He did. He showed them a picture of her. He watched them leave, the red and blue lights flickering as they drove away.
It was after five in the morning. He would need to wake up Chelsey in an hour, and Hen still wasn’t home. And he’d have to explain somehow why there were no Mommy snuggles this morning and why he was the one combing Chelsey’s hair.
CHAPTER 19
The early-morning chill had a bite to it, but Zoe didn’t really mind. Once she started jogging, she’d mostly stop feeling the cold. She had a hat covering her ears and slim gloves for her fingers. Her nose would still feel like an icicle by the time she was done, but it was a small price to pay.
She used to hate jogging.
Andrea had dragged her a few times, when they lived in Boston, and Zoe had found the experience dreadful. Part of it, she had to admit, was that Andrea kept talking throughout their jogs, while all Zoe could do was grunt the occasional “Uh-huh” in between one labored breath and the next, her lungs feeling as if they were about to collapse into a black hole.
But ever since her ordeal in Texas the month before, she needed fresh air, and lots of it. She went for long walks at first, but that didn’t do enough to curb the bursts of claustrophobic panic that hit her randomly throughout the day. Those dissipated almost completely once she ran.
Andrea had explained over and over that she needed to stretch. Her sister had a list of what seemed like hundreds of stretching techniques, some so complicated they reminded Zoe of illustrations in the Kama Sutra. Zoe’s patience was just enough for a twenty-second stretch routine. Andrea had threatened her with terrible sports injuries, but Zoe decided, with zero evidence to support it, that her body wasn’t the kind that got injured while running.
So she did her three stretching exercises and began running. When they’d gotten to Chicago a week before, she’d quickly discovered one of the city’s best assets, as far as she was concerned—the Lakefront Trail. Better than any jogging route in Dale City.
It was still dark when she started, with a hint of blue dawn above the lake, the shoreline almost impossible to discern. A thin layer of clouds stood between the lake and the sky, a vista of ever-changing fluffy mountains.
Her mind worked differently when she ran.
Throughout the day, her brain churned and bubbled, a frothing soup of ideas and theories and unanswered questions. But when she ran, her thoughts quieted down, and she could focus on one thread, carefully reviewing it, thinking it through to the end.
She thought of Catherine Lamb’s gruesome murder. But this time, instead of focusing on the actual act, she considered the moments before. The two men, approaching Catherine’s house. Did they approach on foot, or did they drive there? Did they talk on the way? When they approached the door, did they walk side by side, or was one of them leading, the other behind?
It was difficult to imagine. The whole notion of Glover collaborating with another man was strange. Glover was a man who stalked and murdered alone. He hid under a carefully maintained facade of a nice, friendly man, someone you could have a drink with. And when he shed that facade, he didn’t allow people to see it. Obviously, he didn’t want to be caught. But there was more than that. Glover wanted to be liked.
When he was their neighbor, all those years ago, he’d gone out of his way to be friendly with her entire family. He would talk with her parents about politics, his opinions always matching her father’s. But if her parents argued about politics, he would quickly find merit in both sides and make them both feel pleased with themselves. He would ask for neighborly favors, cunningly figuring out that when someone did you a favor, they often began to like you more. And he’d been absolutely charming with Zoe, giving her what teenagers most wanted, a nonjudgmental listening ear. He wanted to be liked in the way a psychopath did. Not because he was remotely interested in anyone else, but because when someone liked him, it affirmed his positive opinion about himself. He watched people’s reactions to him like a man checking a mirror, verifying that he looked good.
And also because he judged human connections to be useful. And he was right. After all, didn’t the police