Page 27 of Her Last Refuge

Rachel took the wheel and meandered out into the early morning Richmond traffic. The day was forecasted to be overcast and it was already apparent. Everything had a muted gray quality as dawn slowly gave way to true morning. It was still early enough—5:47—that the streetlights still burned along the sidewalks. Delivery trucks moved through the downtown corridors with their headlights on. A few early joggers appeared near the river, their breath visible in the cool air. Rachel drove with the windows cracked enough to keep the drowsiness back, a trick she’d long ago learned worked remarkably well.

She watched the familiar highway signs slide past, and the denser blocks give way to the older residential streets. Novak sat quiet for most of the drive, eyes on the road ahead.

When he spoke up, he said: “If the staging at this house matches and it is related to our case, the facility was never the whole story.”

“I know,” Rachel said. And she did not like what that might mean. The two words were heavy enough to put an end to any further conversation and the car remained quiet until they reached the address.

The house was a modest one-story in a small and slightly aged neighborhood. Two patrol cars and an unmarked sedan already sat in the driveway and along the curb. A man in a robe stood near the front walk speaking with a uniformed officer. Yellow tape had already been strung across the porch steps and the entire scene had a very eerie feel to it.

Rachel parked and she and Novak wasted no time. The officer at the tape checked their credentials and lifted the barrier. Rachel overheard some of the conversation being had with the man in the robe and deduced that he was little more than a nosy neighbor.

Inside, the front room held three more officers and a thin man in his mid-seventies sitting on the edge of a sofa. He was hunched forward slightly, with his head buried in his hands and his entire body shaking. Soft, heart-broken whimpering came out of him and Rachel thought it might be one of the saddest sounds she’d ever heard. A woman sat beside him just inches away. Her posture and stoic face alone told Rachel that she was from victim service.

Their eyes met and Rachel asked: “This is the husband, yes?”

The woman nodded. “Yes. Mr. Mitch Brand.”

At the sound of his name, the old man looked up. His eyes were red and swimming. Something about the sadness in his gaze made him look both incredibly old and impossibly young. It was haunting.

“Mr. Brand,” Rachel said quietly. “I’m Agent Gift. This is Agent Novak. We’re very sorry for your loss and if you aren’t up for talking, I completely understand. Can you tell us what happened?”

To the old man’s credit, he tried. The words came in fragments, broken by tears and the effort of breathing through them. “I woke up… I don’t know, after five, maybe. The bed felt wrong.” Mitch’s voice cracked and he had to stop. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes for a moment before he could continue. “Cecilia was still there beside me, but she wasn’t…wasn’t warm. She wasn’t moving. Her hands were… they were folded like this, over her stomach, all neat. Like somebody had fixed them that way.”

He demonstrated the position with his own trembling hands, then let them drop. And then he let out a shuddering gasp.

“I shook her. I said her name a bunch of times and…and when she didn’t answer I…” He stopped to let out another sob. “She didn’t even…” He swallowed hard. “I called 911 and then I just sat on the floor next to the bed until the officers got here. I didn’t know what else to do.”

The last word, do, stretched out as Mitch let out yet another heart-wrenching sob. That was enough for Rachel. She wasn’t going to push this poor man anymore. However, she looked to the woman from victim services and nodded her head to the right. The woman nodded and, murmuring soft words to Mitch, gently guided him toward the kitchen so the front room could be cleared. Rachel watched him go—the narrow set of his shoulders, the way he kept glancing back toward the hallway as if his wife might still call for him.

Rachel then turned her attention to the house itself. The front room was tidy and cozy…but in that oddly comforting way old people’s houses sometimes felt. There was a safe quality to it, but everything also felt sort of fragile. A pair of recliners sat side by side, pointed at an outdated television. A low shelf held a row of paperback novels and a few framed photographs. Nothing appeared disturbed and there was no immediate sign of a break in or that anything was stolen.

She moved down the short hallway as Novak ventured into a small bathroom to have a look around. Rachel noted that when she stepped into the hallway, the motion light flickered on. The main bedroom came first along this hall. She saw that the medical examiner was already there, looking over a body on the bed. He stepped aside so Rachel and Novak could see.

Cecilia Brand lay on her back in the bed. The covers had been pulled to her waist and her hands were indeed clasped over her stomach exactly as the husband had described—exactly the way Ruth Durst and Howard Pelham had been arranged.

But then there were the marks on her throat. They were plainly evident and clear to see. They were broad, dark, and deep, the kind of bruising that came from sustained, forceful pressure. Rachel could literally see the shapes of the fingers that had strangled her.

The ME apparently saw the look of shock on Rachel’s face. “Those are not the hands of a seventy-five-year-old man,” the ME said quietly. “Not with this degree of force. Someone with significant strength did this.”

Rachel took in the rest of the room without touching anything. A novel lay open on the nightstand beside a pair of folded reading glasses. The closet door stood partly open, revealing neat rows of shirts and dresses. She spent another minute absorbing the ordinary details—the tissue box on the dresser, the glass of water on the nightstand, the way the quilt had been turned down on one side only. And then she stepped back into the hallway.

“The husband says he slept through whatever happened,” Rachel said to Novak. “So whoever did it was either really quick, or they did it elsewhere and returned her to bed.”

“Both are all kinds of messed up,” Novak commented.

Rachel nodded and continued down the hallway. Just a few steps away from the master bedroom, there was a spare room that sat adjacent to another, smaller bathroom.

The spare room sat at the end of the short corridor. The door was partly open. She stepped inside and flipped the light switch. There was a twin bed pushed against the wall. It was made, but there was a bit of disorder and wrinkles in the middle, as if someone had sat there recently. It would have had to be recently because nothing else in the room looked to have been touched in a very long time. Storage boxes were stacked along one wall and dresser stood opposite the bed, its top cluttered with magazines, books, and various clutter collected over the years.

A single window sat in the far wall, facing out to a back yard that was slowly lighting up with the morning sun. She crossed to it and examined the sill and frame carefully. Fresh scuff marks showed in the exterior paint near the latch. She didn’t even have to look very hard for them; they were right there, pretty much highlighted in the sunlight. When she tested the window it moved more easily than a properly locked window should, not setting in the frame securely at all.

From what she could tell, it looked as if someone had forced it from the outside. The marks were recent. There was no other obvious point of entry in the room. She looked back to the rumpled section of the small bed and wondered if that was where Cecilia Brand had been killed.

Novak appeared in the doorway behind her. “What do you have?”

“The window was forced open from the outside.” She showed him the scuffs and the damaged weatherstripping. She was now suddenly sure that this was linked to Ashford Glen victims…but she had no idea how.

Novak looked at the marks, then back toward the main bedroom. “So a break in and the same staging as we’ve seen at Ashford Glen,” he said. “Now what the hell do you think that means?”