. Grabbed his wallet out of his pocket and took the cash inside. Eighty-two bucks.”
“And you left?” Chloe asked. “Right out the door?”
Hughes nodded. “I could even hear the garage door coming back down. I must have missed his wife by no more than thirty seconds.”
“You knew he was dead when he left?” Rhodes asked.
“Not for sure.” He was trembling now, the links on the cuffs rattling against the bar he was handcuffed to. “But the way his head looked…and all the blood, I figured there was no way he was still alive. Or if he wasn’t dead then…he would be soon…”
“Mr. Hughes, do you know a man named Viktor Bjurman?”
The question seemed to jar him, perhaps because it was seemingly unrelated to his own actions. After thinking about it for a moment, he shook his head. “No. No, I can’t say that I do.”
“Have you been to Pine Point anytime in the past week or so?” Chloe asked.
“Yes. There’s a little health food store there. I get my vitamins from them. That was…last Friday, I think.”
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 sorts. It had been a while since she had gotten drunk by herself. She was sure some people saw it as sad and pathetic, but she had always found it liberating in a way she could not quite grasp.
When the knock came to her door, she had already knocked back three margaritas she had made in her blender—a perfect concoction she had learned at work. Walking to the door, she wondered if it might be Chloe, come to rehash everything face-to-face. Danielle almost hoped this was the case. With enough tequila in her, she’d freely say things that a sober-minded Danielle would think better of.
When she answered the door, though, she did not find Chloe on the other side. A man stood there, dressed in what Danielle had always thought of as a “goon suit.” Because her sister was in the FBI, she recognized the get-up and the man’s too-serious expression at once. He was a federal agent. He looked to be of Asian descent and when he smiled at her, it seemed far too fake for her.
“Danielle Fine, correct?” the man said.
“That’s me. And you are…?”
“Agent Shin, FBI.” He flashed his badge, allowing her to study it for a moment before folding it back up and slipping it back into his inner jacket pocket. “Would you mind if I came in for a moment?”
“With all due respect, what for?” Danielle asked.
“Well, while I don’t know your sister personally, I did hear about the ordeal you went through down in Texas. It’s a story that is sort of making the rounds at the bureau. I’ve been asked to come out to check in on you.”
“By whom?”
“By my supervisor. There are some loose ends regarding what happened down there and we’re just trying to tie them up. Of course, with your sister, those ends can be tied up internally. But we need to get just a few assurances and answers from you as well.”
She looked oddly at him but opened the door to let him in. She recalled Chloe telling her on the phone that there was an internal investigation and if anyone came asking her questions, she needed to play it cool. Refusing to allow a federal agent into her apartment would likely be considered the opposite of playing it cool.
She stepped aside and opened the door wider, allowing Agent Shin inside. Danielle sat down at the kitchen table, making it clear in a polite way that she did not intend to let him walk any deeper into the apartment. Shin relented and propped himself up against her kitchen counter.
“First and foremost,” he said, “how are you doing? I know you suffered a few injuries during everything that happened.”
“Thanks for asking,” she said, doing her best to pour on the charm. “But it seems that I’m good. I head back to work tomorrow and—might as well go ahead and admit it—I’ve sort of been celebrating today.” She nodded toward the blender and the pale green drink inside.
Shin smiled and said, “Glad to hear it. Now, I sort of have to ask this, and I’m sorry if it’s too personal, but do you plan on pushing hard for a case to find your father?”