Page 48 of The Secrets We Hide
During the last decade of her career at the FBI, Jude had spent a great deal of her free time driving from San Francisco down to Folsom State Prison, where she’d sat across from a man who had abducted, tortured, raped, and murdered at least twelve girls between the ages of fourteen and seventeen.
Frederick Arnold Henley had been a psychopath, but he’d also been at turns both charming and insightful. Their relationship had been purely transactional. Jude had been desperate to locate the bodies of his victims. Freddy had been desperate for a distraction from the tedium of prison. For years, they had talked politics and current events and geology, the latter of which had been Freddy’s area of educational expertise.
Occasionally, he would tell Jude where to find a victim’s body. Occasionally, he would grow reflective about the events that had led him to the eternity of California’s death row. As with every psychopath before or since, he had been fascinated by his own twisted mind. He’d also been highly invested in excusing his sadism as some sort of evolutionary urge beyond his control.
Doll, he had once told her,anybody is capable of murder. You push them hard enough, you make them feel helpless enough, and they’ll slit a throat or pull a trigger without a second thought.
Jude had emphatically disagreed. While she believed that she could kill someone in defense of herself or others, she could not imagine a scenario where she would murder someone in cold blood.
And then she had watched Reggie Wilder shove Emmy so hard that she’d stumbled backward and hit the ground.
Jude couldn’t recall making the decision to run toward Emmy. Her body had moved of its own accord. Her vision had taken on a predatory sharpness. Rage had infused every muscle and nerve. If Emmy hadn’t taken down the cocksucker with a metal baton, Jude would have beaten him to death with her fists.
She was still seized by an impotent rage as Emmy limped toward a group of sheriff’s deputies who’d done nothing to protect their boss when Reggie had assaulted her. Jude forced herself to look away. She focused on slowing her breaths. Studied the variations in color that speckled the asphalt in the road. Let her gaze travel to the neatly mowed grass in Allison’s front yard.
Jude nodded to herself, a physical check-in with her brain that she was okay.
She walked to Emmy’s cruiser. Found her shoes where she’d kicked them off. She wiped the dirt and grime off the soles of her feet before slipping on the heels. Then she checked her reflection in the side mirror. Blood had trickled down the side of her face where the bullet had grazed her temple. Jude found a pack of tissues in her purse. There were only a few left. It was hard to think that a little over half an hour ago she was burying her mother. She’d offered the tissues to Emmy in the church, but Emmy had looked at Jude as if she was trying to share a bump of coke.
“Hey.” Cole jogged over to Jude. Anxiety radiated off his body. “You think Mom’s okay?”
“She’ll be fine, sweetheart.” Emmy hadn’t been okay for a very long time. Jude looked in the mirror again, wiped at the blood on her face. “Your mother knows how to take care of herself.”
“What about you?” Cole still looked worried, but this time, his concern was directed at Jude. “You could’ve died in there.”
Jude made a show of struggling to stand. “‘It’s just a flesh wound.’”
“Still,” Cole said, missing the joke by about fifty years. “You should take it easy.”
Jude brushed his shoulders with her hands. His beautiful black suit was covered in a layer of white dust. She picked chunks ofSheetrock out of his wavy, dark hair. “How did you get this messy? You look like John Wayne Gacy asked you to smile for the camera.”
He still wouldn’t laugh. He was watching Emmy talk to a group of deputies, clearly eager to join in. Jude was keenly aware of Cole’s frustrations. The fact that his mother kept throttling his leash had been the subject of many late-night discussions.
Jude said, “Remember what I told you? How can you make yourself useful?”
Cole half shrugged. “I looked on socials to see if I could find Bill Garrison. He doesn’t have any accounts.”
“He’s Allison’s age?” Jude waited for his nod. “Would he be on TikTok and Snap?”
“Shit.”
Cole’s phone came out of his pocket. His body contorted into what Jude thought of asthe Posture: shoulders rolled in, head bent over his phone, thumb scrolling the screen. In the six weeks that she’d known Cole, she had seen more of the top of his head than his actual face.
He said, “Bill’s on Facebook. There’s mostly pictures of him and Allison. Some with Mandy.”
Jude pointed to the banner at the top of the page. “What’s that?”
Cole started nodding as he typed in a search for the North Falls Tigers. “There’s a game at two o’clock over at the baseball park. I’ll tell the chief.”
Jude caught his arm before he could go. “Is there a way to tell her without the information getting back to Reggie Wilder?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He walked with his head down as he typed into his phone. Jude took a moment to breathe. The rage against Reggie was still roiling inside of her. She looked down the street. Brett was helping the cocksucker limp to his car. Darla Bell was perched in her window like a judgmental crow. Sherry Robertson was zipping herself into a protective suit. One of the GBI techs was filling her in on his preliminary walk-through.
The rumble of a car engine pulled Jude back to Emmy. She was climbing into the passenger’s side of her cruiser. She’d askedanother deputy to drive her to the ballpark. Yet again, Cole was left standing around with nothing to do. The look on his face tugged at Jude’s heart.
She nodded him back over. “What’s your plan?”
