“Did the husband know anything? Could this be some kind of scam?”
Colm was getting ready to take another drink from his beer. He held the bottle in front of him for a second. “I think it’s more like an addiction. It’s sad when you think about it. She’s got a beautiful family. We found emails between her and her husband. You’d never know she had something going on. And there must have been at least a hundred pictures of her with the kids. It’s like our missing person is two people. Makes me wonder which one we’ve been looking for.” Colm drank several long swallows of his beer. Pool balls clacked behind us, and the chatter in the room was getting louder.
Colm’s thinking surprised me. He’d hit on something going on with my own thoughts. Amy Raye wasn’t all one thing or another. She was the mother and she was the wife, and she was someone completely different from both of these things. I couldn’t help but wonder, as did Colm, if it was the stranger whose life had been put at risk, the one Kenny and Aaron had reported missing, or the one with a husband and children back home. The truth was, we didn’t know who this woman was. I was fairly certain the husband didn’t either. And because of that, we couldn’t make assumptions about her motivations.
Colm set the bottle down and began turning it around and around against the sticky wood-grain finish on the bar. “You know, you hear about this sort of thing. But when you get right down into the thick of it, it’s hard to believe.” He shook his head. “Goddamn mess.” Then he said, “I keep thinking, what if the husband didn’t have a clue?”
I leaned in closer so as not to lose what Colm was saying. He tapped the empty beer bottle against the bar. “It doesn’t matter,” Colm said. “I’m still going to have to question him.”
“What about Kenny and Aaron?”
“I’m going to have to question them, too, and the whole sorry lot of other guys she was involved with.”
“You could be shaking up a lot of relationships out there.”
“Wouldn’t you want to know?”
“Yeah, I would.” I drank more beer, found myself getting quiet.
“At least Maggie never did this,” Colm said.
And I wanted to say, How do you know? But I didn’t. I thought back to Brody’s funeral. I thought about the girl who was crying a lot louder than she had any right to. She’d probably gone to school with us, but I didn’t remember having seen her before. And for weeks after the funeral, whenever anyone would leave cards at Brody’s grave site, I’d read those cards and wonder if any of them were from the girl who’d cried all those tears. Greg said Brody had touched lives in a lot of different ways and everyone handled their emotions differently. Maybe we could never know everything about another person. I felt sad for Farrell Latour, because if he didn’t know those things about his wife, he was going to be grieving the loss of her all over again, and this second loss was going to be a lot worse than the first.
—
Though my work often involved assisting with search-and-rescue efforts and responding to accidents on public lands, the primary scope of my job was protecting the Bureau of Land Management’s cultural resources from vandalism and looters, or pothunters, as they were often referred to. My job fell under the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, which dealt with federal and Indian lands. The law made it illegal for anyone to remove or damage artifacts of human life if those artifacts were over one hundred years old. The only exception would be if a person had a valid permit to conduct professional archaeological research.