Beneath Devil's Bridge(79)

He comes close, looms over her chair. “How? How exactly did Rachel protect you?”

“The locket. My locket—”

“Stop. Now. Just put that phone down. We need to talk. You need to tell me everything. All of it. Before you call your mom.”



Beth is driving. She’s going to pick her kids up from her mom’s place. She’s playing the new episode through the Bluetooth speakers.

TRINITY: Beth stated that Maddy told her she’d seen you having sex with Leena.

CLAYTON: If so, Maddy would have been lying to Beth. Perhaps Beth bought her lie. Or perhaps Beth knew everything and was backing her friend up.

TRINITY: How did your jacket get cleaned? How did it come back to you, if Leena was wearing it right before she was killed?

CLAYTON: I don’t know. I just don’t. It showed up in my office washed. It was inside a plastic grocery bag. At first I thought Leena had left it there. I didn’t know at the time she was dead. Only that she hadn’t gone home, or come to school on Monday.

She hits the brakes. A car squeals and skids as it swerves away from her. The driver flips a sign, honks. She’s shaking. She didn’t even see the vehicle. She pulls off the road onto the verge. She tries to call Maddy. Maddy’s voice comes through the speakers. “I’m on a call or away from my phone, so please leave a message.”

She tries again. Same message. Beth attempts to call Darren.

No answer.

She gulps in a few big breaths in an effort to calm and refocus herself, then puts her car into gear and pulls back into the traffic. She drives to her mother’s house. The front door of her parents’ home opens before she even reaches the porch stairs. Eileen stands in the doorway. Beth realizes her mother must have been watching for her car to come up the drive. Her mother’s face is white, her features pinched. And Beth knows. She just knows—her mother has heard episode four.



A long-haul truck driver heading north along the 725-kilometer Highway 16 corridor between Prince George and Prince Rupert in British Columbia is listening to the Leena Rai murder series. He’s taken to listening to true crime podcasts on these extended trips. They keep his mind alert, and they entertain him. Especially on this highway in the north, where the monotony of trees and trees and more trees along a never-ending ribbon of tar tends to make him feel sleepy. And he’s not young. He drops off more easily these days. He can’t wait to retire. He’s driving for a food distribution company now. He used to work in forestry, driving log hauls through Sea to Sky country. His route used to take him through the mill town of Twin Falls.

As he listens to the host, Trinity Scott, talking about how witness Amy Chan saw Leena Rai on Devil’s Bridge on Saturday morning, November 15, 1997, she reminds listeners that it was the night the Russian rocket hit the earth’s atmosphere.

And later, around two a.m. the following morning, Amy Chan saw Leena Rai on Devil’s Bridge. These are Amy Chan’s words, as per the Twin Falls PD interview transcripts, as she described what she saw. “There was a full moon. Big. It was clear. And there was a really, really cold wind blowing off the sea. That’s what struck me—the sight of someone walking in that freezing wind. I saw long dark hair blowing. And then I saw the shape of the jacket, and the person, and I realized it was Leena.”

A bolt of energy shoots through him. He sits more erect, and he turns up the volume.

“You could totally see it was Leena. She—it’s her shape. Leena is—was—tall and big, and she had a certain way of walking that people made fun of. Sort of lumbering. But it was more marked because Leena had been drinking a lot that night, or at least she looked totally drunk. Falling around and grabbing on to the railing. And then a truck went by. The headlights lit her up. And I said to Jepp, ‘Hey, that’s Leena,’ and I turned around in the seat, to watch . . . I didn’t look farther back or anything to see if anyone was behind her, and then we were past, and off the bridge.”

The image suddenly comes alive in the driver’s mind. He drove over that very bridge just hours after that Russian rocket exploded in the sky and trailed comets over the mountains. He was driving his logging rig north. He remembers seeing a girl on the bridge, lit up by his logging truck lights. They bathed her fully. She was a big girl, with long black hair blowing in the wind. She was wearing a big military-style jacket and cargo pants, and she was stumbling drunk. Or he figured she was drunk. He didn’t think too much about it. Friday night segueing into Saturday morning in a small Pacific Northwest town where kids were bored and there was probably not much else for them to do on the weekend other than get wasted—it seemed quite normal to him.

When he sees a sign for a gas station and truck stop ahead, he puts on his indicators and takes the off-ramp. He pulls into the truck stop parking lot and stops. The driver reaches for his phone and looks up the tip-line number for It’s Criminal.

He dials.

He gets a voice mail recording asking him to leave a message.

“I saw her. I think I saw Leena Rai crossing Devil’s Bridge that night. I was driving a log haul, and I crossed the bridge with my rig probably around two a.m. I remember because of the rocket. I saw a girl stumbling north along the bridge. And farther behind her, back in the shadows . . . I saw what appeared to be following her.”





RACHEL