The guards are almost on top of us now. The siren continues to blare.
I look at the gun in my hand. “Philip?”
“Hang on.”
The car leaps forward. There is a crunching sound. The gates open a bit more, the nose of the car jammed between them. Philip hits the gas pedal, stops, hits it again. The engine thuds and whirs.
The guards are yelling at us, but I can’t hear them over the siren.
The car begins to squeeze through the opening now. We are almost out, almost in the clear, but the gates are still closing, squeezing the car. It reminds me of that trash compactor scene in Star Wars and all the old TV shows where the heroes are trapped in a room with the walls closing in to crush them.
The first guard is at my car window. He’s shouting—I don’t know or care what. Our eyes actually meet. He starts to raise the weapon. I don’t see how I have a choice. I can’t go back. I can’t give up. My gun is pointed at Philip, but now I spin toward the guard.
Aim for the legs, I think.
Philip shouts. “Don’t!”
The guard has the gun in his hand, pointing it at me. Him or me. That’s how it is. I hesitate, but I really have no choice. I am about to fire when the car suddenly lunges forward, snapping my head back. The gates hold on to the car for another second, no more than that, and with one last scrape, we break free.
The guards run after us, but Philip keeps his foot on the gas. The car accelerates to full speed, hurling us down the road. I turn around. The guards stand there. They, along with Briggs Correctional Facility, grow smaller and dimmer until I can no longer see a trace of either.
But even then, I can still hear the siren.
Chapter
12
Rachel heard the siren too.
She was having breakfast at the Nesbitt Station Diner, an eatery inside two converted railcars with a menu only slightly shorter in word count than your average novel. Her favorite listing on the menu, listed under forty different ways of having a burger （beef, bison, chicken, turkey, elk, portobello mushroom, wild salmon, cod, black bean, veggie, plant-based, lamb, pork, olive, etc.） was the “My Wife Doesn’t Want Anything,” which was their way of supersizing your French fries order and throwing in two mozzarella sticks. The diner had a sign at the door saying OPEN 24 HOURS BUT NOT IN A ROW before stating their working hours, which went from five a.m. until two a.m. Monday through Saturday. Another sign read: BYOB BUT WE ENCOURAGE YOU TO SHARE WITH YOUR SERVER.
The Air Fryer Cheeseburger last night had been pretty good, but the draw of this place for Rachel was the excellent Wi-Fi. The Briggs Motor Lodge’s Wi-Fi was so bad she thought she heard a phone-modem shriek when she tried to access it. The Lodge, a word with too many meanings, also didn’t have a bar or restaurant, just a foyer by the front desk that featured free “Continental” breakfast, a truly upmarket term for a stale roll and a half-melted margarine packet.
The diner’s clock had all number 5s on it, with the words NO DRINKING UNTIL AFTER FIVE across the face. Still an hour until visiting hours—enough time to continue her research. That was why she had camped out here last night and again this morning, nursing coffee and ordering enough so as not to draw eye daggers for taking up a booth.
Her laptop had been humming all night, unearthing a mixed bag of information. On the negative side, she had not been able to find one Caucasian male between the ages of two and three anywhere in the country who had disappeared—and remained missing some five years later—that would fit the timeline of Matthew’s murder. Not one. Some boys that age had died. Some had even been kidnapped, usually in custody battles, and eventually found. Three had even vanished for as long as eight months before their bodies were located.
But so far, not one child who could fit the criteria remained unaccounted for, thus raising the most troublesome question: If the body wasn’t Matthew’s, whose was it?
Of course, it was still early. She would widen the search, try more months, farther away from the area, check other databases. Maybe the dead boy in Matthew’s bed—God, that sounded so crazy—had been younger or older or light-skinned Black or Eurasian or something else entirely. Rachel would be thorough. Before her scandal, she had been known as a ruthless researcher. Still, there was no other way to spin it: This “no body” news was a blow to any theory about Matthew being alive.
Matthew alive. Seriously, how crazy pants was that theory anyway?
The more positive news, if you could call any of this positive, involved the main witness against David, the “sweet old lady” （as the media had naturally dubbed her） Hilde Winslow. Locating the elderly widow should, in theory, have been no problem. When it first proved difficult, Rachel wondered whether the woman had passed away in the last five years. But there was no record of her dying. In fact, Rachel had only been able to find two people with that name. One of the Hildes was thirty years old and lived in Portland, Oregon. The other was a fourth grader in Crystal River, Florida.
Nope and double nope.
The name Hilde was derived from the more common name Hilda. No surprise there. The court documents from David’s case and all the pursuant media listed her as Hilde, but just to cover all the bases, Rachel tried Hilda Winslow. There were only two of them as well and neither fit the profile. Then she tried Hilde Winslow’s maiden name—women often go back to using that—but that too bore no fruit.
A dead end.
The siren—Rachel assumed that it was some sort of fire alarm—kept screeching.
Her phone buzzed. She checked the number and saw it was Tim Doherty, her old friend from her days at the Globe, calling her back. Tim had been one of the few to stick with her when the shit hit the fan. Not publicly, of course. That would have been career suicide. She didn’t want that for him or anyone else.
“I got it,” Tim said to her.
“The entire murder file?”
“The court documents and transcripts. There’s no way the cops are going to let me look at their murder book.”
“Did you get Hilde Winslow’s Social Security number?”
“Yes. Can I ask why you wanted it?”
“I need to find her.”
“Yeah, I figured that. Why not go the regular routes?”
“I did.”
“And you got nothing,” he said.
She could hear the lilt in Tim’s voice. “That’s right. Why? What did you get?”
“I took the liberty of running the Social Security number.”
“And?”
“Two months after your brother-in-law’s trial, Hilde Winslow changed her name to Harriet Winchester.”
Pay dirt, Rachel thought. “Whoa.”
“Yes,” he said. “She also sold her house and moved to an apartment on Twelfth Street in Manhattan.” He rattled off the address. “By the way, she turns eighty-one this week.”
“So why would a woman of her age change her name and move?” Rachel asked.
“Post-trial press?”
“Come again?”
“This murder was a big story,” Tim said.
“Yeah, but come on. Once her part was over there was no more scrutiny on her.”
The press was like the worst womanizer. Once it metaphorically bedded someone, it quickly grew bored and moved on to something new. A name change, while perhaps explainable, was extreme and curious.