Some of those pieces are the crime scene photos. These photos are a sliver of time. I've always felt that crimes burn into a place, permanently altering the atmosphere. These pictures record the moment that brand is made. Even tiny details can give insight into the crime that might otherwise be lost. That’s what makes them so invaluable and influential in an early investigation.
My hands pressed flat on the large oval table; I sweep my eyes over the photos spread out across it. They land on one, and I pull it toward me.
"Look," I say to Eric, running my fingertip down the trail of footprints behind Greg's body. "There are footprints all over the beach, but there wasn't much rain in the days before the murder, so the sand was dry. The footprints are shallow. They just pressed down into the very surface of the sand. But look at the ones behind Greg."
"Like the mud under Martin Phillips," Eric notes.
I nod. The deep impressions of boot marks sunk into the wet ground at the train yard, just beneath where the orderly was tied to a fence and tortured, are clear in my mind. They almost superimpose the footsteps in the picture I look at now.
“Exactly,” I tell him. “Those were made when Anson picked Martin up to hang him. Some of those marks were shallower because only he was standing in that place, but then they got deeper when he lifted him up. He had to press his weight down to get leverage. This is the same idea, but not because somebody picked Greg up. Instead, Greg made footprints going across the sand up to the edge of the water. Then another person followed behind, following in his exact footprints. It made them much deeper than any other footsteps nearby.”
“So, whoever shot him followed directly behind him rather than walking beside him,” Eric says.
I nod.
“So, again, I don't see somebody marching Greg out across the beach in the daylight and shooting him. Greg wouldn't comply like that. There would be a fight; he would try to make a scene and get away. But if you look at the sand, there isn't any sign that he reacted at all. He walked to the edge of that water and dropped dead where he stood. No struggle. No movement like he was turning around in response to anyone," I say.
“So, why was he out there? Greg doesn't exactly strike me as the beach-going type,” Eric says.
“Definitely not,” I agree. “The one time I convinced him to go to the river with me, he slathered on sun factor two thousand and still sat under an umbrella the entire time with a shirt on. He was never a water person. He would hike and was a really skilled boxer. When he was a kid, he built go-karts."
"Seriously?" Eric asks.
I nod, an unexpected laugh bubbling up.
“That was his fun fact.”
“His what?”
“His fun fact. We didn't have a cute or romantic story about how we started dating. It just kind of happened. But at the very beginning, when we first met, he did try to flirt with me a little. He just wasn't very good at it. He was too analytical and precise for that. We already talked a lot about work and our current lives and everything, but once he decided he was attracted to me, he just stopped being able to communicate. So, one day when he was struggling with having a conversation with me, I asked him for a fun fact about himself. It was supposed to just throw him off his game and force him to think outside the structured conversation he seemed to have planned,” I explain.
“And his was about go-karts,” Eric acknowledges.
I nod, looking back at the table and a picture of Greg before he ended up on that beach.
“Yes. He didn't even really have to think about it, which was pretty funny. It was almost like that was the only fun fact about him, so it was easy for him to think of. But he told me that when he was younger, he lived in a pretty rural area, and it was just a normal thing for boys to build their own go-karts. As you can imagine, he didn't have a lot in common with most of the guys in his area. But he was smart and mechanical, so that in particular really resonated with him. He was able to build impressive karts; he even entered into races with them." I glance over at Eric with a tense smile. "I bet you didn't see that coming."
"I'm just envisioning a miniature Greg in a little child-sized suit, racing go-karts," he smiles with a tinge of sadness to his voice.
The image is pretty funny; I have to admit. But I’ve slipped off track, letting my mind go into nostalgia and memory rather than focusing on what's in front of me. Even though Greg and I had been over for a long time before all this, it still hurts that he’s gone. Shaking away the emotion, I look back at the pictures in front of me and focus again on the footsteps.
“I think he went on to the beach himself.”
“What about the blonde woman on the security camera?” Eric asks.
“I don't know. It definitely looked like she at least left with him. But I don't think anybody was with him when he first walked out onto the beach. It looks like he did that on his own, and then someone came up behind him.”
“Maybe getting through his captivity with Jonah and surviving being brutalized gave him a new lease on life,” Eric suggests. “He could have decided he didn't want to follow the same patterns and routines he did before and was going to try new things.”
I look up
