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“Okay. Well, I left Joanne because she went off the rails. Used to be the sweetest girl in the world, the kind of girl who’d scold herself if she was a minute late for church. Then she did a total one-eighty.”
Ripley always hated the my-wife-suddenly-changed excuse because there were always two sides to every story, but at least this one had been corroborated by Joanne’s workmate. “How so?” she asked.
Chris looked away as though the answer lay in the beige walls, then said, “Uh, the reason is… look, this is going to get quite dark, okay?”
“Dark is my middle name,” Ella said. “Well, last name, but please go ahead.”
“Okay, so Joanne got hardcore into drugs.Methamphetamines. They completely destroyed her. She stopped taking care of herself; she stopped eating. She managed to drag herself to work, but on her days off, she’d just lay around and get high. All her cash went to drugs. She said it put the devil in her. I couldn’t live like that, so I had to get out.”
Ripley nodded along to the story. “Understandable.”
“But that’s not all. The reason she started doing drugs was because we had… an accident.”
Ella asked, “What kind of accident?”
“Me and Jo had been together since we were nineteen. We envisioned our life from the start, and we actually had it all, except for one thing.”
Ripley saw the ending to this tale immediately, propelled by the momentum of despair. “Children,” she said.
Chris’s expression told her that she’d guessed correctly. “Yes, children. It took us a long time, and I mean alongtime to conceive. Ten years. But then, two months into the pregnancy…” Chris’seyes drooped and his face fell into a frown. Again, his demeanor did the talking, no need for words.
“I’m very sorry to hear that,” Ella said.
“Tough situation,” Ripley followed up. “Our deepest sympathies.”
Chrisswiped at his face, trying to compose himself after a sudden burst of emotion. “Thanks, but it wasn’t just the fact it happened, it was the way it happened.”
Over her thirty year career, Ripley had heard the grisly details of every tragedy in the book. Mass shootings, drownings, cult suicides, incinerations, even people who’d been flayed alive. But something about the loss of a child – even an unborn one – always tugged at her heartstrings. She was surprised she still had any after a lifetime of law enforcement, but it was nice to know that slab of cold steel she called a heart could still beat when it needed to.
“We’re listening,” Ella said. Ripley wasn’t sure how much of this was relevant, but she couldn’t rightly interrupt someone talking about such a topic.
“Jo was poisoned. We’re not sure how. But she collapsed one afternoon. I took her to the hospital and they found traces of something in her system. I can’t remember the name. Perflu-something. The docs called it PFAS if I remember rightly.”
“Perfluoroalkyl. Chemical solvent,” Ella said.
“That’s it,” Chris said. “God, just hearing that word brings it all back. But yeah, that’s why we separated. I begged Jo to keep going, try again. I said if it happened once it could happen again, but she went full self-destructive. She said she lost the only thing she ever wanted.”
Ripley’s gaze swept acrossthe room,taking in all the brief details. It was pretty minimal in here, a glorified crash pad and a stark contrast to Joanne’s fairly lavish residence. Even though Chris had been forthcoming with information, she still couldn’t abandon suspicion just yet.
“You have something of a past, is that right?” Ripley asked.
Chris nodded without hesitation. “Yes I do. But that was a long time ago, before I met Joanne.”
“Care to talk us through it?”
“My ex-girlfriend accused me of beating her. I did no such thing, but I couldn’t prove I didn’t. Her word against mine. I lost.”
Ripley detected sincerity from the man’s nonverbal language. Steady breathing, no sudden twitches, steady tonality. Her instincts told her Chris was telling the truth, but the best psychopaths had the most convincing masks.
“And this Joanne business, how do you feel about it all?” Ripley asked.
“Gutted, obviously. What Joanne didn’t realize was that I lost two people through all of that. She only lost one, because she stopped caring about me soon after.”
“She seems to have gotten the better deal in the divorce,” Ella added.
Chris’s face lit up with a wry smile. “You’re right there. But trust me, she needs all the help she can get. I couldn’t leave an addict to fend for themselves. For all her problems, I still love her.”
Ripley felt the sincerity radiating like a warm glow, Chris’s body language in sync with his tone and inflections. That kind of earnestness couldn’t be faked, at least not by anyone but an experienced performer. But still, the psychological profile was just a small cog in the justice machine. Chris’s involvement needed to be ruled out with hard facts.
