The Girl Who Survived(122)

She melted into him, her whole body shuddering, her knees buckling, his strength keeping her on her feet. She teetered between wanting to go forward and to run away, to close the door behind her and never look back.

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not, Wes. You know it and I know it. It will never be okay. Never.”

*

“Got him!” Johnson said as she strode into Thomas’s office. She spread a series of 8 × 10 photos on his desk. Different pictures of the crowd that had gathered around the hospital when Jonas had been a patient at Whimstick General.

“That was fast.”

“I had someone in the tech department help me with facial recognition, and we were able to match anyone close to the original investigation to people in the crowd at the hospital. It was pretty easy.” She was proud of herself. “Also, I grabbed a lot of shots off the Internet, under the Facebook fan page where a lot of Jonas’s followers, if you’d call them that, anyway, his fans, where they posted selfies and pictures of the crowd that had gathered. That’s how I got so many different angles and perspectives. Take a look.”

Thomas leaned in closer as Johnson said, “The thing is this, quite a few of some our nearest and dearest suspects were there.” She shifted the pictures on his desk. “Let’s start here with dear old ‘Auntie Fai.’ ” She pointed out Faiza Donner, who stood separately from Roger Sweeney, parted by a sea of people so that it appeared Faiza didn’t know Sweeney was there, and vice versa.

“Now, let’s move on. Take a look at this.”

In the picture he saw Brittlynn Atwater again, and he recognized Sheila Keegan holding a microphone near to Mia Long. “Right here.” Johnson touched another image, of the man in the baseball cap, standing beneath the tree and staring at the woman in the long coat who looked so much like Marlie Robinson. In this picture, from the opposite angle of the first, he stood still hanging back from the crowd, but now he stood in front of the tree, his face in clear view.

Water Robinson.

Staring at the woman who was a dead ringer for his missing daughter.

And he didn’t look the least bit surprised.

“What the hell was he doing there?” Thomas said, the wheels spinning wildly in his mind. Walter Robinson? Joining the crowd rallying for Jonas McIntyre and staring at his daughter or a dead ringer for her?

“Check out his hat.”

She showed him an enlarged print of Walter’s face and cap. Not a baseball cap as he’d originally thought, but a cap emblazoned with the emblem for the United States Marines.

“Not ‘simplify’ or ‘send her Fi,’ ” he said aloud.

Johnson was nodding and smiling grimly as he rolled his chair back and reached for his jacket. “Semper fi. Walter was in the Marine Corps.”

“As was Edmund Tate. My guess is they knew each other, and Tate recognized Walter chasing Kara that night.”

“I thought the attacker was masked.”

“He could’ve pulled it off when he gave chase.”

The scene played out in his mind, the terrified seven-year-old running through the forest. A huge man running desperately after her. The cop on the porch hearing screams and recognizing the attacker. “Tate wasn’t chasing Kara.” Thomas reached for his sidearm, slipped it into the holster on his belt. “Walter was.”

“Tate just intercepted the chase, cutting across from his yard and running out onto the ice,” Johnson said.

“And what happened to Walter? Why did he back off? Because he saw Tate?” Thomas asked aloud, his thoughts spinning.

“Maybe, or just to get the hell out of there. He might have decided to get as far away as possible before anyone showed up.”

“Call the Seaside PD,” Thomas said as with a clunk, the department’s aging furnace kicked into higher gear. “Have them keep an eye on Robinson until we get a warrant.”

“Got it,” Johnson said, her eyes narrowing with a self-satisfied gleam. “My ex-brother-in-law is a cop there and we’re cool. He’s close to my son. I’ve already made the call. He’ll let me know where that son of a bitch is ASAP.”

Thomas should have felt a little buzz of anticipation, the jolt of adrenaline that always came with an impending arrest for cracking a case, but something was off about this one. Walter Robinson was involved, he was certain of that, but it all didn’t make sense.

Why would Walter show up at the McIntyre house on Christmas Eve and slaughter the entire family, including his own son?

What had happened to his daughter, Marlie, who, according to Brittlynn Atwater, was supposed to run away with Chad that night?

Where the hell was Chad Atwater? Why did he run?

“Something’s off,” he said.

“What do you mean? We’ve got him!”

“Maybe.” As Johnson peered over his shoulder, Thomas started typing on his computer keyboard. He pulled up the file on Walter Robinson again, but he was antsy as he read the information, felt as if he was spinning his wheels here at his desk.

He needed to move, get out of the office. Do something. Just as Johnson did.

But Thomas couldn’t afford to arrest the wrong man.

Thomas read the info. Robinson’s current address was still Seaside, where he worked as an electrician. Independent. He had been in the marines, where he’d been a medic, and after being discharged had married Zelda Donner. They’d had two kids, the boy named for Zelda’s family, Donner Robinson, and a daughter, Marlie. Zelda and Walter had divorced and Zelda, pregnant with Kara, had married Samuel McIntyre, himself the father of two, his namesake Sam and Jonas, the wild card.