CHAPTER 28
THE KILLER WALKED away from the Newcombe house, along the cart path and into his own drive. He’d watched Riley with that police detective, seen how they’d left together, and it had made him angry. He turned the key in the front door, entered, and let it fall shut behind him with a loud click. He stood in the front hall, silence washing against his eardrums, feeling heavy and drained, spurned by Riley and stunned by Rainier’s punishing eruption in the face of all he’d done. A sense of betrayal, like that he’d suffered when his mother died, weakened from pneumonia and then snatched by an early cold snap in October, rose and buffeted him. Doubts bit at him and he swatted them away like mosquitoes, while he stood in the darkening hallway, remembering.
His father was weak, couldn’t
