Page 66 of Find Me

“Unless it was you,” Ellie said.

His eyebrows shot up in exaggerated amusement. “Me? Yeah, that’s funny.”

“He called you because Tara King showed up on his fishing boat.” A kid carting a pitcher of ice water approached their table, but scurried away when he read their body language. “He remembered her, but she acted like she’d never seen him before. It spooked him. He started wondering if she had figured out that he was the one who killed Richard Mullaney, so he turned to you for help, just like he did after he shotMullaney. Just like he did eight years before that, when he found Mullaney climbing on top of his sister.”

“Ellie, I don’t know what this lawyer has convinced you of, but this is crazy. Let’s me and you talk alone, and I’ll answer whatever—”

“He was a rapist, Steve.” Her voice was low but seething. “Emilia Lopez was only fourteen years old, and she trusted you—her whole family trusted you—because you let them think you cared about them.” She slapped the table for emphasis. “What did you do instead? Shake down Mullaney for money?”

Thompson wiped his upper lip with his hand. “Do you know the good that family has done? The Locke Foundation educates girls all over the world who would otherwise be banned from reading. And Wichita wouldn’t be the same without the Locke fortune. This is a completely different place from when you grew up.”

“And that justifies letting him get away with rape? How many other girls did he abuse before he was killed?”

Thompson looked to Lindsay, searching for someone to intervene, but she held his gaze, her jaw set.

“You two are from a different generation,” he said. “Times were different back then.”

Ellie laughed mockingly. “Give me a break, Steve. That’s just disgusting.”

“Things were less black and white than they are now. It was complicated.”

“Fourteen is fourteen. Do you know how old fourteen is? That’s how old I was when my father died. I was just a child. Would you have let Mullaney fuck me, too, if he had wanted me?” She spit out the words contemptuously.

Lindsay was silent. It was Ellie’s right to call the shots at this point. Hope would get her life back, but Ellie needed this, too, and Lindsay and Hope had decided they were going to trust that her plan would work, as dangerous as it was.

“Trust me, Emilia Lopez was nothing like you.”

“Because her dad was undocumented, and mine was a cop?”

“No, because there’s fourteen and then there’s fourteen. You know, even now, the age of consent in this state is sixteen. And we’re talking about twenty-plus years ago.”

“So you admit you knew Mullaney was a predator.”

“You’re putting words in my mouth.”

“Learned the job from the very best, Uncle Steve. You admit you know Emilia Lopez, which means you were the cop who looked after her little brother. He called you after Hope showed up on that boat.” Ellie’s finger was in the older man’s face now. “His cell phone records show it was a short call. A message on your office voice mail is my guess. ‘Sorry for calling after all these years. I know I promised I never would...’ Something like that? The next day, a new number appears in Lopez’s phone records. An incoming call from a Chicago-based number. You used a burner. You probably gave him a hundred reasons not to worry about Hope—maybe she wasn’t really Tara King, or she simply hadn’t recognized him. You talked him down and thought he’d go away. But then he called the burner again, a month later, after that same woman moved to town.”

Thompson started to reach for his beer mug but took a sip of water instead.

“You tried to calm him down again,” Ellie continued. “Maybe you even looked up her name and found out about the amnesia. Did you offer him money to stop asking questions? Because one thing you definitely could not allow was for his story to come out, or everyone would know that you aided and abetted a serial rapist and then covered up the motivation for his murder. Hell, you even got a new job out of it. Bravo, by the way.”

“Jerry would be ashamed to hear you talk to me this way.”

Ellie flinched as his words hit their target. Lindsay couldn’t hold her tongue any longer.

“Keep her father’s name out of your mouth. We know everything.You tried to keep Alex quiet, but his mind was made up. He confronted Hope. She was terrified. She had no idea what he was talking about. She thought he was trying to kill her. He realized then that she wasn’t faking. She had lost fifteen years of her life because of what he did. He called his sister to say he was turning himself in. And then he called you. You couldn’t allow that to happen. You killed him the next day.”

“You can’t possibly believe this.” Thompson reached for Ellie’s hand on the table, but she pulled it away.

Instead, she reached her purse for a set of printouts, unfolded them, and slid the papers across the table. “We have the flight records, Steve. You flew to Boston Sunday morning—just hours after Alex told you he’d made his decision to confess.” She flipped to a second page. “You rented a car at the airport. The mileage was just about right for you to have taken the ferry over to Long Island.” Carter Decker had shared the documents after they told him what to ask for.

“You mean this happened while I was in Boston? I went to see my brother. I go there every few months. You know that, Ellie. And I have no idea how many miles I put on the car, but I drove out to the Cape to see the ocean. Not exactly beach scenery around here, as you know.”

Lindsay could see that Thompson was getting nervous. She stacked yet another brick in the walls they were building around him. “Carter Decker just left your brother’s house.”

“Mark only hung tough for twenty minutes before he broke,” Ellie added. “Your trip wasn’t planned. You called him Sunday morning and told him you had vacation time you needed to use or lose and to expect you late that night. The reality is that you were already in Boston when you called. The early direct flight from KC landed at eleven a.m. You didn’t show up to your brother’s until nearly ten at night.”

Thompson forced himself to smile as if he were laughing off a ridiculous conversation, but the effect was unsettling. Lindsay was convinced that she was looking into the face of a sociopath.

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