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“What can I get you to drink?” Emma asked. “Tea, water, coffee?”
“Oh, I’m okay. Thank you, though.”
Emma opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle of chardonnay. “Avery Mason is standing in my kitchen, so I’m having a glass of wine. Would you like to join me?”
“I suppose it would be impolite to say no twice.”
Emma smiled and removed two wineglasses from the cabinet. They headed to the back where they sat in the shade of a large patio umbrella and stared off to the mountain peaks in the distance. Emma poured two glasses of chardonnay.
“Thanks for meeting with me,” Avery said, taking a sip of wine. “I’m sure it’s not easy to talk about your sister, even this many years later.”
Emma pulled her gaze from the mountains and looked at Avery with a smile. “Even after twenty years I still miss her.”
“Victoria was your younger sister?”
Emma nodded. “By five years. She was thirty-five when she was taken from this world.” Emma raised her eyebrows and shook her head. “Hard to believe she’d be fifty-five today. There’s just no way for me to picture my baby sister in her midfifties. You know, when a loved one dies young your perception of them is placed in a time capsule. You’re only able to remember them as they were then, not as they would be today. Victoria was so young and healthy, full of life. To me she will forever be that vibrant young woman. It’s the only way I’ll ever know her.”
“Does the news of finally identifying Victoria’s remains bring closure for you?”
Emma took a sip of wine. “In a way, I suppose. But not the type I’m looking for.”
“What kind is that?”
Emma blinked and studied Avery for a moment, a look of curiosity coming over her. “Do you know much about Victoria?”
“Not much. Only that she died on 9/11 and her remains were just identified by the medical examiner’s office. I was hoping you could tell me about her.”
“Yes, of course. And I have waited twenty years to finally put my sister to rest. Maybe that’ll be possible now, but I doubt I’ll be able to do it properly.”
“You mean with a funeral?”
Emma smiled in a way that made Avery feel as if she were missing something.
“You really don’t know about Victoria’s past, do you?”
“No,” Avery said. “That’s why I’m here.”
Emma shifted her gaze back to the panoramic view and took another sip of wine. “My sister was involved in a murder investigation prior to her death. It was a great, big, sensationalized case around here. An awful case, gruesome in its nature and filled with perverted sex. The media and the police painted Victoria out to be a monster.”
Avery sat up taller in her chair. “Victoria was involved in the investigation, meaning . . . ?”
“Meaning they said my baby sister was a killer. Something I know without doubt is false. So until I find a way to come to terms with that, I’ll never be able to properly put Victoria to rest.”
Avery had come out to the country looking for a feel-good story about a woman finding closure twenty years after her sister was killed on 9/11. Instead, she’d stumbled onto a twenty-year-old murder investigation. Her mind buzzed with possibility, and the curiosity center of her brain ached for every detail.
“Would you tell me about it?” Avery asked, trying not to sound too eager.
Emma nodded. “That’s what the wine is for.”
CHAPTER 16
Shandaken, NY Friday, June 25, 2021
WALT JENKINS’S PLANE LANDED THE DAY BEFORE. HAD HE NOT RECENTLY come to the realization that his life was in a downward spiral, he might have passed on Jim Oliver’s offer. But Walt was looking for an opportunity to stop running, and perhaps he’d found it. The Bureau put him up in a suite at the Grand Hyatt in Midtown. It took Walt just over an hour to make the trip out to the country. The Bureau of Criminal Investigation branch of the New York State Police was an investigative division of plainclothes detectives that, for the most part, assisted local law enforcement that lacked the investigative resources needed for major crimes. The 2001 murder of Cameron Young in the Catskill Mountains, near the town of Shandaken, had certainly been an example of a county police department caught off guard. The community consisted of wealthy individuals who owned second homes in the area and spent long weekends and holidays in the town. Before Cameron Young had been found hanging from his balcony, there hadn’t been a homicide in the area in four decades.
The Shandaken Police Department was not prepared for the murder, and the chief had quickly called the state authorities for help. Walt had been assigned to the case. At twenty-eight years old, he had been the youngest detective in the BCI. The older cops in Shandaken had not been happy to see him pull up to the crime scene. Their sentiment, Walt knew, was that if they wanted a kid’s advice on how to handle a homicide they’d ask their own teenagers. But Walt had been undeterred by the cold reception and worked hard to win them over. He was careful to include the police chief in every decision, despite that, once invited, the BCI had full jurisdiction. When the name of the victim leaked—Cameron Young, a well-known novelist—the media took notice. When details about the gruesome nature of the crime were disclosed, as well as the links to sexual deviance, the media sunk its teeth into the story. To keep jurisdictional peace, Walt named the chief as official spokesman and invited him to speak at each press conference. When the cameras rolled, it was not Walt Jenkins revealing the details of the case and answering questions from the press, but Chief Dale Richards. Walt worked in the background. He was happy to stay out of the spotlight and concentrate on piecing the evidence together.
Now, on Friday afternoon, Walt pulled the nondescript government car—on loan from the New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation—into the small parking lot of the Shandaken Police Station. Because Chief Richards had been the front man of the Cameron Young investigation, the case files resided at the Shandaken police headquarters. Twenty years later, Walt hoped they still existed.
