Page 69 of We Are All Guilty Here

Lara’s lips parted in surprise.

“His friends saw him go under. He didn’t come back up. Thecurrent took him away.” Jude felt a rustiness in her throat. She hadn’t told the story in years. “There was no doubt that he’d drowned. But it took six days to find the body.”

Lara’s bottom lip started to tremble. “So, you know.”

“I know what those six days felt like,” Jude said. “I was sick with hope. We all were. Without a body, there was no proof. What if he managed to grab a branch downstream? What if he was stranded in the forest? What if he was injured and alone? My mother fell completely apart. My father drank himself into a stupor. Everything was so dark and oppressive. Like a boulder was pressing down on each of our chests. The not knowing felt like it was going to suffocate us to death.”

Lara had started nodding. It was a terrible club to be in.

“When the police finally found him—I don’t know. It’s almost indescribable. The weight came off. We were still devastated, but we could breathe again. My father backed off his drinking. My mother got out of bed. She showered. She started to arrange the funeral, pick out what to dress him in. I heard my aunt ask her how she was managing to carry on, and Mom said, ‘I just needed a place to bury my grief.’”

Lara’s tears ran freely.

“That’s how I was able to stand being in the same room with Freddy Henley. I wanted you and the other families to have somewhere to bury your grief.”

Lara dabbed at her eyes with the tissue. “I hope your mother is proud of you.”

“I like to think she would’ve been.”

“Oh, no. I’m sorry she’s gone.”

“Me, too.” Jude stood up from the couch. Raheem was probably finished by now. “You want me to walk you back to the conference room?”

“No, you’ve done enough for me already.” She started to leave, then turned back to Jude. “God bless you.”

Jude smiled, but she regretted telling the story. The families who had lost children to Freddy Henley were a close-knit group. They spoke to each other almost daily. There were Facebook pages and private chat groups, and they met at the Pinnaclesonce a year to hold a memorial service. Lara would probably pass on Jude’s private information in a well-meaning sort of way. Then someone would tell someone else and a month from now Jude would have aDatelineproducer knocking on her door asking about her childhood loss.

She shushed out a long breath as she returned to her empty office. Instead of going to her desk, she stood at the window and looked down at the traffic on Turk Street, which ran behind the building. The cars and vendors and people straggling through the last few minutes of morning of rush hour. The distant wail of sirens from the Tenderloin. The pigeons taking up perch on the parking deck across the way.

Jude had seen the sun peering up over the Golden Gate Bridge when she’d driven in. Now, it bathed the wall across from her desk in a warm light. She traced her finger along the dark rectangle where a picture frame used to be. There were twelve ghostly shadows from the twelve photographs of young women aged fourteen to seventeen. You could’ve tracked the time periods by their hair styles and make-up, and the cultural transition between teenagers yearning to look older and the sudden desperation to appear young.

Freddy Henley hadn’t been the only case Jude had worked, but it was the case that had defined her career. Now that her career was over, she found herself asking the same question that Lara Talbot had asked herself: who was she without the struggle to bring all of Freddy Henley’s victims home to their families?

Jude would leave the question for another day. This afternoon, she was expected to give a speech at her retirement party. Then she was supposed to have a dinner where, judging by the multiple other retirement dinners Jude had attended, they would give her aSpecial Agent in Charge of DGAFT-shirt and a coffee mug that readTime to Give it Arrest!

The thought was so depressing that she was tempted to sneak out the back door right now. Instead, she sat down at her desk and woke up her computer. She wasn’t going to leave her inbox full. There were scores of farewells. Jude went through them all, giving her private email to the people she didn’t want to lose touch with and being very diplomatic with the people she hopednever to see again. She was about to check on Raheem back in the conference room when her desk phone rang.

She picked up the receiver. “Archer.”

“So, is it going to be pottery classes or bird watching?” Chaz Hollister asked.

Jude gave an audible sigh. Her boss was in his mid thirties, blind to the fact that he was on the precipice of a cliff that everyone eventually toppled over. “I thought I’d try macramé.”

“I have no idea what that is.” He laughed with the ease of a man who’d never questioned his own intelligence. “Seriously, Quantico would love to have you.”

“Noted.” Jude took off her reading glasses. She didn’t want to go back to teaching. Nor did she want to do consulting work, private investigations, security, or any of the other options available to retired agents. “You’ll have Raheem’s after-action on the Talbot briefing by noon. He’s wrapping up with the family now.”

“Good,” Chaz said. “But that’s not why I was calling. I heard HBO’s doing another documentary about the Pinnacles Killer. They know you’re the one who broke it wide open.”

Jude tilted down the receiver so he wouldn’t hear her curse. Then she remembered her paperwork had already been processed. “Sweetheart, they don’t know shit about fuck.”

Chaz laughed good-naturedly. “I get why you wouldn’t go on camera before, but Freddy Henley’s dead. He’s not gonna see you on TV. Now that you found the last one—”

“Darlene Talbot.”

“Right,” Chaz said. “But what I’m saying is, it could be good for the agency. Celebrate our wins.”

“Twelve young women are dead, and it took us over two decades to bring them home. That’s not a win.” Jude saw a bulletin flash on her computer. The bright green banner indicated a confirmed child abduction. She reached for the mouse, but she hesitated when she saw the origin of the notice.

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