Page 152 of Torin

“Once he was no longer in a position to control what happened inside his own department, investigators could start going back through those cases properly.”

I glance at Professor Bennett. He’s wearing the same battered jacket I remember from a hundred meetings in his office.

“They found records I’d never seen,” I continue. “They recovered evidence that should have been examined years ago. Cases were reopened. And some of the connections I’d suspected turned out to go much further than I knew.”

“So, in trying to stop you, your father made the investigation bigger?”

“Much bigger.”

The microphone moves to a man farther along the row.

“How many of the cases you originally identified have now been reopened?”

“Seven.”

That number still gets me.

“Three missing-person cases and four deaths that had originally been ruled accidental or inconclusive.”

“And have any of them been solved?”

“Two.”

The room quiets.

I don’t give names. Both families have already had enough strangers picking over the worst things that ever happened to them.

“In one case, investigators were able to establish that a woman whose death had been treated as an accident had been at East Ridge that night. There was evidence in the original file that should have led them there years ago.”

I take a sip of water.

“It didn’t.”

“And the other?”

“A woman who’d been missing for six years.”

Even after all the months I’ve spent working on this, that sentence is difficult.

“They found her remains.”

The room is silent.

“Information uncovered during the investigation led police to her remains. There’s now an active homicide investigation, so there’s very little I can say about that case.”

The microphone moves on.

The moderator chooses a student near the aisle.

“Was it difficult to write about your father after what happened?”

“Yes.”

There are a hundred complicated answers I could give her.

“But writing about him wasn’t the hardest part.”

“What was?”