Owen continued to stare at the photo, waiting for it to make sense.
“Oh fuck,” Owen said. He stood quickly, knocking over his chair. He started to pace, but there was no room for it. “I don’t understand.”
“You didn’t know that was your wife?” Goldman asked.
“No. I don’t know,” Owen said. “I need to go for a walk. I can’t…move in here. I need to think.”
Burns nodded at her partner.
“Let’s get some fresh air,” Goldman said. “I’ll come with you.”
There was a greenbelt behind the station with a short dirt footpath created by decades of cops trying to clear their heads. Owen followed the path, his mind racing, trying to rationalize the irrational.
“What does that photo have to do with anything?” Owen asked.
“Maybe nothing. Probably nothing,” Goldman said. “You said that you met Irene five years ago and yet she had a photo of you from almost fifteen years back.”
Owen nodded, staring at the ground. “Yeah.”
“So you really didn’t recognize her?” Goldman said.
“The woman in the photo was from Yorkshire. She had an accent. She had blue hair. And I met a lot of—of girls that year. I probably spent a third of my waking hours in a pub. It was one night out of hundreds, fourteen years ago. She looked completely different back then. Phoebe. I think her name was Phoebe. Well, I don’t know why that matters. It was just a name she gave me.”
“Do you remember anything else about that night?” Goldman asked.
The detective wasn’t sure Owen had heard him. They rambled along the dirt path until they reached a muddy section. Owen stared at the soft ground and turned back. Then Owen spoke. “Are you sure those pictures are from Chantal and Leo’s wedding?”
“Yes,” Goldman said. “The date tracks. Although Whitman wasn’t in any of the photos.”
Owen stopped walking. He stood, hands sunk in his pockets, staring down. Goldman waited patiently for whatever memory was surfacing.
“I don’t understand why she never—fuck,” Owen said, turning to the detective. “She told me about him. When I thought she was someone else. She told me. Fuck.”
“What did she tell you?” Goldman asked.
“She slept with him once. Phoebe—well, Irene—told me she slept with her mother’s fiancé when she took a course from him at college. Before he was her fiancé. He pursued her mom, just a few years later. She was horrified. She tried to stop it, the wedding. She even tried to talk to the guy, and he pretended like it never happened. She knew that if she told her mother the whole truth, her mother wouldn’t believe her.”
“When you met Irene for the second time, in 2014, what did she tell you about Leo?”
“Nothing. Well, nothing about that. Every time Leo was around, you could feel this thing, this sickness. She’d told me that her mom and Leo had a difficult marriage. I figured Irene still resented Leo for how he treated her mom. I never thought anything else.”
Goldman’s phone buzzed in his pocket. The sound brought Owen back to the present, to his current reality.
“Did Leo do this?” Owen asked. “Did Leo kill her?”
April 2005
It was early in April when Luna got the first call from the FBI agent. She’d returned home from class to find a series of Post-its from Casey on her wall. One said, Listen to messages!!! It was followed by a few more with arrows tracing a path toward the answering machine. The exclamation points and cuteness suggested something positive to Luna. When the message started playing, Luna’s heart sank and her stomach churned.
Hello. This is Special Agent Paul Murdoch, FBI. I am trying to reach Luna…Grey. Um, hmm, the subject is a bit sensitive, so I’d rather not leave the information on a machine. If Ms. Grey could return my call at her earliest convenience, that would be greatly appreciated. This is regarding a matter in Colorado. You can reach me at…
Luna played the message three times before she jotted down the number. She picked up the phone, put it down, picked it up again, without knowing whom she wanted to call. She paced, did a few jumping jacks, ate oatmeal with chocolate chips, drank a beer. Then she came to the conclusion that if she just made the call, she could get on with her life. She took the landline into her bedroom. The cord stretched just beyond the doorway. She sat on the floor, her back to the wall, and dialed the number. A receptionist transferred her.
“Ms. Grey, Agent Murdoch here. Thank you for returning my call.”
“Is John dead?” Luna asked.
Luna couldn’t fathom another reason for the call.
“No, miss. Is this a good time? Are you able to speak freely?”
“I guess so,” she said. “I’m getting scared.”
“Nothing to be scared about, okay?” the agent said. “I’m going to ask you a favor. And you can say yes or no.”
“Okay,” Luna said.
“As you know, John Brown has been incarcerated at Sterling Correctional Facility for more than eight years now. I interviewed him a few weeks ago, and he suggested that he may have information about other murders.”
“Murders he committed?” Luna said.
She searched her room for something to throw up in. The wastebasket was one of those dumb mesh ones.
“Possibly,” said Murdoch. “We want to know, one way or the other.”
“I don’t understand,” Luna said.
“He won’t tell us where the bodies are,” Murdoch said.
“What bodies?”
“This is where you come in. Mr. Brown has asked to see you. He said that if you came to visit him, he would tell you where he buried his other victims.”
“There were more?” Luna said, her voice breaking, hot tears falling, something primal pulling her away from her body so she wouldn’t be stuck in it. She was watching a version of herself on the phone with the FBI agent.
“Could be a ploy. But we need to know.”