Detective Andrea Donovan follows her hunches. But hunches without evidence don’t hold up in court. And she refuses to stop digging to prove her latest hunch. A hunch that leads her to disturbing conclusions 
about a disturbing crime—one that will change the survivors, and Andrea, forever. The riveting “What People Leave Behind,” chosen as one of the year’s best stories, explores the lengths people go to succeed—or fail.
“What People Leave Behind,” by multiple Edgar-nominee Kristine Kathryn Rusch will be free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available for $3.99 on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Smashwords and in other ebookstores.
What People Leave Behind
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
The house stood at the end of an upscale subdivision—or what had once been an upscale subdivision. Gracie Ansara drove the panel truck past house after house with rusted for-sale signs on the yard. Some had an additional thin metal sign which said “Bank-owned.”
Fifteen foreclosures in a four-block area. Gracie personally had cleaned out five. This one was the sixth.
She remembered the people who lived in the house. They had come out the front door and stood on the manicured lawn, watching her and her partners toss furniture on the driveway of the house next door.
Gracie’s face had burned as she had done the work. It had been her first house clean-out, and part of her still thought of the work as something to be ashamed of.
She had glanced at the woman neighbor, standing with her arms crossed, her hair a perfectly dyed shade of winter blonde, her gabardine pants and silk blouse something out of a Macy’s ad. The woman’s lips were pressed together, her eyes narrow. She seemed as if she were judging the crew, as if they weren’t worthy of setting foot on this street.
Gracie wanted to say I didn’t ask for this. I got three kids to feed and a house of my own. But she didn’t. She turned her back on that perfectly groomed woman with her tall, handsome, black-haired husband (also perfectly groomed) and went back into the foreclosed house.
She had never expected to be at the perfectly groomed woman’s house six months later.
At least not then. Now nothing surprised her.
Not after she had seen what people left behind.
***
Gracie herself had left behind a lot. Eighteen months ago, she’d been a happily married mother of three, a bank executive who made mid-six figures and lived in an upscale subdivision not too different from this one.
One Friday night, a drunk going 100 miles per hour had crossed the median, slammed into her husband’s car, and shoved it under an eighteen-wheeler.
Gracie had collected half a million dollars of life insurance for life without the man she still adored. She put three hundred thousand into the kids’ college funds, and used the rest to pay off her own house.
Then, after twenty years of work for the same company, she was laid off. No apologies, no offers of advancement, no chance to move elsewhere in the company.
She felt grief-stricken all over again. She had lost the man she had married at twenty-one, and then she had lost the company she had married at twenty-five. She clung to her children so tightly that they started to complain.
“Jeez, Mom,” said Hannah, her oldest. “Why don’t you just pretend this is a mid-life crisis and buy yourself a Porsche?”
Hannah was sixteen. She probably didn’t suggest the Porsche to make her mother feel better; she probably had visions of driving it herself.
But the idea stuck.
Not the idea of the Porsche—Gracie had never been one for flashy cars—but the idea of a mid-life crisis. What happened in mid-life anyway? People often shook up their entire lives, tried out new identities, became someone else.
Gracie, who loved cleaning and painting and organizing, penciled out the price of panel trucks and labor, cleaning supplies and paint. She added in the occasional need for a plumber or an electrician, and she came to a price for starting a business.
A business that she could run out of her paid-for house. A business that would thrive in bad times, and survive in good.
A business that wouldn’t merge and merge and merge again, but would stay alive as long as she wanted it to.
Something that was, for once, all hers.
***
She thought of all of that as she pulled into the driveway of the well-dressed woman’s house. Gracie’s assistant, Micah Collingsworth, hadn’t arrived yet. She was still a few minutes early, but she didn’t get out of the truck.
She knew better than to go into foreclosures alone.
A battered Ford one-ton pulled in behind her. She let out a small sigh of relief. Micah wasn’t late after all. He grinned as he got out of the truck.
Micah had been a godsend. He had been one of the first people to answer her ad for employees. He had worked for a rental services company in Upstate New York years ago, cleaning, painting, repairing. He had placed that experience prominently on the résumé he had designed specifically for her, burying the fact that he had once been a corporate exec at one of the many high tech firms that had fled Oregon in the last twelve months.
“Doesn’t look much different than it did six months ago,” he said about the house.
“Except for the cobwebs.” Gracie nodded toward the windows. They were covered in white webs.
He stuck his hands in the pockets of his faded jeans and peered at the property as if he were a building inspector. “You’d think they would have done something when they saw us next door.”
She remembered the couple’s tight expressions and crossed arms. “Maybe they didn’t have a choice.”
Micah ignored that. Instead he asked, “You ready?”
She nodded.
They both felt trepidation whenever they went into a foreclosure. Sometimes the families trashed the place before they left. More than one had broken back into the house and squatted, still believing they had rights to the property.
The bank had checked the place out before hiring her. So had the sheriff. Both had assured her that no one had returned. Even so, Gracie liked to be cautious.
The front door had a lockbox. She opened it with her special key, and removed the key for the front door. It opened easily.
The house smelled faintly of pine air freshener, which was a relief. Most places smelled of rotting food.
The entry was clean. The owners had left a throw rug behind and both Gracie and Micah automatically wiped their feet. Then they grinned at each other, feeling a little ridiculous. Still, Gracie was glad they did it because the granite tile in front of them gleamed.
It was one less thing to clean.
The vaulted living room was bare. The carpet still bore furniture marks, but someone had vacuumed.
“Lucked out,” Micah said.
They had. This place would be easy to prepare for any potential buyers.
Gracie nodded. “I think we can separate. Got your intercom?”
It wasn’t really an intercom. It was an added feature on their cell phone plan. But they could talk to each other without dialing out, which she just loved.
“Got it,” he said, holding up the phone. She smiled at him. She continued through the living room into the formal dining area.
He went back to the entry and up the stairs to the right. She could hear him walk heavily above her. She found the sound somehow reassuring.
The formal dining room was empty as well. The built-in china cabinet’s doors were open. Someone had used some kind of wood polish on it because the thing shone as if it were new.
Her hope was the rest of the place would be this clean. Sometimes the front rooms were spotless and the bedrooms, bathrooms, and utility rooms were a mess. It was as if the former owners couldn’t quite get enough energy to finish the cleaning job, knowing they were doing it under duress.
Still, she wouldn’t be surprised if these former owners cleaned the entire place. That couple she had seen on the lawn were very well put together, even though their life had to have been falling apart. Appearances were clearly important to them. Even the appearance of the house they had abandoned mattered.
Gracie stepped into the kitchen. It had state-of-the-art appliances, granite countertops, and expensive cherry cabinets.
Her intercom buzzed. She clicked the phone. “What do you have?” she asked, hoping he wasn’t going to tell her that the upstairs was a disaster.
“Something weird,” he said. “It’s spotless up here except for the hall closet. It looks like a giant spider made a nest in here.”
“Well, don’t touch it,” she said. “I’ve got spray in the truck. If we have to, we’ll call in a pest service.”
“I don’t think it’s really a spider web,” he said. “It’s too black. Webs aren’t ever black, are they?”
“Not unless they’re abandoned and covered with dirt.” She had seen that more than once in her short time working foreclosures.
“I think it’s attached to the wall in the back. Let me check….”
She could hear him strain through the intercom. He grunted, a door creaked, and then he said,
“It looks more like wires coming from some kind of box. I think we’ll need an electrician on this one. I can’t even tell what it’s for. Let me—”
The world went white, then banged, and shuddered. Ceiling—or wall—or tile—rained on Gracie. She put up her arms, protecting her head. Dust filled her lungs. She climbed under the counter.
Then the world went white a second time.
Something sucked the remaining air from the room. Gracie gasped, unable to breathe.
More things fell. Burning things.
The air couldn’t be gone, she thought. If the air were gone, there would be no fire. It was hot, and she couldn’t hear. Her lungs ached—no, seared. She reached to the edge of the countertop—
And then….nothing.
Nothing at all.
***
Detective Andrea Donovan stood outside the smoking ruin of what had once been a neighborhood showplace. At least, that was what the remaining neighbors told her, in voices flat with shock.
She had no idea how they could tell which house was the showplace. This subdivision was just a bigger version of the subdivision she had grown up in. Only her childhood subdivision had been made up of ranch houses with alternating floor plans and color schemes. This subdivision was a series of four different McMansions that varied not only floor plan, but driveway and lawn size.
The neighborhood might once have been middle-class chic, but it wasn’t now. In addition to the shattered ruin before her, the entire area looked destroyed. Glass and rock and building shards covered the lawns, street, and driveways. One of the neighbors had found a ripped and bloody leg on top of a roof two blocks away.
The houses on all sides of the explosion had suffered damage, and the entire area smelled of chemical smoke.
Donovan hated cases like this one. She had to coordinate with a variety of other teams, and most of the relevant evidence was outside of her expertise.
She hadn’t even been called in for two days. First the arson team went through and made certain that this wasn’t some gas line explosion or some freak ignition of septic fumes.
When the arson team figured out that there was nothing wrong with the natural gas line that heated the house, they started searching for some other cause. First they searched for something that would ignite the place—some kind of fuel or trigger mechanism.
But this explosion had been big and hot, and they hadn’t found anything except some suspicious wires, bits of cell phones, and something that might—or might not—have been a trigger mechanism.
Initially, the team argued about calling the explosives experts, since they had also found a man’s hand, clutching the bottom half of a cell phone. Since he was holding it, he was probably using it, not making a bomb out of it.
But they finally did call in the explosives expert. The expert found chemical traces of C4 near the ignition site, as well as other things that might—or might not—have been components.
It was the might and the might not have beens that bothered Donovan the most.
That and the fact that no one would let her into her crime scene, at least not yet.
So she paced the exterior and talked to the neighbors—what few remained. Ninety percent of this subdivision had fallen into foreclosure. Some owners were long gone, the properties bank-owned. Some were still struggling to hang on, and only a few were current on their payments.
Current and angry.
It was bad enough to have the bank take half the properties around here, Bill Nelson, who lived three doors down told her. Now we’re going to be the bombing neighborhood. We’re upside down in our mortgage as it is. This thing will make property values plummet even further. I couldn’t sell if I wanted to.
Others had voiced similar sentiments. Donovan had taken all of their names and all of their addresses and made note of their great distress.
Not that she blamed them. This subdivision was already toxic, the subject of articles in the papers and items on the local news. The developer had used shoddy materials in most of the houses, and even if the market hadn’t tanked, these poor homeowners—all of whom had bought new—had probably been upside down in their mortgages from day one.
Normally, she would have looked at that as motive—if the cratered house belonged to the developer. But it had belonged to some not-so-popular neighbors who had already been forced out by their bank.
There was no benefit in blowing up the place, at least not for the handful of families struggling to remain.
There wasn’t even benefit to the former homeowners, unless one considered revenge.
Which she did.
Still, the people killed weren’t bank employees or mortgage brokers. They belonged to a company that cleaned empty houses. No one could have known that they’d be the ones who would suffer for this.
She looked for her partner. Detective Steve Neygan was as upset about dealing with a bombing as she was.
It took her a few minutes to spot him. He was the solidly built man at the end of the street, stringing police tape, and pushing back the reporters who were crowding the area.
“Hey, Andrea.”
Donovan turned. The head of the bomb squad, Keyla Pierce, walked toward her wearing a protective suit, a science-fictiony helmet under one arm.
Keyla was a tiny woman with a mass of red curls that currently clung wetly to her skull. Sweat dotted her face. The suits had no ventilation at all, and even fifteen minutes in one could feel like an hour.
“What’ve you got?” Donovan asked.
“A secondary device,” Keyla said. “There were two explosions, not one.”
“Everyone reported one.” Donovan had talked to enough witnesses to know they had only heard one blast.
“They might’ve been seconds apart,” Keyla said. “Or the first wasn’t quite as loud. The second was the big one.”
“You sure there aren’t any more unexploded bombs in there?” Donovan asked.
Keyla smiled tiredly. “We’re still checking, but I doubt it. We did an initial sweep, and the arson team’s been all over that place. Unless the device is very small or extremely unrecognizable as a bomb, we haven’t found anything.”
Donovan wasn’t sure if this news reassured her or made her even more nervous. She was beginning to realize that bombs creeped her out more than some maniac with a gun.
“So tell me about the secondary device,” she said.
“This was a smart house,” Keyla said. “And the device was tied into that system.”
Donovan barely had a grasp of what a smart house was. “You mean the entire place was computerized?”
“The lights, the heating system, even the entertainment centers were all tied into one central panel. If the house was intact, I could tell you if the refrigerator and stove were part of the system too. I suspect so. This kind of system is expensive and state-of-the-art, and unfortunately, it’s very easy to hack into.”
Donovan frowned. “But wouldn’t a smart system need electricity to keep running? I thought this place was a foreclosure.”
“That was my first thought,” Keyla said, “but the arson team already figured out that the power had been on. We checked why and discovered that the bank puts the power onto its bill while it preps the house for resale. The bank is apparently looking for problems in the system and it’s trying to make things easier on the team that cleans out the place.”
Donovan looked at the house. The bank had done the team no favors.
“It wasn’t easier on them,” she said.
“It was the second blast that caused the most damage,” Keyla continued. “It’s going to take us a while to figure out all the component parts of these bombs, but knowing that the bomber tapped into the house’s system does make it easier.”
“It does?” Donovan asked.
“For two reasons,” Keyla said. “This bomber is sophisticated and up-to-date. He had to be off-premise and aware that someone was in the house. I suspect the second bomb had an off-site trigger.”
“He blew the place from far away after the first device went off?”
“Probably,” Keyla said.
“Watching from one of these empty houses?” Donovan asked.
“Maybe,” Keyla said. “But if I had to put money on it all, I’d say he wasn’t even in the neighborhood. I’d guess he was watching from a computer somewhere, and he waited until someone got close to the second bomb before triggering it.”
“So the cleaning team wasn’t together?” Donovan asked.
“We think one was upstairs and the other in the kitchen. Everything is such a mess that it’s hard to know for sure.”
Donovan shuddered. “And someone managed this off-site?”
“Maybe not even in the city,” Keyla said. “He could’ve been anywhere.”
“Wonderful.” Donovan shook her head slightly. Now she didn’t just have to deal with arson teams and bomb squads. She had to deal with computer experts.
This case was more of a nightmare than she wanted it to be—and it was only just beginning.
***
Donovan was an old-fashioned detective who preferred legwork to DNA analysis. Fortunately, her partner knew that. Neygan volunteered to talk to the computer crimes division and report back to her—in exchange for the right to stay away from the victims’ families.
Donovan understood that one. Talking to the families was a bigger minefield than going into a bombed-out house. But she had talked to families more times than she cared to think about, and she had a routine that minimized her emotional involvement.
Or so she thought.
Minimizing the emotional stake was easy with Micah Collingsworth. His family had arrived from the East Coast the night before, and were holed up in an exclusive hotel downtown.
She met the family in one of the upstairs suites. Everyone had flown in—both parents, four siblings, and the two remaining grandparents, along with the siblings’ spouses and children. The funeral, apparently, would be here “in the place Micah loved,” his mother had said, her voice hitching only a little.
The family had already gotten the news, so Donovan didn’t have to worry about dealing with the immediate grief and shock. They were well off—able to board planes in less than 24 hours and show up in a strange city—not to mention afford rooms in one of the city’s most expensive hotels for more than a week.
The family didn’t know much more. Collingsworth had broken up with a long-term girlfriend before he lost his corporate position. They hadn’t even known he was cleaning buildings.
Minimizing her emotional involvement, however, became harder when she visited the Ansara family. Gracie Ansara had been a single mom with three kids. The kids—two girls and a boy—were sixteen, fourteen and twelve.
They lived in an upscale subdivision not that different from the one that got bombed. Donovan had been surprised at that. She had figured someone who cleaned houses for a living lived in one of Portland’s less expensive neighborhoods.
When she knocked on the door, an elderly woman answered. She introduced herself as Rafe Ansara’s mother, and it took Donovan a moment to realize that Rafe Ansara must have been the late husband.
The grandmother had driven down from Seattle. She was taking care of the arrangements and trying to figure out what to do with the children. By her own admission, she knew little about Gracie Ansara’s life.
So the grandmother took Donovan to meet someone who did know Gracie’s life, her oldest daughter, Hannah.
Hannah sat at the kitchen table. A pile of bills sat to one side, a yellow legal pad on the other. A pencil stuck out of her haphazard nest of blonde hair, and she was chewing on a pen. An iPhone leaned against a pile of schoolbooks, and a calculator sat to her right.
She was thin, with a teenage athlete’s build. She wore an oversized Portland Trailblazers sweatshirt, and blue jeans with the cuffs rolled up.
“If you’re some social worker here to tell me I don’t have the right to stay in my house, you can get out,” Hannah snapped.
She was certainly not what Donovan had expected.
Donovan reached into her pocket and removed her badge. “Detective Andrea Donovan,” she said. “I’m investigating the bombing.”
“You mean my mother’s murder,” Hannah said.
“Yes,” Donovan said. “That’s exactly what I mean.”
Hannah drew her knees up and put her stocking feet on her chair. Then she tucked the chewed-up pen beside the pencil in her hair.
“I thought you people travel in pairs,” she said.
Donovan wasn’t used to this kind of interrogation from family members, let alone teenagers.
“Normally, we do,” she said. “But my partner is working with the bomb squad at the moment.”
“You have any suspects yet?” Hannah asked.
“Nothing official.” Donovan put her hand on the back of one of the chairs. “Do you mind if I sit down?”
Hannah shrugged one bony shoulder. “I suppose I should ask Grammy if you’re allowed to sit down.”
Donovan was beginning to get a sense of the extent of the conflict between grandmother and granddaughter.
“Hannah,” her grandmother said.
“It’s okay, Mrs. Ansara,” Donovan said to the older woman. “You can stay if you’d like, but I’m just going to ask your granddaughter routine questions. Maybe you could get the other children for me…?”
The older woman sighed, then disappeared into the hallway.
“I take it she wants you to go back to Seattle with her,” Donovan said.
Hannah set her jaw. Donovan’s guess had been right. That was the core of the argument.
“Mom paid off this house,” Hannah said. “All three of us have college funds, and Mom took out a lot of life insurance after Dad died. I can take care of everyone.”
“You’re sixteen.”
“And I’m going to be smarter in 15 months when I turn eighteen? C’mon” Hannah managed contempt the way that only a teenager could. “I’ve been helping Mom with everything since Dad died. I can handle it now.”
She put her hand on the bills.
“Grammy didn’t even know where to start. I had to take her to the right funeral home. I had to pick out the package. I’ve been the one making sure that Rafeala and Graden are getting some sleep and have someone to talk to. Grammy’s just getting in the way.”
“And the county’s already been here,” Donovan said, careful not to frame this as a question, “to help you find someone to take care of you.”
“Yep.” Hannah sounded disgusted. “Just today. When that old biddy left, I started looking through all Mom’s stuff for the lawyer who handled Dad’s estate.”
Donovan raised her eyebrows. “Because?”
“Because I’m going to be declared legally fit to take care of my family,” Hannah said. “What’s that called? Emancipated?”
“I don’t know,” Donovan said. She thought emancipation was when a kid wanted to divorce her parents, but she knew better than to say that. She wasn’t sure if any of this domestic drama was relevant to her case, but she was going to hear the girl out. “Taking care of two kids sounds like a big job.”
“Mom and I were a team. I’m the one who told her to start the business,” Hannah’s eyes filled with tears. The transition from prideful anger to sadness was so sudden it took Donovan’s breath away.
It took her a moment to understand why. “You don’t think it’s your fault your mom died, do you?”
“I should’ve known better,” Hannah said, her voice shaking. “She came home from the early jobs, talking about how people trashed their houses, and how sometimes a sheriff had to show up to evict them and they’d sneak back. She said the early visits could be dangerous.”
“And this was an early visit?” Donovan asked.
“This was the first time she’d gone to the house. That’s why Micah was along. Because she knew better than to go alone.”
That made sense to Donovan. “No one could have expected this.”
“I don’t know,” Hannah said. “Those people were weird.”
“Which people?” Donovan asked.
“The Martins,” Hannah said. “I went to school with Richard.”
“You’re not going to school now?”
“Not this week,” she snapped. Then her cheeks turned faintly pink. “Oh, you mean why did I use the past tense about Richard?”
Donovan was startled at how bright the girl was. Donovan didn’t even have to ask the next question. Hannah had known what the question was. Most adults Donovan interrogated didn’t even know that much.
“Richard’s the one who left,” Hannah said. “When his parents moved, he stopped coming to school.”
“Is he going to a different school?” Donovan asked.
“I don’t know,” Hannah said. “He’s one of those preppy bastards, you know?”
“Here they are,” the grandmother said.
Donovan suppressed a sigh. She felt like she had just gotten into a rhythm with Hannah, and the grandmother had interrupted.
Donovan turned in her chair. A gawky fourteen-year-old boy, all matted brown hair and pimples, stood behind her. The boy’s shirt was buttoned wrong, and his face was swollen from crying.
Beside him stood one of the most startling children she had ever seen. She was ethereal and angelic. When she got older, she would be a stunning beauty.
No wonder the grandmother wanted custody. That girl alone would be trouble.
“Thank you, Mrs. Ansara,” Donovan said. “Would you all mind waiting in the other room while I finish talking to Hannah?”
The grandmother’s eyes narrowed, but she led the two younger children out of the kitchen. Donovan could hear them rummaging around in the nearby dining room. They could probably hear every word, but she decided that it didn’t matter.
“It sounds like you didn’t like Richard Martin,” Donovan said.
“God, no.” Hannah rolled her eyes. “He was awful.”
“To you or to everyone?”
She looked away then, moving the pile of bills with her fingers.
That movement gave Donovan her answer. The boy had been mean to Hannah, but not to everyone else.
“I’m not up on the terms,” Donovan said. “By preppy, do you mean that he dressed really well or are you referring to something else?”
“He was going to go to an Ivy,” Hannah said. “He was a legacy, so he didn’t even need SATs. My SATs were the best in my class, and they’re not going to be good enough, that’s what the guidance counselor said. And he gets a free ride because his parents went.”
It took Donovan another minute to catch up. An Ivy, meaning an Ivy League School. This girl was sixteen and she was already thinking about college? Things were very different from the time Donovan was a teenager.
“I thought the schools take various things into account,” Donovan said. “Not just SAT scores, but extra curriculars and grades and everything.”
Hannah shrugged that shoulder again. “That’s what Mom says. But it doesn’t matter now. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll either go to Linfield or Portland State. I’m staying with the kids.”
The fact that she had this all thought out within two days had startled Donovan.
She nodded at the pile of bills. “What are you doing there?”
“Making sure that with Mom’s life insurance, we’ll have enough money to finish school and go off to college. Don’t worry. I’ve done this before. I helped Mom when Dad died.”
Donovan’s heart twisted. The girl impressed her more than she wanted to think about.
“I’m getting all the paperwork in order,” Hannah was saying, “so that when I talk to the lawyer, I’ll be prepared.”
“Is this what your mother would have wanted?” Donovan asked, and then winced at how patronizing that sounded.
“I don’t know,” Hannah said. “We never talked about it past the insurance and stuff. Mom wasn’t that old. She was going to be around for a long time. That’s what she said.”
The wobbly voice again. Donovan could almost hear the conversation after the father died.
Mom, you’re not going to die now, are you?
Of course not, baby. Nothing’s going to happen to me.
Donovan shook it off, and made herself focus on the case. “You said the Martins were strange. You knew the whole family?”
Hannah’s eyes narrowed. “You think they did it, right? That’s what the news says.”
“The news people don’t know anything,” Donovan said.
Hannah grunted, then thought, clearly considering what she was going to say. “I only met them once. They were, like, plastic people, you know?”
Plastic people. Donovan was going to ask for clarification, but she wasn’t going to do so directly. Hannah already thought she was a bit slow—and maybe she was. Donovan didn’t have children. Obviously, she had lost the knack for talking with them.
“Where did you meet the family?” Donovan asked.
Hannah looked away again. “A party.”
“At Richard’s house?” Donovan asked.
Hannah nodded, moving the bills. “That place was so perfect.”
A tear fell, slapping the paper. She shoved the papers out of the way and rubbed her eyes furiously.
“What do you mean, perfect?” Donovan asked.
“Everything in the right place,” Hannah said. “Everything was so neat. Mom would’ve loved it. That’s what I remember thinking. Mom would’ve been so impressed. She always wanted our house to look like that, and it never did.”
Hannah’s voice trembled at the end of the sentence. She bit her lower lip, trying to stop tears. When that didn’t work, she put a hand over her mouth.
Donovan looked for Kleenex, but didn’t see any. Hannah gasped out a sob, then shook her head, and pushed away from the table. She staggered out of the room. She didn’t go into the dining room. Instead she vanished up the stairs.
Donovan sighed. She wasn’t going to go after Hannah. Donovan would let Hannah calm down, and maybe talk to her again, particularly if Donovan felt the Martin family belonged on the suspect list.
Donovan stood slowly, moved the bills around just a little, looking for anything unusual. She didn’t see much.
Then she went into the dining room for her perfunctory questioning of the other two children. It yielded nothing. The grandmother seemed exceptionally clueless about the family she wanted to adopt.
Donovan didn’t like the elderly woman. She wondered if that was reason enough to trust a sixteen-year-old’s judgment that the children were better off without the older woman.
Donovan shook her head, reminding herself that catching the killer was her job. And to that end, the Martin family had caught her attention. No one in the neighborhood had mentioned the Martins had children. No one had said much about the family at all—except that their house had been a showplace, and everyone had been surprised to see the foreclosure notice.
Donovan was a bit surprised too. Not at the foreclosure—seemed like half the planet was losing a home these days. But the mention of the Ivy League school, the talk of legacies, which meant that the Martin family had a long tradition of going to expensive East Coast colleges.
There must have been money once. Ivy League legacies were usually impressive, prominent people. Donovan had always thought they sent their kids to one of those tony East Coast prep schools, usually a boarding school, instead of a local public high school.
Had this Richard Martin been lying to Hannah? If so, why?
Donovan returned to the station with more questions than she expected. Her first task was to track the Martins down. People who got evicted were usually hard to find. They didn’t have to give a forwarding address, and they were usually so poor that their credit cards had been canceled before the loss of their home.
Still, she started through the standard investigatory tools, trying to find the Martins, using their phone records, their credit cards, and any applications they might have made for new utility service.
Everything she found had been canceled or was in default. The cell phone companies were trying to collect on a three-thousand-dollar bill, the forty-thousand-dollar credit cards had been in default for months, and no one had applied for new electric service or anything else.
They had three vehicles, but two had been repossessed. The third was an old Chevy van, and it, apparently, was paid for.
So she started there. She put a flag on the license, hoping that would turn up something. Then she decided to dig into the financials, to see what went wrong.
What went wrong seemed pretty mundane. The Martins lived at the edge of their means for years, juggling the mortgage, the cars, and the unbelievable credit card bills. They spent every penny they had plus.
Gary Martin, the husband and father, worked as some kind of investment counselor at one of the downtown Portland firms. Two years before anyone was talking about economic meltdowns, the firm let him go. Nothing had gone wrong at the firm or in the local economy—at least nothing that she could find.
So far as she could tell, Martin never got another job. His credit card bills and his cell phone records told a familiar story: he went to job seminars and get-rich-quick seminars, often buying the materials. He called job service lines and talked to job counselors, but nothing seemed to pan out.
The financial troubles started about six months in. The family didn’t slow down spending, but they started skating bills, paying one this month and a different one that month. Irene Martin had a job too—some kind of fashion consultant at a local department store—but it didn’t pay a quarter of her husband’s wages. And when the economy got worse, her job disappeared as well.
Both of them were unemployed, unable to afford their lifestyle, and apparently unable (or unwilling) to get some kind of help.
Nothing in their job history gave the Martins the kind of tech savvy that justified a smart house. Donovan dug into their education history. Gary Martin had been a Liberal Arts major at his “Ivy,” Princeton. His wife hadn’t graduated from a real college, but from some school of fashion design.
So Donovan called Gary’s former employer. Once she got past the “we don’t give that information out” response to why Gary Martin left his position, she got her answers.
Gary Martin had been skimming money off his clients for years, maintaining the house and the lifestyle not on his salary, but on his salary plus all he could steal. Rather than charge him with embezzlement, the firm didn’t pay him his vacation or sick leave when he left, using that money to repay the investors.
The firm also didn’t prosecute because they didn’t want to publicize the fact that they had been victims of one of their own employees.
“Of course,” the woman in personnel department told Donovan, “we also didn’t give him any recommendations. It’s hard to get a comparable job when your former employer refuses to discuss you or your work.”
She said that with just a bit of glee, leading Donovan to realize that the firm had gotten its revenge, mostly in preventing Martin from ever working again.
“Did he do a lot with computers?” Donovan asked.
“A little,” the woman said. “The trades and funds were managed online.”
“Did he need a lot of technical expertise to use that equipment?” Donovan asked.
“No,” the woman said.
“Did you ever see any evidence of tech savvy from Martin?” Donovan asked.
“No,” the woman said. “A bit of tech phobia, but that was normal for our traders. Every time we upgrade, they freak out. They’re into the markets and money, not into learning new computer programs.”
Donovan nodded. She asked the same questions of Irene Martin’s former boss, and got similar answers.
“Do you have any idea,” she asked Irene’s former boss, “why the Martins would have bought a smart house?”
“Oh,” the boss said, “that was for the children. They were going to be the next Bill Gates. She thought they were brilliant.”
“Did she mention which child in particular was brilliant with computers?” Donovan asked.
“Oh, they both were,” the boss said. “We even called them in one afternoon when we had a glitch in our system and we couldn’t reach tech support. The son got us back up in no time, and the daughter put in some kind of fail-safe so we wouldn’t have the same problem again.”
“I thought these kids were still in high school,” Donovan said.
“The daughter wasn’t quite twelve when she helped us,” the former boss said. “We had to pay her off the books. But it was because of those kids that we kept Irene as long as we did. We let her go when we no longer had a choice.”
When Donovan hung up from that call, she was frowning. The kids? She couldn’t imagine children setting up bombs that sophisticated. Molotov cocktails, yes. Some dynamite with a detonator, maybe. But not something that tapped into a house’s computer system.
She had just moved from the Martins to the developer when her partner, Neygan, sat down at his desk.
“You got anything?” she asked him.
“A headache,” he said. “I don’t ever want to look at bomb components again.”
She didn’t want to talk to families ever again, but she didn’t complain about it.
“What did you figure out?” she asked, trying not to be annoyed.
“I didn’t figure out anything,” he said. “The bomb squad now confirms that there were two devices. They don’t know a lot about the first one, except that it was smaller than the second.”
“And the other device?” Donovan asked.
“It was triggered off-site. Someone actually had to push a button or something to make it explode. No way it could’ve gone off on its own.”
Donovan rubbed her nose. Her eyes were tired, and she was getting a headache too. “I’d think some off-site trigger would give us a trail to the bomber.”
“You’d think,” Neygan said. “I got computer crimes on it. They’ve already traced everything to an Internet café in Sun River.”
“Sun River?” Donovan said.
“Don’t ask me,” Neygan said. “They don’t know where the doer actually was, because you can route stuff through other computers. All I know is that it happened off-site and our doer was sitting there like a spider in a web, watching its prey work its way into the deathtrap.”
“You’re mixing metaphors again,” Donovan said, as she pulled the file she had made on the developer. He didn’t look very computer savvy either.
Then she realized what Neygan had said.
“The doer was watching these people?” she asked.
“That we do know. There were cameras everywhere. This sick twist waited until the person in the kitchen got close, and then set off that device.”
“You’re sure about this,” Donovan said. “The doer watched.”
“Probably from the time the team came in the door. The bomb squad isn’t sure if the doer waited until they split up and got close to the devices or what. The squad still isn’t even sure if there were more devices in that house, y’know, waiting for someone to get close.”
“This is targeted murder, then,” Donovan said.
“How do you figure?” Neygan said.
“If the doer watched the victims move through the house, then he could choose whether or not to push that button.”
Neygan frowned. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“I was just assuming these were random victims,” Donovan said.
“We all were,” Neygan said.
“But those bombs could have gone off when the sheriff evicted the family or when the city inspectors came in or when the lender’s representative walked through the house. There were probably countless people who could have died in those explosions.”
“We don’t know that,” Neygan said. “We don’t know the bombs were there then.”
He was right; they didn’t know. But it was probable that the bombs had been planted before that lock box went on the building. But probable meant Donovan was making an assumption. Probable began that slippery slope to the right theory, but not enough proof to make an arrest, let alone a conviction.
“Maybe that’s something we can ask the bomb squad,” she said. “Maybe they can tell how long the bombs were there.”
She doubted it, though. Unless the materials used inside the bombs could degrade, they could have been in those spots for years. Or weeks. Or hours.
There was no real way to know.
Neygan’s expression hadn’t changed as she said all of this. She wasn’t even sure he had heard her.
“You’re saying that the doer waited for those two people to go into the house.” Neygan tapped his forefinger against his upper lip. “I thought no one but the bank knew they were going in.”
“So far as I know, that’s right,” Donovan said.
“You’re saying someone from the bank killed them?” Neygan asked.
Donovan shook her head. “I’m just wondering if the bomber was waiting for one of those two people to show up.”
“How would he have known either of them was going to be there?”
She looked up at Neygan. “That’s the question isn’t it? If we know the answer to that, we know the answer to everything.”
***
Donovan drove to the Ansara house. She brought Neygan along even though he didn’t want to meet the family.
They arrived at the Ansara house as the streetlights were coming on. Donovan could see the family through the dining room windows. The boy faced the street, his head bowed. He picked at his food. His beautiful younger sister was stirring the food on her plate like she was making soup.
Hannah ate deliberately, as if she had to think about each bite. The grandmother held a cup of coffee before her chest like a shield.
“Oh, I’m not going in there,” Neygan said as he got out of the car and looked into the window.
“Yes, you are,” Donovan said. “But you’re going to let me talk and you’re going to listen.”
“Because?”
“Because I need someone else’s interpretation, to see if I’m completely off-base.”
Neygan sighed. “We have computer tech working on this case. They’ll figure it out. We don’t need one of your hunches.”
Donovan’s hunches were famous. They were always right, but they were almost impossible to prove in court. Over the years, she’d gotten smarter about them. Now, she at least tried to get some evidence to back them up.
She didn’t respond to Neygan’s complaint. Instead, she marched up the front steps and knocked on the door. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see movement in the dining room.
The grandmother was going to answer the door again.
This time, Donovan was ready for her. Donovan pulled open the screen as the grandmother opened the door.
“Mrs. Ansara,” Donovan said, “I have a few more questions for Hannah. It’ll only take a minute.”
By the time she had finished talking, she was already inside the entry. She strode down the hall to the dining room. Behind her, she could hear Neygan apologizing, then introducing himself. Donovan didn’t wait for him.
As she walked into the room, the boy—Graden?—looked up. The younger sister stopped stirring her food, but Hannah was the one who spoke.
“You know anything?” she asked.
“I’m not sure.” Donovan felt awkward looming over the kids while food was on the table. The place smelled of roast beef and gravy. She pulled one of the extra chairs away from the wall, and sat near Hannah.
Graden put his fork down and turned his chair slightly, so that he could see both his sister and Donovan. The younger sister started stirring her food again, as if this had nothing to do with her.
“Do you know anything about your mom’s business?” Donovan asked.
Hannah shrugged. “Some.”
“We helped in the summer,” Graden said.
Donovan looked at him. His face was still swollen from crying, but his eyes weren’t as red. They shone with the same kind of intelligence that Hannah’s had.
“Do you know if she cleaned out any of the other foreclosures in the Martins’ neighborhood?” Donovan asked.
“All of them,” Hannah said. “It was some kind of deal with the bank. It was the first one she got, and that neighborhood was a—what do you call it?—development.”
“Mom called it a development gone bad.” This from the youngest daughter, Rafeala. The food on her plate didn’t look like food at all. It looked like badly mixed house paint.
“Yeah,” Graden said. “Everyone was upside down and getting out. That’s what she said.”
Hannah’s lips had thinned. She looked scared. “Why do you want to know?”
Donovan wasn’t going to answer that question yet. “Did Micah Collingsworth always go with her when she first visited a foreclosure?”
“No,” Hannah said. “It was whoever was available.”
Two of Donovan’s hunches were right. Now she needed to confirm the third.
“Muscle,” Graden was saying. “She wanted muscle in case something went wrong. She said I could go with her when I came into my growth.”
He sounded like he regretted not being at her side now. Donovan wondered if he had some kind of rescue fantasy going on in his head. Had he thought he would have been able to save his mom when the first bomb went off?
“Last time I was here,” Donovan said to Hannah, “you told me about Richard Martin. You said he was mean, but when I asked you if he was mean to everyone or just to you, you didn’t answer.”
“He was mean to Hannah,” Graden said.
“He was a prick,” Rafeala said almost at the same time. The word was shocking coming from such a beautiful young girl.
Hannah glared at her sister. “Don’t talk like that.”
The grandmother and Neygan came into the dining room. The grandmother returned to her chair, but Neygan hovered near the door. Hannah’s gaze lifted, acknowledged him, and then went back to Donovan.
Graden said, “He hated Hannah.”
“Really?” Donovan asked. “Why?”
“Because she told him off,” Graden said with just a bit of pride.
“I did not.” Hannah sounded tired, as if they’d had that discussion before.
“You did too,” Graden said.
Obviously Hannah didn’t want to talk about this. But Donovan had to know. She turned slightly in her chair so that she faced Graden.
“What happened?” Donovan asked.
Graden glanced at Hannah who shook her head. His lower lip pushed out slightly, pouting, and for a minute, Donovan thought he wasn’t going to answer her question.
Then he said, “It was last year, the day they posted the PSATs.”
Over his head, Donovan could see Neygan frown. So she asked for her partner’s sake, “The PSATs?”
“You can take a preliminary SAT test for college, you know, and see where you stand. It doesn’t count. But everyone does it to practice.”
“And they post the scores,” Donovan asked. She was a bit shocked about that. She thought the scores would be private.
“They hand them out on a sheet of paper, but everyone tells,” Graden said. “If you didn’t tell, everyone would think you flunked.”
“You can’t flunk the SAT,” Hannah said quietly, but her complaint obviously wasn’t about the test. It was that her brother was telling this story.
“Hannah got a perfect score. Perfect. And Richard was being a dick about it like he always was.”
“Graden,” the grandmother said in the same tone that Hannah had used for her sister. “Language.”
“Were you there?” Donovan asked. “Did you see this?”
“Yeah,” Graden said. “It was outside. School had just got out and everyone was comparing scores. I just wanted to go home, so I was trying to get Hannah to come with me.”
“How was Richard being—?” Donovan stopped herself. The grandmother’s tone was affecting her too. “What was he doing?”
“He was saying that Hannah’s just a brain. She’s really boring and no one’ll ever like her because she’s so smart.”
“He hated that about her,” Rafaela said. “She was always doing better than him.”
“You saw it too?” Donovan asked.
Rafaela shook her head. “I seen it other times. He didn’t like anyone to do better than him. He beat up some kid on the soccer team for getting a goal in practice. Richard was goalie that day, and the ball just got by him.”
“Nice kid,” Neygan said.
Everyone turned to him. Graden and Rafaela looked surprised to see him. They hadn’t realized he was in the room.
“That’s my partner,” Donovan said. “So Richard was mean to you, and anyone else who was smart.”
“He was just mean,” Hannah said.
“But something happened that day,” Donovan said to her. “Tell me about it.”
Hannah shook her head again. “It’s not important.”
“What happened was she got mad,” Graden said. “For her whole life, she let him talk bad to her and that day she didn’t take it any more.”
“She was mad anyway,” Rafaela said. “Dad was dead and Mom needed help and Hannah wasn’t getting any sleep.”
“I was too,” Hannah said.
“I hear you at night,” Rafaela said. “You weren’t sleeping then, just like you’re not sleeping now.”
Hannah shot her a nasty look, one that complained she was giving away secrets not hers to give. In spite of herself, Donovan felt her heart go out to Hannah. Hannah was trying so hard to be tough so that everyone would think her strong enough to care for her family, and yet her family knew how hard it was for her to get through each day.
“What happened?” Donovan asked softly.
Hannah bit her lip. When she didn’t speak, Graden again filled the silence.
“It was great,” he said. “Richard asked her score, and she told him. Then he was making fun of her, calling her Miss Perfect, the Ugliest Girl in School.”
Graden was talking directly to Donovan, but Donovan watched Hannah. When he said that, Hannah’s eyes filled with tears. Even now, those words had the power to hurt. Did Hannah think she was ugly? Probably, in comparison to that younger sister.
“And Hannah just had it, you know?” Graden continued. “She gets this voice when she’s really mad, all quiet-like, and that’s what she used on him. She says, ‘What’s your score?’ and he tells her, and it’s really low. Everybody laughs, and usually that would’ve been enough for Hannah, but it wasn’t.”
This time he looked at his sister. She was just watching him implacably, a single tear hanging on her eyelashes. He shrugged a little, as if in apology.
“Then what?” Donovan asked.
“Then he said something about how he’d be going to an Ivy even with his score, and that’s when Hannah let him have it. She said he’d be going to an Ivy because of his parents, not because he did anything. She said Ivys took rich stupid people so that they could get enough money to let poor smart people in. He knew it was true. Everybody knew it was true, and he got really, really mean after that.”
“I wasn’t very nice,” Hannah said.
“What’s really really mean?” Donovan asked Graden.
“He said horrible stuff about Mom. Every time we saw him, he said stuff about her being a cleaning lady and us being white trash and no good and not even a good education would make us classy and stuff like that.” Graden didn’t sound bothered, but Hannah’s expression became more and more strained.
“Sounds like you hit a nerve,” Donovan said to Hannah. “Do you think, maybe, your comment about being rich and stupid bothered him because his family was going broke?”
“What do you mean?” Hannah asked.
“You told him poor, smart kids could get into an Ivy League school, but by implication, you meant that poor dumb kids couldn’t.”
“He wasn’t dumb,” Hannah said. “He just didn’t try hard. His math score on the PSAT was really, really high. It was his verbal that was the problem.”
“Did you ever tell him that?” Donovan asked.
Hannah shook her head. “He really hates me,” she said quietly.
Donovan sighed. Then she asked a few more questions, wrapping everything up so that it wasn’t all about Richard Martin.
Even though it was.
As she and Neygan got into the car, he said to her, “You think that’s enough motive? You think that Richard kid blew up her mom as some kind of revenge for what she said?”
Donovan shook her head. “I think Richard Martin was miserable. I think everything he knew was falling apart, and he was looking for someone to blame.”
“So he blamed that girl’s mom?”
“I don’t think so,” Donovan said. “I think he couldn’t get the idea Hannah planted out of his mind. I think he blamed her for making him so afraid for his own future. I think he decided to get revenge by making her afraid for her future.”
“You haven’t even met the kid,” Neygan said.
“No, I haven’t,” Donovan said. “But I’ve seen people kill for a whole lot less.”
“Well, I think we got a whole lot of less,” Neygan said, “and the chief is gonna want evidence and proof that we didn’t just go after some kid on a hunch.”
“I know,” Donovan said. “We still have a lot of work to do.”
***
And work they did. They interviewed everyone they could think of with connections to the case. The developer knew nothing about computers, the mortgage brokers knew nothing about bomb making, and the neighbors couldn’t get into the house.
It took some time for Donovan and Neygan to find the Martins, but by the time they did, computer crimes had traced a contact between the house and an off-site computer linked to the Martins. Not to mention the Sun River Internet café connection. The family used to ski there in the winter. The café owner remembered Richard, saying he looked like a kid who was “about to blow.”
Donovan got five minutes alone with Richard—a slender, athletic boy with scary intense eyes—but couldn’t get him to say much. Except when she mentioned Hannah.
“You realize,” Donovan said as they waited for Richard’s lawyer to arrive, “that you just made it easier for Hannah to get into an Ivy League School.”
Richard’s cheeks flushed. “What?”
“Private schools,” Donovan said. “They take all kinds of things into account. Not just SAT scores and high grades, but hardship factors as well. She’s an orphan now, raising her siblings, and keeping her grades up. She just went way up on their list.”
“No way,” he said. “You’re making that up.”
Donovan shook her head. “If you had left her mom alive, Hannah probably wouldn’t have had a chance of getting into a good school. You just did her a favor.”
He slammed his fist onto the interview table. “I didn’t want to do her a favor. Miss Perfect—she always lands on her damn feet. Dammit!”
And that was when the attorney came in, shut Richard up, and kicked Donovan out of the room.
But that little outburst was all she needed. It confirmed her hunch. The bomb squad and computer crimes confirmed the rest. The bomb squad found components that matched the setup in the house, and computer crimes found various videos of the house on computers that Richard had used since he moved out.
“It was set up like this,” Keyla told Donovan over a beer the night Richard was arrested. “He had designed the first bomb to go off at a touch. He knew that a house cleaner would clean that up. The first bomb would notify him that she was in the house. Then he’d see if it was her. If it was, he would set off the second.”
“Do you think he would have set off the second if someone else had been in the house?” Donovan asked.
Keyla shook her head. “You can’t figure these guys out. Bombers are crazy. Bombers and arsonists. They’ve got something missing.”
“Even young guys?” Donovan asked.
“Especially young guys,” Keyla said. “Most of them don’t live long enough to become old guys.”
And that was that. Richard decided not to have a trial, instead pleading 25 to life, with the possibility for parole. His parents and younger sibling left Oregon, and the bank bulldozed what was left of the house, selling the vacant lot instead.
Donovan drove by the house a few times while it was still standing, trying to understand—truly understand—a boy’s jealous mind. She finally decided she couldn’t.
But she also knew she couldn’t let the case go.
So the day after Richard’s allocution in court, she drove to the Ansara house.
***
It looked the same, except someone had pulled blinds over all the windows. When she knocked,