Page 11

CHAPTER 11

The calm,

Cool face of the river

Asked me for a kiss.

—Langston Hughes, “Suicide’s Note”

WHITNEY

At a dead end with my investigation into the Finsters’ deaths, I spent three and a half weeks assisting my uncle and cousins with the carpentry work in the academic building at the former Ridgetop Preparatory Academy. Meanwhile, the Victorian sat somber and vacant, waiting for Buck and me to give it some attention. Every day, as I parked in the main lot and strode to the academic building, I felt as if the house were watching me through the woods, sensing its growing frustration as time dragged on with no new revelations. Perhaps I was projecting, putting my emotions on the inanimate structure. Or perhaps there was something more to the footsteps Loflin’s worker claimed to have heard, the moving shadows others had seen.

Finally, on a Wednesday afternoon in late August, I heard from Detective Macedo. He called my cell phone as I was applying a coat of stain to a cabinet door in what would one day soon be a medical office. I set down my brush and tapped the icon to accept the call, my tummy aflutter with anxious butterflies. Would he tell me I was off base to think there was more to the case than met the eye? Or would he tell me I’d been right to feel suspicious about that stray bullet?

“I’ve reviewed the case file and evidence in the Finsters’ death investigation,” he said. “We can discuss it over the phone or, if you’d like to talk about it in person, you could swing by sometime.”

“Can sometime be right now?”

“You don’t waste time, do you?”

“No. I’m already walking out the door.” I texted my uncle as I hurried to my SUV. Meeting with detective. Back soon. A nice thing about working for family was that they were forgiving. Another boss might fire me for running out on the job like this. That said, I generally tried not to take advantage of my uncle’s good-natured demeanor.

I drove up to Springfield, and soon found myself peering through a specialized forensic microscope at a tall table in the county’s crime lab, which was housed in the sheriff’s department building. Rather than one microscope with a single lens, this device had two microscopes connected by a horizontal arm, and was specifically made for comparing pieces of evidence. The viewer allowed you to see the image from just one side or the other at a given time, or to view both samples at once in a side-by-side image.

I looked down at the bullets as a tech trained in ballistics explained the process of examining bullets and helped me understand what I was looking at.

“Bullets are sort of like footballs,” he explained. “Because they’re oblong shaped, they have to spin after they’re fired to stay on an accurate trajectory.”

I’d watched dozens, if not hundreds, of football games over the years, some on TV and others from the stands of one stadium or another. I’d seen footballs spin through the air. I’d also seen the balls wobble when the spin was disrupted.

He continued to inform me. “Inside the barrel of every gun are spiral impressions known as rifling. The recessed parts are called grooves, and the raised parts are called lands. When someone shoots a gun, those impressions cut into the bullet and give it the spin it needs to hit the target. Every gun has unique rifling, which means that the bullets fired from a gun will have rifling specific to that firearm, like a ballistic fingerprint of sorts.”

I raised my head and said, “Gotcha,” to let him know I was with him so far, then put my eyes back to the eyepiece to compare the two bullets.

“After the gun was recovered from the crime scene, it was fired so that the test bullet could be compared to the bullets removed from the Finsters’ bodies by the medical examiner. Firing a test bullet is standard procedure to ensure that the weapon used in the crime has been properly identified. You’ll notice that the rifling and imperfections on the bullets you’re looking at are identical. That means the bullets were fired by the same gun, the Smith & Wesson Model 59 that was retrieved from the scene. The bullet on the right is the one you found in the porch post and gave to Detective Macedo. The bullet on the left was extracted from Rosalyn Finster’s body during her autopsy.”

The thought that I was looking at the bullet that had ended Rosie Finster’s life gave me the willies. My knees went weak for an instant, but I forced myself to continue to stare down at the bullets. They were slightly different in color, probably due to the fact that the one I’d found had spent decades exposed to the elements. But the grooves on each bullet matched, just as the tech had noted. I raised my head. “I was right, then. The bullet I found came from Irving Finster’s gun.”

“It did,” confirmed the tech. He reached over to remove the bullet that had killed Rosie Finster from the microscope and slid it into a small plastic bag with writing on the outside that identified its source. He then opened another small bag, pulled out a bullet, and positioned it on the apparatus for me to look at. “This bullet is the one from the test fire.”

I peered through the eyepiece again. Sure enough, the markings on that bullet matched the ones on the bullet I’d pried out of the porch post.

Once again, he swapped out the bullets. “This is the one that was retrieved from Irving Finster’s body.”

Again, I got the shivers knowing the bullet I was looking at had ended someone’s life. Again, the bullet matched the one I’d found in the post. They’d been shot from the same gun, Irving Finster’s gun.

Our ballistics comparison complete, Detective Macedo thanked the tech. I thanked the man, as well. He’d gone above and beyond here, letting me examine the evidence for myself rather than simply telling me his findings. I appreciated him giving me a hands-on experience.

Macedo motioned for me to follow him to his office. I trailed along, eager to hear whether the fact I’d just learned was of any significance. As Collin had pointed out weeks before, the stray bullet didn’t necessarily mean that the events had unfolded differently than many of the people associated with the school had concluded. It didn’t mean that the deaths weren’t, in fact, a murder-suicide. It might only mean that the Finsters had grappled with the gun, and that it had discharged unintentionally.

Macedo held out a hand, inviting me to take one of the seats in front of his desk, then closed the door behind us. I was too excited to wait any longer. Before his butt could land on his chair, I blurted, “What did you find in the file?”

He sat down, reached into a drawer, and pulled out a stack of manila folders held together with a wide rubber band, plunking them down on the desktop in front of him. The files were thick, each about half the size of a ream of copy paper, filled with two hundred pages or more of evidence. Carole Brown was right. The investigator had been thorough.

Macedo gave me a pointed look. “Before we start, you need to know that there are some things in the file that I can’t show you or talk about. It’s not our policy to let just anyone look at our case files.”

I’m not just anyone! I wanted to tell him as much. After all, I was now the owner of the crime scene, and I had put a lot of thought and anxiety into the case. But I kept my cool. Death investigations were sensitive matters, and my purchase of the Victorian where the crime took place gave me no right to any of the sheriff’s department’s information. In fact, I was lucky that Detective Macedo had agreed to share anything with me at all. “I understand.”

He backpedaled just a little. “Of course, we always appreciate the public coming forward with evidence that might help us solve a case.” He removed the rubber band from the files and set it aside. “First, let’s go over the evidence that supports the theory that Irving Finster killed his wife then himself.”

He pulled the top file toward him and angled it on his lap so that I couldn’t see the contents. He fished out a piece of standard copy paper, yellowed with age and dotted with irregularly shaped brownish spots. “A major piece of evidence was a suicide note left on Irving’s desk.”

He’d left a note? I supposed that was to be expected. Irving had been a writer, after all. But shouldn’t a suicide note have made it a cut-and-dried case?

Though Macedo didn’t let me see the page, he read it to me. “‘I see no point in going on. I can’t give my wife a child. She’s turned to another man. The public has lost interest in my literary work. I was never qualified to serve as headmaster. There’s nothing left for me in this world. Please remember me when I was at my best. Irving.’”

I mulled over the note for a moment. While neither Dr. Joule or Carole Brown thought there was any credence to the alleged affair between Kito Noy and Rosie Finster, the note indicated that Irving believed there was. In fact, his belief that his wife had been unfaithful was more important than whether the affair had actually occurred. The note was incomplete, though, wasn’t it? “That’s a suicide note,” I pondered aloud, “but it’s not a murder note.”

Macedo’s brow furrowed. “Meaning?”

“He explains why he took his own life, but he doesn’t explain why he took his wife’s.”

Macedo reread an excerpt from the note. “‘She’s turned to another man.’ Doesn’t that cover it?”

I thought about the chapters I’d read in A Dark Day for Justice . Irving Finster had clearly established his character’s motivations in the novel. The CIA agent had confided in his wife because the weight of the state secrets he held threatened to crush him, and he needed her to help shoulder some of his heavy burden. Still, Detective Macedo had a point. The mention of the affair implied a motive for Irving Finster to kill his wife and, unlike Finster’s novels, his suicide note had not benefitted from editorial input and several rounds of revision. In fact, with its lack of well-crafted prose and simplistic sentence structure, it sounded as if it had been dashed off on the spot. This fact wasn’t necessarily surprising given that a significant percentage of suicides were impulsive rather than planned. “What other evidence supports the murder-suicide conclusion?”

“Gunshot residue,” Macedo said. “Irving Finster’s hands were covered with it. Rosie’s hands had none.” In this instance, he fished a printed lab report out of the file and placed it on the desk in front of me.

I read it over. Some of the language was scientific jargon or law enforcement lingo I didn’t understand, but the part about gunshot residue was decisive. Irving had gunshot residue on his hands. There was no question that he had fired a gun that evening. In light of the suicide note and the physical evidence on Irving Finster’s skin, this did appear to be an open and shut case. But Macedo had said we’d discuss the substantiating evidence first. That meant there was contradictory evidence, right? “Was there evidence that made the investigator doubt the murder-suicide theory?”

“There was,” Macedo said.

Reflexively, I sat up straighter and leaned in to listen.

He fished a piece of shiny paper out of the file now and turned it sidewise, landscape style. Before laying it on the desk in front of me, he applied two large sticky notes to it to cover the right side of the page.

I looked down at it. I was thankful Macedo had covered the Finsters’ faces and torsos depicted on the right side of the photograph, concealing their bullet wounds. He’d saved me weeks of nightmares. All I could see were their entangled legs, the same thing Carole had seen when she’d peered through the window of the study that night. Still, I had to turn my head away for a moment, then peek through my fingers when I turned back. I didn’t know what I was supposed to glean from the photo, but Macedo filled me in.

He pointed to their feet. “See there? Her ankle is on top of his. If she had fallen first, the expectation would be that his limbs would be on top of hers.”

I sensed his hesitation. “But…?”

“But it can be explained away. Maybe he stepped between her legs after she’d fallen, reached down to check her pulse before turning the gun on himself.”

I got a horrible visual, and my hands fluttered on their own accord, as if trying to make the eerie image in my mind dissipate. When I managed to get my limbs under control, I said, “Anything else?”

He returned to the suicide note. He held the paper up, the back facing me. “See these spots?” He pointed to the brownish splotches I’d noticed earlier. “That’s blood spatter.”

“The note was found on Irving’s desk, right?” I remembered what Carole Brown had told me, that the Finsters were lying in front of the desk when she saw their feet through the window. “Wouldn’t blood spatter on the desk be expected?”

“It would,” Macedo said. “There was a lot of blood on the desk, and some on the typewriter, too. The odd thing was that most of the blood spatter appeared to originate on the back of the paper rather than the front.”

It was my turn to request clarification. “Meaning?” I echoed his earlier phrase.

“Meaning it looked like the note had been typed and placed on the desk after the blood spatter was deposited rather than before.” He laid the paper facedown on the desk. “See these faint outlines?”

I looked down. I saw four very small, barely visible shapes outlined on the paper. Two were irregular, like the amoebas depicted in my high school biology textbook, while two were nearly perfectly round. All of the shapes were filled in and surrounded by slightly lighter stains. “I can make them out, yes.”

“Each of those outlines indicates the outer edge of a pool of blood spatter that had begun to dry. The irregular ones mean the blood hit the desk at an angle and splashed outward. The ones that are rounder fell directly from above, close to a ninety-degree angle. Surface tension causes liquid to bead up and form a raised dome that is thicker in the center.”

“Like raindrops on a car?”

“Exactly. Blood begins to dry very quickly after it’s been shed, and the edges dry out first because they are thinner than the rest of the bead. How quickly the blood dries depends on several factors, such as how thick the spatter is, the type of surface it lands on, and the temperature, humidity, and airflow in the space.”

This was science I could understand. After all, how quickly a wet bath towel would dry depended on the same factors.

He used a ballpoint pen as a pointer to indicate the perimeter of one of the shapes. “If the blood had landed on the paper after it had been placed on the desk, the bloodstain would end at the perimeter. The fact that the bloodstain extends beyond these distinguishable edges tells us that the blood was on the desk before the paper was placed on it. The paper put a small amount of weight and pressure on the blood, breaking the surface tension of the droplets and causing them to spread after they’d already begun drying.”

“Was the blood tested to see who it belonged to?” If the blood belonged to Rosie only, Irving might have killed her before writing the note and placing it on his desk. Then, he might have taken his own life afterward, in a manner that made little of his blood land on the desk. Maybe he’d been kneeling down by his deceased wife.

Detective Macedo informed me this was not the case. “Samples were taken from the particular spots with the defined edges, and from the victims. Irving Finster’s blood type was O positive, the most common blood type. Rosie’s was AB negative, the rarest blood type. The spatter contained both types, so some of the blood was presumed to be hers, and some was presumed to be his.”

“ Presumed? Wasn’t DNA testing done to verify the blood came from them?”

“It was, but not until a few years later.” Macedo gave me a quick and dirty lesson in the history of forensic science. “As common as DNA testing is today, it’s easy to forget that it’s actually a relatively new technology. Law enforcement didn’t start running DNA tests until the mid-1980s, and people were initially very dubious about it. The first criminal conviction in the United States that involved DNA evidence wasn’t until 1987. The Human Genome Project, which mapped human DNA, only launched in 1990. There was a huge uproar in the mid-’90s when scientists started performing DNA cloning experiments. Ever heard of Dolly the sheep?”

“The only Dolly I know sings country-western songs and has golden blond hair.” A bunch of gold albums, too.

“Dolly the sheep was cloned in a lab in Scotland. It was the first successful attempt after a multitude of failures.”

“She was a Franken-sheep?”

“In a sense. Some people got up in arms, saying that the scientists were playing God. They feared where the science might go. The fervor has calmed down since, though the issue hasn’t gone away entirely. At any rate, when DNA tests were subsequently performed, the lab determined that the AB negative blood was Rosie’s and the O positive blood was Irving’s. The strange part is that his blood is on the back of the suicide note, meaning it was already on the desk before the note was placed there.”

I pondered this detail and the gruesome possibilities. “Is it possible that Irving didn’t die right away? That he put the letter on the desk after shooting himself, but before he died?”

“Unlikely,” Macedo said. “However, when he fired the gun, the paper might have fluttered, allowing more blood spatter to get under it than on top of it.”

In other words, there was an alternative, if improbable, explanation why the blood spatter was thicker on the back of the paper than the front. Could there have been a third party involved? “Was there any unidentified blood?” I asked.

He shook his head.

I looked down at the note again. Wait a second… Though the paper was facedown, the moisture in the blood made a few typed letters show through the backside. I could make out an S and a T. “Something seems off here.” I pointed down at the page. “That’s a typed note on copy paper, but Irving wrote out the drafts of his novel longhand on lined paper from legal pads. I saw pages for the draft of his third novel in the study, on the side table by the typewriter. His wife typed them up for him because he didn’t know how to type.”

Macedo’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know he couldn’t type?”

“Carole Tiller told me,” I said. “Well, she’s Carole Brown now.”

“You’ve been talking to folks?”

I hoped he wouldn’t be angry. “I didn’t tell them about the bullet I found, or the hole in the window frame. I just told them I was remodeling the Victorian and having some trouble working past its violent history.” Which was true.

“Besides Carole Tiller, who have you spoken with?”

“Just Adam Joule.” So far.

Fortunately, Macedo didn’t seem put out. “Carole Tiller wasn’t told back then that the suicide note had been typed. Nobody was given that detail. But when the detective questioned Carole about Irving and Rosie’s relationship, she told him that Rosie was a very loving and supportive wife. She specifically mentioned that Rosie typed Irving’s manuscripts for him because he didn’t know how to use a typewriter. Like you, the detective realized that information was salient to the case, and he documented it in his interview notes. The information was corroborated by physical evidence. Fingerprints were lifted from the typewriter. None of them were Irving’s.”

“Someone other than Irving Finster typed the note, then?” No wonder it hadn’t sounded like the same person who’d written A Dark Day for Justice .

“It seems likely,” Macedo said in that same annoying way Collin had of only stating things conclusively if they’d been indisputably proven. “There was a minute amount of gunpower residue on the platen. It was probably transferred when the letter was removed from the typewriter. But all of the prints lifted from the typewriter belonged to Rosie.”

“So, whoever typed the note wore gloves? Or wiped their prints from the typewriter?”

“Maybe. Or they typed with an implement such as a pencil or letter opener so they wouldn’t leave prints, though that would be time-consuming and difficult and seems highly unlikely. A more plausible theory is that Irving made his wife type the note for him, then removed it from the typewriter himself, leaving the gunshot residue on the platen.”

My blood froze at the thought of Rosie sitting at the typewriter while Irving held a gun on her, forcing her to type his suicide note. Was it his way of punishing her for the alleged affair? “What kind of person would do something like that?”

“Someone who wasn’t in their right mind at the time,” Macedo said. “People suffering from mental illness can be unpredictable. By all accounts, Dr. Finster might have had depression. Hard to say since the only person he seemed close to was his wife.”

“Weren’t he and Dr. Adam Joule friends?”

“The investigator included some notes in that regard. He said Dr. Joule seemed to consider himself a good friend of Irving Finster’s since they went back to their boyhood at the school. But an old friend doesn’t necessarily mean a close one. The investigator got the sense it was a one-sided relationship. Dr. Joule was single and not particularly popular with the other faculty, so he might have glommed on to his old classmate.”

“Joule wasn’t popular? Why?” Other than his initial frustration over his faulty showerhead, he’d been personable when I’d visited his apartment.

“Seems he could be arrogant.” Macedo looked down at the notes he’d jotted and made air quotes with his fingers as he read from his page. “‘A know-it-all who thought he was more intelligent than everyone around him.’” He shrugged before circling back to the suicide note. “There were no fingerprints on the note itself, but there were several odd smudges.” He pointed down at the page still sitting on the desk. A few smudges appeared on the outer edges, looking a bit like fingerpaint. “There were bloody smudges on the typewriter keys, too. It’s a farfetched idea, but it’s also possible Irving might have wiped his own prints from the typewriter.”

“But why wouldn’t he just write out the note by hand?”

“Can’t say.” Macedo raised his palms and shrugged. “It’s a good question, though.”

All of the details and unresolved questions had my mind spinning. “If Irving had gunshot residue on his hands, he must’ve fired the gun at least once, right?”

“That’s one of the few things we can say for certain.” Macedo leaned back in his chair and folded his hands across his belly. “Rosie Finster had no residue on her hands, so she didn’t fire the gun. That’s another thing we can say for sure. It’s unclear what happened, exactly. There’s no conclusive evidence a third party was involved. The deadbolt on the back door was locked, but only the knob lock was locked on the front door. There was no key in the front door deadbolt. Rosie might not have locked the deadbolt behind her when she returned to the house because she thought she’d be in and out quickly, just to grab the cookies she’d forgotten and go. But, if someone else had been in the house, someone without easy access to the key for the deadbolt, they could have locked the knob lock behind them as they left to make it appear that the house was secured and inaccessible to anyone but the Finsters at the time of their deaths.”

“The gun was found at the scene, right?”

“It was,” Macedo confirmed. “Otherwise, one or both of the Finsters’ deaths would have been ruled a homicide. A deceased person can’t hide a weapon, after all. But a complicating factor was that the magazine wasn’t full when the shootings took place in the study. The gun used was a Smith & Wesson Model 59. It has a magazine capacity of fourteen rounds. If there’s a bullet already in the chamber, a person can get off a maximum of fifteen shots before having to reload. In this case, the magazine held five remaining bullets when it was taken into evidence. It was impossible for the detective to discern precisely how many shots had been fired in the study since he had no way to know how many bullets had been in the magazine or whether one had been in the chamber before the gun was fired that night. Irving had taken a firearms class at a local gun range when he bought the gun only a few weeks before. The detective questioned the staff at the gun range. They said Finster had trained at the range two days before the incident, but nobody knew whether he’d used up the full magazine. They said he seemed really uncomfortable with the gun and was a lousy shot.”

I could understand Irving’s feelings. I wasn’t a fan of firearms, either. I was much more comfortable with a nail gun than a handgun. “What about the hole in the paneling and the bullet I found? Were they documented in the file?”

“No,” Macedo said. “The crime scene team took photos of the room, but they didn’t spot the hole you noticed.”

I felt proud that my find was new information for the sheriff’s department. But would it make a difference? “It would have been easy to miss. Unless you get really close, it looks like just another knothole. Since the window was intact, they probably had no reason to inspect the window frame. I only noticed it because my cousin and I were measuring the windows to order replacements.”

“There’s another reason nobody found the bullet hole or bullet,” Macedo said. “They didn’t know to look for it. Only two shell casings were recovered from the scene.”

My heart leapt into overdrive. “Someone removed the third casing?”

“Not necessarily,” Macedo said. “You’re assuming the bullet you found in the post was fired that same night. But it could have been fired previously, accidentally or intentionally. Who knows? The hole in the window frame might have been there already.”

My whole body tightened. I’d hoped to get some answers today, but all I’d gotten was more frustrated.

Macedo seemed to sense my tension. “You might not be as off base as this conversation has made it seem. Irving had some injuries to his face that indicate a physical altercation had taken place before he was shot. Rosie had none. She might have gotten a few good licks in before he shot her. He might have not wanted to hit her back. Firing a gun at someone is more lethal, of course, but it’s also less personal. It’s also possible they could have been attacked by a third party. One thing that stuck out to the detective back then was the way Irving was shot. It was unusual. He didn’t put the gun to his head. He was shot at an angle through the neck. The exit wound damaged both his carotid artery and jugular vein, which run right next to each other. He would’ve died almost instantly. But there was a bruise on the underside of his chin on the opposite side that appeared to be made by the gun barrel, like it had been shoved up under his jaw with quite a bit of force.”

Could Terry Thorne have been capable of such force? “Did Irving buy the gun before or after Terry Thorne got into their house?”

“You know about her?”

“Carole Brown told me about Terry. I read Terry’s disciplinary reports, too. They were left behind in the filing cabinet in the headmaster’s office in the academic building. Sounds like the girl was disturbed.”

“She exhibited antisocial behaviors, for sure. The detective considered the possibility that Terry had followed Rosie back to the headmaster’s house. He even asked Terry outright if that was the case. His notes said that Terry rolled her eyes and said something to the effect of ‘how could a little thing like me pull off something like that?’”

The nonchalance of her response was creepy and spine-chilling. Also, her words hinted at the defensive argument she’d offer if arrested. I gestured to the file. “Who else did the investigator talk to?”

“The entire faculty, the board of trustees, students Finster had disciplined.”

“Elijah Clemson, then.”

His eyes narrowed. “Who?”

“Elijah Clemson. He chalked up a bunch of infractions. Irving Finster expelled him, but his sister remained at the school. She was cast in the musical theater program that was supposed to go on that night. Elijah had been on campus to see the show. Carole Brown told me she joined hands with him at a prayer circle that night and that he seemed quite upset.”

Macedo shook his head. “There’s nothing about an Elijah Clemson in the files. The detective might have dismissed him as a possible suspect since he’d been expelled, or maybe he just didn’t think it was worth the additional time and effort it would take to track Clemson down for an interview since he was no longer right there on campus.”

“What about Dwight Nabors? He was in charge of groundskeeping and building maintenance. He quit suddenly shortly before the incident.”

“Nabors was interviewed. He said his sudden departure was because he’d been offered an opportunity to oversee maintenance and groundskeeping at a country club for half again what the school was paying him. He had a bunch of kids.” He looked over at his summary. “Seven, to be exact. He said the extra income would come in handy.”

I wondered where law enforcement would go next with the case. “What now?” I asked.

“Now?” Detective Macedo shook his head. “Nothing, as least as far as the sheriff’s department is concerned. Like I said, the hole you found might have already been there when the Finsters were shot. Any evidence that wasn’t collected back then is likely long gone by now, and memories can’t be trusted after so much time has passed. We’ve only got a few investigators here. None of us can take time away from our current investigations to revisit a decades-old cold case, especially when there’s no family pressuring us to get justice for their loved one.”

I sighed. “There’s just a nosy carpenter butting in where she doesn’t belong.”

Macedo chuckled. “You said it. I didn’t. But even if the Finsters were, in fact, murdered, it appears that the killer committed no further violence—none that we know of, anyway—or they would have come under suspicion for the Finsters’ deaths. As long as it’s been, there’s a good chance the guilty party would be dead now, too.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“I hoped it would.”

Could it be true? Could God have passed judgment on the killer even if a human judge had not? I gave him a feeble smile. “There’s nothing to stop me from poking around some more, is there?”

He raised his palms. “This is America. You’ve got the right to associate freely. But be careful, Whitney. Even if the investigator couldn’t prove that both of the Finsters’ deaths were murders, he harbored enough doubt that he didn’t close the case. That means something. If you find anything else, let me know. Okay?”

“I will.”

Macedo escorted me to the exit. I walked out into a cloudy, gray day, feeling discouraged and ready to give up. The detective didn’t have time to waste, and neither did I. But when a summer hawthorn bush pricked my arm on my way to my SUV, I took it as a direct order from fate to track down Terry Thorne.