You Betrayed Me (The Cahills #3) - Lisa Jackson Page 0,147

Valente’s phone?” he asked Deputy Taggert.

“Not that I know of.”

“I’ll call upstairs to Brown,” Mendoza said and punched in a phone number. Rivers knew she didn’t want to take the steps up to the apartment again, was trying to minimize any alteration to the snow pattern on the stairs in case the killer had left a footprint or some trace evidence.

Rivers asked Zena Wallace, “Did she ever send you something like this before? Any other suggestive pictures or—?”

“No!” Zena squeaked. “Are you kidding? It’s not like I’m a perv—or she is, for that matter. I mean, I never thought Willow would do anything like that. She’s kind of weird, like I said, a little quiet and shy. So . . . I don’t get this. I don’t get it at all. It’s just not like her.”

“. . . okay, thanks,” Mendoza said and disconnected. “No phone found yet,” and her gaze collided with Rivers’s as they both understood that the pictures of Willow with the gun were sent to Zena Wallace’s phone after Willow Valente was dead. So, no, she hadn’t offed herself, not without an accomplice. She had been murdered.

Mendoza glanced at Zena’s phone, where the picture of the nude girl gazing seductively into the camera was still in the frame. “That’s not Willow’s bed,” Mendoza pointed out. “Not the twin bed upstairs. Willow’s has different sheets too and a white headboard. This bed”—she pointed to the screen—“doesn’t have one at all. And is much larger. Check out how she’s sprawled across it.”

But the bed in the small image on Zena’s phone looked familiar. And then Rivers got it, and he felt a frisson of excitement surge through his blood.

Mendoza was asking, “You’re certain Willow doesn’t have a boyfriend?”

“I already told you: no!” Zena was shaking her head violently.

“One she might have recently broken up with?”

“I never heard of one.” She glanced out the passenger door window and ran the tip of her index finger over the condensation that had collected, despite the efforts of the cruiser’s heater.

“What about James Cahill?” Rivers asked.

“What? Are you nuts? No! Geez, I don’t know how to say it any clearer!”

But Rivers recognized the bed in the picture, where a nude Willow was staring provocatively into the camera’s eye, as belonging to Cahill. He’d seen it when going through Cahill’s house.

“Oh, Lordy,” Zena sighed. She fought a new spate of tears.

“What?” Mendoza asked.

“I wasn’t lying when I said she didn’t have a boyfriend, but she did have this major crush on James. She was half in love with him.” Zena started shredding the tissue again. “Well, maybe more like totally in love with him. But it was a complete fantasy.”

“How so?” Mendoza prodded.

Zena rolled her expressive eyes. “He, like, doesn’t even know she exists. Or . . . existed. It was like she was invisible to him.”

“But you know she had a crush on him?”

Nodding, Zena blinked back tears. “Oh, yeah.”

“So why would she be in his bed?” Rivers asked. “With a gun?”

Zena looked absolutely miserable and dabbed at her eyes with the shredded Kleenex. “I don’t know,” she said, “but as I said, she’s a little weird.”

“Does she have any friends or family in the area?”

“I don’t know.” She thought for a second, her forehead wrinkling. “Wait. She never talked much about her folks, but she has a sister.”

“Do you know her name?”

“No. Just that she lived in Tacoma, I think . . . or maybe it was Everett, somewhere on the other side of the mountains. She never called her by anything other than ‘Sister.’ Not ‘my sister,’ just ‘Sister.’ I joked once that I thought maybe her sister was a nun, but she didn’t seem to think it was very funny.” She rubbed her slightly protruding belly and started to cry softly again. “This is so awful.”

“Maybe Fern,” Mendoza supplied. “Could that be her sister’s name? Fern Smithe?”

Zena thought. “Maybe . . . yeah. I heard her say that name once in passing—that it was Fern’s birthday or something.”

They asked a few more questions, but got nothing more. The ME arrived, and a couple of minutes later, the crime-scene team in their van pulled into the lot, waved through a growing crowd of onlookers by one of the deputies.

Rivers eyed the crowd, wondering if the murderer could be hiding in plain sight in its midst.

It wouldn’t be the first time a killer had come back to get his rocks off by watching all the hoopla he’d created. In the short