Page 24 of She Didn’t See It Coming

Lizzie’s mother gets up stiffly from the sofa.

She looks so old, Lizzie thinks, she even moves differently.

Her mother gives her a subtle glance, signaling Lizzie to follow her.

She does it in such a way that Lizzie knows she wants to make it seem natural.

She waits for her mother to reach the kitchen.

Then Lizzie makes a show of noticing her coffee cup is empty and gets up.

“I’m going to get more coffee, anybody want some? ”

Sam and Jim shake their heads. Paige looks up at her and shakes her head too. When Lizzie reaches the kitchen, her mother is waiting for her and steps in close. “We need to talk,” she mouths.

Lizzie feels a clutch of fear. Does her mother know something? Has she been keeping something from them? Lizzie nods silently and starts making more coffee to provide some covering noise. She turns on the tap to fill the carafe.

“What if Sam did it?” her mother whispers quietly. Her face is strained, and her tired eyes are full of horrible possibility.

So, her mother is considering it, Lizzie thinks.

She’s not that surprised. It’s an obvious question, really.

She swallows, unsure how to respond. This signals a shift in family dynamics that Lizzie doesn’t think she’s ready for.

She can’t think of anything to say; her mother seems to take that as agreement.

“You think he did!” her mother says accusingly, wide-eyed.

She turns off the tap. “No! I don’t know,” Lizzie whispers back. This is not what she wants. “I can’t believe that. Sam couldn’t have done it. He loved her.”

“He doesn’t have an alibi,” her mother points out quietly.

“Don’t you think that’s strange? Why wasn’t he at work?

Does he always take such long lunches? Maybe we don’t know him as well as we thought.

Maybe Bryden was keeping things from us.

” Her mother begins to tremble, and Lizzie instinctively reaches out and holds her in an embrace.

She smells her mother’s powdery skin, absorbs her grief, her pain.

Her mother begins to sob brokenly against her shoulder.

“I should have been there for her,” her mother weeps. “It’s all my fault.”

Lizzie is suddenly aware of someone else with them in the kitchen. She lifts her head and turns. It’s Paige; she’s crept up on them, caught them unawares. How much has she heard?

“It’s not your fault,” Paige says to Lizzie’s mother in a low, sympathetic voice. “You mustn’t think that.” She adds firmly, “You must never think that.”

···

Jayne stands at the front of the incident room, glancing behind her at the whiteboard. Beside the enlarged photographs of Bryden Frost and Sam Frost, there is now also one of Derek Gardner. She turns back to face the others in the room.

“Derek Gardner is a smooth character; he’s got a sharp attorney and he’s not going to be easy to crack.

So we need to find everything we can on him.

He says he was home all Tuesday afternoon.

Keep checking the CCTV on the roads around the condo building and the surrounding area.

He drives a black Tesla Model Y; we’ve got the plate number.

Go all the way back to the date they met at the coffee shop, January 26, and forward from there.

Maybe we’ll catch him going into the garage before the cameras broke down, but I doubt it.

I think he’s too smart for that. They probably met somewhere else.

Look into his background, his business, his marriage.

He says he was home alone, working, at the time Bryden Frost was killed.

Let’s see if we can poke holes in that, through CCTV, witnesses—did any neighbors see him leave the house that day?

At this point, he and the husband, Sam Frost, are our main suspects.

If she was cheating, that gives the husband a motive as well.

We may have an ugly love triangle here.” She pauses.

“It could be either one of them,” Jayne says.

“We’ve learned from the building manager that sometimes the door to the storage area is left propped open by the residents.

That means whoever killed her and left her in that open locker didn’t necessarily have to have keys to the storage area.

It could have been Derek Gardner. Has there been any progress on verifying the husband’s alibi? ”

An officer speaks up. “We spoke to the food truck owner—Gino Morelli—where Sam got his lunch. He confirmed it, and it’s on Sam’s credit card. We’re going back to the park now to talk to people over the lunch hour to see if we can find anyone who saw him after that.”

“What about his car?”

“There’s no CCTV coverage where he says he parked it.”

Jayne says, “Okay, so let’s say it’s him.

He picks up lunch, drives home—it’s only about a seven-minute drive from Washington Park to the condo.

He knows his wife is working from home that day.

He gets her to buzz him in so there’s no record he’s there.

He goes up to the apartment, kills her, removes her clothes, puts her in the suitcase.

” She pauses. “What does he do with the clothes? We haven’t found them anywhere.

He takes her in the suitcase down to the storage locker.

He took a risk that someone might see him with a large suitcase and recognize him after the fact,” Jayne says.

“It might have been much less of a risk if he took the stairs,” Kilgour suggests. “He might not have run into anyone. And if he’d heard someone above or below, he could have waited till they were out of sight or ducked back onto one of the floors.”

Jayne nods. “She weighed a hundred and twenty pounds, but it would be doable. And there were wheels on the suitcase. Let’s try that.

Martin, you’re pretty fit, go over there at one o’clock and take the stairs from the eighth floor down to the storage room.

Do it a few times and see if you run into anyone or not and report back to me. ”

There’s a chuckle of sympathy around the room for Martin, fit or not.

She continues. “He uses his keys, or not, if it’s open, to get into the storage locker area.

He leaves the suitcase in the open locker, hidden behind boxes, then what?

He gets back in his car, with her clothes.

What’s he carrying those in? He has to get rid of them.

But he has to go back to work. Where did he get rid of the clothes?

You’ve already reviewed any CCTV footage we can get on the routes to and from his office, right? ”

“Yes. We’ve already done that. There aren’t many cameras. We haven’t spotted him,” an officer replies.

Kilgour says, “But he would have had time, on his way back to work, if he hurried. He picked up the BLT at twelve fifteen. Bryden did her last computer backup at twelve forty-two. He arrives after that, kills her, undresses her, puts her in the suitcase. How long would that take? Fifteen minutes? He might have needed another fifteen minutes to hide the suitcase. By now it’s one fifteen.

It’s about a fifteen-minute drive to his office.

He got there at about two. He had time to get rid of the evidence—almost half an hour.

And we don’t have any CCTV coverage of that route to see where he went, and he hasn’t turned up anywhere else—we’ve looked. ”

Jayne nods. “What about on the way to the day care?” she asks.

“Judging by the timelines, he went directly to the day care that afternoon when he left the office, and then he went directly home again.”

“Most likely on the way back to work then,” Jayne says.

“And he wouldn’t want his three-year-old to see him throwing something away.

He could have dumped the clothes anywhere,” Jayne says.

“A dumpster, the river—without CCTV to know where he might have gone, it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. ” She sighs.

Kilgour asks, “Why did he move the body at all? Why risk being seen with the suitcase? Why not just leave her there?”

Jayne suggests, “Maybe he didn’t want his daughter to see the body. He would have known the day care would call him when Bryden didn’t show up, that he’d have to go there directly to pick her up and bring her home.”

Some nods in the room. It makes sense.

Kilgour offers, “Derek Gardner might have known that the cameras in the underground parking garage weren’t working—Bryden might have told him.

She might have invited him over that day, while she was working from home.

Or he might have just shown up and she buzzed him in.

He might have killed her, on the spur of the moment—maybe she threatened to tell his wife—put her in the suitcase, and left her in the storage locker—if the door was propped open.

He doesn’t have much of an alibi either. ”

Jayne nods slowly. “This one isn’t going to be easy,” she says. “So far, we have no physical evidence.” She stands up straighter, signaling the meeting is over. “Kilgour and I are off to the Coroner’s Office for the autopsy results.”

The officers start moving back to their desks—to hop on their computers, their phones. She has a good team. If there is anything to find, they will find it.