Fidelity

35

As Emily read Phil’s file, she recognized the pseudo-authoritative language he had often used in constructing statements for clients when she was still serving as typist for him.

In certain instances I have included photographs, copies of official documents, audiotapes, and newspaper accounts. I think they are sufficient to corroborate this assembly of facts. But these are not the only ones I have. If there are gaps or discrepancies between this account and other versions of the story, I can make available other documents, photographs, recordings, or independent narratives by others to verify what I say here.

I first met Theodore Forrest on October 23 eight years ago. He called my office at 9:15 A.M. and made an appointment to speak to me about a missing-person case. My colleague Samuel Bowen and I met with Mr. Forrest at 1:30 P.M. that day in my office. He told us he lived on a country estate outside Fresno, and that his sixteenyear-old daughter, Allison, had been missing since late July.

She recognized that what she was reading was the same story that Sam had just told her. But it wasn’t, because it was Phil who was telling it. She pictured him as she read, and then she reached the end of the story Sam had told her. He and Sam delivered the girl to Theodore Forrest at the Espinoza Ranch, received their payment in the form of a cashier’s check, and drove home.

Our business was concluded, and that was the last time I saw or spoke with Theodore Forrest for eight years. I did not initiate any contact with him, nor did he with me or my employees.

On the fourteenth of June this year, I was engaged in a project intended to increase the income of Kramer Investigations. Over the previous twenty years, the Kramer agency had served a great many satisfied clients. Some clients had been assisted in a oncein-a-lifetime matter: a divorce, a lawsuit, a search for hidden assets, a defense against criminal charges. But it seemed to me that it might be useful to compile a mailing list of former clients and remind them that the agency was still there to fulfill their needs.

Emily could hear Phil’s voice saying the words, as though he were dictating them. She had been hearing him since she had begun to read, but now she could see him, too. It was June 14, only a few months ago. Phil was sitting in the office. He was behind his desk in the glassed-in room. She saw him through the clumsy, overly formal narrative he was typing on the computer, and then without at first expecting it or wanting to, she began to supply the other parts Phil had left out. Part of what she was seeing was memory, and where memory was not enough, her imagination supplied the rest, and he was alive again in her mind.

In her imagination, Phil was wearing the light gray super-100 wool pants that she had bought him around Easter. He had on a blue oxford shirt, and hanging on the spare chair at the side of the room was his navy summer-weight blazer. He wore a coat only when he was with a client or in court. It had been hot since the tenth of May, even though May and June were usually cool and overcast in Los Angeles. This year it had seemed to Phil that the climate had changed, and the little break that the June weather brought had been revoked.

Emily pictured him looking out through his glass wall toward the doorway. What was there to look at but April? She was so far away on the other side, and as he watched her, she must have seemed unreachable. Phil loved to touch, to put his hand on a small shoulder or around a thin waist, but he couldn’t right now. She was probably talking on the telephone, reminding clients to pay on time. Emily had noticed she had a pretty voice, like a singer, and it seemed to disarm deadbeat clients and make them send in a check here and thereoften it was just a token payment-as though they were giving her a little present.

Phil must have had a feeling of cynical amusement whenever he saw the smile appear on her face and knew that she had gotten one of them to agree. He would have said, “The stupid bastards.” That would describe him, too, more than any of them. She knew now he was as susceptible to a pretty woman as any fourteen-year-old boy. He was a man who made resolutions, but these had probably all been broken when the first temptation presented herself. The resolutions undoubtedly never lasted long enough to include him actually turning a woman down and watching her walk away forever. She imagined that he had watched April through the glass for a few more seconds, and then forgave himself. He would have said it didn’t really do any harm unless Emily found out, and he had always taken precautions to keep Emily from suspecting. He had kept her ignorant and resigned to a life she didn’t really understand.

Emily stopped herself. That was a false note. Phil would never have called her ignorant in his thoughts. He would have fooled himself long ago into believing he was protecting his wife from being hurt. He would have said male promiscuity was an inevitable force of nature, but that there was no reason to hurt Emily’s feelings.

But probably he wasn’t thinking about Emily at that moment, only about April. She was sweet and loving, and when she looked at Phil, he must have felt young again, and attractive. It had been a long time since Emily had looked that way at him. Pete’s death had been the major moment of her life. Since then she had looked at Phil as a partner in her hopes and disappointment, an old friend suffering with her.

Phil did a lot of brooding during the past year. Emily guessed that he had been getting ready to make a change in his life. He was coming up on his forty-fifth birthday, and for some reason, it was affecting him more than any earlier one had. Maybe for him it was Pete, just as it was for Emily. It was going to be five years since the crash, a big, round number.

Phil had always been intellectually and emotionally involved in his work, but not long ago, he had told her he could see the end of the detective business. He was being pinched. On one side there were huge security companies that provided an umbrella service against unpleasantness. They monitored alarm and surveillance systems for businesses, swept offices and phones for bugs, took care of paper shredding and burning, did background checks on employees, rivals, and customers. They supplied bodyguards for foreign travel, and forensic specialists for testifying in court.

On the other side, there were small, low-end operators. Those guys would tap telephones, do black-bag jobs to steal papers from offices and houses, threaten or beat up opposition witnesses. They seemed to spend every day with one foot in a jail cell. But the other foot was in the bank, on the way in to cash a fat check.

Phil wasn’t sure what he wanted to do next, but he had said several times that he was in a game he was losing gradually, and all he could do was try to make his chips last as long as possible. Now maybe he had decided it was time to stand up and cash in.

According to Ray, for a couple of years, Phil hadn’t been able to concentrate on the actual cases that came in. He seemed to have occupied his time looking for grand strategies and shortcuts. If he could have gotten to work again-really working-he might not have felt this way.

During one of these conversations Emily had wondered aloud if he was in a midlife crisis. He had been insulted. What the hell was a midlife crisis? Were troubles supposed to happen only when you were a child or a dying man? He supposed that if he made it to ninety, then fortyfive was the exact definition of midlife. And he was sure as hell in a crisis. He had to do something that worked soon.

Phil’s written narrative said: “For several years, Kramer Investigations had been running at a deficit. I had cut costs by not replacing personnel who left. I had been keeping the business going by using my family savings to keep the office open and the employees paid.” Emily stopped. There it was: the explanation of where the money had gone, and the halfhearted way he had been running the office. He had been trying to keep it alive.

Phil continued: “I had begun a project of going through the company archives to find clients with open accounts.” He was reading the files of his agency’s old cases, looking for money. He assembled a list of deadbeats. He started a policy of reissuing bills to them, even if their cases were ten years old. Emily felt a sad closeness to him, because she had seen the letters in the files. As of May, the billings had not been a startling success, but April’s wheedling had brought in a few dollars. Then, while he had been finding open accounts, he had noticed another kind of client: those he or his detectives had served especially well, and who had businesses that might require help again.

He started to build a mailing list of satisfied clients to remind them that Kramer Investigations was still around and still cared about them. A lot of companies did that and thrived. After a few weeks of work, he hit on the file of Theodore Forrest. It had been eight years.

Phil admitted he wasn’t sure exactly what services a man like Forrest might need after eight years. But as Phil looked at the case file, he wrote, he “felt proud of how effective Kramer Investigations had been.” He and Sam had found Forrest’s daughter when several police forces and big security companies had failed. He and Sam had managed to snatch her off the street and deliver her to her father unharmed and without leaving a hint of how it had happened. The girl could go on with her life as though she had never had her little breakdown. It occurred to Phil that in the eight years that had passed, time had not stood still for Allison, either. She would be twentyfour or twentyfive. She had almost certainly gone to college, graduated, and done something with herself by now.

As Emily read the next portion, she could tell that Phil’s mind was sparked, ideas blazing in his mind, each igniting others. Forrest had been obsessed with his daughter. He had wanted her back so badly that he had been willing to do just about anything, to pay just about anything. And Phil Kramer had delivered her. When it was over, he had not taken advantage, he had not padded the bill. He could have invented ten or fifteen imaginary operatives, or gotten thousands in cash to pay rewards to imaginary informants. He could have done almost anything, and Forrest would have paid and then thanked him. Maybe now, Forrest would consider paying a retainer for a permanent all-purpose security service, like the big companies offered.

Eight years was a long time. Maybe by now Allison Forrest had married. Maybe she had a husband Forrest wanted watched. She could even have a baby or two. Forrest would be the sort of grandfather who would pay for surveillance to be sure no harm ever came to his grandchildren. And whom could Forrest trust more than the detective agency that had saved his daughter from ending up as a teenaged prostitute or an unidentified body in the L.A. County Morgue?

The fact that Kramer Investigations had never tried to capitalize on the case would help a lot. In eight years, Phil had never even used Theodore Forrest as a reference. He had kept everything confidential to protect the family’s privacy. Emily knew the truth was that he had kept it quiet because of the girl. Phil genuinely liked women, and the idea of compromising a young girl’s reputation would have been unthinkable to him. But he was not in a position to turn down additional work if the Forrests happened to feel gratitude he had legitimately earned.

It was clear that he saw the Forrest family as a potential solution to a lot of his financial troubles. There were big, complicated familybusiness interests to protect. There were undoubtedly pieces of real estate to watch, employees to clear. There were probably deals all the time that would be safer if the parties on the other side were the subjects of quiet, discreet investigations.

He recorded his uncertainty about how to approach Theodore Forrest that day. He looked in the case file for the telephone numbers, picked the home number, and started to dial, then stopped. It had been eight years. What if something had happened in the past eight years that he ought to know about? If there had been some major event, Forrest might say, “Some detective,” and hang up. Eight years was enough time for some fundamental change, and it was more than enough time for Forrest to forget how pleased he had been with Phil’s work.

Phil turned to his computer and began to run searches. At first all he discovered was that Forrest Enterprises was mentioned a few times a year in regional newspapers in Fresno, Stockton, Sacramento, and even San Jose. But Theodore Forrest was almost never in the article. Phil tried typing in the girl’s name-Allison Forrest, Fresno, California.

In Phil’s narrative, he described the entire process. His computer screen had said: “Your search for Allison Forrest, Fresno, California returned no results.” He deleted the request and typed “Allison + Missing.” In seconds the search engines threw up dozens of references: “Allison Missing,” “Still No Sign of Missing Girl.” Of course there would have been local news reports from years ago. The fact that she had been missing was why he knew Theodore Forrest at all: Private detectives and cops met rich people only when disasters happened. He kept searching for something that sounded more recent. Finally he found a Web site titled “Allison’s Story,” and up it came.

Emily could imagine what it must have looked like: At first the opening page appeared in a small window in the center of his screen. He clicked on the Enlarge box and it blew up, the pale white face coming at him like a swimmer rising toward him from the bottom of a lake. The picture was a reproduction of a newspaper article. The caption: BODY OF MISSING GIRL FOUND.

There was a printout of the page in the file that Emily was reading. She could see that it was a picture of the same young girl that was in the snapshots. She could tell that seeing her face again must have been a shock to Phil.

She could almost hear Phil making that sound of surprise, just a quiet “Uh” as though he had tripped. He would have turned instinctively to exclaim to someone about what was on his screen, but there was nobody to tell. Sam Bowen had retired two years ago and moved to Seattle. Ray and Dewey and Bill were probably out of the office on jobs, and he had never told even Ray much about the case. The only one always in the agency office in the middle of the day was April, and she was beyond the glass wall, on the telephone. Even though he must have felt affection for her, the idea of telling her any of this would have seemed impossible to him.

Phil described the difficulty he had trying to understand the article. The name was Allison, and the picture was Allison Forrest, but it said she was dead. Could the paper have made some weird mistake at the time when Allison was missing?-maybe assumed some unidentified body was hers and printed her picture? He looked at the date at the top of the article. It was November eight years ago, a few months after he had brought Allison home alive and well. This made no sense. Maybe the mistake was that some other girl was missing and had been found dead, but the paper had accidentally used an old picture from the time when Allison Forrest had disappeared.

Phil said he looked at the screen and forced himself to scroll down and read the article-just as Emily read it now. The article said the girl’s name was Allison Straight. She had been found in an abandoned irrigation ditch on a large farm ten miles outside Mendota. The ditch was just a trench about five feet wide and four deep that ran alongside a huge empty field about five hundred yards from a road. The trench was part of an old irrigation system that had been handdug around the early 1900s.

A hunter had come onto the land without permission, and was walking along the trenches looking for the game that hid in the ditches. He came across human remains. At first he thought it was a girl who had fallen into the ditch during a rainstorm and drowned. But the coroner was able to say the body was more recent than the rains, and a police officer and the coroner both thought they recognized the girl. Through photographs and dental records she was identified positively as Allison Straight, a sixteenyear-old Mendota girl who had been missing from her home for six months. Phil printed the article and searched for others.

Phil must have been sweating. This was unquestionably the girl he and Sam Bowen had taken off the street that night in Hollywood eight years ago. He kept his eyes on the screen and clicked on other articles. The story was repeated over and over. There was one that had been printed in the Stockton paper much earlier, when the girl had first disappeared. It quoted the girl’s mother, Nancy Straight of Mendota. Emily could imagine Phil muttering to himself, “What the hell?” over and over, and dreaming up possible explanations.

Maybe the girl’s mother had been Theodore Forrest’s wife at one time. No, the girl’s name would still have been Forrest. But in the paper it was Straight. Maybe the mother had been a girlfriend who had gotten pregnant. But Phil had seen a birth certificate that said Forrest.

Did Forrest even have a wife? Forrest had never involved his wife in the discussions with Phil and Sam. Phil thought he remembered some reference to her being “distraught,” and after that he had thought little of her. Lots of his fancier clients didn’t want to have their wives talking with anybody as rough and low-class as a private detective. He kept thinking of explanations that accounted for all of the seeming contradictions, then rejecting each one. Emily could tell Phil was trying to keep this from being what he thought it was. Anyone could see it was a horrible, sad story, but Phil wanted it to be a particular kind of sad story, an ordinary family tragedy.

Phil wanted Theodore Forrest to have been a doting father who had hired Phil Kramer to find his wayward daughter Allison and bring her back to her comfortable, safe home. He wanted the daughter to have been one of those girls who had a gift for getting into the worst kinds of trouble. Girls like that vanished all the time, and maybe two years later, or twenty years later, somebody found a small, delicate set of female bones in the woods.

That was a horrible story, but it was horrible in a banal, quotidian way. It was almost routine. In a lot of those cases, the killer was already in jail for some other girl before anybody found this one’s bones. Phil couldn’t keep the story from being horrible, but Emily knew he didn’t want it to be horrible in the way he feared. He wanted Theodore Forrest to be what he seemed. Phil wanted to have given this sad, unlucky man a chance to see his beautiful young daughter again-if only for a month or two-and to have given the daughter a brief reprieve, a chance to pull herself together and live.

Phil worked the keyboard and mouse for an hour or two longer and then studied all of the contents of the old case file before he was certain. Then he wrote down the plain truth, not trying to spare himself. Theodore Forrest had not hired him to find his naive, foolish daughter. He had hired Kramer to find a girl-someone else c daughter-who had escaped his influence, his abuse. Phil kept remembering that when he and Sam Bowen had found the girl, they had quickly gagged and later drugged her. She had never had a chance to give her side of the story, to tell them the truth about who she was. And a month or two later, Theodore Forrest had killed her and buried her body in a ditch at the edge of a remote field.

Emily imagined exactly how Phil must have felt. She also knew from years of observation that by now Phil must have been angry. His anger would be indignation and disgust at the horrible crime, but even stronger would be his hatred of Forrest for using Phil to help him commit it. Forrest had fooled Phil in a terrible way for a terrible purpose. He had manipulated Phil into finding and capturing the victim and delivering her to him bound and drugged, helpless and without hope.

Emily could feel the anger in the way he had written his account. He had constructed the first part of the story patiently and carefully, beginning with the parts that Sam Bowen had already told her, but now the sentences were short and terse: “I had the following facts: Theodore Forrest was not Allison’s father. The documents he provided were forgeries. His victim’s real name was Allison Yvonne Straight.”

Phil went on to list the pieces of evidence inserted in the packet at this point:

I have included copies of the genuine birth certificate in the name Allison Straight I obtained by a search of the public record in Fresno County, the forged birth certificate in the name Allison Forrest given to me by Theodore Forrest, the letter signed by Theodore Forrest giving Kramer Investigations his permission to take charge of and physically transport his daughter Allison, photocopies of the cashier’s checks he provided in payment for the agency’s services, twelve photographs of Mr. Forrest and Allison Straight together in various locations, and copies of tape-recorded telephone calls from Theodore Forrest to Kramer Investigations.

Emily glanced at them, and they seemed to be what Phil said they were. The ones that still struck her as odd were the tape recordings. Even Emily knew it was illegal to tape-record anybody without his knowledge in California. Maybe Phil thought that if this file turned up, he would be beyond prosecution.

She read on. She noticed that Phil wrote the next part in a more measured way, moving away from what he had established to what he believed:

I concluded that the reason Allison Straight was in Los Angeles was that she had fled Mendota to end a relationship with Theodore Forrest. The relationship was a secret one, and I believe it was sexual in nature. Theodore Forrest did not hire the Kramer agency out of concern for the girl, but out of extreme possessiveness and a refusal to let her end the connection. At some point after he had Allison Straight under his control, he caused her death and buried her body in an irrigation ditch on a piece of land he owned, called Espinoza Ranch.

Emily could feel the growing hatred as Phil laid out each phase of this. She knew he had been controlling himself with difficulty, trying to contain his anger. He wrote:

Because of this day’s discoveries, I began an investigation of what had happened eight years ago after I left Allison with Theodore Forrest. I collected evidence to help me understand the crime and the circumstances surrounding it.

Emily looked at the next packet of papers. Phil had a copy of the tax assessment for the Espinoza Ranch, showing its owner as Theodore Forrest. He had photographs of the place where the girl’s body had been found and a map of the property showing precisely where that was. There were photographs of Espinoza Ranch, which looked to Emily like a pretty place.

Then she came upon a copy of the autopsy report for Allison Straight. Cause of death: Gunshot. Manner of death: Homicide. As Emily looked at the forms, she felt the way she had always felt years ago when papers of that sort came to the office-a squeamish sensation of alarm at each of the marks the pathologist had made on the simple outline drawing of a woman. But this time it was worse. She could imagine the torment the girl had gone through before she died, and she could also feel what Phil must have felt when he had learned about it and known he was partly responsible. There were marks around the wrists and ankles, signs of abuse that had partially healed. The thought of that made Emily feel physically sick, because she knew that meant it had gone on for a long time. She tried to calm herself by reading the paragraphs below, the results of the various tests that had been performed on the body-most of them only because they were always done. But then she read the sentence at the end of the third paragraph: “At the time of death the victim was pregnant.”

Emily read on. The fetus was approximately three months old. Samples of its tissues had been retained as potential evidence in the homicide investigation. She imagined Phil’s surprise and his grim excitement when he saw those words. If tissue from the fetus had been preserved, it would be possible to perform a DNA test.

Suddenly she understood the whole packet of evidence. She had been struck by the large quantity of it, the thoroughness of Phil’s methodical collection. When she had seen the words “the victim was pregnant,” she had wondered for a second why Phil had bothered with the rest of it. The police could compare the baby’s DNA with Theodore Forrest’s, establish that he had impregnated a sixteen-yearold girl whose body had been buried in a remote corner of a piece of land he owned. He had obviously killed her to prevent the revelation of the relationship.

But then Emily’s mind began to supply the obstacles. Theodore Forrest was a rich, powerful man, apparently one who had at least a passable reputation. Phil would have to supply some very compelling facts before a judge would order a DNA test on Theodore Forrest for comparison with the fetus of a murder victim from eight years ago. So Phil had patiently gone about collecting just the sort of circumstantial evidence that would persuade a judge.

Then it occurred to Emily that there was another possibility. Phil was fairly sure that Forrest had killed Allison and, inevitably, her baby. But Phil could not know whether the baby had been Theodore Forrest’s child. The girl had run off and been gone for a couple of months. It was entirely possible that the baby had been fathered by someone Allison met after she ran away. The DNA test could just as easily prove Forrest was not the father as prove that he was. Phil had no way to know in advance of the test. Phil didn’t know the precise circumstances. Forrest might have killed Allison because he was the father of her child, or killed her because he was not. Phil had no evidence that would prove Theodore Forrest had even known eight years ago that Allison was pregnant. And Forrest had to know, if the baby was to be his motive for murder.

Phil had collected a great many exhibits showing that Theodore Forrest had a suspicious relationship with Allison Straight. If a jury believed Phil-and probably Sam Bowen, who would be called to testify-then they might agree with Phil’s belief that Forrest had killed Allison. But they might not. Phil was a big-city private detective who would have to admit to having kidnapped a girl who was murdered a month or two later. And his credibility would also have to survive a thorough investigation by Forrest’s own private detectives. Theodore Forrest could afford the best lawyers to make himself look like a victim.

So Phil had kept collecting and assembling evidence. He had left the box under April’s bed while he had done it. He must have been afraid that his repeated visits to the Central Valley to collect more evidence might be noticed and reported to Theodore Forrest.

Phil had kept at his investigation for months. He had long before delegated all of the real work of the detective agency to Ray and Dewey. Billy Przwalski was still a trainee, but he was alert and energetic and smart. They could handle the cases, and April was appealing enough to keep buying them time when a client got impatient, and to keep at least some clients paying. Phil had spent all of his time on Theodore Forrest.

Emily sat on the wooden deck, holding the box of evidence in her lap and staring out at Puget Sound. The sun was getting lower now, and it looked like a pale red ball through the fog.

Sam said, “What do you think? Was he trying to blackmail Forrest? Is that what this is?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I think that at first he was furious. I can feel it. He was trying to assemble all the evidence he could find to prove that Forrest murdered Allison. He was using his officialstatement style to tell what happened. I don’t think there would be any reason for him to do that for Forrest. He did a lot of work, and gathered things from up north that he didn’t know before, just so he would have a complete package. I don’t think he needed pictures of Forrest’s ranch to prove anything to Forrest. I think he was genuinely trying to put Forrest away.”

“Then what do you think happened?” Sam asked.

“I think he tried as hard as he could, and thought he’d failed.”

“So do I. I think he collected it all, and put it in that box, and when he ran out of things to collect, he looked it all over. And I think that when he did, he realized that it wasn’t enough.”

“Was he right?”

“I think he probably was. It’s hard to go into a strange town and get a local jury to convict one of their most prominent citizens of anything, and this is a capital offense. It’s eight years old, and the evidence is all circumstantial. But Phil was damaged. He could never look at himself in the mirror again without seeing a man who had hunted down a young girl running from danger and dragged her back to be murdered. It’s such a painful, debilitating piece of information that at first I don’t think he even considered telling me. He didn’t want me to have the same feelings he was having, unless and until it was unavoidable. I didn’t hear from him during any of this. That’s a sign of how much knowing this hurt him.”

“But he left the box with someone, and he asked that it be mailed to you if he didn’t come back for it.”

Sam shrugged. “I’m the only one who was with him to see the first part of this story. I guess he figured that if he didn’t come back for it he would be dead, and I’d be the only witness to swear it was true. He couldn’t let Forrest off.”

“When he was killed, he was out alone at one thirty at night, and it looked as though he was on his way back from meeting someone. He was getting into his car. And the man who kidnapped me said Phil had been trying to blackmail Forrest.”

“I’m sure Phil set it up to look that way, but I don’t think there’s any chance Phil was really after money. There wouldn’t have been enough money in the world to make Phil keep quiet about that girl. That’s what it is, you know. When you blackmail somebody, you become their best friend. You’re making sure that they’ll never be punished. “

“Then what do you think he was doing? I want to know if you think what I think.”

“And what’s that?” Sam asked.

“I think that Phil realized he didn’t have the perfect piece of evidence, the bit that makes a conviction a sure thing. I think knowing he didn’t was eating away at him. He kept searching, but ran out of things to find. And then I think he called Theodore Forrest, and told him he wanted to meet with him. I think what he wanted to do was to manufacture the perfect piece of evidence.”

“You think he was going to make a tape of Forrest paying him off?”

“Yes, and maybe admitting what he had done. But not that night. I think Phil went to meet Forrest and show him some of this file. Maybe he showed him copies of all of it. I think he probably showed him enough to make him pay blackmail. But this was a huge crime, and the payoff would have to be large, too, or Forrest would never believe it was blackmail-too much money for Forrest to have brought with him without even seeing the evidence. I think Phil was planning to meet Forrest again for the payoff-maybe with a microphone or a video camera, and maybe with a few police officers waiting to make the arrest.”

Sam nodded and took another sip of his drink. “That’s what I think, too. Phil knew Theodore Forrest was guilty-that he had used Phil and me to help him kill that poor girl-but that the only punishment he would ever get was what Phil Kramer brought to him. So he decided to trap him.”

Emily found herself in tears. “Oh, Sam. You don’t know how much I wish I were sure that was it. I feel as though it is, but I need to be sure.”

Sam said, “I don’t know everything. I do know that when I was a cop, the way we could figure out whether somebody was guilty of something was that he had come into some money he couldn’t explain. I mean, Forrest wasn’t the first person Phil knew bad things about. He could have blackmailed hundreds of people. Did Phil leave you a whole lot of money, Em?”

Emily laughed through her tears. “No. I’d declare bankruptcy if I could afford a lawyer.”

“Good. Then we know he was an honest man.”

“He was hardly that. He wasn’t honest with me.”

“He loved you, so you were the hardest, because the truth would chase you away. But if he didn’t have any money, he wasn’t blackmailing any millionaires.”

“It doesn’t seem likely, does it?”

“There’s one thing that makes it certain he didn’t. You read Phil’s statement. He found out about Allison on June 14. He had enough to blackmail Forrest on the first day, but he didn’t do it. He worked on the case for months, collecting all kinds of bits and pieces that didn’t add anything to the prospects for blackmail, but would be helpful to the police. He kept at it until all he needed was that one last piece of evidence that made the case undeniable. He needed to have Forrest convict himself. He needed to have him on tape admitting he killed the girl. There’s no doubt at all that Phil was trying to do the right thing. The only thing I’m disappointed in him for is trying to do it alone.”

Emily could picture Phil going to meet Theodore Forrest. He had made sure nobody who would worry about him knew where he was going. He couldn’t have anyone following him and making Forrest suspicious. Maybe he carried one of the tiny tape recorders from the office in his pocket, but probably he didn’t, because he was afraid that Forrest would frisk him before speaking. He had already put together the copy of the evidence for Forrest, before he had brought the originals to Lee Anne’s house for safekeeping.

She imagined that Phil made sure everything he brought to Forrest had been copied on a photocopier, even the photographs. It was all black and white and grainy. She knew that he had done that because he didn’t want Theodore Forrest to think, even for a second, that he held the originals. Theodore Forrest was, after all, a murderer.