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“Where you only absorb others’ guilt or remorse?”
She shook her head. “They aren’t the same thing at all, in my opinion. Remorse requires sorrow or contrition. Guilt is merely conceding that we’ve done wrong. It can’t be banished without acknowledging the harm we did to others.”
“So you sat beside Thorne and could ‘see’ his guilt. Where it sprang from. And what he was going to do next?”
Reese was already weary of the conversation. Trying to apply reason to her skill relegated it to nonsense. “It’s not like that. I have to lower my guard. Allow the emotion in. It’s not so much reading thoughts as…” She searched for a description that would satisfy him. “Like stirring a finger through the mental flotsam of his mind. I might turn up words, emotions, flashes of memories. Enough to tell a story.”
“Enough to determine where Thorne would hit next.”
Good. Goodies. Goodness.She shivered and reached over to turn down the air conditioning a notch. “Sometimes what I see doesn’t make sense. I have to stitch it together. Like his pattern. It isn’t about the number of victims he kills in each state, but how many times he strikes. So I knew he wasn’t done in Mississippi yet. But Tupelo and Vicksburg were well-populated. Police soon appeared at the crime scenes. So somewhere smaller. Without a nearby police force.” She thought for a moment. “I’ve never understood where Thorne got his money. It wasn’t unusual for him to rent a property, like he did in Goodness. How? He had a very spotty employment record.”
They drove under the overpass, and Hayes waited until they’d emerged from the other side before answering. “We discovered he had several fake sets of identification. All the IDs were in names with the initials S.T. Your guess is as good as mine as to how he acquired them. We identified the people they were stolen from, but Thorne always said he found the IDs, which is clearly untrue.”
“Nothing makes much sense right now. My aunt was killed less than an hour after leaving the trustee’s office. We had Pollack on our trail shortly after our appointment with Rivers. But even I can’t make that leap to include Stephen Thorne within the attorney’s circle of acquaintances.”
Hayes followed her train of thought. “Rivers is the common denominator. But you’re right. We’re a long way from connecting him to Thorne.”
“You search for tracking devices each time we leave, in addition to explosives.” When he said nothing, she felt a dart of annoyance. “At least, I assume that’s an RF sniffer you deploy after putting the remote away?”
“It would show a GPS tracker, yes.”
“So Pollack didn’t find us that way.” She remained quiet through the rest of the ride, filtering the random thoughts crashing and colliding in her head. The San Diego skyline had just appeared in the distance when Reese straightened, chasing a mental snippet that threatened to turn to mist before it fully formed.
“I wonder if Detective Gibbons checked Julia’s car for one.”
Traffic slowed as they drew nearer to the city. Hayes adjusted his speed accordingly. “One what?”
“A tracking device.”
His reply was delayed enough to make her think he was choosing his words carefully. “I didn’t realize her death was being investigated as a homicide.”
“It’s not. But I couldn’t sleep last night, so I spent hours looking through the documents she’d been examining.”
“The ones associated with your brother’s care?”
She clenched her teeth remembering the sight of him this morning, in Julia’s bedroom, studying the wall Reese had turned into a visual display of the questions her aunt had compiled. Of course he’d read enough to realize they weren’t for an outline for the book Gordon wanted her to write. “I started going through the financial documents related to the monetary part of the trust. I realized the company charged with investing the funds has their offices down the block on the opposite side of the street from the public parking garage Julia used. She could have turned out of the ramp, walked to the light, crossed to the corner, and then turned north. But the accident occurred after she’d exited the garage on foot and used the crosswalk in front of it.”
She swallowed hard. The recitation brought an image swimming into her mind: a speeding van, a careless driver not looking or watching for pedestrians. Julia, ducking traffic and stepping right into its path. Interviews with the onlookers had elicited the usual mixture of opposing stories. Even the tourist’s video hadn’t begun until right before the impact.
“Did your aunt have an appointment with the investment advisor?”
She sighed, realizing she sounded as paranoid as she felt. “None noted in her planner. The detective checked with firms in the area, and no one had a client by her name on their calendar. Her phone and computer were stolen before the police got there.”
“Well, it won’t hurt to look. Her vehicle is still in the apartment parking garage?”
“I picked it up after a couple of days when the police were done with it.” Reese needed to do something with the careventually, and she’d been dragging her feet. Just like she’d put off packing up Julia’s personal belongings. There was a finality in the acts, an inescapable conclusion to a life that ended much too soon. Picking up the investigation her aunt had been doing into different aspects of Ben’s trust had been a welcome diversion. But knowing that didn’t mean it wasn’t an equally necessary task.
A steady throb pulsed in her temple. She could attribute it to lack of rest, or nothing to eat or drink today. But she thought it was from the constant barrage of unanswered questions, the tangled lines that refused to connect properly from one fact to the next. From her journalistic work, she knew that it came from missing information. Either nothing connected, or there were random pieces unaccounted for.
Which in the past, had always urged her to dig deeper. But this wasn’t research for her articles. She wasn’t following leads as much as trying to fit misshapen puzzle pieces into an image that never materialized.
Hayes turned into the garage and cruised to her floor. He reparked the Hyundai. When they exited, she pointed out her aunt’s vehicle. “That’s Julia’s silver Chevy Equinox.”
He turned off the SUV, exited, and walked to the back of Reese’s vehicle, opening the hatch. She got out and went silently to his side. The dull pounding in her head now felt like a trio of demented gnomes doing a drum solo. But Hayes was going through the motions to please her, and Reese could hardly tell him the act could wait.
She leaned against the rear fender and watched him circle Julia’s Equinox with the second handheld device he always manned after he checked for explosives. He circled the car slowly, paused, got down on his knees, and moved the scanner under the chassis.
“Did you find something?”