Matthew raided the canister for the last of Shannon’s cookies, poured himself the final inch of the coffee, and then made the call he was both relieved and stressed to make, given all that was behind Shannon’s decision. “Paul, she wants to have a conversation with you tomorrow. She got the news about her
dad not being her biological father last night. And her friend still hasn’t called. Shannon thinks she’s dead. She’s going to start giving you what she has.”
Paul sighed. “This is very much the wrong way I wanted to reach this point.”
“I hear you. Keep it small,” Matthew recommended. “You and Theo, maybe Ann. Or maybe just you, depending on how it goes.”
“Where’s best to have it? What time?”
“I’m thinking we have it at the FBI office so she can walk away from it when it’s over. A conversation here or at your home is an easier environment, but that becomes her memory of the place. Let’s do it early in the day so she’s not spending too much time dreading the meeting.”
“Nine thirty here, then. We’ll use my office,” Paul suggested.
“We’ll be there. I’m going to guess you’ll hear a list of names for those in the family. Locations they’d been or might be. The gravesites. She’s presently marking up state maps.” Matthew thought through the coming meeting. “Just let her talk, try to avoid asking questions. She handed me another diary from year four. That may be the only way she’s ever able to share the details, via those written diaries. She’s going to need a counselor reading them before she needs cops reading them.”
“You can relax, Matthew. I know how fragile this moment is and the foundation it needs to set for the future,” Paul reassured him. “I’ll let Shannon say what she’s comfortable sharing, and not push. This is a process I have no desire to rush with her. Hopefully this becomes the first of several smaller conversations. We need names, locations, confirmations on photos. We need to know who to protect her from once this becomes public. If we’re any good at our jobs, maybe she’ll only be a
minor footnote in the trial, the majority of it built on physical evidence we can seize, IDs from abducted children, and confessions we can get from the family.”
“Thanks, Paul. The more you can keep her involvement to a minimum, the better for her future. As it is, I’ll need to make a break for her for four or five days, get her some breathing space.”
“Leave town?”
Matthew rubbed the back of his neck. “I don’t know. Maybe. I’d prefer not to travel again. It sets up being too easy for her not to want to return. But we stay in Chicago, it’s obvious she’s not seeing her parents. She needs to get her mind off those problems.”
“Talk to John. He’s good at coming up with ideas.”
“I’ll do that.” Matthew checked the time. “One last thing before I let you go. Don’t press her for the address where she was to be delivered. She’s still not comfortable giving you that detail.”
“Any guess why she’s holding it back?”
“Maybe.”
“I’ll read into that that she’s expressed reasons she’s withholding it that you can’t share with me. I won’t quibble. Your first priority has to be Shannon’s trust. She stops trusting you, or this process, and our ability to unravel the case falls precipitously.”
“So far I think we’re both walking that line about as well as it can be done. This is moving as fast as it could, given what I see.”
“That’s useful to know.”
“See you in the morning, Paul. I’ll keep my role tomorrow to that of interested bystander, unless I see something with her that warrants my stepping in.”
“Understood.”
M
atthew settled on the living room couch, found an old movie, filling in time while he waited for Shannon to finish marking up the maps. She’d been working at the kitchen table for the last two-plus hours. He had a mild headache, along with a desire to call Becky and hear the world was right in at least one corner of it. But he knew his daughter was out for the evening with friends and he would just be interrupting. He had a craving for something cold and set aside the remote. Maybe ice cream? He got up and fixed himself a bowl, set its twin on the table beside Shannon. She said a quiet thanks as he took a quick scan over her shoulder—dots and red lines now crossed the state of Georgia. He went back to the movie.
Just after ten p.m., Shannon stacked the open maps rather than try to refold each one, rolled them together, used several rubber bands to secure the roll, then placed them beside the canvas bag she had placed by the door.
“Ready for tomorrow?” he asked.
“Mostly.”
She leaned against the doorpost into the living room. She
didn’t know what to do with herself, he thought, didn’t particularly look sleepy, even though he could see exhaustion in her overall appearance.
“What are you watching?”
“The first
Star Trek
movie.” He hit pause, as the movie was simply a placeholder while he’d been waiting. “Shannon, you’re a survivor. Tell me what to do that will help. Would you like to talk? Go for a walk? Want me to find a hotel with a pool?”
She ran her hand through her hair, an oddly vulnerable gesture for her because he rarely saw it. “I’ll be okay, Matthew. It is what it is.”
“You’re not okay right now.”
What he didn’t want to do was leave her alone, trapped in this sadness. It was one thing to carry the weight of the sorrow, to feel it, to grieve—but it was quite another to be alone during that process.
“Move over,” she said.
He did so. She curled up beside him on the couch. He offered the remote. She sorted through options, then came back to the one he’d been watching.
“Tomorrow when I talk to Paul, don’t go very far.”
“You know I won’t,” he promised. At the next commercial he returned to the top item on his list and mentioned casually, “Have you called your brother?”
“I don’t have much to say yet. I sent a text that I needed more time before I called him.”
“You could just dial and say you wanted to say good-night.”
She poked a finger in his ribs. “Quit pushing.” She sighed. “But, yeah, maybe. When the movie is over.”
If he had his hope, she’d fall asleep on the couch before the movie was done. She coiled her feet up and tucked her head
in against his shoulder. He stilled, then relaxed, smiled. He didn’t know if she actually realized how much simple proximity represented security to her, but he was growing aware of the pattern. He suspected her primary love language was related to touch—to be handled roughly was a strike against her person, to be touched with gentleness a significant statement of her worth. But he knew she was seeking comfort and doing it in the only way she knew how.
For Shannon to be restored to wholeness, someone had to pour in that emotional balm she needed. He figured he was part of that for her. He didn’t mind. He was a better man when he was needed. Tomorrow was going to be a very long day for both of them. But it would be over . . . that initial wrenching conversation with law enforcement. For merely a week since he’d met her in the hallway of an Atlanta hotel, it was good progress.
He watched a commercial while he wondered how the next week with Shannon would unfold. He had seen a strength that was bearing up under terrible news. On the other hand, she also seemed extremely fragile. Her dreams were being shattered now—her knowledge about her family, her hope for her friend’s safety. Freedom was proving to be not as wonderful as she had imagined.
He realized his own emotions were becoming tangled with her, more than was wise. But having his own heart slightly bruised when she was ready to thrive without him wouldn’t be such a high price to pay for this journey. Becky was right. Shannon mattered to him not only because she had sought him out for help, because she reminded him of what had happened to his daughter, but because he simply enjoyed being with her, liked her. Based on that first diary, on what she had described,
Shannon had a long road ahead of her. He wanted to walk it with her.
Which meant once she turned in tonight, he was going to be reading her diary from year four. The only way to be able to help her tomorrow was to be as fully aware of her history as he could piece together. His heart already ached, but he’d deal with it. She needed one person besides God who knew it all, knew her, and accepted her as she was. Becky had taught him the significance of that. Shannon’s brother would be filling part of that role for her. A doctor and counselor would fill more of it in the future. But she also needed friends who knew, whether in whole or in part, who still unreservedly accepted her. He was determined to be one of those friends.
He watched the movie, idly turned a strand of her hair around his finger, knew she was drifting to sleep. He’d send her to bed shortly and then go turn in himself. The movie went to commercial again.
“Matthew.”
He glanced down at her profile, surprised she was awake. “Hmm?”
“I need to tell you something when the movie’s over.”
“Want me to turn it off?”
“No. It’s about the graves. But it can wait a couple of minutes.”
“I’ll listen when the movie is over to whatever you want to tell me,” he reassured.
She shifted away, got up and went over to her canvas bag to pull out a legal pad, the edges of its pages curled. When she sat down on the couch again, he saw the pages were covered in notes.
Her long list toward cleaning up
the last eleven years
, he thought.
She watched the end of the movie with him. The credits began scrolling by. He muted the volume rather than shut it off, not sure if she might need the next movie as a distraction after they were finished with a difficult conversation.
She flipped through the pages to midway in the pad and carefully removed four sheets. “I wrote out what I could remember about the graves.” She handed them over. “Would you give those to Paul?”
“Yes.”
“I’d like to tell you about the graves so I don’t have to tell him. There are . . . too many of them.” She was silent for a long time. “I don’t think I can do this more than once. I thought I might be able to do it with Paul, but I can’t.”
He reached over and settled his hand on hers in a gesture that had become habit between them, the one piece of contact they both needed. “Just start somewhere.” He could see the sadness and weight of this pressing on her, and he felt it pressing on him too, even though he didn’t yet know the details.
“The family itself, that last set of photos I gave Adam York—the ones involved in smuggling kids, who were killed in a family dispute—I was a witness to three of the shootings. I was nearby but didn’t see the other two. I helped bury all five at the farm.”
“Were you shot during one of those confrontations?” he asked carefully, putting what he suspected on the table. When she wore that swimsuit, there were some scars not fully faded that suggested she had been.
“Shrapnel, I think. Gunfire in a kitchen hits a lot of things.” Shannon’s gaze turned distant for a while before she blinked and focused back on him.
“There were three other family murders. Year two for me—so it would have been nine years ago—George Jacoby shot his
son Robert in the back of the head. They were in an argument about following the rules of the family, and Robert was at that age, probably eighteen, where he wasn’t going to do what his father wanted. He’d been pulled over for speeding with several valuable paintings in the car trunk—a close call with law enforcement, and it put the family at risk. Things escalated, and I saw George’s face change. The next thing I know, he’s pulled the gun and killed his son. He stood over the body and said, ‘Let this be an example that I mean what I say.’ I don’t know where Robert is buried, but I think maybe along Bluff Road near Cedar, Montana, where a bridge crosses a creek.”
The harsh violence so early in her eleven years with the family appalled him, but if he showed that emotion it would only make it harder for her to say what she needed to tell him. He forced himself to keep his voice level as he said, “That’s enough detail to give the police somewhere to look.”
She took a deep breath, let it out, seemed both resigned and relieved to be telling someone. “Year three, Kyle was assigned responsibility for Jason that day. Kyle decided he was going to ditch the route and go see his former girlfriend for a few hours, try to patch it up with her. His plans went awry, and he was gone forty-eight hours. They shot Jason because he was Kyle’s responsibility. When Kyle showed up, they shot him for not caring about what happened to Jason. Both are buried outside Plum, Texas. The details on where—as best I can remember them—are on that written list.”
“You liked both Kyle and Jason.” He could hear it in her voice.
“They were . . . decent-enough guys. Trapped in a family that was what it was. I’d like them to at least get decent burials, markers for their graves.”
“Agreed.”
“Outside the family deaths, most of what else I have about deaths are things I heard. There was a disagreement in Ohio with another party over the sale of two small statues. They shot the buyer in his home, buried him outside of town in an old cemetery. He’s buried between a Maggie Thomas and a Joseph Lindstrom.” She worried her thumb in the palm of her opposite hand.
“There was a girlfriend of Thomas Jacoby in Alabama who broke it off with him and was killed. She’s buried in a cemetery near the movie theater where they used to meet—laid to rest as an addition to the plot of a recently deceased Lewis Tobias.” She gestured to the pages he held.
“I’ll flag several locations at the farm. They might all simply be dirt, or some of the stories I heard may be true. I think there’s a child laid to rest under a willow tree. Another by an old windmill overlooking a pond. A first name Lacey for the girl, and a surname Prize for the boy. Those were before my time, so they’ll need to look longer than eleven years back.”
That news suggested this family had been active long before they had taken Shannon, and it left him concerned the investigation was going to span twenty years before it was concluded.
“There was a child—the third year in, so eight years ago—in an abduction that went wrong. She ran from the car at a gas station, drowned in a stream, was buried where it happened. All I have is Emily Lynn and Lazy Jill Creek, Colorado.”
He tightened his hand on hers in sympathy. The father in him, along with the cop, took those facts as a heavy blow. He knew what it was like for Emily’s parents, not knowing where their daughter was, if she was dead or alive somewhere, and it
would be a crushing blow for them to hear the confirmation of her death.
Shannon used her free hand to wipe at tears. “The fourth year, there was a car wreck on the West Coast. They had an abducted child with them, Lindsey Bell. I know she died; I don’t know how. They buried her in a pet cemetery outside of Dark, California.”
Shannon stopped talking. She looked over at him, the misery on her face clear. These were her facts, her history, and she dealt with them because she had no choice.
“That’s a lot of deaths to carry with you,” he said softly.
“Yes.”
And he worried more deeply than ever before what the years had done to her. “Reliving many of them?”
“I trigger easily when I hear a gunshot,” she whispered. “A full-on fight I tend to expect to end in a shooting. But no, the reruns in my mind have calmed down.”
He thought she told him the truth about that, and he knew in an odd way she might already be through the worst of it. Her mind would have accepted the facts about the deaths, done its best to shield her from the emotions of those facts. To survive it, she would have fought to keep that distance. The recent deaths would be fresh, but also a relief—the people she feared were no longer able to hurt her, unable to abduct other children. There would be guilt over being glad they were dead rather than sadness. “What do you need from me, Shannon?” he asked.
“To never have to repeat that summary. To not have to be the one to tell the cops. To not have to testify in court.”
“I will do everything I can to make sure that is the case. Can you show us the farm? Or give us directions to find it?”
“It’s difficult for me to pinpoint on the map. It would be best
if Paul and Theo go with us to locate it. I can point out places, then hopefully never have to discuss or see it again.”
“We’ll arrange that.” That trip was one more heavy matter coming in her near future. He was aware of the calendar. This needed to be told, and then she needed space. He desperately wanted to get her away from all this. “Let me talk with them about what might work best, make the arrangements.”
She nodded. He waited but she offered nothing else. It was late, pushing past midnight, but he didn’t want to end the evening like this. “Want me to make some popcorn so you can watch part of another movie?”
“I’m okay calling it a night. I just didn’t want to have to take this list of graves into tomorrow’s meeting. It’s going to be a long enough conversation without it.”
He nodded to her notepad. “That’s the list of what you need to do, and of items to tell people?”
She fluttered the pages. “I do like lists. This one puts closure to the last eleven years.”
“I’ll help you get it finished if you will let me.”
“I will. There’s also a personal list. I’ll probably let you help me with that too.”
He smiled, pleased at the trust she was offering him. “Okay.”
She got up from the couch, returned the pad to her bag. She turned back to face him, her expression hesitant. “I’m guessing you’re going to read that fourth-year diary tonight, or call Paul and talk about what I just said. Please don’t feel like you have to fix me. It’s enough that you’ve been here to listen. That’s what I need, Matthew. That’s all I really need.”