Page 135 of Take Your Breath Away

“Where’s the gun?” she said out loud to herself.

Fifty-Six

Andrew

While I’d been intending to make Isabel and Norman’s house my next stop, something new was nagging at me that prompted a detour along the way.

I wanted to take a run by Candace DiCarlo’s house. I wanted to see where it happened. A couple of minutes online, and I’d found the location. There were two police cars at the end of Rosemont, plus a van and a flatbed truck. I couldn’t park near the house. I left my car more than three houses away.

I was doing a lot of thinking as I got out of the Explorer. About who had ordered the hit on Brie, and who might really have killed Candace DiCarlo.

It was all coming together for me. I was pretty sure I knew what had happened, and I believed Jayne when she said that Tyler couldn’t have done it.

An idea came to me. A long shot. Might not amount to anything. Something that, if I was going to try it, I had to make the decision right then and there. It’d either work, or it wouldn’t. Time, and the thoroughness of Detective Hardy, would determine that.

I pulled on a pair of rubber gloves that had been sitting in the center console back from when we were going through the pandemic. I’d always slipped them on when I had to press all those buttons at the self-serve gas bar. They were tucked down there along with a couple of masks and a nearly empty bottle of hand sanitizer that I should have thrown out long ago. I snapped the gloves into place.

Hands in my pockets, I walked up to the house, saw the Volvo wagon in the driveway, and recognized it from the surveillance shots I’d gotten from the man who’d built the house on my old lot. That explained the flatbed truck. They were probably going to take the car away and subject it to a forensic examination.

The closest I could get to it, however, was the end of the driveway, because the property itself was marked off with police tape. The car was maybe ten feet away. A uniformed officer was standing at the end of the drive to make sure I wasn’t going to cross the yellow tape perimeter.

At the side of the house was someone in one of those get-ups you see them wearing in the crime shows. A hazmat suit. Conferring with someone else in the house. That explained the van parked in the street. These were the so-called scene-of-crime tech guys. Even when a case looked like a slam dunk—they already had Tyler in custody—the authorities wanted their case to be airtight. No stone left unturned, and all that.

Confident that Tyler had not killed DiCarlo, I was willing to try something that might steer the investigation away from him. Muddy the waters, as it were.

“Wow, what happened here?” I innocently asked the cop standing guard.

She gave me a friendly smile. “Sorry, sir. I’m not really at liberty to provide any details.”

I looked toward the end of the street. “Do you know if they’re closing off Rosemont completely?”

She followed my gaze as I took my hands out of my pockets. “Don’t know, sir.” She turned her head back to look at me. By then my hands were tucked away again. “I’m going to have to ask you to go back to your vehicle.”

“Sure thing,” I said, nodding respectfully.

I was ready to go, anyway. I’d done what I’d come to do. I returned to my truck and peeled off the rubber gloves.

I parked in front of Isabel and Norman’s house, a bland two-story built in the seventies. Norman’s Nissan was not there, so I figured he was still where I’d left him, no doubt enduring a barrage of questions from Detective Hardy. But Isabel’s car was there.

With Norman’s phone in my pocket, I went to the door and rang the bell. Isabel’s eyes popped when she saw who was standing there. It wasn’t like I’d dropped by to say hello very often in the last six years.

“What do you want?” she asked.

I held out Norman’s phone. “First of all, to return this. It’s Norman’s.”

She took the phone and, looking alarmed, asked, “Why do you have this? Is he okay? What’s happened?”

“He’s fine,” I said. “I know this is not a good time, that you’re probably making arrangements for your mother’s service. But I wouldn’t be here unless it was important. May I come in?”

I could have asked her to be my best friend and not received a more stunned expression. “Okay,” she said slowly.

She directed me to the living room. I sat on a La-Z-Boy chair, resisted the temptation to kick it back into a reclined position, and waited for Isabel to take a spot on the couch opposite me.

“Where’s Norman?” she asked.

I told her.

“What’s he doing up there?” she asked.