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Hallie smiled. “Absolutely. Where should we start?”
Trinity took her file folder out of her messenger bag and held it on her lap. “First, I want to thank you for sending the file you compiled. There’s so much here. It’s rare that we start out with so many documents.”
Hallie smiled. “My friend Bella helped me. Bella Crooke. Like I told you, she worked in records at the police department.” Her smile faltered. “I forgot to ask you the last time we talked—you don’t have to reveal that she was the one who got me all these reports and things, do you?”
“No,” said Trinity. “I don’t.”
“You don’t need to talk to her, do you? ’Cause she was already nervous about helping me. Although since she’s retired, it probably doesn’t matter.”
“No need to talk with her,” Trinity reassured. She patted the folder. “All I need is what you’ve already provided. However, I do feel that there are a lot of things from the file that your friend wasn’t able to get. I’m trying to obtain them but for now, maybe you can help. Jana did live with you at the time of her death, right?”
“Yes, Jana and Mathias, we all lived together as a family.” She waved a hand around the room. “Not here. I had to leave that place a few years ago. Landlord sold the building.”
“To your knowledge,” Trinity asked, “did the police look into Jana at all? Check her phone? Talk to her friends? Coworkers? Anyone she went to school with?”
“Oh,” said Hallie. “You mean did they actually investigate the circumstances of her death, or did they just call it an accident and move on?”
Trinity smiled. “Precisely.”
“They looked pretty closely at her life, from what I remember, especially after Mathias told them that she had said she was meeting someone the night she died. That was a big deal. They thought if they could find that person, they’d find her killer. I did, too. I still don’t know how they never found anyone. They had her phone. I know they looked at that. I could never get it back. Never got any of it back. They came to our place and searched her room. They took some things. She was studying biology at school. She wanted to go into medicine, study genetics. That’s why she took the job at that doctor’s office as a receptionist. Anyway, they took her textbooks, some papers she had written, her laptop. My understanding is that they never found anything. Like I said, my friend Bella had access to the file. She reviewed it and told me she didn’t see that they’d found any leads. I mean, if they had, we wouldn’t be talking right now, would we?”
Josie tried to recall what reports Trinity had shown her. “How about friends and coworkers? Do you know if the police interviewed any of those people?”
Hallie gave a slow nod. “Bella said there were some reports of interviews, yes.”
“But none discussed the identity of the person Mathias said Jana was meeting that night?” Josie said.
“No. Not that I’m aware of.”
Trinity said, “What about you, Hallie? Do you have any thoughts as to who it could have been?”
Hallie’s eyes landed on the photos next to Josie. Lines creased her forehead. “I don’t know. It’s bothered me so much all this time. Jana told me everything. I mean, I was her mother! Well, sort of. Mostly. She would come home and tell me every little detail about her day. I knew everything.”
Josie didn’t point out that—particularly in her experience as a police officer—teenagers did not, in fact, tell their parents or even their mothers everything. Although parents almost always assumed they did.
“Then why wouldn’t she have told you she was meeting someone that night?” asked Trinity gently.
Hallie swiped a knuckle beneath one of her eyes, catching a tear before it could roll down her cheek. Her voice was husky. “The only thing I can think of is that she was looking for her birth parents and she thought that if she told me, it would hurt my feelings. Maybe she didn’t want me to be insulted. After all, she barely remembered our foster parents from before. We really were her parents, Mathias and I. Maybe she didn’t want us to think she was ungrateful by trying to find them. I won’t lie. I would have felt sad and maybe scared for her in terms of what she might find out, but I wish she had told me. I could have helped her. I did find everyone I could after she died—distant relatives. They didn’t care about her. Had never been in touch. That was a dead end.”
Josie said, “This is probably a long shot, but have you ever spoken with the gas station clerk that night? Maybe she talked with Jana while she was making her purchases?”
Hallie rolled her eyes. “You mean Carolina Eddy, drug addict and pathological liar?”
“You did talk with her?” asked Josie.
Beside her, Trinity was writing Carolina’s name down and began searching the file folder for mention of her.
Hallie laced her fingers together and began twisting them in her lap. “Of course I did, the very next night when Mathias and I were looking for Jana. We went back to the gas station to find out if Jana had maybe come back or if Carolina had heard or seen anything. She said she didn’t know anything, but she’s got a reputation in town for lying. Who knows what she really saw or heard? She kept working there for a long time after Jana died. From time to time, I’d go in there and chat her up, try to see if she’d change up her story. Tell me the truth.”
Trinity found the report and drew a star beside Carolina’s name. “You think this Carolina Eddy was lying about what she saw or heard the night Jana went missing?”
Hallie shrugged. “I don’t know! That’s the whole point. I could never believe her.”
“Did her story ever change?” asked Josie.
Hallie shook her head, shoulders slumping. “No. It never did.”
“Okay,” said Josie, changing the subject. “Was Jana seeing anyone when she died?”
