What Have You Done Read online

  After leaving Sean’s house, doubts had begun to creep into his mind about his innocence and his theory that he was being framed. He still couldn’t recall anything about the night Kerri was murdered, and although his heart wouldn’t let him believe he could do such a thing, facts were facts. Everything pointed to him.

  Liam walked to the closet and pulled his Timberlands out into the hall. He remembered Vanessa yelling about him leaving them out the morning after he woke in the tub. That could only mean he’d been wearing them the night before. Part of him wanted to run from whatever he might discover, but he had to know. There was no other way.

  Inside the spray bottle was luminol. He sprayed each boot, covering every inch of surface and sole, a process he’d done countless times at countless crime scenes. Now he was doing it in his own home. He rushed back to the bag and pulled out a black light that he plugged into the wall next to the side table and knelt down. He took a deep breath and then turned on the light.

  Luminol was a substance that bonded with the hemoglobin in blood and created a light-producing chemical reaction that made traces of blood glow. Without special chemicals to thoroughly wash it away, blood could remain on things for years. Liam watched helplessly as both boots glowed in the black light, the blood illuminating his guilt. A feeling of helplessness overwhelmed him. How could he be innocent? After everything he’d found, how was it possible at this point?

  “What’re you doing down there?”

  Liam quickly straightened up. “Nothing,” he replied. “Cleaning my boots.”

  Vanessa was at the top of the stairs, watching him. “With what?”

  “Leather cleaner.” He cleared his throat. “That was a quick shower.”

  Vanessa came down a few more steps. “I had to get my brush from my pocketbook.” She was at the bottom landing now. “What’s with the light?”

  “Nothing. I wanted to make sure the waterproofing stuff I put on hadn’t come off. It’s an old trick I learned from work.”

  “So you need a black light for that?”

  “It helps.”

  “Is all that glowing stuff the waterproofing?”

  Liam shut the light. “Yup.”

  Vanessa stared at him for what seemed like an eternity, then shrugged and pointed. “You missed a few spots.”

  “I know. That’s why I was checking with the light.”

  She walked over to her pocketbook and retrieved her brush. “What happened to the Chinese?”

  “I thought I had a few minutes. I’ll order it now.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” Liam replied, forcing a grin he knew looked both fake and stupid. “Why?”

  “You look like you’re about to have a panic attack or something.”

  “I’m fine. Sometimes the fumes from the cleaner get to me. Hard to breathe.”

  “You know you can talk to me about anything, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “Whatever might be bothering you. We can talk. That’s what we need to do to keep us going. If you need me, I’ll be there for you. From now on I’ll always be here for you. You’re all I have, Liam. You’re all that’s left in my life. If something’s bothering you or you need to talk, please. I’m here.”

  Liam nodded but said nothing more. Finally Vanessa turned away and started back up the stairs.

  “I’ll meet you upstairs. With Chinese.”

  “You got it.”

  He watched her as she went and then listened for the bathroom door to close again. When it did, he threw his shoes back in the closet, unplugged the black light, and placed the items back in his bag. He ran to the television and turned it on, flipping through the memory on the DVR until he got to Saturday night. Just as Vanessa had said, Jaws had been viewed from nine thirty until eleven thirty. He dropped the remote and fell onto the couch. His life was crumbling, and he had no idea how to stop it. His boots had Kerri’s blood on them. With everything else, what more proof did he need? How could there be any doubt? His only hope was to find something when he traveled to Delaware tomorrow to look at the other victim. But he was clearly running out of tomorrows.

  It looked as though Liam could, in fact, be guilty of murder.

  32

  The screams sent shivers down his spine, freezing him in place as he sat up in bed. Even with his eyes still half-closed and his mind still somewhat dormant, he knew it was Liam. He was having another nightmare.

  Sean pulled the covers away and hopped onto the floor as his brother’s cries pierced the otherwise quiet house. He half jogged, half stumbled out of his bedroom and down the narrow hall, pushing himself to keep moving forward when what he really wanted to do was cover his ears, curl up in a ball, and yell at his brother to shut up. But he knew he couldn’t do that. His grandmother hadn’t been feeling well this past week, and getting woken up like this wouldn’t be good for her. It was Sean’s job to get in there and stop the screaming. It always was.

  Sean threw Liam’s bedroom door open and rushed inside, his bare feet slipping on tiny Matchbox cars and hard plastic superhero figures that were scattered across the floor. He fell onto Liam’s bed and took his brother by the shoulders, shaking him.

  “Liam! Liam, wake up! Wake up. It’s just a dream.”

  Liam continued with a few more screams that then turned into whimpers.

  “Wake up, buddy. You’re okay.”

  A ten-year-old Liam finally opened his eyes and focused on his big brother. Perspiration matted his hair to his forehead, his skinny chest rising and falling with deep, ragged breaths.

  “Sean?”

  “You were having another bad dream.”

  “Did I wake Grandma and Grandpa?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “And this is real life?”

  Sean smiled. “Yeah, this is real life.”

  Liam propped himself up on his elbows and looked around the room. “Can you turn on the light?”

  Sean walked back toward the door and fumbled in the darkness until his fingers found the light switch. He turned it on and could now see the booby traps of toys that he’d tripped over on his way in. The room was a mess. Clothes that should’ve been in the hamper were thrown over his desk. Liam’s extra pillows had ended up against his closet. Picture books lay open on the floor, the pages dog-eared and worn. A small stack of photos was on top of the desk, next to the clothes. Their mother and father.

  “I had a dream about Mom,” Liam said.

  “Yeah, no kidding. You been looking at these pictures before you went to bed.”

  “I found them in one of my books. I didn’t do it on purpose.” He fell back against his pillow and stared up at the ceiling as he spoke. “She was like she was . . . that day, you know? All sick and scary. She was chasing me around the living room, and Grandpa was on the couch reading the paper, and you were at the dining room table doing your homework, and Grandma was making spaghetti in the kitchen. None of you would help me. I kept calling out, but it was like you couldn’t hear me. Or you were ignoring me. And Mom kept coming. She kept chasing me and wanted to throw me in the tub. You wouldn’t help me.”

  Liam started to cry, and Sean came over to the bed. He pulled his little brother against him so he could hug him.

  “I would never do that. I would never ignore you. It was just a dream. I’ll always be there for you. Always. Whenever you need me, you call me, and I’ll be listening. I’ll hear it.”

  “You promise?”

  “Of course I promise. We only have each other, Liam. So because of that, we only have each other to count on. I’ll be there for you, and you be there for me. Got it?”

  “I guess.”

  Sean kissed his brother on the head.

  Liam looked up at him, his eyes still glassy from crying. “Do you think you can stay here with me until I fall back to sleep? I keep thinking about Mom. I’m scared.”

  Sean maneuvered himself next to Liam on the small twin bed and kicked his long legs under
the blankets until they were covering both boys. He pulled half the pillow over to his side and flopped an arm over his brother’s chest.

  Without another word, Liam and Sean closed their eyes and fell asleep. The night pressed on, unimpeded.

  Sean was in the basement sitting at his workbench when his cell phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket, glanced at the number. Vanessa.

  “Hello?”

  “We need to talk.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Vanessa spoke in a whisper. There was an urgency about her. Her breath came in short bursts. “It’s about Liam.”

  Sean closed the toolbox he had open in front of him and pushed himself off the stool he’d been sitting on. “Where are you?” he asked.

  “I’m at home. In the bathroom. Liam’s downstairs.”

  “What’s going on?”

  Again, there were a few short breaths before she spoke. “His boots.”

  “What about them?”

  “Wait, I think I hear him coming. I have to go. I can’t talk now. Meet me tomorrow.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “I said I have to go. I’ll call you tomorrow. He’s coming.”

  “Tell me!”

  The line disconnected, and Sean was again in the silence of his basement. He redialed and waited, but it immediately went to voice mail. He hung up and dialed again. Voice mail.

  “Dammit.”

  He tried one more time. Vanessa didn’t answer. He hung up and stared at his phone, waiting to see if she’d call back. After a few minutes, he knew she wasn’t calling, so he stuffed it in his pocket and sat back down on the stool in front of the workbench. What had she seen? What was going on?

  33

  There was a bit of traffic, so the drive from Center City to Wilmington took a little over an hour. During that time, there wasn’t much conversation with Jane, who kept busy by studying Kerri’s file and comparing it to the victim they were about to see. The victim was known on the streets simply as JB and had been working a certain section of the city for about four years. She’d been arrested several times for loitering and solicitation, but nothing heavy. On the night she was killed, she was working the corner of Hay Road and East 12th Street, just under Interstate 495. She worked that area alone, and no street cameras were operational in that section of the city, so who she went with, and at what time, remained a mystery. She was found the following morning in a motel on Bowers Street, several miles away from where she was picked up. There had been no next of kin, so JB was buried near the railroad tracks in a city cemetery primarily used for inmates with no families, homeless people who couldn’t be properly identified, and the occasional Jane and John Doe the department came across.

  Liam drove in almost absolute silence. He thought about the mounting evidence that pointed to him, the fact that he still couldn’t remember anything from the night Kerri was killed, and the latest discovery that his boots were stained with blood. Even the victim they were driving to see was surrounded in more mystery than he could handle. Sean was right; Vanessa had been at a medical convention for her hospital the weekend of Valentine’s Day, and Liam had been alone at the house. Theoretically, a drive to Wilmington and back, even with a brutal murder crammed in between, wouldn’t have been that big of a time crunch. He strained to try to recall exactly where he’d been that weekend, as the thought of someone else framing him for Kerri’s murder began to fade. All he could remember was watching TV alone at the house. No way that would hold up in court.

  Detective Grimley was standing outside the medical examiner’s office when Liam and Jane pulled up. He was a portly man, forties, whose thick beard swallowed the rest of his face, leaving only tiny black dots for eyes recessed in the back of his skull. He smelled of cigars and cheap cologne. Strands of thinning brown hair tossed about in the morning breeze. His dress shirt had the remnants of an old stain under the breast pocket. Exploded pen, no doubt. Happened to the best of them.

  Introductions were brief but friendly, made in the parking lot before the local detective led the way inside the building. They walked down a narrow corridor made up of sky-blue subway tiles and what had once been a bright-white grout that had stained to a nasty mustard yellow over the years. Fluorescent lights hovered above. The space was completely functional. No room for anything other than the task at hand.

  Grimley pushed through a set of double doors and ushered his guests inside. The medical examiner was standing over the exhumed body of JB, who was lying on the stainless steel operating table, a sheet covering her body.

  “Here she is,” Grimley said. “Just like you asked.”

  Liam walked toward the girl and could feel his heart beating in his chest. His body was shaking, so he kept moving. He didn’t want the others to see.

  The medical examiner took out his file and opened it. “I know you guys wanted a tox screen and autopsy,” he said. “We didn’t do one originally, and she’s been embalmed, so we’re going to have to take bone samples and go from there. Results will take a bit longer, but that’s the only option we have at this point.”

  “No tox at all when you first found her?” Jane asked. “Not even a general screen?”

  “No.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “It was coded as a homicide when she came in with clear cause of death being strangulation. She was a prostitute, and we could see how she died. At the time, we didn’t think anything more was necessary. Obviously we had no idea this could’ve been a part of something bigger.”

  “I get it,” Liam replied. “Hooker with no next of kin to care that she’s dead. No one to ask any follow-up questions. Get her in the ground and move on. Don’t waste the taxpayers’ money. We would’ve done the same thing.”

  Liam pulled back the sheet that was covering the girl. A small squeak of breath escaped from his pursed lips. It was as if he were staring at Kerri all over again. The haphazard nature of the hair cutting. The neck that was just slightly out of place from the noose. It was all so horrifically familiar.

  “According to some old ID we found at an apartment she shared with a handful of other girls, her name was Jamie Buffucco,” Grimley said from the edge of the room. “She was found hanging from a ceiling fan in the motel room by the cleaning crew the next morning. Uniforms cut her down, and my partner and I spent about a week following up on leads that went nowhere. No one saw anything. She worked her area alone, got picked up, and was found dead the next day. We went to the address on her ID, but no one there knew who she was, and no one in the area knew her, either.”

  “And nobody saw anything at the motel?” Jane asked.

  Grimley shook his head. “No. Guy who checked in paid cash and left a fake name. Elvis Costello. No one saw the girl.”

  “Elvis Costello,” Jane said. “Sounds like our guy.”

  Liam couldn’t take his eyes off the victim. “She was probably unconscious in the car. This motel the type of place you drive right up to your room? No lobby to walk through?”

  “Yup.”

  “Then no one saw anything.”

  “We did the best we could with what we had,” Grimley said. He closed his file. “The trail went cold at the motel. We filed unsolved soon after.”

  Jane walked up and stood next to Liam. She pulled pictures of the crime scene at the Tiger Hotel from her file and held them up next to JB’s body on the table. They were almost identical. “I think he was practicing,” Jane whispered to herself.

  Liam turned. “Say again?”

  “He was practicing. This girl was a nobody. She was a hooker, a throwaway as far as he was concerned. Kerri wasn’t. Kerri had a family, a job, a life. The killer had one chance to get it right with her, and he didn’t want to screw it up.” She looked at Liam. “So he drove down here, picked an anonymous woman no one would miss, and practiced on her. He did everything to this girl he would eventually do to Kerri to make sure he got it right. This girl was the sketch before he put actual paint to canvas.
He cared enough to want to murder her exactly the right way. After all, she was the mother of his child. She was special. He didn’t want to screw anything up.”

  Liam slowly reached down and brushed a few strands of the girl’s hair from her brow. He tried desperately to recall her features, to see something that might be familiar, but there was nothing. He was certain he’d never seen this girl in his life.

  “You might be right,” Liam replied. “He was either practicing, or we have a serial killer no one’s picked up on yet. Kerri Miller could’ve been the prize, or she could’ve just been another victim like this girl here. Could be a crime of circumstance instead of one where he was working his way up to a victim who counted for something. We just don’t know.” He walked to Grimley, who was still standing near the examination room doors. “Can you take us to the motel and the area of town where this girl normally worked?”

  “Sure. Not certain what you think you’re gonna find, though. Must’ve been a dozen rain- or snowstorms since then to wash away any evidence.”

  “I’m not looking for evidence. Just want to get a general sense of the town. Put myself in her shoes. See what she saw.”

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  What Liam wasn’t telling any of them was that he needed to see the motel and the area where JB worked to see if there was a memory that would jog loose or if his world would continue to drown in waves of amnesia.

  He needed to see if this girl’s death could, in any way, point to him.

  34

  The men sat around a large conference table on the executive floor of the precinct. Sean, Lieutenant Phillips, and Sean’s PBA lawyer, Paul Brown, sat on one side. The detectives from Internal Affairs, Farmer and Nix, sat on the other. Paul Brown was an older man, perhaps in his sixties. He had a thick mat of white hair and a matching white mustache that dominated his face. Nix was short, balding, and slightly unkempt. His tie was pulled down a bit, his top button unfastened. Farmer was taller and more physically fit than his partner. His suit fit him well, his tie appropriately up under his collar. Cuff links glistened in the overhead lighting.