a cheap one he must have gotten from a drug store. It had a bright yellow sunflower on the front.
She opened it up, careful not to smudge anything. The first thing she realized: it was less than a quarter full.
The first few pages were some of the best photos of Marisa de Seroux. Pale skin, blond, with serious eyes and a heart-shaped face. An angel.
Then she came to a yellowed newspaper clipping. Laura recognized it: The New Times article about the de Seroux murder-suicide. She turned the page and saw the photo from Page 2, a white coffin under a mass of lilies being hefted up the steps into a church.
In the margin someone—Lundy, she assumed—had written in faded ink, “Liars!”
She made a note to save it for handwriting analysis.
Chief Redbone bent to see over her shoulder. “What does he mean by that?”
Laura knew. She felt it, that tangible truth that occasionally revealed itself at a certain point in a case. “He didn’t believe she was dead.”
“What? Why would he think that?”
“It was a closed-casket funeral, right? He could have gotten the idea she somehow escaped.”
“Escaped?”
“Uh-huh.” Laura remembered the news reports on TV after the Judd murder case in Safford. The hope everyone had that one of the children had escaped when all that time she lay underneath the house, dying.
“He must have been delusional,” Redbone said.
“They say love is blind.”
“What? Are you saying he was in love with a twelve-year-old girl?”
“Is it really that much of a stretch? How old do you think he was?”
Redbone frowned. “I don’t know. A teenager, I guess.”
“Probably not that much older than Marisa—Misty.”
“She didn’t escape, though. Everybody knew that. No way anyone could escape something like that—Henry shot up the house.”
“The paper didn’t publish any crime scene photos.”
“No, of course not.”
“There was no trial?”
“Nobody to prosecute. Everybody was dead.”
“I’m guessing Lundy didn’t want to believe it, so he didn’t. What do they say? Perception is reality. Misty escaping—that was his reality.”
“We can’t know that for sure.”
“No.” Laura turned the page. It felt fragile in her hand, crackly. Another shorter article describing the murders- suicide. Laura read through it quickly—nothing new.
But on the opposite page was something that made no sense at all.
It was a small news item in a Vancouver newspaper.
“WOMAN IN ALERT BAY SUCCUMBS TO INJURIES. Live-in Boyfriend Charged with Capital Murder.”
“Misty Patin of Alert Bay, British Columbia, who has been in a coma for half a year, died today, paving the way for Robert Lewis to be charged with murder…”
Laura read quickly. Misty Patin, age twenty-eight, had been beaten so badly she had been on life support for six months before succumbing to her injuries. She left behind a girl, thirteen, and a boy, five. This had been one of two traumatic events in Misty Patin’s young life. Her daughter, Kim, had been kidnapped from a Wal-Mart in Vancouver during a family shopping trip two years before. Tragedy was averted, though, when she was found shortly afterwards in the custody of a cabbie several miles away. According to the cabbie, he had picked up a nervous man and young girl in the Gas Town district. The girl started crying and told the cabbie that the man was not her daddy. The man then jumped out of the cab and disappeared into the crowd.
The Pakistani cabbie described the man as “not a tough guy, you know? He was more like a gay.”
Gay, Laura thought. Or just effeminate? The kind of guy who grew up sewing alongside his mother. She said aloud, “How would he get the idea this woman was his Misty?”
“Lundy?” The chief stared at her. “What, you think he followed her there? Because of her name?”
Laura was thinking on her feet now. “My guess it was Lundy who kidnapped the girl.”
“I thought he was in love with Misty.”
“I know.” It didn’t make sense. Something was missing. Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe he didn’t follow her there. But she wondered how a man in Apalachicola, Florida, would get his hands on a newspaper from Alert Bay, Canada. She wondered how many people in Apalachicola, Florida, knew of the existence of Alert Bay, Canada—or vice versa. She herself had never heard of Alert Bay until now.
Laura said, “There must be some link.”
“You think he tracked down every Misty he could find?”
“Somehow he got on to this one.”
