at times.” I was hoping to bait Regan into talking about Sam, maybe revealing something about their relationship.
“Sam grew out of nothing, Harry,” Regan continued. “That something so complex and beautiful and unique could grow out of the beginning that Sam had is just amazing to me. He was full of potential. He refused to be what he should have been, another scavenger. It took a long time to understand what Sam did to me.” He struggled with the words. “For me.”
“You loved him, didn’t you?” I said. “You were in love with him. What did he do to you?”
Regan hung up on me. I saw a house through the trees before me, a car sitting in the gravel driveway. The lights in the house were off. With regret stinging in my chest, I approached the house and made a cautious circuit, looking for the best way in. I needed a car and a new jacket, and my food supplies were running low. I hated to steal from innocent people, but right now I had no choice.
As I shoved open a window left ajar at the side of the house, my phone beeped. The text message contained an address.
Chapter 33
KILLERS HAVE THEIR RITUALS. I’d seen them before. A murderer comes into a house and cuts the phone lines, turns all the family photos face-down, maybe tours the victim’s underwear drawer as he waits for her to return home from work. He draws the curtains. Sits on the living-room sofa in the dark and gets a feel for the house. The ritual allows him to do the deed, move on, and do it again. A well-practiced routine.
Cops have their murder rituals, too. They unfurl blue-and-white crime-scene tape and festoon the house and surrounds like they’re preparing for a party. They close off the street. Set up roadblocks. Video the cars, the people emerging curiously from their houses. They go in, turn the lights on, push back the blinds.
I crouched in the bush behind the house that had been identified in Regan’s text and watched the goings-on, well acquainted with everything that was happening and the reasons for it. The Nowra police had the scene but seemed to be holding off processing it, waiting for someone. They’d set up a perimeter around the house and gathered in a neighbor’s yard to smoke and chat under umbrellas. When a car arrived and two detectives got out, the most senior officer broke away and approached, hand out in greeting.
Whitt and a woman I didn’t recognize walked up and identified themselves before being led into the scene.
I gasped at Whitt’s appearance. Usually immaculate, his shirt and hair were rumpled and his eyes were restless, like he was afraid. He walked with a sharp, determined stride. It hurt to be so near to my friend and unable to go to him. I envisioned myself walking up from the back of the house and simply presenting myself to the Nowra officers. But I knew if I did that, I would be shoved in a patrol car and driven right back to Sydney, perhaps without even getting to talk to Whitt.
I had to know whose life Regan had taken. What he had done. I decided to wait.
The hours passed by with agonizing slowness. I knelt in the bush, huddling against a tree.
It was dark when three officers wheeled a stretcher from the house. I stood, resisting the urge to move closer. There was no telling who was dead—but the figure in the body bag looked to be female. Whitt and the red-haired woman he was with followed the body out, got into their car, and disappeared. If it was possible, Whitt looked even more awful as he walked toward the car, his head down, eyes searching the ground. I thought I saw a thin sheen of sweat on his brow, despite the chill.
As night fell, the Forensics staff left the house one at a time, taking with them their various envelopes and packages of samples. The lights flicked off. A pair of officers took up stations in the concrete driveway, visible from where I hid. The smoke from their cigarettes curled in the orange light of a streetlamp. As I expected, one of them walked away from his position at the front of the house and did a lap of the property every fifteen minutes, squinting into the dark, shining a torch over the bushes, causing me to duck. I counted off three of these patrol rounds and