I’d Know You Anywhere

But now-now the story had its long-missing climax, and it was going to be all Jared’s. Oh, other journalists might write about the execution. But no one would get to talk to Walter. He had Barbara LaFortuny’s word.

“A spree killer, back in the eighties,” he said. “Probably a serial killer, but that was never proven.”

“Is there a difference?”

He began to explain but almost immediately felt the woman’s attention drifting away from him. He interrupted himself, pointed to the cards arrayed before him: “I should get back to my work,” he said.

“Of course,” she said with apparent relief. “I’m going to go to the café car.” He couldn’t help noticing that she took her computer bag and purse. She would probably stay in the café for the rest of the trip, drinking white wine, sizing up the men. She was on the prowl, Jared decided, a lonely woman on a train. He was grateful for his thirty-year marriage, his solid life with Florence, even if she did roll her eyes at him from time to time. A woman alone-that was a sad thing. Barbara LaFortuny had seemed pathetic to him, although he had tried not to betray this. No one liked to be pitied.

He had Googled her, of course, as soon as she had e-mailed him. She had made a point of telling him that she wasn’t some sad sack, pining for Walter, but he thought she was kidding herself. Walter was good-looking, at least in photographs. Less so in person, but she had never seen him in person. She may not admit it, but LaFortuny was motivated by something more than a principled stand against the death penalty.

Still, it seemed clear, after several e-mails, that she really did have something to offer. He had taken a sick day from work, reasoning that his sick days were one of his remaining benefits in a world of shrinking benefits and he shouldn’t be penalized just because he was healthy. By not taking his sick days, he was cutting his own pay, in a sense. But the first half of the day, spent driving around sites he had long ago explored on his own, had been a big honking disappointment, and he had begun to feel that he was being taken, especially when she drove out to a large county park.

“Walter Bowman’s never been linked to this area,” he said, thinking of his own obsessive map, how he had examined every missing person case. The true-crime bloggers who followed the Bowman case fell across a wide range, from total apologists who would deny even the two obvious murders to those who basically put every missing teenage girl, 1980 to 1985, in his column. Jared was one of the more moderate, believing that Walter could be linked to at least four unsolved murders and four missing person cases in the Mid-Atlantic region. Jared had his own formula based on distance, opportunity, and victim. Distance: Walter Bowman had never been more than three hundred miles from home in his entire life and, per Elizabeth Lerner’s testimony, he seemed to rotate around a fixed point in his mind, staying in Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia. Opportunity: He had nonconsecutive days off and, before he killed Maude Parrish, had never spent a single night away from home. Finally, victims: Both were young, under sixteen, and not the least bit streetwise, so throwing in every random hooker killing was really missing the mark. Hookers didn’t fit Walter Bowman’s pattern.

But then-neither did Elizabeth Lerner, not in the looks department.

At any rate, he had known, when Barbara turned into this suburban park, that it had no co

“Sounds like you have a nice life,” he said, just to make conversation, hoping to conceal his dismay at the menu offerings.

“I do,” she said. “Being attacked was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Not because it freed me from working, but because it showed me that my life was empty, purposeless, and that was through no one’s fault but my own.”

He pulled out his microcassette recorder, more to be polite than anything else, and let her drone on and on about her life. Perhaps this was all she had to offer, he thought. Perhaps she thought it was a great gift, the Walter Bowman story, as strained through the eyes of his greatest supporter. The thing is, she hadn’t told him a single thing about Walter that he didn’t know, and her insistence that Walter had changed-he couldn’t buy it. Barbara LaFortuny had a near-death experience through no fault of her own. She should be able to see that Walter wouldn’t be able to experience that kind of awakening until they strapped him to the gurney. And even then, even if some miracle happened and he didn’t die, he probably wouldn’t change.

She had let one tantalizing detail drift across the lunch table. “You know about the autopsies, right? What wasn’t there?”

“What wasn’t…oh, yes. I wrote about that. I thought you had read my book?”

“I did. I just wanted to remind you.”

“It doesn’t matter, not in the case of Holly Tackett.”

“No, it doesn’t. If one believes the testimony of Elizabeth Lerner. And you seem to be the one person willing to be skeptical of her.”

“I merely raised some questions. Killers have patterns. Elizabeth Lerner breaks the pattern in almost every way. She finds him, he doesn’t find her. He takes her and-if you believe her-doesn’t attempt sex with her for weeks, and then only once. She’s not a tall, shapely blonde. If she’s not actively helping him, why does he keep her around? I mean, I know the prevailing theory was that she was a witness and Walter always killed while in some sort of near-psychotic state, brought on by the other victims’ sexual rejection of him. And maybe all she did differently was submit, not fight him. Still, no, I think there’s always been something off about her testimony.”

The check came and Barbara LaFortuny picked it up, although she seemed surprised that he didn’t offer. But he had come down here on his own dime and he sure hadn’t chosen to eat vegan. What did she expect? And now she had brought him to some park. What could she possibly have for him here?

“Athletic field number nine,” she said, stopping the car.

“What about it?”

“It’s at the top of this hill. I have to stay here, because she knows my car, my face. It’s not a face people easily forget.” She laughed at her own lopsided visage, as if it were a delightful joke. “But you can probably walk up and get close enough to see her.”

“Her?”

“Elizabeth Lerner. Although, of course, that’s not the name she uses now. But go on, take a gander.”

“What name does she use now? How did you find her?”

She smiled. “We’ll save that for another day. I just wanted you to know how much we can give you, if you’re patient.”

“We?”

“Walter and I.”

“How can Walter have any influence over her?”

“As I said, they’re talking.”

“Will I be able to recognize her?”

“Look for the redhead, with the redheaded son and a rather ugly dog. Her daughter is number seventeen, I believe. Doesn’t look a thing like her. If anything-well, you’ll see.”

He felt ridiculous, trudging up the long drive in his loafers and work clothes. If he were one of these parents, he’d make him for a pedophile. Yet the parents, almost all mothers at this time of day, paid him no mind. The drive was on an incline and he was puffing and sweating by the time he arrived at field nine. A quick sweep-no one. Wait, there was the redheaded boy and dog, romping along the sidelines.

And there she was. He would not have recognized her in a crowd, or without the expectation of seeing her. She was curvy, whereas the teenage Elizabeth had been straight up and down, with no shape. (He had speculated, too, that Walter might have confused sexual leanings. Walter hadn’t liked that, but it was fair, given what Elizabeth looked like and how he had made her dress. And it was consistent with the other evidence.) But there was something else that was different about her, something that took him a moment to diagnose.