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He had a flash of Alexa’s senior picture, widely shown on TV and online, her face the picture of youth, skin glowing, eyes shining with optimism for the future. “I’m guessing the media isn’t the only reason you thought someone would ask questions.”
“It ate away at my husband,” she said. “Robbed him of sleep, of peace. I didn’t understand at first.”
“Why is that?” Nick asked.
She scowled like the question was beneath him. “You were a detective, Mr. Murphy. You know what kind of cases are handled in the department, what kinds of things you see. The car accident was horrific, but it wasn’t the worst thing Gary had seen on the job.”
A series of images flashed through Nick’s mind, images he’d tucked into the locked vault of his memory. It was the only way to survive them, the same way Ronan locked away his experiences in Afghanistan.
“Why did it bother him so much?” Nick asked. “Aside from the obvious.” The obvious being two young girls left for dead — one of them actually dead and the other so physically decimated she’d hovered on the verge of life and death for weeks.
“Gary didn’t talk specifics when it came to his work. He took seriously the responsibility to honor the privacy of victims and their families, and he took just as seriously his loyalty to the department.”
Nick took a drink of coffee, wanting to choose his next words carefully. “But you had a feeling.”
Her nod was slow. “I had a feeling.”
“Which was?”
She looked at him. “Do you know the case was only open for two months?”
“I did.”
“Not very long for a case like that,” she said.
“No.” It had been a red flag for him too. Alexa and Samantha Hancock had both come from middle-class families. Neither had the pull to force attention on the case, but the media should have done it for them. The follow-up coverage on Alexa’s recovery alone should have kept the case open for at least a year.
“Any idea why?” Nick asked.
She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I tried to stay out of Gary’s work. I knew there was only so much he could tell me. We had an… understanding.”
“I get that.” Some jobs weren’t conducive to pillow talk.
She looked at him over the rim of her coffee cup. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
Her brown eyes were sharp. “You said you stumbled on the case, that it was nagging at you. Can I ask how? Why?”
“I came across some of the old footage.” He didn’t want to mention his personal relationship — if that’s what you could call a run-in at Copley Square followed by breakfast and a hurried goodbye — to Alexa. “As a former detective, the case intrigued me.”
She nodded. “An accident like that one, a normally busy stretch of road, no witnesses, no CCTV footage.”
“Exactly. And…”
“The girls,” she said.
He looked down at his coffee. “Seems so unfair.”
“Completely unfair.” She hesitated. “Gary and I were never able to have children.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She shrugged. “Gary and I were happy, but people think when you don’t have children you can’t feel the pain of others who lose them. It’s not true. All that lost potential… all those moments those parents won’t have with their daughter — college and graduation and a wedding and grandchildren. And the other one, Alexa Nash, what she’s been through.”
He shouldn’t have been surprised that she remembered Alexa’s name. Linda Maynard might have had an “understanding” with her husband about his work, but she didn’t miss much. “It’s part of what got my attention,” he said. “She had to fight her way back pretty hard.”
“Have you found anything new?” she asked. “About the case?”
