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The screen faded to black, but Rob’s pain lingered. Gabby fought to breathe as it swallowed the air around them.
“They say the attacker slammed her to the pavement. She had a head injury that put her in a coma. She never woke up again.”
“I’m so sorry.” Gabby was all too familiar with the debilitating grief of a sudden, unexpected death. She’d been stuck in the mire of it, unable to reason or push the horror of it out of her mind. “You were close.”
“She was my fiancée.” He visibly swallowed. “And the story was flawed. The angle about stealing her purse? Impossible. She didn’t carry one. She used a small wallet. The kind she could loop around her wrist. It was in her backpack when the police returned her personal items to me.”
Gabby had to admit that sounded odd, but then she didn’t know how great Rob was at reciting facts. He could be comingling the truth with an alternate one he invented to survive Tami’s death. That sort of anguish twisted and gutted a person. Him not being okay made sense.
“We met in college,” Rob continued. “After graduation, I became the typical skeptical newspaper journalist, following stories about corrupt politicians and misspent government funds. She wrote for magazines, taking weeks, months, or however long she needed, to draw out the story behind the story. She wrote beautifully lyrical prose with heart and nuance.”
Not the talk of a man wrapped up in conspiracy theories. The pain poured out of him, spilling out and covering every word and movement with a thick layer of loss.
“A friend of hers was the daughter of one of the men killed two years ago, Ken Turner.” Rob reached into his bag andslapped a file down on the table between them. “After a years-long whisper campaign about inappropriate behavior with the women in his office—touching them, demanding sex, demoting them if they turned him down, tying moving up in the company to sucking him off—he was killed. In a single-car accident just days after an internal investigation cleared him to a great deal of public outcry.”
“Did the daughter think he was innocent?”
“She wanted to, but no. She knew who he was and how little regard he had for women. But she didn’t buy the single-car accident explanation for his death. After years of not talking, she had texted her father. She said he was apologetic and begged to see her. He was supposed to be on his way to visit her but never arrived. His car was found a day later, nowhere near where they were supposed to meet. In a lake. He was wrapped up in the seat belt as if he’d tried to escape but couldn’t.”
Poetic, maybe, but Gabby wasn’t convinced that proved anything. “He could have changed his mind about the meeting. Felt guilty...”
“This guy’s daughter was pretty vocal about the story of his death not making sense, and asked Tami to investigate it. Then the daughter, a respected teacher, became the target of suggestions that she did something with a student.” Rob finished his coffee. “The daughter abruptly agreed with the police findings, and the nasty rumors stopped. An unnamed jealous coworker was blamed but never outed or disciplined.”
“Unnamed?” Gabby would have sued the pants off that liar.
“Strange, right? The daughter stopped talking to Tami.Blocked her calls. So Tami dug deeper. She found more cases. Similar circumstances.”
Gabby remembered the story about this Ken Turner guy and how relieved the women who knew him sounded when he died. But that still didn’t prove anything. “Coincidence.”
A second file went on top of the first. “Damon Scott. A politician and slum landlord who evaded criminal prosecution even after two of his tenants died when a poorly maintained balcony collapsed. One month after that he died in a fall off the rooftop deck of his Georgetown home. His wife insisted an accidental fall was impossible due to the railing. As soon as she spoke up, criminal charges were filed against her. Those were later dropped when she agreed to the medical examiner’s findings about her husband’s death.”
She read about that strange fall. “Okay.”
“Need more?” He stacked a third file on the pile. “Richard Kellerman, pediatrician accused of molesting his patients. Children. He drowned in the Potomac even though he hated water and didn’t have a boat.” Rob reached into his bag and brought out the files he previously shoved away. “Amos Prince, another doctor accused of molestation, but this one by his daughters.”
The facts made Gabby sick. “I can’t—”
“Leonard Waters. Kane Long. Bart Thomas. Are you seeing the pattern?”
The long list of names sounded compelling. Again, not evidence of a conspiracy, but she was tempted to sort through those files and see what he and Tami had compiled.
Still, one of them had to be rational and it looked like she’dwon that prize. “People die, Rob. Accidents are horrible, but they happen.”
“Do you think I want to believe this? I have losteverything. Don’t you get that?” His voice rose until a few people in the coffee shop glanced his way. He ignored the stares but lowered his voice. “I sat with her, watched her while machines pumped air into her broken body. Argued with the doctors for more time, but I wasn’t officially family. Not yet. I didn’t get to make the decision to give up on her.”
Gabby ached for him. For Tami. But she tried to separate out that empathy and heartache from reality. “Is it possible... Could you be too close to this?”
“Maybe. Probably.” He exhaled. “But what choice do I have? This was Tami’s legacy. If I’m right, she literally gave her life to find out the truth. I owe it to her to follow this to the end.”
The haunting sound of his voice pulled at Gabby. “Even though you lost your job and your reputation?”
“Tami was worth more than all of that.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes. Gabby skimmed her fingertips over the file in front of her, wanting both to open it and to walk away. Not knowing gave her an odd sort of power. It shielded her, let her wallow in possible ignorance and not take a stand. She could pretend to be noble without ever risking a failed test.
Rob’s voice cut across the quiet stretching between them. “These men, by paying hush money or falling back on their positions, got away with the unthinkable. They weren’t held accountable by the legal system. In the age of supposed cancelculture, they didn’t lose anything in the way of reputation or serious cash. Then they died.”
After a quick glance around to make sure no one was watching this little scene, she tried to reason with him. “Say you’re right. Say someone is taking the law into their own hands and deciding judgment, why assume it’s a group?”
