Page 29 of Her Last Refuge

CHAPTER TWENTY

The pastry shop two blocks from the Brand house had the soft, cinnamon-rich smell that, for some reason, always made Rachel think of Christmas. She’d smelled it as soon as they got out of the car and it practically embraced her when they stepped inside. Yes, coffee was often her fuel on cases like these, but cinnamon rolls and pastries were another kind of drug altogether.

Inside, the interior lights were low enough that the glass reflected the street outside more clearly than the room within. A handful of customers occupied the scattered tables—two nurses in scrubs finishing a quick meal before a shift change, an older man reading a folded newspaper, and a young woman with a laptop open and a half-eaten muffin beside her keyboard.

Rachel and Novak moved quickly to the counter as Rachel already spied a perfect corner-seat for the monotonous work they were about to put in. She ordered a large coffee and a pecan cinnamon roll she was not certain she would finish. Novak took a cheese danish and the largest black coffee on the menu. They carried everything to the table she had spotted, situated just perfectly enough so that no one passing by would get a glimpse over their shoulders at what they were looking at. Rachel set her bag on the empty chair beside her and sat down. She wrapped both hands around the paper cup and let the heat work into her fingers, as if preparing them for the research they were about to conduct. The long night sat in her shoulders and behind her eyes. Sleep felt distant, a small and annoying thing now that she had a proper coffee and a cinnamon roll.

She tore a small piece from the edge and set it down again without eating it. The pastry was flaky and still warm. Her appetite had not recovered from the scene at the Brand house, no matter how tempting her breakfast looked. She could still hear Mitch Brand’s broken voice, and she could still see the dark marks on Cecilia’s throat. All of it still felt too close. She took a careful sip of coffee and watched Novak settle into his own chair across from her.

“Three victims,” she said once he had taken his first bite. “No longer in the same building, but within the same city. Actually, within about twelve miles of one another. But that’s about all we can say with any certainty right now. Ruth Durst and Howard Pelham both lived at Ashford Glen. Cecilia Brand lived across town in a private home. No shared facility that covers all three. No family connection that we know of. No church groups, social clubs, or volunteer organizations that put them in the same rooms at the same times.”

“So let’s get to looking,” Novak said through a mouthful of food.

Rachel finally managed a bit of her cinnamon roll, finding it as delicious as it looked. Then, before turning her attention to digging into the pasts of three dead people, she took out her phone and sent a text in a group thread to Paige and Jack. She simply told them good morning and then, because she wanted to inject a little brightness into the morning, she snapped a picture of her cinnamon roll and sent it, too.

Paige responded right away, likely having only been up for a few minutes. Lucky! She responded. Jack replied a few seconds later with: Yeah, looks like you’re hard at work…

She smiled, allowed herself to miss them for a few seconds, and turned her attention and focus back to the case.

“I keep coming back to a personal grudge,” Novak said as Rachel pulled up the bureau’s mobile database on her laptop. “Something unique to each of them, maybe. But something about the staging seems almost…I don’t know…personal to me. Hands folded. Bodies arranged like they were already at rest. Like the killer did nothing wrong. It could be a signature more than a single shared motive.” He shrugged and popped more Danish into his mouth. “Feels like a grudge.”

Rachel considered it and thought it was a good theory. Then again, a grudge of some kind was generally at the core of most murders. She didn’t want to make the mistake of simplifying what this killer was doing. “That is possible,” she said. “But I can’t stop thinking about the things they said before they died. Ruth asked Donna Pryce to forgive her one more than one occasion. Donna said Ruth never explained what for, only that she needed forgiveness and that she was upset when she said it. And Howard, in one of those brief clear moments, told Yates that no one could prove anything. The words were specific. Cold, even.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty damned creepy, actually.”

“Those do not feel like ordinary guilt loops to me,” Rachel said. “Dementia patients get stuck on old feelings all the time, from what I understand. But the timing feels too clean to me. Ruth starts asking for forgiveness the same week Howard moves into the facility. Then both of them end up staged the same way. Cecilia receives the same treatment in her own bed on the other side of the city. I think those words are a memory. Quite possibly a shared one.”

“So how do we link Ceceilia to two at Ashford Glen?”

“No idea.”

Novak considered that while he finished the danish. He crumpled the empty paper and set it aside. “Shared memory is a theory worth testing, though. Let’s see if the backgrounds give it any weight.” He snickered and added, “It would sure as hell be the weirdest link between victims I’ve ever come across.”

They fell into silence after that, each taking on their own lane of research. The pastry shop gradually grew busier as the morning wore on, but Rachel was able to shut out the background noise once she was fully zoned in to the research.

She started by logging into the Bureau’s mobile database and began with the small amount of data they already held. Ruth Durst, born Ruth Malone. Howard Pelham. Cecilia Brand, born Cecilia Harrison. She worked backward through the decades, filtering for any period when their addresses, employment records, or property listings might have overlapped in a meaningful way. School enrollments. Old driver’s licenses. Property tax records. Early employment histories. Most of it remained ordinary and disconnected, but this job had taught Rachel that even the most mundane things could be hiding something significant. Digging further, she saw that they all went to different high schools, and had different first jobs—though they did all appear to be Virginia natives. During their adult lives, they’d all lived in different towns for long stretches of time, never overlapping until Howard and Ruth came to Richmond to stay at Ashford Glen.

She nearly stopped there, but decided to go back even further. She’d checked colleges and high schools, but maybe there was something further back. She kept pushing further into the late 1970s and early 1960s, the years when all three would have been young adults with fewer fixed roots.

The search moved slowly because there wasn’t much to find. Each new filter she applied and ran returned another set of partial matches that failed to line up. Rachel sipped the cooling coffee and adjusted her posture against the stiff chair. She reached for another bite of cinnamon roll and realized she’d eaten it all at some point. She wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing that she didn’t remember finishing it. She looked to the clock on her laptop and saw that they’d been at this for nearly half an hour now. Novak had been just as quiet as he was, which she took to mean he was having no luck, either.

She was on the verge of closing the laptop and suggesting they drive to the field office for more people and better tools when a cluster of old address records finally aligned.

She sat up and checked the screen again to make sure she was seeing it right and her tired eyes weren’t deceiving her.

They weren’t. She’d found something. And it was big.

“Novak…look at this.” She turned the screen so Novak could see what she’d found.

As he looked, she walked him through it—more to process it for herself rather than narrate for him.

“For roughly nine months in nineteen-seventy-one, all three of them lived within a few miles of each other,” she said. “In a small township called Garner’s Mill. Rural Virginia...about two and a half hours away from here. Ruth Malone is listed with her parents just outside the town limits for most of that year. Cecilia Harrison appears at an address about two miles south, a rental according to the property records. Howard Pelham shows up in a boarding-house listing near the main road. The dates overlap almost exactly from January through September. Pelham would have been fresh out of law school, taking whatever work he could find in a place like that.”

Novak leaned forward and read the lines carefully. “Garner’s Mill. I have never heard of it.”

“Neither had I.” Rachel pulled her laptop back to her, feeling a new surge of energy now. She opened a browser tab and ran a series of basic searches for the town and the year. The results were thin: a handful of modern real-estate listings, a short historical-society page that hadn’t been updated in years, and a Wikipedia stub that mentioned the township in a single paragraph but offered nothing about 1971. And from what she could tell, there were no digitized newspaper archives that reached that far back.

She sighed and said, “Two and a half hours from here, depending on traffic. Not the kind of drive Anderson is likely to approve on the strength of an address overlap alone. I wish we could—”