sit in my car beside Officer Berg, about signs of forced entry—a broken window, a busted doorjamb—or blood. Was there blood at the scene? Or defensive wounds, maybe, on Morgan’s hands? Did she try to fight her intruder off?
Or maybe the little girl saw the attacker or heard her stepmother scream.
I don’t ask Officer Berg any of this. It’s been over twenty-four hours since the poor woman was killed. The etched lines on his forehead are deeper today than they were before. The pressure of the investigation is weighing on him, and I realize then: he’s no closer to solving this crime than he was yesterday. My heart sinks.
Instead I ask, “Has Mr. Baines been located?” and he tells me that he’s on his way, though it’s a twenty-some-hour trip from Tokyo with layovers at LAX and JFK. He won’t be home until tonight.
“Have you found her cell phone? That might give you something to go on?” I ask.
He shakes his head. They’ve been looking, he says, but so far they can’t find her phone. “There are ways to track a missing cell phone, but if the phone is off or the battery is dead, those won’t work. Obtaining a warrant for records from a telecommunications company is tedious. It takes time. But we’re working on it,” he tells me.
Officer Berg shifts in the seat. He turns his body toward mine, knees now pointed in my direction. They bump awkwardly into the gearshift. There are raindrops on his coat and his hair. There’s icing on his upper lip.
“You told me yesterday that you and Mrs. Baines never met,” he says, and I have trouble snatching my eyes from the icing as I reply, “That’s right. We never met.”
There was a photograph online of the woman. According to the paper, she was twenty-eight years old, eleven years younger than me. In the photo, she stood surrounded by her family, her happy husband on one side, stepdaughter the other, all of them dolled up in coordinating clothes and wreathed in smiles. She had a beautiful smile, a tad bit gummy if anything, but otherwise lovely.
Officer Berg unzips his rain jacket and reaches inside. He removes his tablet from an interior pocket, where there it stays dry. He taps on the screen, trawling for something. When he finds the spot, he clears his throat and reads my words back to me.
“Yesterday you said, I just never found the time to stop by and introduce myself. Do you remember saying that?” he asks, and I tell him I do, though it sounds so flippant now, my words coming back to me this way. A bit merciless, if I’m being honest, seeing as the woman is now dead. I should have tacked on an empathetic addendum, such as, But I wish I had. Just a little something so that my words didn’t sound so callous.
“The thing is, Dr. Foust,” he begins, “you said you didn’t know Mrs. Baines, and yet it seems you did,” and though his tone is well-disposed, the intent of his words is not.
He’s just accused me of lying.
“I beg your pardon?” I ask, taken completely aback.
“It seems you did know Morgan Baines,” he says.
The rain is coming down in torrents now, pounding on the roof of the car like mallets on tin cans. I think of Otto all alone on the upper deck of the ferry, getting pelted with rain. A knot forms in my throat because of it. I swallow it away.
I force my window up to keep the rain at bay.
I make sure to meet the officer’s eye as I assert, “Unless a onetime wave out the window of a moving vehicle counts as a relationship, Officer Berg, I didn’t know Morgan Baines. What makes you think that I did?” I ask, and he explains again, at great length this time, how he canvassed the entire street, spoke to all the neighbors, asked them the same questions he asked Will and me. When he came to the home of George and Poppy Nilsson, they invited him into their kitchen for tea and ginger cookies. He tells me that he asked the Nilssons what they were doing the night Morgan died, same as he did Will and me. I wait to hear their reply, thinking Officer Berg is about to tell me how the older couple sat in their living room that night, watching out the window as a killer slipped from the cover of darkness and into the Baineses’