minted junior detective barely out of training camp. For a week he had probed doggedly into her life, interviewing family, friends, and witnesses, including Rosten, before her half-buried body was discovered in a remote forest outside the city.
The discovery had been heartbreaking. During that first week, Green had formed bonds with her family and suspicions as to her killer, and so when the Ontario Provincial Police parachuted a team of investigators in from Toronto to take over the case, those close to her continued to seek him out to share their raw pain and outrage. The horror of the case haunted his nights. Young, idealistic, and impassioned, he had ignored every order and article of police protocol to continue working on the case.
In the years since, as the letters from Rosten kept coming, he’d asked himself a thousand times whether that horror had coloured his judgment. Made him see only what he wanted to see.
“Cops and chaplains aren’t mind readers, Mike,” Sullivan said, “not even that old fox Archie Goodfellow. We can’t see inside a guy’s head. A really smart psychopath can fool even the best of us, and Rosten was smart. He’s been messing with your head for years.”
Green fished the letter out of his outbox and handed it across the desk. “So this is his next game?”
Sullivan studied the page. Slowly he shook his head. “More like a commentary. That’s what I came to tell you. Just heard on the locker-room grapevine that the stepfather died last week.”
Green’s eyes widened. “Murdered?”
Sullivan shook his head. “Heart attack shovelling snow. At least that was the ER doc’s diagnosis.”
“Any chance it was not?”
Sullivan’s lips twitched into a smile. “You think James Rosten reached out from his prison cell and cast some kind of voodoo spell?”
Green didn’t laugh. He retrieved the note and studied the words. “So that’s what Rosten thinks? Now that Lucas Carmichael is dead, he will never be brought to justice?”
Sullivan nodded. “And James Rosten will never be cleared.”
Green arrived at the Carmichael home almost half an hour late. Traffic on the eastbound Queensway had been excruciatingly slow. Yesterday’s snowfall had been ploughed from the roads, but it lingered in slushy ridges along the edges, splattering the cars and slicking the roads. Rush-hour traffic out to the sprawling suburb of Orleans was bad in the best weather, but with slippery roads and poor visibility added to the mix, the freeway became immobilized.
The village of Navan was tucked into the middle of dairy-farm country south of Orleans. When Green had last visited, it still had much of its original flavour as a trading hub for farm produce and supplies, but now it was just the rural fringe of sprawling suburbia. Century-old farm houses and tiny wartime bungalows like the Carmichael’s sat side by side with modern brick superhouses. Green barely recognized the place.
This was a courtesy call. Green knew he owed it to Marilyn Carmichael as well as to her remaining children, but he was dreading it. In his years as a Major Crimes investigator, he had learned to cope with the callous brutality of killers and the tragedy of lost lives, but the anguish of the survivors still haunted him, especially when the loss of an offspring was involved.
When he first met Marilyn Carmichael, she’d been like a tiger possessed, eyes flaming and teeth bared as she whipped the investigators on, insisting first that her missing daughter was alive but in danger, and later that her death must not go unanswered. It was only once the trial began, and the relentless spotlight of the media and police shone full-strength on her family and on her daughter’s last hours, that she began to fold in on herself, rebuffing sympathy and shrivelling in defeat.
In the years since, Green had come to understand the pattern. Survivors needed a reason to go on, a cause to embrace, a purpose for their unbearable loss. Sometimes they founded campaigns, set up scholarships, or embarked on pilgrimages of memory. Almost always they threw themselves into the case, becoming the most relentless of investigators and prosecutors. As Jackie’s case stretched into months, Green had kept in constant communication with Marilyn, updating, explaining, reassuring, and often just listening. He had watched helplessly as her passion slowly gave way to the empty ache of loss.
The past ten years had slipped by without contact, however, and now he hardly recognized her when she opened the door. Her once glossy auburn hair was completely white, plastered thin and lifeless against her scalp. Her eyes were bruised with grief, and her petite frame was lost inside a bulky knit sweater. He knew she wasn’t yet sixty-five, but she looked ninety. Her eyes lit at the sight of him, however, and for an astonished moment he thought she was going to give him a hug.
Instead, she ducked her head, flustered, and backed away to lead him inside. “Any trouble remembering where the house was?”
He wasn’t about to tell her of his battles with the Queensway or his GPS, which had been adamant that her little backcountry road was on the opposite side of the village.
“I had a good map,” he said.
She shot him a very small smile. “You’d need one. Google and GPS don’t have any idea. That’s actually a blessing when you’re trying to avoid people.”
Green knew the family had considered selling the house shortly after the murder, uncertain they’d be able to live in the house that still echoed with their daughter’s carefree chatter. Where neighbours gossiped behind half-drawn curtains and shook their heads in pity. But in the end, the memories themselves bound them to it. This remote wartime bungalow, tiny and squat behind its screen of overgrown spruce, was still suffused with the scents and sounds of their girl.
“Everything’s a bit worn out, but then so are we.” Marilyn had stopped in the centre of the dark living room as if embarrassed. Heavy drapes hung over the bay window and an assortment of brocade chairs and loveseats were crammed into the boxy space. Green remembered the chairs from twenty years ago, as if time had stopped for the Carmichaels at that time.
Marilyn gestured to one of them. “I’ll make tea. I thought on a day like this, you’d appreciate the warmth. I even remember you take it with lemon.”
Despite her forty years in Canada, her speech still retained the lilt of Yorkshire, and at first she’d insisted that any tea worth drinking needed two tablespoons of milk in the bottom of the cup. She had even tried to teach him and his partner how to make a proper pot. A woman who relied on ritual and bustle to keep the waves of panic at bay.
Recognizing this, Green accepted and followed her toward the kitchen. The walls were lined with her watercolour paintings — sunny flowers, lacy pines, and rocky bluffs — now sapped of life in the dingy hall light. One, depicting the ruins of an old limestone farmhouse long reclaimed by purple wildflowers, had once hung with pride over the fireplace but was now relegated to the darkest corner. A metaphor for her life, he thought.
The kitchen, too, was narrower and shabbier than he remembered, the once-white sink mottled with stains. “I’m sorry about Lucas, Marilyn,” he ventured. “Are the kids home?”
Her lips tightened. “They’re coming. That’s why we’re holding off on the memorial service until next month. So Gordon can arrange to get here from France, and Julia …”
Her hesitation matched his own. “How is Julia?”
Marilyn busied herself spooning loose tea into a cracked china teapot covered in roses. “She has a new job in Costa Rica now. She’s not one to stay in touch, you know, but I think she’s finally doing okay.”
“Will she come home too?”
“I don’t know. It was harder on her, you know, losing her younger sister, and she never really — well, she wasn’t that fond of Luke, to be honest.”
Green refrained from comment. “Not fond” was a massive understatement. Julia had been moody and changeable when her sister died, and although she accused everyone close to her of failing Jackie in some way, she was especially hard on Lucas. Before Jackie’s body