Suspect. Jasmine Cresswell

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СКАЧАТЬ little girl was not, it seemed, Chloe’s child or his daughter. Liam pushed aside a twinge of regret and tried to decide how he was supposed to respond to Morgan’s overture. “I’m thirty-five,” he said finally, since age seemed big in her life at this point.

      Morgan’s eyes opened wide. “That’s old,” she informed him. “That’s very old.”

      “Er…yes, I guess it is.”

      “My grandpa is old. My grandma is old. My nana is old. My poppa is old. Miss Rose is old—”

      “Who is Miss Rose?” Liam asked, interrupting what threatened to become an endless litany of the aged. “Is she your teacher?”

      “No!” Morgan chuckled at his ridiculous mistake. “Miss Rose is my dog. She frew up on Mommy’s shoes ’cos she ate Peter’s chicken nuggets. Mommy shut her in the laundry room.”

      Liam had no idea how to respond to this wealth of information. Tom, on the other hand, simply laughed.

      “The bit about throwing up on Mommy’s shoes might have been more than we needed to know, Morgan, love. Peter, you can play with your sister for a while.” He set his son on the floor and dragged a box of wooden blocks into the center of the room. “Build a house for Morgan’s dolls,” he suggested. “Build a red house.”

      Peter, clearly a man of few words, sat down without complaint and carefully selected a dozen or so red blocks. “He’s very good with his colors,” Tom said proudly. “He knows them all.”

      “Er…great.” Liam felt as if he’d been plunged into a foreign country where he spoke only a textbook version of the language and didn’t quite grasp the native customs. According to Morgan, Peter was three years old. Didn’t all three year olds know their colors?

      “Do you like how I fixed Barbie’s hair?” Not wanting to be overlooked, Morgan extended her naked doll for closer inspection and Liam noticed that the stiff blond hair was haphazardly decorated with glittery pins.

      “Er…very nice,” he said.

      Tom smiled. “Barbie is beautiful, honey bun. I love all those pink diamonds. Why don’t you try dressing her in a skirt to match? Then she can go to the ball.”

      Morgan frowned. “She’s not Cinderella. She’s Barbie.”

      “Right. But Barbie can go to a ball if she wants.”

      Morgan considered this in silence for a second or two, then shrugged. “Daddy, tell Peter not to pull the heads off of my Barbies.”

      “Peter, are you listening? No chopping off Barbie’s head, okay?”

      Peter interrupted his turret building long enough to give a reluctant nod.

      “Okay, be good both of you. Don’t fight. I’ll be right back.” Tom appeared unaware of anything in the least strange about his conversation with his kids. Maybe discussion of head-removal was a normal exchange when you were dealing with preschoolers? Since he’d been thirteen by the time Megan was four, Liam had spent very little time playing with his sister but for sure he couldn’t recall harboring any murderous impulses toward her Barbie dolls.

      Liam followed Tom out of the family room, trying to remember when he’d last spoken to a human being under the age of twelve. He supposed it must have happened at least once or twice during the past fifteen years, but he’d be damned if he could remember the occasion.

      A slender, pretty woman sat at the kitchen table across from a tiny little girl with poker straight, mouse-brown hair who was coloring with magic markers. The child’s head was bent so intently over her task that it was impossible to see her face. The little girl didn’t send a single glance toward the newcomers, but the woman rose to her feet, her smile not quite hiding both fatigue and worry.

      “Liam?” She pushed her chair away from the table and stood up, holding out her hand. “Hi, I’m Alexia, Chloe’s sister. I’m so glad you’ve agreed to help us. I’ve seen you on TV several times and your glowing reputation precedes you.”

      Liam let the possible reference to Sherri Norquist’s trial slide over him. Surprisingly, it barely stung. “With any luck we’ll be able to get Chloe’s problems squared away fast,” he said. “Then your sister won’t need my help or anyone else’s.”

      Alexia didn’t look reassured. “I’m not optimistic about this being resolved quickly,” she said, her voice low. “The whole situation is made-for-TV perfect and, boy, are they reveling in the mess.” She glanced quickly toward Sophie, who gave no sign that she’d even noticed Liam’s arrival in the room, much less that she was paying attention to the conversation. Once again, Liam was forcefully reminded of his own family’s situation only two months earlier. Media intrusion then had been a nightmare for his mother and sister. He could barely imagine how much worse it would be if you were trying to shield young children from a brutal reality.

      “I have a couple of questions for you,” Alexia murmured, walking over to the sink where she stood staring at the dish detergent as if she couldn’t remember why she was there.

      Liam followed, gesturing toward Sophie when Alexia didn’t speak. “Is your niece going to be upset at being picked up by a complete stranger?”

      Alexia shook her head. “I’ve told her the truth—that you’re here to drive her home—so I’m sure she’ll go with you willingly. She’s taking the loss of her father very hard. She’s been frighteningly quiet today.” She gave a quick shrug. “Although I guess that’s a dumb thing to say. How else could she take Jason’s death except badly?”

      “It’s a difficult situation all around and the media attention makes everything that much more difficult.” Liam winced at the platitude but he was sneaking covert glances at his daughter and didn’t have much brain power to spare for conversing.

      “Especially in our family. Did you know that our father—Chloe’s and mine—is the deputy superintendent of schools in Colorado Springs?”

      “No, I wasn’t aware that Chloe had parents in the state.”

      “We all moved here in the late eighties, when Chloe started serious training for the Olympics. Once we were here, we fell in love with Colorado and never left.”

      He’d been ignorant of that, along with virtually every other fact about Chloe’s life. “Is your father’s profession significant for some reason?” he asked.

      “Well, just that he’s such an important figure in their community and the notoriety of Jason’s murder is already proving horribly difficult for him and my mother.” Alexia sighed. “Dad always tries so hard to set a good example for his students. Family is really important to him and to my mother. This is just the pits.”

      Tough for dad, maybe, but the situation wasn’t exactly easy on Chloe, either. “I’ll do my best to prevent the situation getting any worse than it already is,” Liam said coolly. “I recommend, however, that you and your parents avoid piling any more burdens on your sister’s shoulders, even by implication. She’s carrying a heavy enough load as it is.”

      Alexia flushed. “I’m sorry. I must have sounded like a jerk just now. That’s what comes of listening to my mother cry into the phone all afternoon. She’s terribly worried about Chloe, of course.”

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