Deathscape by Dana Marton

nothing. Maybe they weren’t close enough to share things. Although, this was pretty big, and they did see each other regularly. He knew Price took his granddaughter nearly every weekend to visit her mother.
    “ What incident?” the man demanded.
    So Jack filled him in, keeping to the basics, not mentioning the paintings.
    “ You can’t think that my daughter has anything to do with this,” Price charged Jack when he was finished.
    “ How close are you to your daughter?”
    “ Close enough to know what she’s capable of. You people harassed her enough. I don’t want you to talk to her again without a lawyer present.”
    “ That’s her choice, I believe.”
    “ If you think—”
    “ Why are you raising your granddaughter? Why isn’t she with her mother?”
    The man flashed a grim look. “Ashley has had a hard time since the accident. Anybody would. Look, she’s struggling with depression. She’s taking medication, and she will get better.”
    “ You believe that her being alone is the best thing for her?”
    “ I offered her to come here.”
    Another interesting tidbit. He wondered why Ashley hadn’t accepted.
    “ She has this…anxiety,” the man said. “She doesn’t like to leave her house. She’s mentally fragile at the moment. But not like her mother,” he quickly added.
    “ Her mother?”
    He’d found the story of the woman’s meltdown and subsequent death in the online archives, society pages, but he wanted to hear Price’s version.
    The man stepped to the window and stared out, shoving his hands deep into his pockets. “My late wife was an actress. Broadway. She pushed herself. Stimulants to work, depressants to sleep, other drugs she thought would help her with emotions and creativity. I didn’t realize at the beginning, and then… She’s…” His jaw tightened. “I’m not sure what happened at the end. She began having hallucinations. And then her heart gave out.”
    “ How old was Ashley?”
    “ A teenager. A bad time to lose a mother.”
    “ I don’t suppose there’s a good time.”
    Price nodded as he turned back to him. “I suppose you’re right, Detective.”
    They shared a moment of silence while Jack thought of his own mother. He barely remembered her. He remembered Shannon a lot more clearly; the big sister who’d stepped into the mothering role and had taken care of him. Only he’d been too much of a snot-nosed teen to appreciate it. And then she was gone. Taken.
    “ Is Ashley seeing anyone?” he asked, although, all that time he’d spent watching her house, he hadn’t seen anyone go inside her place and stay.
    “ No. What does that have to do with anything?” Price strode back to the desk. “Is she in any kind of danger?”
    “ We don’t believe so. Nothing in the killer’s profile says that he would go after her. His victims have always been carefully selected, two or three at a time. Then he moves on to a whole other state. This time, he wasn’t hunting. He just wanted me off his trail.”
    Price didn’t look reassured.
    Jack watched for his reaction as he asked, “Can I ask where you were during the first three days of this month?”
    “ Now, listen—” he blustered immediately, but Jack raised a placating hand.
    “ I’m asking everyone I talk to regarding the case. No suspicion implied. Standard procedure.”
    But the man shot him another dark look before he glanced at his calendar. “Thursday and Friday I was at work, then here with Maddie and Bertha. Saturday my granddaughter and I went to see Ashley in Broslin.”
    An alibi easily checked, so no point lying about it.
    Jack asked the man some questions about his job, about his relationship with Ashley, then more questions about his daughter, her childhood, her career.
    William Price was a type-A, dominant personality. Ashley wasn’t, although she had fire inside her, part of her artistic passion. But crimes of passion were usually part of domestic violence. Being a serial killer