CHAPTER SIX
“You’re absolutely crazy, you know that?” Jack said from behind the steering wheel. “Or maybe I am. Maybe I’m the crazy one for letting you come along.”
“Would you have tried to stop me, Jack?” she asked. “Really?”
“Maybe. I mean, Anderson is pretty upset about what you pulled yesterday.”
“Am I being completely irresponsible if I suggest we just don’t tell him I came along?”
The look of shock on his face surprised her. It was no longer a gentle back-and-forth ribbing of one another, but now treading on insubordination that could get them both in a bit of trouble.
“Yeah, maybe you are, a little. I just…I don’t get it. Why would you request a leave of absence when you’re clearly not ready for it? Was it just a powerplay against Anderson?”
“Maybe a little,” she replied. She didn’t see the point in lying about it. “I have limited time. I want to spend it in a way that’s meaningful. And I had convinced myself that if I couldn’t help bring Alex Lynch in, there was no point. But these terminal cancer patients…that hits a little close to home. I can’t just sit idly by, you know?”
“So why not go directly to Anderson?”
She knew the answer but was ashamed to admit it out loud. She shrugged and looked to the floorboard, a clear indicator that she wasn’t interested in answering. Jack understood this right away and let the issue lie. Still, Rachel could clearly see that the entire situation bothered him. It made her feel slightly selfish, thinking only of what she’d needed to keep her sanity and not how this might affect Jack’s state of mind or, maybe even worse, his career.
“I’m glad to have you with me,” Jack said, looking straight ahead into traffic. “But I need you to keep a backseat position on this. For your safety and my ass. Got it?”
He sounded both stern and compassionate and Rachel wasn’t quite sure how to take it. As the state of his mood settled over her, she also realized that she was already feeling guilty for leaving Grandma Tate and Paige. It was a vicious circle that she was apparently never going to escape from, even when she wasn’t technically on the job.
The remainder of the drive was quiet. It took a little over forty minutes to get to the crime scene, and when Jack pulled up to it, two things occurred to Rachel. First, he’d told her that he had interviews to conduct with family members of the deceased. Second, he’d insinuated that the most recent crime had happened “nearby.” Neither of these seemed to be true, making her wonder if he’d secretly come by her house with the intention of getting her to come along the entire time.
When he pulled the car into the parking lot, Rachel gave him an accusatory stare. “I thought you said you had interviews to conduct.”
He shrugged and offered a smile. “I lied. I wanted you to think that I was in the thick of it, really having to tackle this thing head on since I didn’t have a partner.”
“So I was supposed to feel guilty?”
“Hey,” he said, parking the car. “I can’t force you to feel any particular way.”
“Ah, yet here I am.”
Again, he only shrugged in a playful smart-ass way as they stepped out of the car. But when they were both out, he shook his head and something resembling sincerity passed across his face. “I thought you’d want in on this because of the topic…the characteristic of the victims. Call it poetic or just sappy, but it’s almost like you’re supposed to be on this one, you know?”
She said nothing, but she did understand what he meant. And in a very strange way, she appreciated the thought behind it.
They approached the scene together. Although there was no crime scene tape around the area within the lot where the victim had been killed, several of the parking spots around it had been cordoned off. Jack handed Rachel his phone and she saw that he already had some of the photos from the crime scene pulled up from before the body had been removed. She saw a young woman with prominent damage done to her head, sprawled out by a car.
“The victim was twenty-six-year-old Polly Warren,” Jack said. “She was hit in the head twice from what we can tell, though the coroner may correct that. It’s believed she was attacked after her afternoon appointment, pegging her as having died somewhere between five fifteen and five thirty-five—when another hospital visitor spotted her body on the pavement.”
“Anything from forensics yet?”
“Nothing worth mentioning. Just before I arrived at your house, they found a bit of dirt on her pants but it turns out that came from right here in the parking lot.”
“Have requests been put in for her medical records?”
“Yes, I did it myself last night. Of course, you know how that goes, though. Fortunately, we got lucky in that the next of kin was more than willing to help us out. A sister, I believe, who lives out in Poquoson. She confirmed that Polly had breast cancer, that it was in the late stages, and she was considered terminal.”
Rachel stepped into the blocked off area and looked around the parking lot. As she studied the layout of the parking lot, she listened to Jack as he gave her more details. “When we tried finding anyone who passed by this area around the time we believed her to have been attacked, only one person was able to offer anything. It was a hospital employee, a janitor reporting for his late shift. He said he saw two people talking right here, right where she fell. He didn’t see faces, but he did confirm that one appeared to be male, the other female. He also stated that there appeared to be no danger or animosity—that it looked like two friends were simply chatting.”
“And I don’t see cameras anywhere nearby,” Rachel said. “The closest one is over there, to the left.”
Jack looked in that direction, to where a small security camera was attached to the top of a light pole. “Yeah, and the police looked the footage over and there’s nothing.”
“And you said the first victim…the murder occurred in Brandermill.”