She smiles again, swats him with her menu. “I’m serious. It will mean more hours. A longer commute. You’ll have to take on more with the kids.” She gazes lovingly at the twins, who each have a fistful of Cheerios from the container Bob put in front of them.
“You didn’t answer my question. What do you want to do?”
“Stan said I could focus on financial crimes. The cases are super-interesting. It’s the best white-collar crime team at the Bureau.”
“No psycho high school principals?”
She shakes her head in exasperation. “That reminds me: Jesse Duvall was on Good Morning America this morning. She’s getting a lot of attention for that piece she wrote in the New Yorker about the case. She mentions me in the segment.”
Bob’s eyes light up. He’s already on his phone, pulling up the clip. “It’s a long interview, I’ll watch the whole thing later, but where does she mention you?”
“Near the end.”
Bob fiddles with the device, fast-forwarding, then holds the phone so they both can see the screen. The twins are watching them, seemingly fascinated.
Jesse Duvall sits on a veranda, a handsome estate in the background. She looks like a movie star.
The host says, “So the killer, he says something extraordinarily creepy to you during the attack, the same words he said fifteen years prior to the lone survivor of the Blockbuster killings?”
“That’s right.”
“Why do you think he did that? Or let you survive, for that matter?”
“I think he wanted to divert attention from himself. At the time, everyone thought Vince Whitaker was the Blockbuster killer, so he thought they might think Vince killed the employees of the ice cream store. But his backup plan, which was what ended up carrying the day, was that the authorities would believe that I committed the crime.”
“Why would he think that?”
“Because he knew I was researching the Blockbuster case. He didn’t know why, but I’d met with him when I was having a problem with some girls at school. We talked about my interest in journalism. I was like, ‘You were a teacher and knew all these kids from Blockbuster, tell me about them.’”
* * *
Bob pauses the clip. “Does she get into the thing about her teacher?”
“Briefly,” Keller says, “she just mentions that after her New Yorker story other girls came forward and creepy Chad Parke was finally charged and pled guilty.”
Bob nods, clicks PLAY.
* * *
The host asks, “Why do you think he killed so many? And there was a big gap in time here, what do you think triggered him to do it again?”
Jesse seems to ponder this. “I think he killed my mother because he was obsessed with her. If he couldn’t have her, no one could. I think he killed her friends at the store because they knew about their relationship and threatened to tell. I think the same thing happened with the Sawyer sisters. Hannah wanted out of the relationship and told her older sister when he was stalking her. Madison was going to tell their mom. He must’ve been watching the ice cream store and saw me go in there and decided to take the opportunity. As for the time between the crimes, we’ll never know.”
The host says, “Do you think he knew you were his daughter?”
“I don’t think so. But I don’t think it would’ve changed anything if he did.”
“All these years, he was a monster in plain sight.”
“I struggled with that a lot. Shouldn’t I have put the pieces together sooner? Could I have prevented what happened at the ice cream store? Then a wise FBI agent said something to me I’ll never forget.”
The host waits, an eager expression on her face.
“She said there’s a saying, ‘The sheep spends its life worried about the wolf, only to be eaten by the farmer.’”
* * *
Bob blurts, “Yeah!”
The diner goes quiet for a beat, then the murmur returns. Keller shakes her head.
Looking at the twins, she says, “I’m so happy they’re too young to be embarrassed of us yet.”
“Embarrassed? Are you crazy, their mama’s the wisest new agent at the Manhattan field office.”
Keller stares at him a long moment.
“By the way,” Bob says, “did Jesse make a bunch of money from the article or something? That’s a pretty impressive mansion she’s at.”
“That’s the crazy part. Ella Monroe’s mother took her in. I met that woman and, let me tell you, she’s a tough one. It could be her chance to do what she should’ve done with her own daughter, a second chance to get things right.”