Page 68 of We Are All Guilty Here

Not just good. She fucking loved it.

The monitor showed a slide of DNA matches. Raheem was reaching the end of the briefing. Jude caught his attention, holding up her phone, pretending she had to take a call. He looked nervous when she left. Jude silently made a note to shore him up later. Then she realized there wasn’t going to be a later. This was the last day she would walk the halls of the thirteenth floor of the Phillip Burton Federal Building. The mandatory retirement age for the FBI was fifty-seven. Jude had managed to get another two years out of them, but there was no more negotiating. The Freddy Henley case was finally closed. They were putting her out to pasture.

“Jude?” Darlene’s mother had followed her out of the room. Lara was gripping a tissue in her hand. She looked distraught.

Jude asked, “Too much?”

“No, I needed to know. They needed to know. It’s good to understand what happened. What you did.” Lara pressed the tissue to her mouth. “I’m sorry, Jude. I should’ve trusted you. I should’ve listened when you promised you’d find her.”

Jude remembered making that promise. It was the kind of rookie mistake that years of experience had taught her never to do again. “We really got down to the wire.”

“But you did it,” Lara insisted. “You found her. You found my baby. And I treated you so bad. I hated you. Why did I do that? Why did I blame you?”

“Listen,” Jude said, “there’s no wrong in these situations. Everything you did was exactly what you were supposed to do.”

“I screamed at you. I wrote hundreds of letters trying to get you fired.”

“It’s good to write things down. Gets it off your chest.” Jude knew her bosses had never cared about the letters. The multiple warnings in her file were for violating the FBI’s dress code and swearing like a sailor. She nodded toward her office. “Let’s go in here.”

She felt a moment of surprise when she saw the empty room. The furniture remained, but all of her personal items had disappeared. The shelves were bare. The photos had been taken off the walls. Her record player was gone. Only her purse hung on the coat rack. Everything else had been packed up by security to ensure she didn’t purloin a stapler.

“What’s this?” Lara asked. “Are you being promoted?”

“I’m taking retirement. Today is my last day.”

Lara’s quizzical expression quickly turned to heartbreak. “You waited until you found my baby?”

Jude reached into her purse for a packet of tissues. “You know what? I was just thinking about the first time I walked into this building. Thirty-two years old. Thought I was a hotshot. There was a bunch of old farts telling war stories about Patty Hearst and Jim Jones. That’s why I’m leaving. I don’t want to be the old fart to this new batch of hotshots.”

Lara made a tutting noise as she dried her eyes. “Please, talk to me when you’re my age.”

Jude knew that they were around the same age, but Lara had been worn down by nearly thirty years of stress and uncertainty. She asked the woman, “What about you? What now?”

“What now?” Lara let out a heavy sigh as she sat down onthe couch. “I don’t know, to be honest. Who am I without the struggle to bring Darlene home?”

Jude leaned against her desk. She knew that Lara wasn’t looking for an answer.

“I’ve always had hope. That’s what’s kept me going.” Lara’s voice took on the tone of a confession. “Even after Freddy admitted that he killed her, even after you told me about those photos he took. It’s not that I didn’t trust you, but there wasn’t a body. All the other girls were found, but not Darlene. Every time there was a new one, every time it wasn’t her, it gave me hope that she was still alive.”

“I know,” Jude said. Lara Talbot wasn’t the first mother to tell her this secret.

“Everyone keeps talking about closure, or forgiveness, or moving on, and I just want to scream in their faces. Freddy Henley doesn’t deserve forgiveness.”

Jude told her the brutal truth. “He’s dead, and even when he was alive, he didn’t care whether or not you forgave him. He never thought about any of you.”

Lara nodded, but not in agreement. “He told you how to find her. There’s redemption in that.”

“He didn’t do it for redemption. He did it because we played a game, and I won because he was dying.”

She looked stunned. “It’s that simple?”

“Psychopaths don’t worry about right and wrong. They make their own rules. Freddy was transactional. I visited him. I talked to him. I was interesting. He gave me enough information to keep me coming back.”

“How did you do it all these years? I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with that maniac.”

Jude never shared personal information on the job, but this was her last day, and she had spent almost the entirety of her professional career working to bring this woman’s child home.

She sat down on the couch beside Lara. “My brother died when I was little. He drowned in the river.”

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