LITMIR.BIZ

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so the gentleman I spoke with said there is no sign that the alarm was sounded last Friday morning,” Rhodes said. “He also pulled up their data timeline and said he didn’t see where the alarm had been disengaged at all. It wasn’t cut off by one of the Fairchilds at any point.”

      “Did he give you details on how it works?”

      “Yeah. The alarm kicks on when the door is opened with force. Opening with a key automatically disengages the alarm. When the door is opened from the inside, it is also disengaged. The only time the alarm would kick on other than someone essentially picking the lock or kicking the door open is if the door is left standing open for more than twenty seconds.”

      “In the few weeks they’ve been there, were there any instances of the alarm going off?”

      “He said there were two notes on their account. Both came from the first week they were living there. Intel gives courtesy calls when the alarms are triggered. On both of the calls, Mark Fairchild said they’d neglected to fully close the door while bringing in boxes and furniture as they were moving in.”

      “What about windows? Does the alarm work for windows as well?”

      “According to what I was just told, any time a window is opened from the outside, the system has to be deactivated. They gave an example of spring cleaning—making sure the windows and frames are all cleaned. If someone planned to do that sort of cleaning, they should kill the alarm first.”

      “But you’re saying there were no suspicious alarm triggers over the last week or so, right?”

      “Not a single one.”

      “So in other words,” Chloe said, “whoever killed Jessie Fairchild did not break in. They were allowed to come inside.”

      “Seems that way.”

      The car went quiet as they both pondered this. Chloe knew where they needed to start looking next. So far, all they truly knew about Jessie Fairchild was that ever since she and Mark had moved to Falls Church, she had been looking into how to get involved in local groups and organizations. New to town, neither she nor Mark had any real friends—and that meant most of the people they spoke to would be unreliable.

      But she also thought about a question that had come up earlier. Had the Fairchilds perhaps left their home in Boston because they had been running from something? If the investigation ended up taking them into the lives of the Fairchilds all the way back in Boston, this seemingly simple murder case could become a lot more convoluted.

      “No friends, no local family,” Rhodes said out loud as they neared DC. “A sister in Boston, both parents deceased. If this thing takes us into Boston…”

      Chloe grinned, pleased with how the two of them were starting to think along the same lines, at the same speed. “Well, wasn’t there a note somewhere in the file about a relative of Mark’s? Someone who lives right outside of Falls Church?”

      “Yeah, his uncle. But from what I gather, he’s on some kind of trip. A vacation, I think.”

      She answered it with the sort of nonchalance that made Chloe think Rhodes felt the same way about that potential lead as she did—that it wouldn’t come to much anyway.

      Closing in on home, Chloe slowly allowed herself to slip into more personal thoughts. She strongly considered calling Danielle to apologize for her behavior yesterday. But those kinds of conversations with Danielle typically turned into a rather long discussion, and she did not have the stamina for that.

      They returned to bureau headquarters, swapped out the bureau car with their own, and parted ways. Chloe once more thought about Danielle before she left; she even considered driving out to Danielle’s new place—an apartment she had rented just twenty minutes away after moving so her ex-boyfriend had no idea where she was living.

      In the end, she decided against it. She knew she and Danielle would be okay—that sometimes, it just took some extra time for both of them to cool down. Still…she had an hour before she needed to ramp down for the night. And with things at a standstill on the Fairchild case until morning, there was one other thing she could do that came to mind. The thought seemed to flip her insides, making her feel slightly sick, but the impulse was there and she acted on it almost immediately.

      She pulled out into the street and pointed her car toward her father’s apartment.

***

      She had no intention of actually seeing him, let alone speaking to him. But she needed to prove to herself that she was capable of even driving past his place. It would have to happen at some point if she wanted to check up on him so she may as well get over her nerves as soon as possible.

      His apartment was less than half an hour from bureau headquarters, and less than twenty minutes away from her apartment coming in from another direction. It was 10:08 when she cruised into the parking lot. His place wasn’t so much an apartment as a townhouse…the kind of home that was directly attached to another, and then another, in an apartment complex style. She knew the car he drove—a used Ford Focus—and it was parked directly in front of his place. A light was on, visible through the main window.

      She paused without parking, peering at that light and wondering what he was doing. Was he just watching TV? Reading, perhaps? She wondered if, when he cut that light out and got ready for bed, visions from his past flooded his mind…his daughters, his dead wife. She wondered if the torture and torment he had put them all through kept him awake some nights.

      She certainly hoped so.

      Anger started to rise up in her. It rushed through her, hot like injected venom, until she realized that her hands were gripping the steering wheel tight enough to show the whites of her knuckles.

      Maybe I should just go in right now, she thought. Knock on his door and lay it all out. Let him know I know what he did…that I read Mom’s diary…

      It was compelling enough to make her heart feel like it might burst out of her chest. A pleasant little rush of adrenaline plowed through her bloodstream as she considered it.

      But of course, she could not go there. Not yet…

      Chloe found the closest empty parking spot and used it to turn around. She headed for home, not realizing until she came to the first stoplight that she still had the steering wheel in a death grip.

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      It had been quite eye-opening for Danielle to realize that once her last relationship had ended, she found herself unemployed again. The bartending gig and the too-good-to-be-true dreams of running her own bar had been enough to float her through life for a few months but here she was again, without a man and without any sort of meaningful job.

      She’d always done a good job of masking her contempt for shit jobs, but this one was particularly difficult. She was bartending at a strip club—only the management was adamant about not calling it a “strip club.” They preferred either just “club” or “gentlemen’s lounge.” As far as Danielle was concerned, it didn’t matter what you called it. The fact of the matter was, there was currently a woman on stage, rhythmically shaking her ass in a man’s face to the beat of some shitty Bruno Mars song.

      She finished making the mojito a customer had just ordered (seriously, who orders a mojito at a strip club?) and handed it to him. He was about fifty and when he took the drink, he made no effort to hide the fact that he was checking out her boobs. He smiled at her and sipped from his drink, his eyes never leaving her chest.

      “You should be up on the stage, you know?” he said. Finally, he looked to her eyes, maybe so she could see the seriousness in his drunken gaze.

      “Wow. I haven’t heard that one before. What a unique pick-up line.”

      Confused, the guy eventually sneered at her and then moved away from the bar and took a seat closer to the stage.

      Yes, she’d had more than a dozen guys clearly baffled that she was behind the bar and not on the stage. Her manager was one of them. And while Danielle had endured enough demeaning jobs in the past, she drew the line at taking her clothes off for drunk men so

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