CHAPTER 9

I lay in the bathtub and stared at the ceiling, Murder Unplugged playing through my earbuds. The lights in the massive bathroom were off, the only illumination coming from the candles, which lined the upper windows of the room and cast the all-white marble tile in a flickering pale-yellow hue. The tub was situated on the far end of the room, with entrances to the steam shower on one side, the closets on the other, and his-and-her sinks and vanities stretching down the back side.

I had special ordered the tub and waited almost two months for its arrival. It was solid copper, a focal point in the room, and matched the sink and cabinet hardware.

Grant would say my water was unbearably hot, but I liked it at that temperature. I enjoyed the painful contraction of skin cells as they panicked, recoiling in a way that rarely occurred from any other stimulus. What did it say about my husband that he was too weak of a man to stand a dip in hot water?

What did it say about me that I had chosen a man like that to marry?

Grant didn't used to be so weak. When I was in middle school, he was like a god to me. The bad-boy older brother who swore and snuck beers and had a car and ignored us, except for every once in a while, when his eyes would meet mine and the corner of his mouth would tug up and I would swoon inside. No male had ever made me feel the way Grant had, except for my father—and his love had come with conditions and boundaries and, always in the back of my head, the understanding that being a parent wasn't a choice but often a chore.

Sophie was often a chore and had never been my choice. The older she got, the more I was reminded of that fact.

I inhaled deeply and then blew out slowly, watching as the air shuddered over the top of the water. The podcast hosts were discussing Leewood's refusal to talk about the crime and reading out comments from listeners who were weighing in with their opinions.

"Here's the thing," Rachel said. "And listen up, because this is important."

I paid attention despite myself.

"I combed through all the homicides in a five-hundred-mile radius, and do you know how many similar crimes like this occurred in the twenty years surrounding 2002?"

Of course we don't, Rachel. What a stupid question to ask.

"Zero. So you either have a killer who swooped in, pulled off a three-girl slash attack without leaving any DNA or fingerprints behind while framing the father for the murder ... or ..." She drawled out the conjunction, then paused.

"Or Leewood was the killer," Gabrielle said in a hushed tone, as if she'd just broken the case wide open. It was hard for me to decide which one of these two airheads I liked the least, but Gabrielle was holding her own as a contender.

"Right," Rachel said grimly. "I mean, otherwise, there'd be more murders. This isn't a one-and-done sort of guy."

"Or girl," Gabrielle chirped. Of course she was a champion of female equality. I unhooked the loofah from its hook by the hand sprayer and poured a generous amount of rosemary oil onto it.

The podcast hosts had a point. In every murder, there needs to be a motive, unless the motive is the enjoyment of the crime itself. If Leewood was ever going to get off, we needed a caricature of a different suspect. There wasn't one with a motive—who would have the motive to kill three preteen girls?—so instead, it would need to be a psychopath. Someone who enjoyed killing for the sake of killing; someone who had committed the Folcrum Party crime, then retreated into hiding, content to let Leewood take the fall.

I reached over and pressed Pause on the audio, letting the idea soak in. After running the loofah slowly over my arms and shoulders, I dipped it into the hot water once more to refresh it.

This killer would need to have a fresh event to put him on the police's radar. Something that tied him to the original crime. Something that would cast enough doubt on Leewood's guilt to trigger an appeal.

A recreation of the crime would do it. Three new preteen girls. A twelve-year-old's birthday party. A dozen or so details that matched the old crime to the new.

I had some great details. I had Sophie and her piles of preteen friends. I even had her birthday, coming up in a few months. Her twelfth.

Too many conveniences for it not to be fate.

It could work. It could more than work. It could, if done right, kill multiple birds with one stone.

I moved the loofah over my breasts and imagined Leewood's eyes warm with appreciation, his voice husky as he thanked me for everything I'd done to set him free.

I beamed at the thought.