Chapter 3
LEROUX WALKS INTO THE STATION wearing all the signs of someone who wants to be left alone.
Of course, all that does is bring more attention his way.
He swears there’s no one better at ignoring social cues than his coworkers.
The whole lot of them would clear a staggering number of cases if they spent less time busting chops and more time pounding the goddamn pavement.
He dodges several questions and requests, pushing his way through the room at a breakneck pace.
He blows past a sea of desks and officers, entering his office and slamming the door behind him.
He looks to his left and is immediately greeted by the photos of Melissa Evans and Beth Landry tacked to a corkboard in the corner of the room.
The two vibrant young women smile at him, wordlessly asking why he can’t find them.
The clock ticks loudly, the one on the wall echoing the one in his mind.
There is always a countdown attached to a missing person, and Melissa’s time feels as if it is slipping away.
After a week, the nature of an investigation into a missing person shifts.
The commitment to finding the missing and to close the case is always there.
With families, friends, and the general public all desperate for resolution, how could it ever wane?
But after a week it evolves into something darker—something resembling desperation.
After speaking with the very few people Melissa kept in contact with, Leroux and his colleagues were able to piece together her last steps before she vanished, seemingly without a trace.
She was last seen walking toward the bus stop at North Rampart and St. Ann around eight thirty a.m. Sunday.
The few witnesses said she was wearing a white T-shirt and a long denim skirt.
Slung over her shoulder was a light blue fringed cross-body bag, and they all agreed that she seemed to be hurrying in the direction of the bus stop.
The bus driver on shift at the time had a lot to say, but absolutely nothing could be categorized as important.
He treated the interview like a long overdue catchup with his dearest friends.
No matter how many times the investigators steered him toward the basic questions they needed him to answer, he insisted on going into detail about which regulars give him trouble; who is getting divorced, married, or promoted; what he had for lunch that day; and his feelings about people who listen to music without headphones.
Initially, the endless deluge of details had them thinking he was a pretty decent suspect.
No one force-feeds a detective pointless minutia like a guilty person.
As it turns out, he was just a lonely guy excited to explain his job to people who had no choice but to listen.
No matter how many people they spoke to, there was still a giant chunk of time missing after Melissa got on that bus.
A few people thought they knew where she’d jumped off at, but they all listed different stop.
The investigative team had followed up on each stop, but nothing seemed to hold any water.
Somehow Melissa had managed to sneak off into the abyss.
Beth seemingly followed her there just four days later.
Leroux feels like he can hear these women’s heartbeats, like that fucking Poe story. They haunt his every waking minute. He feels like they’re following him, but they get softer, weaker, as he fails to find them.
If he’s being honest with himself, they are more likely to find Melissa’s body at this point, though that’s a brutal reality he won’t say out loud, and it won’t stop him from pouring everything he has into finding her.
Beth’s case is coming up on the critical seventy-two-hour mark, and as the seconds tick by, her heartbeat fades further away, until eventually it will disappear along with her.
His cell phone vibrates in his pocket, a welcome intrusion into his self-imposed guilt.
The name “Lucas Hart” lights up the screen.
It feels like another part of his brain blinks on, illuminating a different set of priorities, a different purpose.
He feels his pulse quicken and answers it almost immediately.
“Leroux,” he says curtly.
“I know, I called you,” Hart jokes.
Leroux sighs, a little annoyed. “What do you want, Hart? I hope it’s something good.”
Lucas Hart contacted him weeks ago to ask about Jeremy Rose and Philip Trudeau.
Initially Hart was just feeling eager to prove himself at his new job, so he dug deep into Jeremy Rose and what had recently happened in the notoriously safe Berkshires bubble.
But he’d been surprised to find some inconsistencies related to Trudeau, who was supposedly held hostage in his home by Rose.
And every time Hart brought up Trudeau, the good old Kingsborough Police Department threw up roadblocks.
They didn’t want to hear about any connection between Trudeau and the now-imprisoned Rose, though the two have a clear history as childhood friends.
They shunned Hart and told him it wasn’t his case.
Hart was an outsider who had no business forcing connections that weren’t there, but Leroux has been relieved to learn that Hart isn’t led from the smoke that easily.
The response only drew him closer. After that, Hart kept his eyes and ears open, waiting for one of the Kingsborough PD to drop their guard.
Well, to the patient victor goes the spoils, and his moment finally came one evening when he overheard some of his coworkers discussing the case, believing they were only among their own.
Hart’s ears perked up when he heard his fellow officers start digging in specifically about a Detective Leroux out of New Orleans who had tension with the department over his “unfounded” suspicions against Pastor Philip.
That’s all the encouragement Hart needed to reach out to Leroux and form a connection.
He’d immediately tapped Leroux for insight and shared his own.
Separately, they both know that Trudeau has a dark side, and together they’ve found what feels like validation.
One of the most important things Hart was able to access for Leroux was all the physical evidence related to Richard Muller’s crime scene—and confirmation of some interesting facts that Leroux had heard about through his own law enforcement grapevine.
On the syringe used to inject Richard with the lethal succinylcholine, they uncovered partial prints that do not match Jeremy Rose.
Technicians also found a hair on Richard’s body that does not completely match Rose.
Word was that the hair, when tested, came back as being dark facial hair belonging to what was assumed to be a white male.
Leroux was halfway elated by the news. He could think of only one person in close proximity with Jeremy Rose who had dark facial hair, and that person was the kindly pastor with a heart so golden, he allowed the devil to stay in his home.
For weeks they got the runaround about whether the hair sample included enough of the root to extract nuclear DNA.
The department had already cited budget issues as a reason for delaying certain testing, but Leroux and Hart shared a belief in the theory that the Kingsborough PD would do a lot to hold that information back if it harmed Trudeau.
Leroux imagined the budget concerns would become their crutch.
This was the ideal proof that Jeremy Rose did not kill Richard Muller alone.
Leroux was deeply invested in Richard’s case, not just because Richard had been married to one of Leroux’s closest friends but also because Richard himself had become a good friend over time.
However, Leroux felt utterly powerless to make any progress with the case.
That’s how Hart became his rat.
Of course, if you ask Hart, he’d say he’s no rat.
In his words, he has a “thirst for justice,” and his department feels anything but just to him.
Whatever he is, it’s exactly what Leroux needed to start chipping away at the ironclad fortress around Trudeau.
So he asked Hart to look into the evidence found at the scene, maybe see why these buffoons weren’t comparing it to Rose’s last known acquaintance.
So Hart dug deeper, and what he found was shocking.
No one was even looking at Trudeau. He simply wasn’t a concern to the department, and Hart soon discovered that there was actually nothing to dig into, nothing to investigate, because the hair evidence, which could have been compared to a sample from Trudeau, was lost.
Somehow, in the span of weeks, the Kingsborough Police Department had ignored partial prints and had lost a vital piece of physical evidence from the crime scene of a notorious serial killer.
Even more interesting was the fact that Pastor Philip suddenly showed up to his services sporting a cleanly shaven face.
Leroux was so angry, he could have fucking spit.
That’s when he knew he was up against something bigger than even Jeremy Rose.
He became determined to prove that Philip Trudeau was poison being fed to the community like an antidote.
Now, when Leroux hears Hart’s voice, he feels hope, but it’s always mixed with the anticipation of battle. Nothing ever comes from Kingsborough without a thick layer of fraudulent red tape wrapped around it.