Kathleen Creighton - Memory of Murder

“Do you recognize them?” Lindsey asked. Her throat hurt so intensely she could barely speak.

Susan’s shaking fingertips caressed the groom’s smooth cheek, almost as if it was warm flesh she felt instead of cold paper. She nodded, and a tear fell onto the image, making a small wrinkled circle. “James,” she whispered. “Oh, James…” She looked up at Lindsey and her face was bathed in tears. “He’s dead. That man killed him-the one who says he’s my husband. He shot him. I asked him why, but he wouldn’t answer me. Why? Why would anybody want to kill James? He was such a good, sweet, gentle man…”

Lindsey slid from her chair and, kneeling, gathered her mother into her arms. She held her mother while she cried and cried. And all the time, Susan just kept asking, “Why?”

On Monday afternoon, a packet of files arrived from the Richmond, Virginia, PD. Included in the file were several clear photos of the woman rescued from the Chesapeake Bay, the one that came to be called Chesapeake Jane Doe. Carl, being a bit more adept with computer stuff than Alan, scanned them into a facial recognition program along with the high school graduation portrait of Karen McKinney and a recent photo of Susan Merrill. Shortly thereafter the computer came up with a positive match: Jane Doe and Karen McKinney and Susan Merrill were one and the same.

“What do you think?” Carl asked as they stood together staring at the monitor screen. “Is this enough to pull him in?”

Alan nodded grimly. He had his cell phone in his hand and was punching in numbers. “Calling Lindsey?”

Alan glanced at him as he listened to the rings. “I’d feel better knowing where she is and what she’s doing before we do this. Don’t want to take any chances on her getting into the middle of a situation.” Carl nodded.

After a moment, Alan put the phone back in his pocket and plucked his jacket off the back of his chair. “She’s not answering. She might be out jogging-she leaves her phone home when she runs. I’m going to drive out there…see if I can locate her. We’ve got Merrill boxed in. Let’s hold off on bringing him in until we’ve got his daughter under wraps.”

Safe, he thought.

Lindsey left her car parked at the curb and walked up the driveway on legs that felt as if they might give way at any moment. The garage door was open, and so was the door to the backyard patio. She went on through, calling, “Dad?”

“Lindsey? I’m out here, honey-come on back.”

He was cleaning the pool. How many times had she watched him do that? He was wearing a windbreaker with his Bermuda shorts and tennis sneakers with no socks-a typical San Diegan’s concession to winter-standing with his legs a little apart to brace himself against the pull of the strainer, methodically moving it back and forth, back and forth… He could have installed an automatic cleaning system, like most of their friends had, especially now that they were all getting older, but he always insisted he liked the exercise.

“This is a nice surprise,” he said, and as always his face had lit up at the sight of her. The smile almost instantly turned to a frown of concern as he got a better look at her face. “Honey? What’s wrong? Has something happened?” As he spoke he was drawing the long-handled skimmer out of the water, laying it on the pool deck. He came toward her, drying his hands on his shorts, reaching for her. She backed away before he could touch her. His gaze dropped to the manila envelope in her hand, then rose again to her face. “Lindsey? What have you got there?”

She turned away from him and put the envelope on the patio table. She opened it and pulled out the wedding photo of Karen and James McKinney…slid it across the glass toward her father. When she looked up at him, she found that he was staring down at the photo, not looking at her.

“Where did you get this?” His voice sounded stifled.

“Do you recognize them, Dad?” She was amazed at how controlled her voice seemed.

He didn’t reply. His face, his whole body seemed to have frozen.

Almost gently, she said, “You do, don’t you?”

He cleared his throat. “Well, it’s your mother, obviously, but I don’t-did Alan give you this? Of course he did.” He paused, and his smile was sad. “Is he even your boyfriend, Lindsey?”

She shook her head as if to clear away fog. “Maybe-I don’t know-does it matter?” Her voice hardened. “You know him, don’t you? Of course you do. How could you forget the face of the man you killed? ”

He jerked as if she’d slapped him. “Lindsey? What are you talking about? Where did you get such an idea? I don’t know what you-or Alan, the police, whoever-think I’ve done.”

“No-don’t lie to me.” She was crying, suddenly. “The fact that I have that photo should tell you I know pretty much everything. The police do, too. The only thing they can’t figure out-the thing I can’t understand, no matter how hard I try, is why? ”

There was a long silence. He drew a shaking hand over his face, which seemed to have aged a decade in a matter of minutes. “I have always known this day would come.” His voice sounded oddly stilted, as if he were reading from something he’d written. He paused, then turned and started toward the house in a vague, lost sort of way. “I have something I must give you. Something I’ve been saving for you…”

“No!” Lindsey shouted at him, “Don’t walk away. I want you to tell me why. Forty years of lies, pretending to be my father, saying you loved us-Mom and me-”

He turned back to her, his movements jerky, off-balance. “No-that was not pretense. I love you, Lindsey, as my own daughter. Your mother-I loved her, too. I think I loved her maybe from the first.”

“Then why-how could you-”

“Please try to understand.” He held out his hands to her in a kind of entreaty, but at the same time his voice seemed to grow stronger, to take on a note of determination-even pride. “I was a soldier. I was doing what I had been trained to do. It was my duty-my mission. I believed I was doing what I had to do-”

“You had to kill them?” She couldn’t stop a shudder of revulsion.

“Yes!” His eyes were fierce; she’d never seen him look like that before. “They were the enemy-traitors to their country!” And just that quickly the fire died, and his face looked haggard and ravaged. “Or so I believed…”

He reached blindly for a chair and sat in it heavily, then raised tortured eyes to her face. “Please,” he said hoarsely. “Sit down. I will tell you everything. But, you must let me begin at the beginning.”

I thought it would be safer to have her close to me. Then, I told myself, if her memory ever did return, I would be able to deal with her. The years went by and I dared to hope the day of reckoning would never come.

Excerpt from the confession of Alexi K.

FBI Files, Restricted Access,

Declassified 2010

Alan was standing on the steps of Lindsey’s townhouse, scowling at the top of a distant palm tree, the cell phone pressed hard against his ear. “I’m at Lindsey’s place,” he told Carl. “She’s not here, and neither is her car.”

“What’re you thinking? She might have gone to confront Merrill herself? Would she do that, knowing what we know?”

“I don’t know,” Alan said, his voice reflecting the darkness of his thoughts. “She might just have driven over to Mission Bay to take her run. Or…she might have decided to take matters into her own hands. I couldn’t tell you. What’s the surveillance on Merrill saying?”

“They haven’t reported any movement, so I’m assuming he’s staying put.”