The Last Invitation (32)

Damn, now Rob had her connecting phantom dots.

He sat back in his chair. “Look, I get that this sounds impossible. But it’s real, and following this, unraveling the puzzle, is personal.”

“How?” She wanted to write him off. Get up, walk away . . . but so little of her life made sense right now. Someone had sent that letter to Kennedy. The longer Gabby sat here, the less convinced she was that Rob had done it. Then who?

“I didn’t figure this conspiracy out on my own. Like you, I had to be convinced, and I fought it. Thought it sounded too twisted, too fantastical, to be real,” he said.

“Okay. Let me talk to this other person who convinced you.”

“She’s dead.”

Gabby knew she should have seen that coming. So many dead bodies. Gabby felt like she was swimming in a sea of them. She hated to ask—tried not to, but . . . “How did she die?”

“They killed her.”





Chapter Twenty-Nine

Gabby




Gabby balanced her elbows on the table. No way was she walking away now, not after that line. “Okay, let’s start again.”

“Tami Zimmer.” Rob tapped a few buttons on his phone then turned the screen around for her to read the headline.

Award-Winning Reporter Killed on Capitol Hill



The photo showed a smiling brunette, young, probably in her thirties, more ponytail-wearing than DC chic. Someone you’d want to sit down with and chat over coffee.

He flipped through a few more photos. These were personal. They showed him with Tami. Her smiling. Hiking. Out to dinner. Laughing on a couch with a cat stretched out on her lap. Images so intimate and personal that Gabby felt like she was intruding on private moments between lovers.

He took the phone back, not bothering to shut it off as he cradled it in his hands. “More than six months ago. I lost her in a supposed purse grab gone wrong.”

The screen faded to black, but Rob’s pain lingered. Gabby fought to breathe as it swallowed the air around them.

“They say the attacker slammed her to the pavement. She had a head injury that put her in a coma. She never woke up again.”

“I’m so sorry.” Gabby was all too familiar with the debilitating grief of a sudden, unexpected death. She’d been stuck in the mire of it, unable to reason or push the horror of it out of her mind. “You were close.”

“She was my fiancée.” He visibly swallowed. “And the story was flawed. The angle about stealing her purse? Impossible. She didn’t carry one. She used a small wallet. The kind she could loop around her wrist. It was in her backpack when the police returned her personal items to me.”

Gabby had to admit that sounded odd, but then she didn’t know how great Rob was at reciting facts. He could be comingling the truth with an alternate one he invented to survive Tami’s death. That sort of anguish twisted and gutted a person. Him not being okay made sense.

“We met in college,” Rob continued. “After graduation, I became the typical skeptical newspaper journalist, following stories about corrupt politicians and misspent government funds. She wrote for magazines, taking weeks, months, or however long she needed, to draw out the story behind the story. She wrote beautifully lyrical prose with heart and nuance.”

Not the talk of a man wrapped up in conspiracy theories. The pain poured out of him, spilling out and covering every word and movement with a thick layer of loss.

“A friend of hers was the daughter of one of the men killed two years ago, Ken Turner.” Rob reached into his bag and slapped a file down on the table between them. “After a years-long whisper campaign about inappropriate behavior with the women in his office—touching them, demanding sex, demoting them if they turned him down, tying moving up in the company to sucking him off—he was killed. In a single-car accident just days after an internal investigation cleared him to a great deal of public outcry.”

“Did the daughter think he was innocent?”

“She wanted to, but no. She knew who he was and how little regard he had for women. But she didn’t buy the single-car accident explanation for his death. After years of not talking, she had texted her father. She said he was apologetic and begged to see her. He was supposed to be on his way to visit her but never arrived. His car was found a day later, nowhere near where they were supposed to meet. In a lake. He was wrapped up in the seat belt as if he’d tried to escape but couldn’t.”

Poetic, maybe, but Gabby wasn’t convinced that proved anything. “He could have changed his mind about the meeting. Felt guilty . . .”

“This guy’s daughter was pretty vocal about the story of his death not making sense, and asked Tami to investigate it. Then the daughter, a respected teacher, became the target of suggestions that she did something with a student.” Rob finished his coffee. “The daughter abruptly agreed with the police findings, and the nasty rumors stopped. An unnamed jealous coworker was blamed but never outed or disciplined.”

“Unnamed?” Gabby would have sued the pants off that liar.

“Strange, right? The daughter stopped talking to Tami. Blocked her calls. So Tami dug deeper. She found more cases. Similar circumstances.”

Gabby remembered the story about this Ken Turner guy and how relieved the women who knew him sounded when he died. But that still didn’t prove anything. “Coincidence.”