On the other side of the basement was her workstation, which housed several computer monitors and half a dozen external hard drives. Before they’d moved in, Rachel had installed closed-circuit cameras throughout the interior and exterior of the home. She stored the camera recordings on the hard drives. Over the past year, the cameras had recorded an armed man breaking into her home and another man abducting and trying to murder her. If Evie came back, Rachel would know.
Rachel booted up the computer. The first thing she did was look at the camera feeds around the outside of the house. She found nothing out of the ordinary. Then she ran a background check on Evelyn Boggs. She needed to know more about Evie. Damned if she would be frightened into silence.
Rachel had met Evie Boggs while she was living in Torrington, Connecticut. She had left her longtime home in Darien following the horrific death of her husband. A lawsuit against the city of Darien and its police department had garnered a several-million-dollar payout but left her with nobody to trust or turn to. In Torrington, Rachel began attending a self-defense class taught by a strong, boisterous woman who introduced herself as Myra. Everyone in the class used aliases to ensure privacy and security. Myra was the name Evie Boggs had chosen.
Myra’s lessons had saved Rachel’s life more than once. The woman she knew back in Torrington had dedicated her life to helping others. To helping women like Rachel. She would not turn on Rachel without a reason. She knew Evie was being used. Somebody was dangling a scythe over Evie’s neck. Rachel needed to find out who.
According to her birth certificate, Evelyn Boggs was forty-two years old, born in Springfield, Massachusetts, adopted by Arnold and Estelle Boggs. There was no record of her birth parents. Serrano and Tally could potentially get that information unsealed, but not without a court order. Evie had graduated from Northeastern with a degree in communications and at twenty-two married a man named Charles Ford. They had one son, Benjamin, born at Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital. She and Ford divorced, and Evelyn got custody of the boy.
She then married Javier Landau, and Landau officially adopted Evie’s son. But Evelyn Boggs and Javier Landau divorced soon after, and records showed that despite Landau not being Benjamin Ford’s biological father, the boy still spent a significant amount of time with his stepfather and had even attended school in San Luis Obispo, where Landau moved following the split. Strange, Rachel thought, that Evie’s son was partially schooled in his stepfather’s city.
Evelyn still lived in Torrington. Benjamin Ford was currently a student at Conn College, where he resided in Hamilton House. Javier Landau worked as an admissions officer at California State University.
Rachel could not find a connection between Evie Boggs and Matthew Linklater.
Putting Evie aside for the moment, Rachel thought back to the manner in which Matthew Linklater was killed. You didn’t walk up to someone’s home and happen to have the perfect arson materials plus a hungry rodent like you were a pet-store owner who’d gone off the deep end, as well as a can with which to commit an act of torture fit for one of the epic fantasy novels her son and boyfriend devoured like M&M’S. No, that kind of act required a healthy dose of both sadism and practicality. And as Rachel had learned firsthand, the most sadistic people also tended to be the most patient.
But planning that kind of crime took time. Meaning there had to be a trail.
She pored over Hector Moreno’s autopsy notes, which he had sent via Dropbox. They had called in a local veterinarian, Dr. Walter Krecher, to analyze the rodent bones and teeth. Rachel’s downstairs printer was out of paper, so she printed them on the shared inkjet upstairs, retrieved them, grabbed fresh paper, then headed back to the basement.
Per Krecher’s notes, there were four types of rodents commonly found in Illinois: the house mouse, deer mouse, white-footed mouse, and Norway rat. Based on the larger size of the remains, Krecher believed the bones inside Matthew Linklater belonged to a Norway rat.
Rachel took a moment to reflect on the strange life journey that had led to her researching rat bones in a basement. From what she’d gathered, the Norway rat was the most common species, frequently used in lab experiments though even sold at pet stores. But this type of rat also tended to be most prevalent in places where there was an abundance of sewage or poor sanitation.
They also lived in colonies. Thankfully pest-control companies stayed open late. Rachel called the three closest to Linklater’s home. None of them had a record of ever visiting the Linklater home, or any residence within a square mile, in the past several years. Which meant that whoever had done Linklater in had likely carried the rodent from somewhere else. Rachel wondered if there were laws against transporting filthy vermin across county lines but figured breaking those laws was the least of the killer’s concerns.
She read the police reports. Serrano, Tally, and the forensics team had done a thorough job. They’d spoken to dozens of Linklater’s neighbors, friends, and colleagues. He was not a loner, but he was not particularly outgoing either. He had friends but did not go out on a regular basis. He did not frequent local bars and only had two receipts from the nearby Loonie’s Liquors in the past year—both for a single bottle of Belvedere vodka. He didn’t seem particularly interested in other people, nor they him. He kept to himself but was not socially awkward or inept. He was just a man living an ordinary, contented life.
Rachel went back over the crime scene photos. Not the photos of Linklater’s body. His charred, mutilated corpse would remain etched in her mind for a long, long time. She wanted to go back over photos of his house. Thankfully Montrose and the rest of his forensics team were professionals. There were dozens and dozens of photos of the Linklater home, taken from all conceivable angles. She tried to forget what she saw when she first arrived, in an effort to survey the scene through fresh eyes. What she saw in person may have been different than what the Ashby PD photographers captured. She was looking for discrepancies. Alterations. Clues. Clarity amid the rubble.
She printed all the crime scene photos and spread them out on the basement floor. She downloaded a PDF of the house’s layout and photos used as previous sales material from a real estate brokerage site and printed them out as well. She then re-created the interior of Matthew Linklater’s house using the crime scene photos, matching the photos up with the interior layout. Like a broker’s listing after the apocalypse.
She put together each room, every corner and tile and floorboard. The living room. Bathroom. Kitchen. Closet. All burnt wood, melted plastic, and scorched metal. She looked at every beam. Every pipe. For something. Anything.
And then she saw it. At the very bottom of the grid. Ignored because it had been in plain sight.
The front door.
When Rachel, Serrano, and Tally were given access to the interior of the Linklater home, after it was declared structurally sound, they entered through the burnt frame of the front door.
The open front door.
But in the first responder photos, the door was closed. The PD had opened it when examining the structure. But after the crime itself, the door was closed.
Rachel examined photos of all the windows in Linklater’s home. With few exceptions, the glass had been blown out by the fire. The frames still appeared to be intact. Linklater also had a home-security system. Had someone broken in through one of the windows, a call would have gone out to a security-monitoring station, and the murder-in-progress would have been interrupted. Not only did the killers need to prevent Linklater from alerting anyone to the crime, but they also needed to make sure no alarms had been tripped beforehand.