Mr. and Mrs. Collins faced Laura like engravings, both of them sallow and long faced, the signs of grief almost etched into their cheeks. They had obviously been crying for a long time, both of them. Looking at them, Laura figured that by now, on the third day since their daughter’s death, they had reached the stage when it feels like the body has no more tears to give.
It did, of course. But the numbness was a special phase itself.
“We just don’t understand it,” Mrs. Collins said, distantly. She was worrying a handkerchief between her fingers, turning the edges over and over between them. “Why anyone would want to…”
“I’m sure you’ve spent a lot of time over the last couple of days thinking about this,” Laura said gently. “Is there anyone that comes to mind that ever had a problem with your daughter? An ex-boyfriend, a customer, someone from school – anything at all?”
“No,” Mrs. Collins said, sniffling slightly. She reached over and took a framed photograph that was sitting beside their sofa, passing it to Laura. It was almost an instinctive gesture, as if she’d passed it to a number of people over the past few days. “No, there wasn’t ever anything serious. Look at her. She’s so beautiful.”
Laura did look, because she could do that much for the grieving mother. Evelina was grinning in the picture, a graduation photograph in her gown. She was about to throw her cap up into the air, by the looks of the shot. She looked happy, carefree. Younger than the body Laura had seen, but yes, pretty. Still, that didn’t mean anything about personality – and Laura had cause to know, more than most, that beauty in itself could even be a motive for murder. The killers who had sexual motives went after women who turned them on. Those who were in her shadow could experience dark jealousy, later turning to rage. Beauty was no armor at all.
“You said nothing serious,” Laura said, handing the photograph to Won to give him something to do. He was perched beside her in an armchair, doing his best to put on an expression that was both sympathetic and keen, as if to show that he was definitely paying attention. “What about the things that weren’t serious?”
Mrs. Collins shrugged, looking at her husband in a kind of helpless gesture.
“Regulars at the café,” he said, speaking up for the first time. He had a quiet deference about him, like he preferred for his wife to do the talking. Laura always wondered, in these situations, whether she was seeing the people as they really were – or whether it was grief layered over them in sheets, concealing them, turning them into someone else. “A few of them could be kind of jerks. She complained to us about them sometimes when she came home from her shifts. But nothing that would make us suspicious. Just normal kind of stuff.”
Laura nodded. “Did she have a large group of friends?”
“Oh, yes, she settled in here so well, didn’t she?” Mrs. Collins said, prompting a mournful nod from Mr. Collins. “She made so many friends. She dated a couple of times, I think, but it never went beyond dates. She was young. She wasn’t taking anything too seriously yet.”
She pressed the handkerchief against her mouth suddenly, as if she’d just heard what came out of it. Laura’s heart went out to her. She was sure that, in Mrs. Collins’s position, she would be doing much the same: imagining all of the things her daughter would now never do.
Laura hated thinking like that. It was too real, with Lacey around to pin those fears on. She wrenched her mind back from that brink before she had a chance to topple over it.
“Thank you,” Laura said, getting ready to stand up and leave. “Those are all the questions I have for now. We’ll leave you in peace – but if we think of anything else, we’ll be back.”
“Oh, Mrs. Collins,” Waters said, moving suddenly from the doorway where he’d been watching them. “I almost forgot. Toni said she doesn’t need all of Evelina’s things, and the chief approved me bringing her keychain over. They both said there’s no evidential value to it and thought you might find some small comfort in having it back.”
“Wait a second,” Laura said, just as Waters was moving across the room with something in his hands. It wasn’t an evidence bag, that was clear. “Let me see that?”
He glanced quickly at the Collins before handing it over with a kind of apologetic gesture, as if to say he really had wanted to give it to them, but Laura had a higher rank. Laura took it, and the first brush of her fingers across it sent a stab of pain into her forehead. An excellent kind of pain. The kind she had been waiting for, to give her a –
Laura was looking at a flame. Right at it. It filled her whole vision, the only thing she could see. Everything was so clear and bright – the yellow-gold tinged with amber around the edges, through to the small core of blue, the hottest part of it. It danced and leapt in some unseen, unfelt wind. It was almost enchanting.
Laura blinked, looking down at the keychain in her hand. There were only a couple of keys on it, evidently house keys. Almost definitely for the very property they were sitting in now. There was a plastic dog attached to it, a stress relieving toy, the novelty kind that made the pug’s eyes bulge out when you squeezed it. Laura turned it over in her hands for a moment. Since it wasn’t bagged up, there was no point in insisting that it was returned to the lab – any forensic value it had was contaminated already.
But it had given her one very useful thing. A vision. Even though she didn’t know what it meant yet, the presence of a flame was no coincidence. It had to have some connection to the killer and his penchant for candles.
All of which meant she was on the right track.
Laura handed the keychain over to Mrs. Collins, seeing no need to keep it from her any longer. Waters was right, it would probably be a comfort for her.
But that didn’t stop Laura from taking him aside, just as they were leaving the house, and giving him the clearest warning that she could muster: “Don’t release any other items related to the case before speaking to me first. Got that? Every little thing could be evidence.”
Waters swallowed and nodded, and she didn’t fail to notice how a sympathetic look passed between him and Won a moment later. Two young and inexperienced investigators empathizing with one another on how difficult the job was, when you were up against someone who knew what they were doing.
“Right,” Laura said, seeing no reason to dwell on the mistakes. They needed to keep moving forward. It was already past noon, and the killer wasn’t going to be waiting for them to get settled in. “Now. Let’s go visit Ashley Christianson’s family.”