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When I spoke to her, she snapped her gaze toward me.
The lights in the living room flickered as the cocktail of shock, excitement, and horror hit me at once.
“Oh my god,” she whispered as she looked at me with an intensity I hadn’t experienced while dead or alive. “You’re …” She trailed off. There was no question anymore.
I almost missed the fact that April was leading the male detective into the living room to retrieve the keys to the Kia.
“Come on,” I told the girl with the black hair. “I’m not missing this.”
* * *
Skye and I sat in the backseat of the Kia while the detectives towed the car to the station.
We discovered we had a lot to talk about.
April stood in the driveway with Kimmie and Emma as we pulled away, her face a mask of dread and fear. Maybe I was imagining it, but I thought I saw a trace of something else: doubt.
After the detective from Utah had called a couple of months earlier, James had less-than-patiently explained to April that he was the target of a witch hunt. And it was April’s fault. The woman in their old congregation in Utah—the one who had sent April those texts and called the police when she saw the similarity between James and the photo in the news—had opened this can of worms. April hadn’t done shit about it. She hadn’t even shown him the text messages until he “stumbled” across them while looking for a photo on her phone.
So they had to hire a lawyer they couldn’t really afford.
I knew they could afford it. Easily. April didn’t, though. She had almost nothing to do with the finances. He transferred a few hundred dollars into a checking account she used for groceries and the occasional outfit when the girls needed new clothes. That was it. So when the detective from Utah had called her cell a few days after she called James, April stayed on the phone for less than thirty seconds. Just long enough to repeat the line she’d been instructed to deliver about all questions going through their lawyer. But afterward, while Emma was at school and Kimmie was taking a nap, she opened an incognito browser and searched for “Meghan Campbell murder.” She read every article. She scrutinized the photo of him up close. She shook her head as if exasperated with herself for even entertaining the idea that her husband—her James—could be involved in anything like that. Then she shut the browser and went to pick Emma up from school.
I told Skye all of this as we sat in the towed Kia at the impound lot, waiting for it to be processed that evening. I told her what he had done to me two years earlier. And she told me what he had done to her two months earlier.
He had killed her while I was at home with his wife and kids, pretending that maybe he had stopped because he wasn’t using MatchStrike anymore. Pretending like April was.
“I’m so sorry,” I told her in the dark car. There were no tears. I didn’t have those anymore, and neither did she. But the electric weight of the sadness in the car reached even the lone streetlight at the corner of the impound lot that had just blinked on in the storm rolling over the hills. “I tried so hard to stop him. I followed him everywhere. Like his shadow. In the end, I couldn’t do anything to stop it from happening. There was another woman: Meghan. Before you. I was there when he did it … I stopped following him after that.”
Her eyes looked like deep pools in the dark Kia. She nodded. “It’s not your fault, you know. It’s nobody’s fault. Just his.”
* * *
The car was pretty clean. There was no blood. No hair. No fibers of significant interest.
There was, however, a fingerprint. Just one that didn’t match with April, the girls, or James himself. It was on the front passenger side of the vehicle, where the seat connected to the base of the car.
Skye and I looked at each other. Both of us knew that it could mean anything. That justice wasn’t guaranteed. That sometimes bad people got away with doing bad things and never paid the price. After all, he’d gotten away with my murder for years now. He’d gotten away with Skye’s murder for months. He’d gotten away with all of it.
There was a very small chance that the fingerprint was hers. Zero chance it was mine. The only time I’d been in his car was as a ghost. Most likely, it was from one of the many other women he’d met up with on MatchStrike. The ones he had wowed and terrified and annoyed—but not murdered.
So we didn’t grin at each other the way I might have before. Skye just followed the tech to the lab while I stayed with Detective Kittleson.
Because a small chance was still a chance. And small chances were all we had left.
30. SKYE
Kuna, Idaho
Now
The tech said it would take about two hours to run the fingerprint they’d found in his car.
I sort of expected them to be able to pop it into a computer. That we’d know immediately whether or not it was a match. But as I watched the tech carefully prepare and clean up the image she had digitized, I was impressed it was only going to take two hours. The fingerprint card, up close, was a dense maze of ridges, furrows, and channels. And on the other side of that maze was—maybe—the key to an arrest.
The tech was young—not much older than me. Probably just a few years out of college. Her dark hair was tucked into a neat braid, and her brown eyes darted back and forth across the print slide with a focused determination. When someone knocked on the lab door, she ignored it.
She was amazing.
