Page 66 of I Will Find You

“At my trial. Your testimony. It was all a lie.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

There really is no choice here. I lift the gun and press it against the old woman’s forehead.

“I need you to listen to me,” I say, hoping my voice doesn’t crack. “I have nothing to lose. You understand that, right? If you lie to me again, if you don’t tell me the truth, I’m going to kill you. I don’t want to. I really don’t. But right now, it is my son or you.”

Her eyes start doing the rapid-blink thing.

“That’s right,” I continue. “My son is still alive. No, I don’t think you’ll believe me on that, and I don’t have time to convince you. All that should matter to you right now is that I believe it. And because of that, I will have no qualms about killing you to find him. Do I make myself clear?”

“I don’t know what to tell you—”

I hit her in the cheek with the barrel of the gun.

No, this isn’t easy for me to do. And no, I didn’t hit her hard. It was a tap. No more. But it’s enough to both get the message across and make me feel awful. “You changed your name and moved away,” I say. “You did that because you lied on the stand and needed to escape. I’m not looking for revenge or any of that. But there’s a reason you lied, and that reason might lead to my son. So I’m going to either learn why or I’m going to kill you.”

She stares at me. I stare back.

“You’re delusional,” Hilde-Harriet says.

“Could be.”

“You can’t possibly think your son is still alive.”

“Oh, but I do.”

Hilde’s hand flutters up to her lips. She shakes her head and closes her eyes. I don’t lower my gun. When she opens her eyes, I see a change. The defensiveness and defiance are gone. “I can’t believe you’re standing here, David.”

I stay silent.

“Are you taping this?” she asks.

“No.” I quickly pull out my phone and show it to her. Then I drop it on the table, just to emphasize the point. “This is just between us.”

“If you tell anyone, I’ll just deny it.”

I feel my pulse quicken. “I understand.”

“And if someone is taping this, I’m just telling a story to appease a crazy killer who is threatening me with a gun.”

I nod encouragingly.

Hilde Winslow looks up at me and meets my eye. “I’ve imagined this moment for a long time,” she says. “You standing in front of me, me confessing the truth.”

She takes a deep breath. I hold mine, afraid that even the slightest movement on my part will break this spell.

“First off, I justified what I did because I thought my testimony wouldn’t matter. You would have been convicted anyway—I was icing on the cake. That’s what I told myself. I also genuinely believed you’d committed the murder. That was part of the sales pitch—I was helping put away a killer. And do you want to know the truth, David?”

I nod.

“I still think you did it. The evidence against you was overwhelming. That helps me sleep at night. The knowledge—the certainty—that you’d done it. But that doesn’t really let me off the hook, does it? I was a philosophy professor at Boston U. Did you know that?”

I did know that. My attorneys dug deep into her background, looking for something that we could use on cross-examination. I knew that she’d been widowed when she was sixty, that she had three children, all married, and four grandsons.

“So I have studied all the ‘ends justifying the means’ type rationales. I did that here too, trying to defend my actions, but there is no way around the fact that my testimony sullied the trial. Worse, I sullied how I saw myself.”

Her phone buzzes then. She looks up at me. I nod that it’s okay to check it.

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