showed up,” Tan said.
“Yes, then I showed up.”
After Kate woke, Agent Unger, with some assistance from Agent Tan, questioned Kate Priddy for about twenty-five minutes. She told them exactly what she’d told James before. Nothing more, nothing less. At the end of the conversation, when Kate’s eyes were starting to close, she said: “It’s me, I guess.”
“What’s you?” Agent Unger said.
“It’s my fault. They come to me, psychopaths. I’m like a magnet.”
“I don’t know everything right now, Kate, but I do know that none of this is your fault. None of this.” James decided that she liked Agent Unger, despite the flat-top haircut and what had to be a pretty serious gym addiction.
Back outside in the hall, Unger asked James what Kate had been talking about.
“She was attacked about five years ago by an ex-boyfriend. This was in England. He locked her in a closet and committed suicide, leaving her there.”
“Goodness.” Unger drew the word out, made it sound like a curse.
“Yeah.”
“But there’s no connection?”
“Not that we could find,” James said. “I think it’s just random, or maybe she is a psycho magnet, like she said.”
She’d said it as a joke, but Unger frowned, as though he was considering it. “Either way, poor thing,” he said, then added: “Are you going to tell her that it looks like Henry Wood had been hiding in her apartment for at least two days?”
James had already thought about this. The crime scene officers had found fingerprint evidence from Henry Wood all over the apartment: on food in the kitchen, in most of the rooms, on Kate’s possessions. They’d also found hair and DNA evidence that suggested he’d been sleeping underneath one of the beds in a guest room.
James, remembering Kate’s request that she be told everything, said, “Yeah, I’ll tell her.”
When Kate’s parents finally reached the hospital, it was just past visiting hours, but James escorted them past a uniformed officer into a private room, where Kate lay sleeping.
They watched her sleep for half an hour, not willing to wake her. “Let’s go check into the hotel, then come back,” Patrick Priddy said in a whisper to his wife.
“You check us in, darling, and I’ll stay here.”
But before Kate’s father had left, Kate opened her eyes, saw both her parents, and for the first time since she’d been admitted to the hospital, began to cry.
Corbin Dell was officially identified by his brother, Philip Dell, who had driven down from New Essex to make the identification. Detective James hadn’t met him, but she heard from the grief counselor who’d been present that he displayed no emotion whatsoever and kept insisting that he needed to return to his mother, who was not used to being left alone.
Philip Dell was questioned by the FBI. Abigail Tan told James that he’d never heard of a Henry Wood. When asked about his brother’s semester abroad in London, Philip Dell said that he hadn’t remembered his brother going to London at all. When asked about Rachael Chess, and Corbin Dell’s relationship with her, Philip said that Corbin’s sex life was no concern of his.
On the day that Kate Priddy was released from the hospital, she agreed to see Alan Cherney, who’d shown up that morning at the hospital the way he’d shown up every morning since Kate had been admitted. He entered Kate’s room, pale and nervous and holding a bouquet of paperwhites. Kate was sitting up in bed, drawing in a new sketchbook that her parents had brought to her the day before. She’d already sketched four nurses and two doctors.
“Thank you for the flowers,” Kate said as Alan handed them over. They were strong smelling, and Kate couldn’t stop herself from making a face as she placed the vase on her side table.
“They smell terrible,” Alan said. “Sorry.”
“No, they don’t. They smell better than this hospital room, anyway.”
“I heard you were getting out today.”
“That’s what they tell me, but I’ll believe it when it happens.”
“What are you going to do?”
“My parents have a suite at a hotel around the corner, so I’ll stay there tonight, I guess. Then I’ll go home.”
“You’re not going to stay and finish your courses?”
Kate laughed. “No, I don’t think so. Where would I even stay?”
“Well, you could stay with me, of course. It wouldn’t be a problem. I’d like it . . .”
“Thanks, Alan, but I don’t—”
“I totally understand. I just wanted you to know that there was an offer on the table. A real offer. I didn’t expect you to say