Thief River Falls

27

Denis Farrell.

When Lisa heard his name, she knew that he was at the center of whatever was going on. She wasn’t surprised at all. He was a ruthless, arrogant son of a bitch who treated the town of Thief River Falls like his personal empire. She’d already seen once before how he reacted to loss in his family. If his life had now been touched by the murder of his daughter, he would be the blackest kind of avenging angel.

She and Denis had been antagonists for more than twenty years. He hated her, and she knew it. To this day, he refused to be in the same room with her. Yes, she’d shamed him into taking action against the man who’d assaulted Shyla Dunn when Lisa was only a young nurse, but the bad blood between them went back much further than that. It really had very little to do with Lisa and everything to do with Denis’s son.

The golden boy. The inheritor of the legacy. The young man who was going to expand Denis’s reach beyond the flatlands in their little corner of the state to the capitol building in Saint Paul. And maybe beyond, to Washington, DC.

Daniel Farrell.

Danny.

Lisa could still remember the first time she’d met Danny’s father. She was fifteen years old, and she and Danny had only been dating for a few weeks when the county attorney’s assistant called to invite her to dinner. Not the two of them. Just Lisa. Danny had sarcastically told her that his father was a force to be reckoned with, but even that warning hadn’t prepared her for what was ahead. She remembered standing in front of Denis’s desk in that dark, baroque office of his and trembling as he lectured her in a booming voice about everything that was not going to happen.

You are not getting in the way of my plans for that boy.

You are not following Danny to college.

You are not marrying my son.

You are not going to be in his life after high school. Period.

At that point, Lisa did something that she still regretted. His verbal assault had left her feeling small and abused, and she’d fired back at him with two words. Screw you, she said. Only she hadn’t phrased it so delicately. No one said those words to Denis Farrell. No one, and certainly not a teenage girl. From that moment forward, their relationship had become a cold war. It was no longer just about Danny following The Plan. It was about making sure he never ended up with that girl.

She took no satisfaction in the fact that she’d ultimately won the war, because it was a contest in which there were no winners. In the end, Danny chose her over his father, even though it meant living with Denis’s near-total rejection. She hated the idea that she’d been the source of a permanent split between father and son. When Danny went off to California to fight the fires, he hadn’t spoken to his father in nearly a year. And they never would again.

She blamed herself for that, and she wasn’t alone. Denis blamed her, too. He blamed her for everything that had gone wrong. He blamed her for letting Danny go when she could have made him stay. For ten years, ever since Danny’s death, there had been almost no direct contact between them. There were days when she wished for a thaw, for a chance to put the past in the past, but that was never going to come.

Not now. Not after she’d taken his name and made him the villain in Thief River Falls.

Denis Farrell. County attorney. Murderer.

She’d intended it as a malicious joke, but she was beginning to fear that Denis was the one who was laughing.

Lisa knew where to find Fiona Farrell’s house. In many ways, it was a carbon copy of where Lisa had grown up. A corner house with the same floor plan. Two stories. Looking out across the front yard to the lonely railroad tracks.

She did what she’d done at home, parking the Camaro at the end of the block where it wouldn’t be seen. She crept through the backyards toward Fiona’s house and approached it from the rear. Like her own house, the construction dated back to before the war, but Denis’s money had made sure that his daughter lived in a nicer style. The house was neatly painted in bright white, with hardly a speck of dirt on it. Crossbeams on the gable gave it a Tudor look. The roof had the deep-black color of new shingles. The backyard, situated under trees whose leaves were as orange as fire, was manicured, with decorative rocks around a flower garden and a wooden shed painted white to match the house.

What was most noticeable now was police crime scene tape, strung from tree to tree and surrounding the entire yard.

Lisa took note of the neighborhood, but she didn’t see anyone watching the property. There were no police vehicles left to guard the house. The crime scene tape itself had pulled away and torn in places, thanks to days of wind and rain. The murder had happened more than a week earlier. There had already been time for an autopsy and for the body to be released and for Denis to bury his daughter.

She darted across the lawn from the shelter of the trees. She ducked under the sagging crime scene tape and made her way to the back door. There had been a lock there, but no longer. Someone had kicked the door in, leaving it broken, barely hanging on its hinges. No one had repaired it yet. More crime scene tape had been adhered in an X across the frame, but she had no trouble squeezing through it into the house.

It was cold inside. She went from the back porch into the kitchen, where the surfaces still showed the fine debris of fingerprint dust. Evidence markers remained in place. The first thing she noticed was that the forensic team had paid a lot of attention to the kitchen counter and particularly to a butcher block of white-handled knives.

One of the slots, the one for the largest knife, was empty.

Lisa continued into the living room. The furniture was modern, more Minneapolis than Thief River Falls, with a young woman’s eye for decor. She suspected it was a combination of Fiona’s taste and Denis’s credit cards. As she surveyed the room, she found her gaze drawn to the mantel over the fireplace. Fiona had kept framed photographs of her family there. Lisa plucked a tissue from a box on one of the end tables and used it to take each frame in her hand to look at the faces.

She recognized Fiona in a photo that had probably been taken in her college days. She had the family hair, sunny and blond, and blue eyes that were pretty but didn’t look happy. Life in the Farrell household wasn’t a recipe for contentment. Her big smile yearned for her father’s approval. She wore a white tennis outfit and held a racket in her hand, and Lisa noticed that a tennis trophy sat on the mantel next to the picture. Whatever tournament she’d been in, she’d won. That was the kind of performance that was expected of the Farrell children.

Next to that picture was another photograph of Fiona, years later. It must have been a recent shot, because she looked to be in her late twenties. There was no smile in this one. It was a professional portrait, obviously taken in a studio to look artsy, but it revealed more about the subject than she might have intended. Her blue eyes looked lost, staring over the camera at something she couldn’t find. Her left hand had its index finger over her lips, as if begging for silence. Her shoulders were bare, making her look naked and vulnerable. The intervening years must have been hard ones.

And then there was Denis. The portrait on the mantel showed him with his wife, Gillian, both of them elegantly dressed. He was in a tuxedo; she was in a long navy-blue gown. It was probably a fund-raiser of some kind. Denis wasn’t a big man, only three or four inches taller than Lisa, but he exuded toughness in his appearance. Danny had always said that his father prided himself on making the difficult choices that others wouldn’t. He never let emotion get in the way of practicality. But the consequences of those decisions were written in the deep lines on his face and in the painful expression as he tried to stand up straight. He’d spent his life like a statue staring down the elements, but sooner or later, even the hardest stone began to wear away.

Gillian had paid the price, too. Her eyes had the glazed look of a woman who wasn’t entirely there. Her smile was hollow. There had been a time, almost a year after Danny died, when Gillian had asked to see Lisa. Her late son’s fiancée. They’d met for lunch, not in Thief River Falls but forty-five minutes away in Crookston, obviously in the hope that Denis would never find out. It had been an uncomfortable meal. Gillian had drunk way too much. After they went their separate ways, Gillian had never contacted her directly again.

Lisa felt a wave of anger, staring at the two of them. Then she turned over the silver frame and undid the clips that held the photograph in place. She had no business removing anything from the house, but she took the picture of Denis and Gillian Farrell and tucked it into her pocket anyway.

She backed away from the fireplace. There were no other pictures on the mantel and none on any of the walls or on the tables around the living room. What struck her as strange were the pictures she didn’t see. Danny was invisible. He didn’t exist in Fiona’s house. There was nothing to suggest that Fiona remembered her brother at all. It was like the Farrells were somehow two entirely separate families, the one in Lisa’s memory, where Danny had lived and died, and the one in this other universe, where Fiona was an only child.

Someone else was missing, too.

Fiona’s husband.

Her left hand, so prominently displayed in the artsy photograph on the mantel, bore a simple gold band. She’d been married. And yet, like Danny, her husband was an invisible presence in the room. Every symbol of him and their married life had been erased. No pictures. No mementos of a wedding. No signs of a man in the house. A single woman lived here now.

A single woman who was dead.

Lisa looked around the room again, absorbing the details. Near a cherrywood end table, something small glistened on the lush carpet, like a diamond. When she went over there and bent down, she saw that it was a tiny shard of glass. There were a couple of other sparkling shards, too, buried in the pile immediately below the table. She noticed that the end table had a drawer, and using the tissue again, she opened the drawer.

There was another picture frame hidden inside. This one was shattered. Glass filled the drawer like sharp popcorn. An eight-by-ten photograph sat amid the glass. It was a classic wedding photo, Fiona in her white dress, her husband next to her in his black tux. He was a tall, muscular man, with very short black hair and a nose that looked as if it had weathered multiple fights. His lips were bent into a smile that didn’t come naturally to his face. He had a hawk’s eyes, piercing and observant. Lisa knew the type. A lot of women would find this man sexy and irresistible, the he-man, the boxer in the ring. For Lisa, he was the kind of man who would have sent her running for the hills.

Fiona had married him, but now he was a broken picture in her drawer. Lisa took the photograph, folded it up, and secreted it in her pocket along with the picture of the Farrells.

She knew she should leave before anyone discovered her. She’d hoped that the house might show her some kind of connection between Fiona’s murder and Purdue’s appearance in her life, but there was nothing to be found. It was time to go. But something kept her in this place, something she wanted to walk away from but couldn’t. There was an echo of horror in the house. Like a ghost was screaming at her.

She had never been here before, but it was almost as if she could see and hear what had happened in her head.

The stairs to the second floor were on the far side of the living room, and the echoes drew her there. Near the base of the stairs, she found more broken shards, not of glass but of ceramic. The pieces of a vase lay on the floor. Above her, on the fifth step, was an evidence marker. Whatever had been there had been taken away by the police, but she saw an image in her mind of a woman’s high-heel pump, sleek and black, lying forlornly between upstairs and downstairs. Lisa felt her heart beating faster.

She could picture the scene. In her imagination, she heard the thunder of running footsteps. A woman shouting. She heard the clatter of the vase tumbling to the floor; she saw Fiona escaping up the stairs and a man chasing her, grabbing her foot, coming away with a shoe.

Lisa went up the stairs slowly. She grimaced at the images flooding her brain.

At the top of the stairs, there was another evidence marker. She knew that was where the other heel had been stripped away in the chase. It pointed her toward a room at the end of the hall. This way. She saw a bedroom door, kicked in like the back door of the house, splinters of wood on the carpet. The doorway took her into the master bedroom, which was painted like a snow castle, all white, a king-size bed with a white comforter and white pillows, white curtains on the windows, white carpet. It looked like a winter fairyland, which was what made the other color so shocking.

Red.

There was blood everywhere. Blood on the bed, spatter on the walls and curtains, a vast crimson sea of blood in the middle of the carpet. Even closing her eyes, she could still see it. She could still smell it. Nausea rose in her throat.

He’d caught up with her right here.

Stabbed her.

Killed her.