James returned to the waiting area where Alan Cherney sat, an unread book on his lap, a hopeful expression on his face.
“She’s not ready to see you yet,” she said to him.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll wait a little longer.”
“She didn’t recoil in horror when I mentioned your name,” James said, wanting to reassure him for some reason. She supposed she liked him, and not just because he had probably saved Kate Priddy’s life by convincing James to return to Bury Street. He’d been right about the scratch on Henry’s arm; the coroner said it had come from a cat.
Alan smiled. “That’s something.”
James moved out of earshot of Alan and called in to the station. The Bureau had descended in force, Abigail Tan replaced by a senior agent named Colin Unger, who looked like a model from a military recruitment catalog. James got through to her captain and reported on Kate’s condition.
“I’ll let them know she’s awake and ready to be questioned.”
“Let them know in a little while. She’s going to be overwhelmed.”
“You think she knows anything?”
“About what? Henry Wood? No, nothing. She knows what happened the night she was nearly killed, but that’s it. She told us all about it while she still had a knife stuck in her back. Oh, she wanted to know if Corbin was innocent.”
“What did you tell her?”
“Told her we’d talk later. She’s still pretty fragile.”
After hanging up with her captain, she thought of the Polaroid picture they’d found in the apartment that belonged to Henry Wood. It was of Corbin Dell, standing in the rain, above an open grave that contained the body of what looked to be a brunette woman. There was an old gravestone in one corner of the picture, suggesting that he was in a cemetery. Corbin, to James’s eye, looked about eighteen years old. It was hard to read the expression on his face; his eyes were maybe a little shocked, but he looked relaxed, his mouth parted slightly. It was that image that had been haunting James for the past thirty-six hours, even more than what she’d seen in Kate’s apartment, the bloodbath that was stopped when James took a man’s life with a single bullet. It hadn’t saved Corbin Dell, but her being there had probably saved Kate Priddy.
It was something.
Four hours later, Agents Unger and Tan arrived at the hospital to question Kate.
“You want me in there, as well?” James asked.
“We do,” Unger said. He had a slight southern accent. North Carolina was James’s guess.
“Okay. Happy to. We can’t wake her, but we can wait till she wakes up on her own.”
They didn’t have to wait too long. In half an hour a nurse came to tell them that Kate had woken and that she’d asked for Detective James again. In that half an hour, Abigail Tan filled James in on what they’d learned. Corbin Dell and Henry Wood had studied at the same program in London fifteen years earlier. Not only that, but there was an unsolved homicide from the time, an English student at the same business school they’d both attended by the name of Claire Brennan. She’d gone missing at the time when Corbin and Henry had both been in London, and her body had eventually been found, buried in an old graveyard in North London. No one had ever been arrested for the crime.
“Was she mutilated postmortem?” James asked.
“She wasn’t, no,” Tan said.
“Still.”
“Right, still.”
“What are you thinking right now? They killed women together?”
“That’s what it looks like,” Tan said. “Henry and Corbin meet in London and kill Claire Brennan together. They take pictures, then maybe do it again here in America. First Linda Alcheri, and then Rachael Chess.”
“Corbin Dell was out of the country when Rachael Chess was killed,” James said.
“Corbin Dell is supposed to be out of the country at this very moment, according to flight records.”
“Okay. Point taken. Then what? They kill Audrey Marshall together, and then Corbin Dell returns here so that they can kill his cousin? It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
“No, I know. It doesn’t,” Tan said. “We’re hoping Kate Priddy can help out.”
“She told me what happened on that night. According to her, Corbin was suddenly in her apartment. He woke her up and told her to hide in a closet, that a bad man was there. Those were his words. When she came out, Corbin was bleeding out on the floor and she was attacked from behind.”