The Night Shift(79)
The next images come in waves, as if under a strobe light.
The room filling with figures.
Stan.
Hal.
Arpeggio.
A medic with a concerned look on her face.
Keller sees the darkened ceiling … she’s being carried away on a stretcher. She shifts painfully to look around her.
She passes Atticus, who isn’t moving … Chris, who isn’t moving … Ella, who isn’t moving.
And then everything goes dark.
EPILOGUE
ONE YEAR LATER
Keller waves to Bob, who’s pushing a double stroller that nearly takes up the entire sidewalk. He has an overstuffed diaper bag slung over his shoulder. She’s told him he doesn’t need to do this, but he brings the twins for lunch near her office every Wednesday. It’s a production, getting them seated at the diner, but he insists.
After the nightmare of folding the stroller, wiping down the table, setting up the baby seats, and having toys at the ready before one of them starts up, they finally look at their menus.
“You don’t have to do this, you know,” she says.
“I get an afternoon away from the moms at the park, and I get to see my favorite G-woman, why would I not?” He’s wearing a concert T-shirt and for a moment she’s taken back to their first date. Him fawning over her job, never once talking about himself, a rarity in the dating scene. He left his job shortly after the kids were born. When Keller was in the hospital that terrible night—when things were touch and go for both her and the twins—he told her he’d made a deal with God. If they got through this, all of them, then he would dedicate every second of his life to taking care of his family. He’s a tad dramatic, her husband.
“I have news,” Keller says.
He looks at her, waiting.
“Stan is transferring to the New York City field office. He’ll still be a SAC, but they’re grooming him to be the A-DIC.”
“Who came up with all these acronyms? They sound like jobs on a porn set.”
Keller smiles despite herself. “He wants me to come with him.”
Bob thinks about this. “What do you want to do?”
“I wanted to talk with you.”
“I’m a moron. Why would you want to do that?”
She smiles again, swats him with her menu. “I’m serious. It will mean more hours. A longer commute. You’ll have to take on more with the kids.” She gazes lovingly at the twins, who each have a fistful of Cheerios from the container Bob put in front of them.
“You didn’t answer my question. What do you want to do?”
“Stan said I could focus on financial crimes. The cases are super-interesting. It’s the best white-collar crime team at the Bureau.”
“No psycho high school principals?”
She shakes her head in exasperation. “That reminds me: Jesse Duvall was on Good Morning America this morning. She’s getting a lot of attention for that piece she wrote in the New Yorker about the case. She mentions me in the segment.”
Bob’s eyes light up. He’s already on his phone, pulling up the clip. “It’s a long interview, I’ll watch the whole thing later, but where does she mention you?”
“Near the end.”
Bob fiddles with the device, fast-forwarding, then holds the phone so they both can see the screen. The twins are watching them, seemingly fascinated.
Jesse Duvall sits on a veranda, a handsome estate in the background. She looks like a movie star.
The host says, “So the killer, he says something extraordinarily creepy to you during the attack, the same words he said fifteen years prior to the lone survivor of the Blockbuster killings?”
“That’s right.”
“Why do you think he did that? Or let you survive, for that matter?”
“I think he wanted to divert attention from himself. At the time, everyone thought Vince Whitaker was the Blockbuster killer, so he thought they might think Vince killed the employees of the ice cream store. But his backup plan, which was what ended up carrying the day, was that the authorities would believe that I committed the crime.”
“Why would he think that?”
“Because he knew I was researching the Blockbuster case. He didn’t know why, but I’d met with him when I was having a problem with some girls at school. We talked about my interest in journalism. I was like, ‘You were a teacher and knew all these kids from Blockbuster, tell me about them.’”
* * *
Bob pauses the clip. “Does she get into the thing about her teacher?”
“Briefly,” Keller says, “she just mentions that after her New Yorker story other girls came forward and creepy Chad Parke was finally charged and pled guilty.”
Bob nods, clicks PLAY.
* * *
The host asks, “Why do you think he killed so many? And there was a big gap in time here, what do you think triggered him to do it again?”
Jesse seems to ponder this. “I think he killed my mother because he was obsessed with her. If he couldn’t have her, no one could. I think he killed her friends at the store because they knew about their relationship and threatened to tell. I think the same thing happened with the Sawyer sisters. Hannah wanted out of the relationship and told her older sister when he was stalking her. Madison was going to tell their mom. He must’ve been watching the ice cream store and saw me go in there and decided to take the opportunity. As for the time between the crimes, we’ll never know.”