Page 27 of Find Me

“We had a training last year at the office,” he said. “A Hofstra law professor came in to talk about how mental shortcuts can lead to wrongful convictions. Anyway, she said one way to prevent tunnel vision is to force yourself to do the opposite. You heard about a DNA hit from the College Hill Strangler samples in the database and naturally assumed there was a connection. But think of all the other explanations for a blood sample from that house turning up now in East Hampton.”

She pulled up what she could recall about Janice Beale while Max filled a large pot with water and turned on a burner. “She was single and lived alone. She had broken up with her boyfriend a few months before she was killed. It’s certainly possible he cut himself at some point.” In his confession, Summer described to the police how he had first spotted her buying toothpaste at Target and had selected her as a potential new “subject.” When he followed her home and saw that her house was adjacent to Edgemoor Park, he thought it was a sign that she was a perfect target. He could watch her from the park for hours, planning his attack. But then a man had arrived. She kissed him. A boyfriend. He shifted his focus, searching for another subject, but still continued his strolls through the park. After three months without a single sighting of a male visitor to Janice’s house, Summer decided that he was finally ready to make his move. He had joked that his only fear was that an overly protective parent might call the cops on themiddle-aged man who kept showing up at the summer camp to stare across the park.

Then she saw it.

“The rec center,” Ellie said. “The backyard of Janice Beale’s house essentially ran directly into Edgemoor Park, which has a big rec center on the opposite side of the park. She used to bring juice and snacks out to the kids if they were playing ball on that edge of the field. If they needed to go to the bathroom, they’d run into her house instead of schlepping all the way back to the building. The police ran a kids’ sports program out of the park, so the cops took her death especially hard.”

“So did your father actually know her?”

She shook her head. “No. He and his partner both used to volunteer there, but by the time Janice Beale moved to the neighborhood, Dad was so obsessed with the investigation that he barely had the energy to pay attention to Jess and me, let alone a bunch of other kids.” Ellie had a vague memory of talking to her father about the camp a few weeks before he died. A girl at school was gossiping on the playground that her older sister got a “pervert” vibe from one of the volunteers, and Ellie had passed the story on to her father. In retrospect, she realized it was simply a rumor, but having something potentially police-related to report to her distracted father had been Ellie’s way of trying to get his attention. She shook away the memory. “Anyway, Janice Beale was like a de facto den mother to all the camp kids, which means she had rug rats running in and out of that house on a regular basis.”

“So if a kid cut his leg or something...”

He let her finish the thought. “Her house would have been the natural place to run to. And the kid with the skinned knee might be a carpenter in East Hampton now and cut himself again in someone else’s house.”

“Or he could be a bad guy who had some kind of altercation with that missing woman—”

“Hope Miller,” she reminded him.

“Right.”

“But either way, it doesn’t have anything to do with William Summer,” she concluded.Or my father.

She started to reach for her cell phone to call Lindsay Kelly, but decided it could wait until morning. Maybe by then, Lindsay Kelly would have moved on to another theory about her missing friend. Better yet, maybe Hope Miller would already be home, safe and with a simple explanation.

18

Monday, June 21, 8:20 p.m.

Carter was swiping much more left than right on Tinder, the Mets game playing out on his muted television, when his cell rang. He didn’t recognize the number.

“Decker.”

“Carter, it’s Harvey from Truth Training.” The Irish lilt on the other end of the line belonged to Harvey O’Brien.

“Hey man. I’m overdue for a session, I know.”

“Tell me about it. Your belly must be jelly by now. I’m calling about that fishing guide who drowned this morning. Chris told me about it this afternoon. He said you were involved somehow. Does that mean it wasn’t a drowning?”

The Chris in question was a reputable journalist who was also part of the gym crowd. He was a national cable anchor, but always seemed to know every local development as well. An “anonymous police source” had confirmed that a body was pulled from the water near Star Island in a suspected drowning, but the department had not yet released the man’s name or the fact that he was a fishing guide.

“Nah. I took the initial report when he went missing. Must have taken a couple days for his body to wash up.”

“But it’s an accidental drowning? Nothing... fishy?”

“Harvey, would you believe you’re the very first person to have used that pun today?”

“Not at all. I was asking because one of my clients owns a dive shop out in Montauk. This is crazy, but he found a twenty-four-kilo kettlebell at the bottom of Fort Pond Bay yesterday. He assumed someone was goofing off on their boat and lost their grip. Anyway, he managed to get it out of the water and dropped it off at the gym today, thinking we could always use an extra bell. But then I hear a dude’s body floated to shore, so I want to make sure I don’t have some kind of murder weapon sitting on my gym floor right now.”

“I doubt it. Bodies sunk with fifty-pound weights tend to stay missing.”

“Maybe the tie came loose or something. All I know is I’m not touching that bell now. Gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

“Yeah, okay, set it aside. I’ll pick it up from you tomorrow, just in case.”

Carter had returned to his profile-scrolling when he found himself thinking about Alex Lopez again. Damn it. The nagging feeling Carter had about Alex Lopez as he left Star Island had long passed, but now Harvey’s phone call had him wondering again. He closed the dating app and pulled up the number for the Suffolk County Medical Examiner’s Office. He was soon connected to Dr. Loretta Mason, the deputy chief.

“Hi, Doc. I know you said the autopsy on Alex Lopez would probably be tomorrow, but I was calling to see if anything was out of the ordinary so far.”

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