“Right,” Laura agreed, pulling up outside a reasonably nice home. It was a reasonably nice neighborhood, too. Again, a contrast to Kenya’s family. What she was seeing was that there were very few things that Kenya had in common with John – with the only real potential link seeming to be Pete, who had an alibi.
Still, it didn’t necessarily mean he couldn’t be the link.
“So, remind me about the mannequin on this one,” Laura said, hesitating before she got out of the car.
Nate pulled out the photo and showed her. The scene was, perhaps, even creepier than the way Kenya had been posed. John was sitting on an upturned crate, propped against the wall of a building to make it look as though he was sitting up on his own. Next to him was the mannequin, posed as if it was sitting on the same crate with one hand on his shoulder. Like they were best friends, one listening to or comforting the other.
It had the eerie effect of looking as though the mannequin was trying to tell the dead man things weren’t so bad.
Laura shuddered in spite of herself. “Well, this one has a completely different vibe, doesn’t it? More of a friend or listener than a lover.”
“Meaning what?” Nate frowned. “If the first one was a reference to the cheating somehow, then what does this reference?”
“Maybe he confessed his problems to someone recently,” Laura said, but she had to figure out a way to make it negative. You didn’t kill someone for doing something you thought was good or helpful. “Maybe he told a secret he wasn’t supposed to tell. I don’t know. But we don’t even know for sure if the other case was about the cheating.”
“True,” Nate said. “Alright. After you.”
Laura nodded and got out of the car, walking up to the house. The door opened before she’d even knocked on it, revealing a little old woman who had a sweet face and walked with a cane. On closer inspection Laura thought that she was perhaps closer to her late sixties or early seventies than an older age, but she obviously had some kind of issue with her hips that had her shuffling into position even as she stood at the door.
“Are you with the police?” she asked, peering up at them inquisitively.
“Yes, ma’am,” Laura told her. She instantly felt pain for this woman. She was obviously getting on in years, with mobility problems, and now she was dealing with the death of her son. A death that had happened out of order. No parent should have to bury their child, and yet that was what happened wherever Laura went – even if the death was the cause and she the effect, not the other way around. “We’re special agents with the FBI. We’re investigating the death of Mr. Wiggins – your son?”
She nodded and slowly moved aside to let them in. “Round the corner,” she said, nodding down the hall towards a doorway out of sight. “We’ve been waiting for you to come and set all this right.”
Laura moved obediently through; behind her, she heard Nate insist on offering the woman his arm to help her back to the others. The others turned out to be an old man, older than his wife, sitting crumpled in an armchair that seemed to be fitted to his body with wear, and a woman in her thirties who looked horribly uncomfortable about being there.
“Hello,” Laura said, looking around at them. Behind her, Nate was shuffling the mother slowly into the room, going at her pace. “I’m Special Agent Laura Frost, and that’s my partner, Special Agent Nathaniel Lavoie.”
“Have you found the person who did it?” the nervous-looking woman asked immediately. There was a kind of eagerness in her voice that wasn’t hard to interpret, given the context of her body language. She was tightly clasping the strap of her purse, still on her shoulder, as though she was about to leap up at any moment. She clearly wanted to know that the murder had been solved so that she could get out of there.
“No, we’ve only just arrived in town so we’re currently getting up to speed,” Laura said, which was a good enough introduction to the fact that they were going to have to ask some questions. “You are…?”
“I’m Sara,” she said, then seemed to wilt under the next declaration. “Sara Wiggins.”
“John’s wife?” Laura asked, beginning to put the pieces together. They were at his parents’ house. His wife looked uncomfortable to be there.
They were in the middle of breaking up, weren’t they?
“Sort of,” Sara said, fidgeting uncomfortably with a glance at the two elderly occupants of the room. Nate was finally getting the woman down onto her seat on the other side of the sofa, taking it slow and easy on the way down so as not to exacerbate whatever problem it was she had with her hip. “We were in the middle of a divorce.”
“I see,” Laura said, raising her chin a little because this was detective work 101. If there was a dispute with the spouse, then it was fairly often the spouse who had done it. Of course, that normally applied when the woman was dead or the man had been poisoned, because women didn’t normally commit violent crimes like bashing someone’s skull in with a blunt object – but you never knew. “Can you tell me where you were two nights ago?”
“I was staying over at a – friend’s place,” Sara replied, telling much more with that tiny pause than with the words she had spoken. She obviously wasn’t comfortable with sharing anything about her new love life in front of the parents of her deceased husband, even if things had been over between them.
“Can we get the name of this friend, so we can check you were there?” Laura asked, pulling a notebook and pen out of her pocket. Sara reached for them with a grateful nod, obviously pleased to not have to say a man’s name out loud.
There was every possibility, of course, that a lover would lie to protect Sara. They could cross that bridge when they came to it, however. No need to embarrass her right in front of these people she was obviously awkward around – not when Laura didn’t get any kind of vibe from her that would make her suspicious.
“Now,” Laura said, turning to include the two parents in the conversation as well. “It’s a horrible thing to think about, but do you know if there was anyone who wished to do John harm? Someone he’d fallen out with, perhaps?”
“We already told the other cops everything,” the old man spoke up, at last. “They asked all of that. No, no one comes to mind. There wasn’t anyone he had a problem with. Or if he did, he never told us. Not except for Sara.”
Sara shifted uncomfortably again, looking as though she would have rather been anywhere in the world but there. Laura wondered if she was there out of a sense of obligation to the old couple, or whether the police had implied she had to stay so it was easier to question her.
“What was the reason behind your divorce?” Laura asked, looking at her again. There could be something there. A new boyfriend, maybe. Jealousy. Control. Something like that.
“We fell out of love,” Sara said, tucking a hair behind her ear self-consciously. “I guess that’s all it was. John had some hard times lately.”