“Whoa there, friend. Can we help you?”
This is Jack Westman’s voice. The camera is still trained on the three at the table. Jack, Zoe, Colleen. Then there is a yelp and the camera jerks to the shooter. He comes into fuzzy view before the first shot is fired. Another. Then another. “What did you do?” someone yells. Zoe is screaming, and the camera waves about, focused on nothing. There is a brief flash of Jack Westman slumped against his wife, his temple marked with a red circle that looks dabbed on with paint. Finally the focus settles on the ceiling. Charlotte must have dropped the camera. “What did you do?” A woman screams again. “What did you do?” Then: “Get him!” From there the sounds are mixed together, too many voices at once. The video ends.
Clare and Somers shift back in their chairs.
“Less gory than I was expecting,” Somers says. “Anything in particular you noticed?”
“That was Zoe in the video. So Charlotte must have been filming. One of the witnesses I spoke to, Kavita Spence, the hostess—you can see her in the video. She had conflicting memories with Roland about what door the guy used. I don’t know why she’d lie.”
“She probably isn’t lying,” Somers says. “Not intentionally, anyway. Memory is garbage. It’s the worst possible witness. Especially with something like this. Your mind will play tricks on you. She can’t describe his face properly even though she probably looked right at the guy. She thinks he came in one way when he actually came in another. Her brain inserts that element so she can process what she witnessed.”
“Can you zoom in on the shooter and take a screenshot?” Clare asks.
Somers toggles the video to land on the frame that best depicts the shooter. Though it is grainy, it is clear that the shooter is wearing eyeglasses, the hood of a jacket pulled tight to conceal the color of his hair. But his face is visible enough. If you knew him, you’d recognize him.
“He probably wore glasses to mess with facial recognition,” Somers says. “This guy knew what he was doing. Do you recognize him?”
“No,” Clare says.
“He’s probably a hired gun. I’ll get copies of this image printed at the front desk. Anything else?”
“One thing,” Clare says. “Jack. Did you notice something about him?”
“He seemed pretty calm,” Somers says. “But I guess he didn’t know what was coming. He’s just out for dinner with his family.”
“I know,” Clare says. “But… hmm. Can we replay it?”
This time Clare edges over to the laptop and cues the video up herself. They watch the first minute again. Then again.
“What do you see?” Clare asks Somers.
“He seems distracted?” Somers guesses. “But also kind of out of it. Drunk, maybe.”
“Yes,” Clare says. “He does.”
“He keeps looking at the door.”
Clare clicks at the video to zero in on the section with Jack clearly in the frame. It seems plain: His smile is put on, and he is looking to the restaurant’s entrance. As if waiting. Next to him, Zoe and Colleen laugh and lean into each other, hamming for the camera. Clare presses pause. In the frozen frame you can see Jack clearly. His eyes are glassy. His coloring is off. He looks ashen.
“I’m not exactly sure what I’m supposed to see,” Somers says. “He’s thin. Doesn’t look all that great. Kind of sickly. But the guy was old.”
“No.” Clare touches the screen. “Look. Look at his expression.”
“I’m not sure,” Somers says. “But he seems scared.”
In the paused image Jack has edged away from his wife in the booth. He is waiting, watching.
“Actually, it’s pretty clear,” Somers says. “I see it. He knew.”
“Yes,” Clare says. “He knew it was coming.”
The road hugs the cliffside over the ocean, then curls and climbs. Clare checks the dashboard clock. The drive to the prison is thirty minutes from these final outskirts of Lune Bay. Clare pulls her rental car over at the top of the switchback and steps out to a brisk wind. The sky is gray. Black cliffs rise from the frothy sea and stretch for miles northward.
It takes Clare’s breath away, the beauty of it. This craggy end of the earth. From here, she will drive inland to see Donovan Hughes again. An hour ago she left Somers in the hotel conference room to work at decoding the video file and its source. Clare found her rental car in the depths of the hotel parking lot and started out of Lune Bay, stopping only at a drive-thru to satiate her aching hunger. Now she walks to the stone guardrail and peers over. It’s a precipitous drop to the ocean below.
Clare returns to the car and sits on its hood, eyes still out to the water. In the hotel parking lot, Clare found herself scanning the backseat of the car and even the trunk before getting in. She feels antsy, paranoid. And then the fear makes her angry. It is easy enough to keep going, to focus on the case, when she is with Somers, when Somers is reassuring her. But alone, Clare can’t help looking over her shoulder.
In her marriage, Clare developed a kind of sixth sense, a means to navigate Jason’s moods, his next steps. She could anticipate him. And here, alone at this lookout point, Clare feels it more distinctly than she has since those early weeks after she left. His presence. Jason, right behind her.
Where are you? she thinks. Are you here?
Clare unlocks her phone and inputs a number she’s known by heart for two decades. Before it can ring, Clare hangs up, gnawing
