The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)(95)

Halloran walks with us down the hall to where Ramirez and Burnside are waiting, to let the agents on guard know they can return to their post. “I’m no expert, of course, but it doesn’t seem like he’s faking it.”

“Doesn’t seem like it, no,” I say carefully. “That’s what the tests will determine.”

“I wanted to say thank you, to both of you and the Bureau in general. You’ve been extraordinarily sensitive about all of this.”

“I’ll admit, if we were still looking for the girls, it might have been a different story,” Kearney replies. “Not that we’d be cruel, of course, but . . . we wouldn’t have the space to give him this. It’s for the best that we weren’t relying on him to find them.”

“The story should break around ten this morning,” I tell the lawyer. “Do you have a preferred method of contact we can give to the media?”

She pulls a business card from her blazer pocket, flipping it over to show the phone number and email penciled on the back. “It’s not a wild guess that this is going to get a lot of attention,” she sighs. “A case like this is going to incite a lot of emotional responses. Do I believe he’s guilty? Yes. The trail of bodies over the decades eliminates any possibility of coincidence. But I also believe that he’s entitled to the best legal defense I can provide him. It’s easy for people to forget that a fair trial is a constitutional right.”

“Good luck,” Kearney says, extending a hand.

It is half past five in the morning, and the only good thing about that is the coffee shop in the hospital lobby is opening its gate. We drain the first round standing there in the shop, then get a second round for the office from the concerned barista.

Our arrival back at the bullpen with caffeine is greeted with a wave of moans. Ramirez kicks the chair out from under Anderson before he can even make the filthy comment promised by his leer. With my cup of tea in one hand, I lift Bran’s jet fuel out of the carrier and head over to his desk. He looks like he actually slept a bit. Not much, but some.

He’s also not the only one at his desk. He’s got my chair rolled over for a guest, a woman in her sixties with blonde hair cut short and styled around a face that’s aging gracefully. There’s enough grey in her hair to make it look ashy rather than golden, but her blue eyes are clear and alert. And shocked.

“You must be Laura Davies,” I greet her, handing Bran his cup. I can see an empty mug at his elbow and a mostly full one beside Ms. Davies.

“I used to be,” she says ruefully. “I’m Laura Wyatt these past thirty-some years.”

“Of course. My apologies, Mrs. Wyatt.”

She shakes her head. “It’s just . . . this is all so hard to believe. Mark really killed all those girls?”

“The Wyatts got in about twenty minutes ago,” Bran says, answering the questions I’m not quite sure how to ask. “So they haven’t really been told much yet. The Smiths took her son down to the cafeteria.”

I step away long enough to steal Ramirez’s chair and push it over so I can sit. An hour of sleep in two days is not enough. “You must have a lot of questions.”

“Probably,” she admits. “Hell if I know what they are yet.” She rubs at her eyes, her plain gold wedding band worn with time and care. “We just . . . we were married so young. Too young. We hadn’t even been dating all that long, and suddenly I was pregnant. I wanted to get an abortion, but he convinced me to keep it. I don’t . . . I don’t regret that, precisely.”

“But it was hard.”

“Impossibly hard. We had to work all the time just to keep a roof over our heads at first. Things got better financially, allowing us to spoil Lisa a little.”

“Didn’t do much for your marriage, though.”

“If I hadn’t started throwing up every day, I doubt our relationship would have lasted the rest of the semester,” she says with a pained laugh. “Our marriage was actually better when we were too busy to see each other. We tried to make it work for Lisa’s sake.”

“And then she got sick.”

“I have a neighbor whose little boy was diagnosed with leukemia a few years ago. It’s amazing how the treatments have advanced. Still terrible, of course, but they’ve gained so much ground in the past forty years.” Her eyes are bright with tears, but none fall. “Thank God for St. Jude’s. We had Lisa home whenever possible, but they took such good care of her. It just . . . it wasn’t their fault it wasn’t enough. And after she died . . .”

“There was nothing holding you and Mark together.”

“I waited for a year to see if I could stick it out, if things would change. And . . . well. I wasn’t going to be the woman who served him papers at our daughter’s funeral. But it was so much worse than it had been. It was like I was drowning all the time, without ever breaking the surface. I’d managed to keep in touch with one of my best friends from high school. She offered me a place to stay so I could get back on my feet.”

“When was the last time you heard from Mark?”

“We finalized the papers two years after Lisa died. He had his lawyer keep pushing for counseling, for couple’s therapy. It slowed things down. He sent letters for a few months. I didn’t answer them. I moved out of my friend’s into a place of my own a few states over, and finally felt like I could breathe. I haven’t seen or heard from him since. I should have stayed.”