Kathleen Creighton - Memory of Murder

Alan helped himself to a cup of coffee and took a sip of it-black-before he answered. “There wasn’t any reason for it to show up on Baltimore’s radar-or yours, either. She didn’t stay a Jane Doe long enough. Her husband showed up, ID’d her. Nobody questioned it.”

Holt sat for a long moment in silence, staring down at the folder. Then he looked up at Lindsey, and his eyes were gentle. Compassionate. “This must be a tough time for you.”

She managed to smile, even laugh, a little. “Oh, yeah.”

He held up the photo of the young Karen McKinney. “This is my mother. I understand you…think it might be your mother, too.”

She nodded, fighting back tears. Holt said, without smiling, “Well, then, obviously, that would make you my sister.” She nodded again, hugging herself tightly; it was all she could do, it seemed, without breaking down. Holt shook his head and simply said, “Wow.” Lindsey thought, He’s as shaken by this as I am.

And as before, the awareness brought her a measure of calm. She said softly, “This must be hard for you, too. Finding out your mother is alive, after all these years.”

“ Might be alive,” Alan broke in, his voice harsh. “We’re still lacking absolute proof.”

“Which, thank God, we can get easily enough,” Holt said briskly. “I’ll make sure you get a DNA sample before you leave.” He closed the folder but held on to it. “But seems to me we have a pretty strong connection here…”

“Connect the dots…” Lindsey murmured, but nobody paid any attention to her.

So, she stood silently and watched them, the two men who had come into her life so unexpectedly and with such catastrophic effect. It struck her how alike they were, without actually looking alike. Same approximate age, similar coloring-dark hair and blue eyes-although Holt had more silver in his hair and deeper creases around his eyes and mouth, and his eyes weren’t quite as hard and steely as Alan’s. They were of similar build and body type, too-tall but not extraordinarily so, slim but muscular-although Alan was more powerfully built. A memory-the glimpse she’d had of him naked to the waist, mopping water drops from his neck and chest-flashed into her mind, and something inside her chest did a peculiar dropping-squeezing maneuver that made her catch her breath, inaudibly, guiltily…

“I agree,” Alan said, setting his coffee down and leaning toward the other man, elbows on his knees. He counted, raising and touching one finger at a time, and Lindsey found herself riveted by the graceful economy of his movements. “One, the McKinneys are abducted from a movie theater parking lot in Baltimore. Two, two days later a Jane Doe matching Karen McKinney’s description is pulled out of the Chesapeake, sporting a head wound that appears to have been caused by a bullet crease. Three, three days after that she’s identified by a man claiming to be her husband, as Sally Phillips, his wife, who is also discovered to be in the early weeks of pregnancy.”

He paused then, as a young woman came into the room, moving quietly to stand behind her husband’s chair. She was small and slender, with short blond hair cut in shaggy layers. Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, she seemed very young, barely more than a girl-until she leaned forward into the light, and Lindsey saw that her face wore the kind of serenity that only comes from having lived through the worst life has to offer, and emerged whole and happy on the other side.

Holt looked up, smiled, and took the hand she’d placed on his shoulder. “Hey, there you are. Alan, Lindsey-like to have you meet my wife, Brenna.”

Alan, who had risen with old-fashioned courtesy, nodded and said, “Nice meeting you, Brenna.”

Lindsey nodded, too, and murmured, “Hi.”

“Don’t let me interrupt,” Brenna said. Her voice had a raspy, husky quality, and her eyes were a shade of golden hazel that seemed only a shade or two darker than her hair.

Alan smiled at her and continued. “And…four, Richard and Susan Merrill appear in San Diego, California, Susan gives birth to Lindsey roughly eight months later. Oh-and Susan Merrill also happens to have a scar on her head that closely corresponds to Sally Phillips’s head wound. And, has no record or memory of a past prior to San Diego.”

“Seems like a no-brainer to me,” Brenna said with a shrug.

Holt nodded, but then let out a breath in a frustrated gust. “Okay, I’m pretty much convinced. It all makes sense, except for one thing- why? ”

But when the man threw himself in front of her and my bullet went wild and missed its mark, I knew I had made a terrible-perhaps fatal-mistake.

He fought like a demon, even though his hands were bound. It was several minutes before I could regain control of the situation, and by that time, the woman had vanished in the darkness and fog. I searched, but could find no trace of her. At that point I could only hope the ocean had taken her after all.

Excerpt from the confession of Alexi K.

FBI Files, Restricted Access,

Declassified 2010

No one spoke. Holt looked at Alan, then Lindsey. After a long moment, he repeated it, in a voice rigidly controlled. “Why were they taken? There was no reason for them to be targeted-none whatsoever. That’s what’s always confounded me. It’s what confounded Baltimore PD. It’s damn hard to solve a case,” he growled, “when there’s absolutely no motive. No suspects. Nothing that makes any kind of sense.”

Alan cleared his throat. “Well, there is one thing.”

So Alan told him what Bob Faulkner, the retired Baltimore homicide cop, had said.

When he’d finished, Holt was staring at him, stony-faced. Brenna sat down on the arm of his chair and put her arm across her husband’s shoulders.

Lindsey whispered, “A mistake? ” Her face was pale with shock. Alan wanted to go to her, tell her to sit down, for God’s sake. Hold her. But of course he didn’t.

They all sat in silence, listening to the noise the rain and wind made as if fascinated by it-such unfamiliar sounds in that part of the world. Alan thought there probably weren’t any words that could have expressed what they must be feeling, these two people whose lives had been turned upside down-forty years apart in time-by someone’s mistake .

If that’s what it had been.

Brenna rose abruptly. “Anybody want more coffee?”

“Yeah, Billie-thanks,” Holt said absently, and Alan said, “Billie?” He was tuned to pet names, it seemed.

Brenna turned to smile at her husband, but only said, “Long story.”

While they waited for the coffee, Holt made a visible effort to pull himself together and asked Lindsey to tell him about her mother.

His mother, too, Alan reminded himself. Most likely. There was real poignancy in that, he thought, but he had fortified himself against it; wallowing in the tragedy of these people’s lives, he told himself, wasn’t going to help solve the mystery of what had happened to Karen and James McKinney, and why.

He listened to Lindsey talk with only half of his attention, while he watched her avidly-watched the two of them, of course, but mostly Lindsey. It struck him how alike they were-not surprising, considering they were almost certainly brother and sister. He didn’t need DNA to know that, it was right there in front of him. They had the same general body type-tall and slim, athletic build. And the same thick dark hair-although Holt’s was a little more wavy and beginning to gray at the temples-and those same thick-lashed blue eyes.

Although Holt’s didn’t have quite the same effect on him Lindsey’s had.