Page 56 of Find Me

“Will you stop?” she asked, reaching for his hand. “We can’t just be—”

“Do not. I mean it. It’s the least that you owe me.”

She waited until she could no longer make out his figure in the distance before walking back to the courthouse.

33

Wednesday, June 23, 12:45 p.m.

Hope lifted the V-neck of her white T-shirt to her nose. “I still stink like that jail cell.”

Her hair was still damp from the long shower she’d taken as soon as she got home, but Lindsay had seen the toll that a night in custody inflicted on first-timers. Whatever smell Hope thought she detected was likely etched in her mind forever.

The last hour had been arduous, both physically and mentally. They had managed to get the cottage back into order. As they worked, they also talked through next steps to protect Hope from whatever the DA’s office was planning for the future.

But Lindsay knew she was preoccupied. When she heard the whistle of the Long Island Railroad in the distance, she pictured Scott on the train. She had sent him one text since he walked away from her at the courthouse.I’m not pushing you, but please let me know when you’re ready to talk.

He had not replied.

Hope must have sensed where her mind had wandered, because she offered yet again to call Scott and explain that the prosecutor’s office had completely overblown one journal entry about one drunken evening.

Lindsay shook her head. “You have other things to worry about right now. He’ll come around.” Even though Lindsay didn’t buy her own assurances, she also knew that Hope was the last person Scott would want to hear from. “Let’s go back to what Alex said to you that night. He said ‘What kind of game are you playing?’”

“Yeah, I think those exact words. My best guess is that when I showed up on his boat, he must have recognized me. But when I didn’t acknowledge any recognition of him, maybe it set him off.”

“Except in a normal situation like that, a person would say, like, ‘Hey, don’t I know you?’He must have had a reason for not asking you directly. And it probably comes back to Richard Mullaney. You’re sure you don’t remember anything about him?”

Hope shook her head. “But going back to Alex, he must have seen me again once I moved here and thought I was messing with him somehow. So that’s why he followed me and finally asked me what game I was playing. I can’t even remember everything I said, I was so frantic. But I tried to explain I had amnesia.”

Lindsay shut her eyes against a wave of her own memories. Hope, unresponsive on the side of the road as Lindsay waited next to her in the downpour, and then reaching for her hand from the gurney. Scott, a confident grin on his face, when he asked her to move in four months ago. Hope, dragged away in handcuffs, her eyes pleading with Lindsay to help. Scott’s back as he walked away from the courthouse.

Blinking her eyes open, she willed herself to focus. “Alex told his sister he realized that his decisions fifteen years ago had forced other people to live their lives in limbo. He must have been talking about you. Whatever happened back in Wichita, you must have left town together and then gotten in that car accident. The car was stolen, and so he just bailed.”

“I was the one he left behind to pay the price,” Hope said. “Being in a constant state of limbo is the perfect description.”

“When you showed up on his boat, and then ended up moving to town, he must have thought you were running some kind of con.Maybe he thought you were going to blackmail him. Or sell whatever he thought you knew about him and Mullaney to Melanie Locke. But once you were in the house together, and you tried to explain the memory loss, he could have realized the truth about the long-term repercussions of whatever happened back in Wichita. He called his sister and said he was going to turn himself in.”

“But now he’s dead,” Hope said.

“He couldn’t admit to killing Richard Mullaney without explaining his motive. It would have exposed Melanie Locke as the wife of a sex offender and a pedophile.” Lindsay recounted the online conspiracy theories speculating that Melanie had the Wichita police on her payroll.

“So is it possible Melanie somehow found out that Alex was planning to confess?”

“It’s even possible that she was the person he tried to call at LockeHome’s offices—maybe to apologize or tell her he was planning to come clean. She could have been talking to him directly after that with a burner phone. If so, she might have preferred to shut him down rather than have the truth about her husband’s death come out.”

“Especially now that she’s running for office,” Hope added.

“I wonder if the police are even considering the possibility.”

Lindsay opened the browser on her laptop and searched for “Richard Mullaney murder lead detective” and found aWichita Eaglearticle that mentioned a Detective Steve Thompson. It was too generic a name to be memorable, but now she wondered if she had seen it before. Was it possible?

She searched for “College Hill Strangler detective suicide partner.” The very first hit was the newspaper article she was thinking of. Same guy.

It made sense. Lindsay’s father would play a role in any major crime that went down in Hopewell. Wichita was bigger than her hometown, but small enough not to have many longtime, go-to homicide detectives.

“Earth to Lindsay. What exactly are you looking at?”

Lindsay pulled up Ellie Hatcher’s number.

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