Chapter Eight
During the last decade of her career at the FBI, Jude had spent a great deal of her free time driving from San Francisco down to Folsom State Prison, where she’d sat across from a man who had abducted, tortured, raped, and murdered at least twelve girls between the ages of fourteen and seventeen.
Frederick Arnold Henley had been a psychopath, but he’d also been at turns both charming and insightful.
Their relationship had been purely transactional.
Jude had been desperate to locate the bodies of his victims. Freddy had been desperate for a distraction from the tedium of prison.
For years, they had talked politics and current events and geology, the latter of which had been Freddy’s area of educational expertise.
Occasionally, he would tell Jude where to find a victim’s body.
Occasionally, he would grow reflective about the events that had led him to the eternity of California’s death row.
As with every psychopath before or since, he had been fascinated by his own twisted mind.
He’d also been highly invested in excusing his sadism as some sort of evolutionary urge beyond his control.
Doll, he had once told her, anybody is capable of murder. You push them hard enough, you make them feel helpless enough, and they’ll slit a throat or pull a trigger without a second thought.
Jude had emphatically disagreed. While she believed that she could kill someone in defense of herself or others, she could not imagine a scenario where she would murder someone in cold blood.
And then she had watched Reggie Wilder shove Emmy so hard that she’d stumbled backward and hit the ground.
Jude couldn’t recall making the decision to run toward Emmy. Her body had moved of its own accord. Her vision had taken on a predatory sharpness. Rage had infused every muscle and nerve. If Emmy hadn’t taken down the cocksucker with a metal baton, Jude would have beaten him to death with her fists.
She was still seized by an impotent rage as Emmy limped toward a group of sheriff’s deputies who’d done nothing to protect their boss when Reggie had assaulted her.
Jude forced herself to look away. She focused on slowing her breaths.
Studied the variations in color that speckled the asphalt in the road.
Let her gaze travel to the neatly mowed grass in Allison’s front yard.
Jude nodded to herself, a physical check-in with her brain that she was okay.
She walked to Emmy’s cruiser. Found her shoes where she’d kicked them off.
She wiped the dirt and grime off the soles of her feet before slipping on the heels.
Then she checked her reflection in the side mirror.
Blood had trickled down the side of her face where the bullet had grazed her temple.
Jude found a pack of tissues in her purse.
There were only a few left. It was hard to think that a little over half an hour ago she was burying her mother.
She’d offered the tissues to Emmy in the church, but Emmy had looked at Jude as if she was trying to share a bump of coke.
“Hey.” Cole jogged over to Jude. Anxiety radiated off his body. “You think Mom’s okay?”
“She’ll be fine, sweetheart.” Emmy hadn’t been okay for a very long time. Jude looked in the mirror again, wiped at the blood on her face. “Your mother knows how to take care of herself.”
“What about you?” Cole still looked worried, but this time, his concern was directed at Jude. “You could’ve died in there.”
Jude made a show of struggling to stand. “‘It’s just a flesh wound.’”
“Still,” Cole said, missing the joke by about fifty years. “You should take it easy.”
Jude brushed his shoulders with her hands. His beautiful black suit was covered in a layer of white dust. She picked chunks of Sheetrock out of his wavy, dark hair. “How did you get this messy? You look like John Wayne Gacy asked you to smile for the camera.”
He still wouldn’t laugh. He was watching Emmy talk to a group of deputies, clearly eager to join in. Jude was keenly aware of Cole’s frustrations. The fact that his mother kept throttling his leash had been the subject of many late-night discussions.
Jude said, “Remember what I told you? How can you make yourself useful?”
Cole half shrugged. “I looked on socials to see if I could find Bill Garrison. He doesn’t have any accounts.”
“He’s Allison’s age?” Jude waited for his nod. “Would he be on TikTok and Snap?”
“Shit.”
Cole’s phone came out of his pocket. His body contorted into what Jude thought of as the Posture: shoulders rolled in, head bent over his phone, thumb scrolling the screen. In the six weeks that she’d known Cole, she had seen more of the top of his head than his actual face.
He said, “Bill’s on Facebook. There’s mostly pictures of him and Allison. Some with Mandy.”
Jude pointed to the banner at the top of the page. “What’s that?”
Cole started nodding as he typed in a search for the North Falls Tigers. “There’s a game at two o’clock over at the baseball park. I’ll tell the chief.”
Jude caught his arm before he could go. “Is there a way to tell her without the information getting back to Reggie Wilder?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He walked with his head down as he typed into his phone.
Jude took a moment to breathe. The rage against Reggie was still roiling inside of her.
She looked down the street. Brett was helping the cocksucker limp to his car.
Darla Bell was perched in her window like a judgmental crow.
Sherry Robertson was zipping herself into a protective suit.
One of the GBI techs was filling her in on his preliminary walk-through.
The rumble of a car engine pulled Jude back to Emmy. She was climbing into the passenger’s side of her cruiser. She’d asked another deputy to drive her to the ballpark. Yet again, Cole was left standing around with nothing to do. The look on his face tugged at Jude’s heart.
She nodded him back over. “What’s your plan?”
“The chief ordered me to take you to the wake at Taybee’s farm.”
“That’s not happening.” Jude couldn’t be pecked to death by hundreds of Cliftons right now. “Your mother’s going to be pissed when she gets back here and sees you.”
“Are you saying I should go to the farm?”
“I’m saying the way you get onto a case is to make yourself valuable to the case.”
She could almost hear the wheels turning in his brain. He tried, “I can help search the woods.”
“If the killer was in the woods, they would’ve found him already.
” Jude saw Sherry walking toward the front porch.
It was too late for the Socratic method.
She rattled off a list of things for Cole to do, from checking with neighbors to pushing for search warrants.
She was about to send Cole off when she thought of one last thing.
“Sweetheart? What did you call Papa when he was in charge?”
“Boss.”
“Then that’s what you should call your mother.”
He gave one of his thoughtful nods. “Yes, ma’am.”
Jude quickened her pace so she could catch Sherry before she disappeared into the house. “Special Agent Robertson?”
Sherry had been in the process of putting on her mask. She let it drop, a smile spreading across her face. “Dr. Archer, please call me Sherry. I’m trying not to fan girl. I cited your study on community-wide trauma responses to childhood abductions in my college thesis.”
“How wonderful.” Jude felt approximately ten thousand years old. “Do you mind if I shadow you inside?”
Sherry’s smile glowed. “I’d be honored.”
Jude made quick work of suiting up, navigating her dress, feeling like a ridiculous TV detective as she slipped a pair of booties over her high heels.
Sherry handed her a mask. “Ready?”
Jude stepped inside the foyer. Everything was a depressing shade of brown.
Sherry pointed to a purple velvet bag on the hall floor. “Not sure whether the killer dropped it or Allison did.”
“When I first started on the job, we weren’t allowed to wear holsters. Too unladylike. We put our guns in Crown Royal bags so the firing pins didn’t build up lint inside our purses.”
Sherry looked at the bag with renewed interest. “If Allison pulled her gun, we haven’t found it yet.”
“Early days.” Jude kept looking around. The house was at least three thousand square feet. The team was going to be here for a while. “Can you take me through it?”
“One shot fired here in the foyer, two more in the kitchen, then two upstairs.”
Jude was more interested in the state of the dining room. Papers, photos, files, a broken laptop. She knew the answer, but she wanted to show deference to Sherry. “Do you think the killer searched this area?”
“Definitely. Allison didn’t leave messes like this.”
That much was clear from the house. Barring what had happened upstairs, there wasn’t a speck of dust or a sign of clutter anywhere but the dining room.
Jude imagined that the papers had been neatly stacked prior to the shooting.
She walked closer, stepping around a broken pack of Crayola sidewalk chalk.
The blue, red, purple, green and orange sticks had shattered into pieces.
Jude used her foot to angle the cardboard pack. The yellow was missing.
Sherry said, “Most of these photos are from the local hook-up spot, the Dew Drop Inn.”
Jude knew the spot. “Allison was working as a private investigator?”
“Yep. She took retirement last year. Should’ve probably done it sooner, but she wanted to hit her full twenty.
” Sherry shrugged. “A case went sideways. She got the blame. You can get away with a lot in this job if you’re a man, but a woman screwing up like that—no way.
Not to mention her marriage was a mess.”
Jude waited for more.
“Bill was abusing her. Emmy and I tried, but she wouldn’t leave him.’”