Page 19

A s I’m leaving Annette’s house, I notice a car pull up in front of the house, and Ander climbs out of the back seat. He stops a step up into the lawn and stares at the house, not moving past the crime scene tape. I call out to him, and he turns to watch me jog across the lawn toward him.

“How’s your mother?” I ask.

“She’s doing much better now. She wasn’t having a heart attack. They said it was a panic attack, and that can sometimes mimic the symptoms of a heart attack. They gave her some fluids and sedatives to help her calm down then sent her home,” he says.

“That’s good to hear,” I say.

“I was going to get that camera footage for you, but I don’t know if I’m allowed to go inside,” he says.

“Let me go talk to the detective,” I say. “The scene is still being processed, so they likely won’t want you to go inside, but I might be able to bring the computer out to you.”

“It’s in the office,” he says.

“I’ll be right back.”

I duck under the tape and nod at the officer, who lets me through into the house. Detective Fuller is in the living room on the phone when I walk in, but he quickly ends the call and steps up to me.

“Agent Griffin,” he says. “Have you found out anything new?”

“I confirmed with the police near Ander’s mother’s home that he was at the scene very soon after she called him, well within the amount of time they expected it to take for him to travel from here to there, and he was with her the entire time. The calls from him that are on Sabrina’s phone were made from his mother’s house. The officers saw him make them and then heard him mention to his mother that she wasn’t answering and needed to check on her.

“I also spoke with a couple of neighbors. One across the street said that she didn’t see anything and didn’t have much to say about them as a couple other than that they always seemed happy. The next-door neighbor was friends with Sabrina and told me that she thinks she heard a scream really early this morning, but she can’t be sure. She didn’t see anything either. She did tell me that Sabrina Ward thought she was pregnant.”

“That just adds another layer to the tragedy,” he says.

I nod. “Ander Ward just got back here from checking on his mother at the hospital. I know he can’t come inside right now, but I asked him to get me the footage from the camera at the front of the house. I’m going to get his laptop from his office and bring it out to him.”

“Hopefully, there will be something on it,” he says. “Right now all we have is the window that the perpetrator used to get inside, the messages written on the walls, and her body. No fingerprints, no weapon. Nothing.”

“We’ll find something,” I tell him.

I find the office and unplug the laptop, carrying it outside to Ander.

“Thanks,” he says. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to go back inside there.”

“You will,” I tell him. “It will be hard, but you will. Let’s sit in my car so we can have some air-conditioning while you pull up the footage.”

We get into the car, and I crank the air conditioner as he balances the computer on his lap. He goes through a few screens before eventually pulling up some grainy black-and-white footage of the front porch. The mailbox and street in front of it are just visible at the top of the screen.

“I’m not sure when that note got there, but I know it wasn’t there earlier in the day because it was sitting on top of the actual mail. Sabrina had forgotten to check it, which is why I did after work. The note was on top of the mail, that would have gotten there in the afternoon,” he says.

He scrolls back through a few hours and then goes forward.

“There,” I say when I see a car slide to a stop in front of the mailbox. An arm reaches out of the driver’s door to open it and put something inside. “Go back and show that again.”

Ander scrolls back, and we watch the car come up again. He moves the footage forward, and it shows a few minutes later when he walks out of the house to go check the mail.

“I was right there,” he says. “If I’d gone out just a few minutes earlier…”

“Can you get to this morning?” I ask.

Ander scrolls through the overnight hours and pauses when the camera picks him up racing out through the front door toward the driveway.

“That’s when I was leaving for my mom’s house,” he says.

“Go forward,” I tell him.

He slowly scans through the next couple of hours until his car shows up again and he walks into the front door. There’s nothing that shows someone approaching the house or going around the side to get to the window.

I grab my bag from the backseat and rummage through it, finally finding a thumb drive that I hand to him.

“Could you save that footage to this for me so I can review it again later?” I ask.

“Sure,” he says.

He saves the footage and hands the thumb drive back to me.

“What are you going to do now?” I ask.

He gives a bitter laugh and shakes his head. “I have no idea. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do. The world doesn’t make sense anymore.”

“You’re not going to be able to get back in your house today,” I tell him gently. “And it would be best if you weren’t alone. I recommend you go stay with your mother for at least a couple of days so that you have someone there for you.”

He nods. “I’ll probably do that. Helping her fix everything from the fire will be a good distraction.” He shakes his head and rubs his forehead with one hand. “How could this happen?”

“I’m going to find out,” I tell him. “I can escort you through the house to pack some things to bring with you.”

“Thank you.”

I go inside first and let the detective and officers know that Ander is coming through the house so they are careful what they say. This is already traumatic enough for him; he doesn’t need to overhear any gruesome commentary or theories. I can see his eyes scanning the messages written on the walls and encourage him to try to ignore them and keep going. In the bedroom, he looks around and suddenly breaks into tears, covering his face as his shoulders shake.

I put a reassuring hand on his back. “Let’s get you packed.”

He takes a duffel bag out of the closet and fills it with clothes, then goes into the bathroom and stops to stare at the towel on the floor. I can almost see the thoughts racing through his head as he thinks about his wife so vulnerable in the shower when the intruder climbed through that window into the house. Ander finishes packing, and we leave the house. I wait until he is in his car and driving away before I go back inside to talk to Detective Fuller.

“The camera on the front of the house has a very limited view. It really only shows the front porch and the street. There’s nothing showing the killer getting into the house. But there are time stamps showing when Ander left and when he came back. That bracelet she was wearing looked like a fitness tracker. My best friend has one just like it. The tracker itself is inside the little cage. It will show when her heartbeat stopped. That should give an accurate time of death,” I say. “It’s a tight timeline. Whoever did this was ready for it to happen.”

“We’ll keep canvassing the neighbors to see if anybody was up and saw anything,” he says.

“I’m going to look at this footage again and see if anything pops out at me. I’ll keep in touch.”

I leave the house and head back to Bellamy and Eric’s house.

Bellamy and Bebe are home, and I greet them before going into the guest room to get my computer and pull up the footage again.

“What did you find?” Bellamy asks, coming into the room.

“Ander Ward installed a camera on the front of his house after he started getting the threatening messages. It doesn’t have very much of a field, but it shows enough that he got footage of a note being left in his mailbox yesterday. A car comes up, someone reaches out and puts the note into the mailbox, and they drive away. Less than twelve hours later, his wife was dead. I’ve already looked at the footage a couple of times, and I didn’t notice anything, but I feel like there has to be something.”

Bellamy stands behind me and watches as I go through the footage again, watching the car drive up slowly to the mailbox, the arm come out of the window, and the note go into the mailbox. The camera isn’t great quality, so the footage isn’t particularly clear, and at the distance from the house, it’s impossible to get a clear view of the person in the car. I zoom in as much as I can, but the person is sitting back in the seat, almost like they are aware of the possibility of being recorded. I zoom back out, but Bellamy puts her hand on my shoulder.

“What’s that?” she asks.

“What?” I ask.

“Zoom out again. There’s something on the window.”

I move the footage in as far as I can and look at the sticker on the back driver’s side window. It looks like a logo for something. It takes me a few seconds, but recognition flashes through my head.

“I’ve seen that before,” I say. “That’s the logo for that low-cost car rental company, the one that rents old cars and ones that have been in accidents and stuff,” I say. “I saw a commercial for it.”

“Rent-a-Heap,” Bellamy says. “They aren’t too far from here.”

“Which means they aren’t too far from Ander Ward’s house,” I say.