Chapter 21
Zane is two cars back, trailing me. As I pull into my drive, he pulls into the same spot where I found him when I left the house. I’m happy to be left alone and need time to think before the all-powerful FBI arrive.
My happiness is quickly zapped. A black Lincoln Navigator claims part of the driveway in front. Standing outside their vehicle, Alderson wears a pleasant smile, and Greene her usual earnest indifference. She removes her sunglasses as if to take a better look at me in the daylight.
Clouds have moved over the sun, dimming the early-day glare and casting an enormous blanket of shade over the mountain slopes. Greene’s hazel-green eyes take on the color of yellow moss in the diffused sunlight. Alderson keeps his Ray-Bans on.
“Johnny-on-the-spot,” I say.
“You have ’em?” Greene asks, holding out a hand like we’re engaging in some drug deal.
“In my purse.”
I fetch the earrings and hold them out in my palm.
The clouds slide by and the bright sun makes the silver sparkle and the sapphires deepen to near black.
“No use in dusting them,” I say. “My prints were all over them to begin with, and so are my friend’s.
I’m certain they haven’t left this purse since I used it almost nine months ago, when I forgot it at Fiona’s. ”
Greene holds out a baggie from her blazer pocket, and I slip the earrings inside. She studies them through the plastic for a second before handing them to Alderson.
He gives them a long look before tucking them into his shirt pocket, but not before throwing a wide-eyed look to Greene that says I’m screwed.
“We’re going to need the full name of your friend and everyone she lives with.” Greene’s face is solemn. “And we need to talk more. Can we go in?”
“I have groceries.” I walk back to my car, open the trunk, and grab two large canvas bags stuffed to the brim. A red-tailed hawk sails above the field to the north, hunting mice. I feel the agents’ eyes on me, watching my every move.
“Need some help?” Alderson asks.
“I got it, but you can close the trunk for me.” I take one last look at the circling hawk and inhale the faint, sweet scent of prairie hay wafting from the fields, brown from the past summer’s heat.
Inside, I have no patience for pleasantries. I turn to them, my arms folded. “What would you like to talk about?”
“We’d like to sit down,” Greene says. “If that’s okay.”
“I’m fine right here.”
Greene sighs but doesn’t respond. She isn’t going to confront my obstinacy, which I take as a bad sign.
I transfer bananas and apples to a white ceramic fruit bowl on my counter. I don’t want to be a jerk, but I can’t seem to help it. To let everything proceed entirely on their terms hints of surrender.
“Have you come up with those names we need?” Greene asks.
She’s referring to the list of people with a possible reason to want to harm me. “I’ll grab it for you in a sec.”
Alderson leans casually against the counter, his arms across his chest. He’s rolled his crisply ironed sleeves up. Greene stands dead center between the U-shape of my counters.
“Before I get it,” I say. “Has anyone else contacted the FBI? Who thinks they might be the one?”
“There’s a woman in Texas we’re checking out. She looks a lot like the sketch. And a lot like you.” Greene scrolls through photos on her phone and holds it out for me. “But she doesn’t have the earrings.”
The woman does resemble me, more than any of the others I’ve seen so far online, more than Jennifer Garner, more than the woman from Oregon who confessed she had an affair while her husband lay sick in the cabin of their sailboat.
This stranger resembles me more than Jess does, which I find surreal. It’s oddly comforting to know there’s someone else out there. “Does she own any earrings that might be somewhat similar?” I hand the phone back to Greene.
“I mean, she has lots of danglies, but nothing precisely like the ones in the sketch.”
“Has this Texas woman confessed anything?” My own guilt and the fact that I have zero desire—or intention—of confessing anything make me feel like something rises up and lodges in my throat. Like shards of my own conscience. I swallow it down.
Greene shakes her head. “But she’s thinking of doing an interview with the press to generate a bunch of interest in her, hoping that if more people are aware of her out in the world, she’ll be more protected. Swamped by reporters and such.”
I cringe. Who in their right mind would want that? I think of the media spectacle it will create and how it will change her life, how people will always consider her the CA’s potential victim from here on out, how it will inevitably draw the attention of other stalkers and online bullies.
One of my first cases as a PI was with a twenty-three-year-old woman in the Flathead who’d become the target of an online bullying campaign for no other reason than her success.
She’d grown up gaming and become a bit of a sensation on Twitch.
Simply becoming popular among gamers made her the subject of online harassment.
A handful of gamers began coordinating attacks, creating countless new accounts with fake names across multiple platforms with the sole purpose of making her life miserable.
They issued death threats and harassed family members.
I didn’t have the means to ID and monitor those stalkers making the most violent intimidations, so I contacted the local FBI, and eventually, they shut the key accounts down.
As far as I know, no one has posted anything about me on social media.
My friends have only texted or DMed me or each other since the sketch came out.
Fiona mentioned on her Facebook account that she has a friend who resembles the sketch, but even she has enough sense, perhaps because of my warnings to her, to not tag me or mention my name.
Greene notes the sour expression on my face. “Going public isn’t an entirely horrible idea, Crosbie. Like I said, it’s more difficult for a stalker or a killer to strike if everywhere you go, a certain number of people can ID you.”
At the suggestion, something hot shoots through me, like the sun is suddenly burning ten times hotter directly over my head.
For one tiny second, I had considered appeasing whoever is up to this crazy cat-and-mouse game of shame.
It’d be fresh, gleaming meat for the press.
But of course, if I confessed, there’d be consequences. Serious ones.
For me. For Railes. For Ewing, maybe, too.
But it’s not only the consequences. It’s the shame, red hot as a flame, searing me to my core.
I can’t bear the thought of the public knowing me that way.
Of Jess, Wallace, Fiona, Hannah, Mark, Allison, my stepdad .
. . everyone in the police force. Of the community and the world.
The friendly guy—what’s his name, Mr. Tyson—at the bakery in Columbia Falls.
Joan at the county library. Dr. Jones at the Women’s Health Clinic.
Dr. Ammera at the dentist’s office, Mr. Dahlton, my favorite teacher in high school . . .
And I’d have no work. How would I make a living?
But as always, I swing back to Jess. How would she take it when she wanted closure so badly and I helped rip it away from her? Would she ever forgive me?
Not just my future, but my relationship with my sister and Sam dries up like dead leaves right before my eyes. I see the debris of them sweep away in the wind in flurries. It makes me dizzy, like the walls of my kitchen are swaying around me like a ship in a storm.
I wonder briefly what the Texas woman might have to confess, but I don’t ask. I’ve been seeing enough already online to make my head spin.
But even if I wanted to confess, I have Jess to think about. We would become victims for life even if I didn’t end up being the CA’s intended target. The media would skin us alive. They would uproot and scrutinize every incident in our lives beyond my deplorable decision to protect Billy Railes.
I can’t fathom putting Jess through the viciousness of the press after everything she’s endured, especially since one of the main reasons she refused to report Mark Coleman in the first place was to avoid their savage bites.
She watched me go through it with Sophie years before, when social media wasn’t half the beast it is today.
And I was a nobody. Thanks to her rising career in podcasting, she’s a much more prominent figure than I’ll ever be.
“And you think that’s wise for the woman in Texas to do that?” I look to both my FBI protectors.
“Can’t deny she’ll be surrounded by reporters,” Alderson offers. “They’ll post up right outside her front door for a while—and while they’re there, it would make it more difficult for the son of a bitch to grab her. Plus, if she confesses something, he claims he’ll leave her be.”
“But you don’t even think it’s her, do you?”
They both stare at me, not answering, eyes searching.
“Because of the earrings?” I say.
“We think we need to take this very seriously with everyone and anyone who could be the target,” he says.
“But honestly. Do you think it’s wise for this woman to go to the press? For me to do the same?” I can’t fathom the thought.
“Ninety-nine percent of the time,” Greene says, “the press makes our job harder. But we don’t know.
She could be safer with the spotlight on her.
For you, though, we have a different idea.
” She pauses, letting that sink in. “And it involves some information we want to share with you. So please, can we have that seat now?”