Barrons, Vermont

November 2014

The Barrons police department was emptying out at five o’clock, the day staff packing up and going home. They kept a dispatcher on at night, but in a town as small as Barrons, that was all that was needed. A few cops were kept on call in case of emergencies, and a duty officer stayed on until midnight in case of evening domestic disputes, noise complaints, or bar customers that got out of hand. The parking lot was nearly empty when Fiona pulled in, though Jamie’s SUV was still there.

Holding a file folder in her hand, Fiona walked through the front door and saw the dispatcher sitting behind the front desk. He looked to be nearly seventy, and he was peacefully leafing through a fishing magazine. He looked up with some surprise.

“Help you?” he said.

He knew who she was. Of course he did. If he didn’t know she was Malcolm Sheridan’s daughter, dating a fellow cop, she’d eat her journalism diploma. But she said, “I’m looking for Jamie Creel. Is he around?”

“Are you here to report a crime?” he asked.

“I’m here to see Jamie.”

The dispatcher slid a clipboard across the desk at her. “You’ll need to sign in. Name, address, identification.”

It was bullshit. This was Barrons, not Rikers Island. “Just tell me where to find him.”

His hairy white eyebrows rose on his forehead. “I’ll have to get my supervisor’s approval to let a journalist in here.”

“If you know I’m a journalist, then you know my name.” She slid the clipboard back across the desk at him. “Go ahead and write it down.”

She walked past before he could protest.

She’d never been inside here, even when Deb died. The cops had interviewed her at the house, sitting in the living room, her parents beside her. I last saw my sister on Sunday, when she visited for dinner. No, I haven’t talked to her since. No, I don’t know where she could have gone. And then, after the body was found: No, she never mentioned anyone following her or threatening her. Yes, I’ve met Tim Christopher. No, I didn’t talk to her that night. They had been exhausted, those cops that interviewed her. Bewildered, maybe in over their heads. Neither of them had been Garrett Creel.

Jamie was at his desk, a tiny cubicle in the open main room of the station, in front of a 2000-era desktop computer. He was in uniform, though his hat was off and the top buttons of his uniform shirt were undone, the white T-shirt he wore underneath it contrasting with the navy blue. He had obviously heard Fiona’s voice, because he was already watching her when she came around the corner from the front dispatch desk, and his eyes, flat and wary, watched her come toward him.

“There a problem?” he said.

“Can we talk somewhere?” she asked him.

His gaze stayed on her face for a minute, and she knew he was reading her, the fact that she wasn’t here for personal reasons. What did he expect? That she’d bring whatever they had to his work while he was on shift to try to hash things out? He knew her better than that.

His eyes darted briefly to the back of the dispatch desk, and then to the others in the room—a cop putting his coat on, another standing by the coffee machine—and pushed back his chair. “Come with me.”

He led her to an interview room, a closet-sized space with two chairs and a table between them. There was no two-way glass, like on TV cop shows. Fiona wondered if Tim Christopher had ever been in this room, if he had ever sat in one of these chairs.

“What’s going on?” Jamie asked, clicking the door shut behind them.

Fiona looked at him. Jamie: tall, broad shoulders, dark blond hair worn slightly long and brushed back from his forehead, scruff of gold on his jaw. She’d missed him—but when Jamie wore his uniform, he was less familiar to her, less like the man who had first said Hi to her in a bar on a Friday night. The uniform did that, made him a different man. “Do you know the name Helen Heyer?” she asked him.

“No,” he said.

“Think,” she said. “Assault case. Unsolved. She nearly died.”

Jamie put his hands on his hips, forefingers hooked over his hip bones, the classic pose of the cop pulling you over, and narrowed his eyes, thinking. “No, I don’t think so. When was this?”

“She was assaulted in 1993,” Fiona said. “She was twenty. She’s forty-one now.”

“I was eight in 1993,” Jamie said.

“But it doesn’t sound familiar?” Fiona persisted. “She was found just outside the back door of her parents’ home. She’d probably been on the back walkway, coming to the door, when it happened. Someone used a weapon on her, likely a baseball bat. Nothing stolen. She was nearly dead when her father opened the back door to take the garbage out, but her blood was warm. It was quick and silent.”

Jamie was staring at her. Behind his eyes, she could see him thinking, calculating. Going over the angles. He was telling the truth; he probably didn’t know the case she was talking about.

But he knew she wasn’t here for a random reason. He knew she was going somewhere. And he was trying to figure out where it was. There was no baffled confusion in his face, just a closed-off determination to figure out what angle she was going to come from, so he could put up a defense before she got there.

“Did she live?” he asked her. “You didn’t say ‘murder.’ ”

“She lived,” Fiona said, swallowing down the lump in her throat. “She’s in a long-term-care hospital in Bowfield. Her cognitive functions were damaged, and she can’t care for herself. She can barely form words, can barely do the most basic functions of life. She hasn’t spoken a complete sentence since the assault.” She held up the file folder she’d been carrying in her hand. “I went to see her this afternoon. No one was ever arrested, Jamie. No one saw the attack, and Helen can’t name her attacker. She was supposed to be dead.”

Jamie shook his head. “What does this have to do with me, Fee?”

She slapped the file down on the table, harder than she’d intended. Keep it under control, Fiona. Keep to the facts. “It’s interesting,” she said, opening the folder and pulling out the printouts of newspaper articles that she’d made at home in her apartment before coming here. “It was a big story at the time. The police went to the local media to ask for help. Anyone who had seen the crime, anyone who had seen a stranger in the neighborhood, was asked to call in a tip. It was tragic, a pretty twenty-year-old girl beaten nearly to death, her life destroyed on her parents’ doorstep, left for her daddy to find when he took out the garbage. Beaten while her parents were inside, eating supper and watching Jeopardy!” She spread the articles out. “But not one of these pieces reported what her brother told me this afternoon. Helen had a boyfriend—a new boyfriend. He was big, handsome, rich, and she was excited. His name was Tim Christopher.”

Jamie had been looking down at the printouts—the school photo of Helen Heyer on the top page, her lovely oval face, framed by dark hair that she had placed smoothly over one shoulder for the photograph, smiling for the camera—but when she said Tim’s name, he looked up sharply. “What?”

“Her parents didn’t know,” Fiona said. “The relationship was physical, and her parents would have been horrified that their daughter had given up her virginity—but her brother found out about it. She swore him to secrecy, begged him not to tell their parents about Tim. She was swept up by him. She thought Tim was wonderful, most of the time. According to her brother, there were occasions she was quiet and withdrawn because she and Tim had had a fight. But then she’d forgive him, and all would be well again.”

Except for the part about not telling her parents, it was Deb, her exact pattern with Tim, except further back in time. Deb had been so excited to be dating Tim. She was twenty, and thought that the world held bigger and better things for her than life in Barrons with her nerdy parents and their middle-class income. She’d seen wide horizons with Tim, probably because he’d promised them to her. And Helen was Deb, a year before Deb met Tim and died.

She watched the knowledge flicker across Jamie’s face. She read him closely. He hadn’t known about Helen, yet he didn’t register surprise or even shock. What settled into the corners of his eyes was a heavy kind of knowledge, as if he was hearing something he hadn’t known but could have guessed would happen. Still, his voice was tense, defensive. “Did they think Tim was a suspect?”

“When Helen’s brother told the cops about Tim, they questioned Tim. At his parents’ home, not at the station. One conversation, and then they dropped it.”

“Then he must have had an alibi.”

“He said he was at the movies at the time—alone. Nothing to back it up. He also claimed that he had never met Helen Heyer, had no idea who she was, and certainly was not dating her.”

“Maybe he was telling the truth.”

She stared at him in shock. “You realize you’re talking about the man serving life in prison right now.”

“Just because he committed that crime doesn’t mean he committed this one.” Jamie sighed. “Fiona. I told you, I know nothing about this case. But if there was no arrest, it’s because the officers in charge of the investigation didn’t find enough evidence to arrest a suspect. It’s their job to close cases, their job to chase these things down. You’re looking for something that isn’t there.”

“Isn’t there?” she nearly shouted. “If the police had done their job, even a little, Tim would have been arrested before Deb even met him. She would be alive.”

“Assuming Tim did this,” Jamie countered, indicating the articles strewn on the table. “This girl was hit with a baseball bat, not strangled. She was left at her parents’ house, not dumped in a field. Deb was seen with Tim dozens of times, while this girl was not. What evidence do you have that he was dating her at all?”

“She admitted to her brother that she was.”

“Did the brother ever see him?” Jamie asked. “Did Tim come to the house? Meet the parents? Did he talk to them on the phone? The cops would have asked her friends and family if they’d ever seen her with him. Did they do that?”

Fiona was quiet.

“Of course they did,” Jamie said. “So she never told her parents about this great boyfriend she was supposedly seeing, and she never told her friends. Just one person knew, her brother. And he was reliable?”

“He was into drugs,” Fiona said. “It got worse after his sister’s attack. He became an addict. But he wasn’t an addict when it happened. Just a teenager messing around.”

“For God’s sake, Fiona,” Jamie said. “You’re listening to a story spun by a drug addict? Because that’s who you’ve been talking to, isn’t it? The brother.”

Damn it. She had known this would happen, that he would be like this, and it made her so angry. “He’s telling the truth,” she said, fighting the impulse to shout. “He knows what his sister told him. There’s nothing wrong with his memory.”

“And how did he find you?” Jamie’s gaze was hard and cold. “Because he did find you, didn’t he? He found some way to approach you and reel you in. You’re a smart woman, Fee, but when it comes to anyone mentioning your sister’s name, you can be completely goddamn stupid.”

She stared at this Jamie and she didn’t know him. “Fuck you,” she spit at him. “That’s the cruelest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“I’m cruel?” he said. “Did you plan to go to your father with this? Was that your idea? To rip his wounds open with an unproven theory that his daughter’s death could have been prevented? Your evidence is hearsay from a girl who hasn’t spoken in twenty years and an addict. You’ll kill him with this kind of shit.” He took a breath. “But it’s all an acceptable sacrifice, isn’t it? Your life, your father’s life, your own happiness, our relationship—it’s all an acceptable sacrifice to you. This case has already taken your parents’ marriage and your mother’s life. What’s a little more misery for the pile?”

The words made her wince—yet she felt that only now, after a year together, were they getting to the heart of it. “You think I should drop it,” she said.

“Of course I think you should drop it. Do you know why? Because you should fucking drop it.”

“Really? Or does this have to do with your precious police force?” She shoved the words at him. “The cops did a shit job on this case, Jamie. You know as well as I do that it’s always the boyfriend. It’s always the boyfriend. You think someone came up randomly behind her with a baseball bat? Did anyone think that, even for a minute? But we’re talking about Tim Christopher, aren’t we? Rich, good-looking, his family one of the wealthiest in the county. Oh, no, sir. No way it could be the boyfriend! Sorry to bother you—we’ll just be on our way!”

“Goddamn it, Fee!” Jamie shouted. His face was red.

“You want to talk about acceptable sacrifice?” Fiona said to him. “What’s an acceptable sacrifice to you? Is it acceptable that Helen’s case is never solved, that her attacker goes free, just so that the Christophers aren’t bothered with too many questions? Is it an acceptable sacrifice that you brush me off, just so no one asks questions now? So that the force doesn’t face any criticism? Everything is smoother, easier, if we just let it go.”

He was breathing hard, trying to keep control. “You need to leave,” he said, his voice low and furious. “Now.”

“You’re right,” Fiona said. “I do.” She picked up her papers, put them in the folder, and walked out the door.