The Heirloom Murders - Kathleen Ernst [24]
Libby joined him a few minutes later. “Two hundred and thirty-two steps,” she announced flatly. “Now, what the hell was all that about?”
Roelke told her about Bonnie Sabatola’s instructions. “She said she’d be three hundred paces up the trail. I reached her in one-eighty-seven, but I was running. I wanted to calculate a woman’s pace. According to Bonnie’s driver’s license, she was five-feet-seven.”
“About my height.”
“Exactly. But you didn’t get even close to three hundred paces. Besides that, she said her wallet would be on the wheel of the car. Instead, I found it by the trail.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Libby said. She turned and started walking back toward the parking lot.
Roelke followed her. For a moment neither one spoke. Finally he said, “I just want to understand what happened.”
“Are you trying to understand the last minutes of Bonnie’s life?” Libby asked. “Or are you trying to figure out what sent Bonnie to that trail in the first place?”
Libby had a habit of out-thinking him. He hated when she did that. “Well, first of all,” Roelke said, “I want to know what pushed her over the line. Someone must have done something to make her feel the way she did.”
“Dellyn wasn’t aware of anything going on. If Bonnie’s sister didn’t know about any problems, and her husband says he didn’t know, what can you possibly do now? Even if Simon was having an affair or something, that’s not a crime.”
“I know,” he admitted. “And maybe I’m way off base. But something doesn’t add up here. What if someone was abusing or threatening Bonnie Sabatola in a criminal way? Isn’t discovering that worth some effort?”
Now Libby looked away. She had some experience with domestic abuse. After her husband’s first punch she’d left him, gotten a restraining order, and started divorce proceedings. But lots of women weren’t as strong-willed as Libby.
They reached the parking lot. Libby didn’t speak again until they’d climbed into his truck and left the trailhead behind. “Roel-ke,” she said quietly, “if someone was brutalizing that woman, physically or emotionally, I hope you find some way to nail his ass to the wall.”
“Thank you.”
“But I also think that you’re wasting your time obsessing about Bonnie’s last moments.”
“I’m not obsessing!”
“All I mean is, you’ll never understand what she was thinking. What she was feeling. You’ll never know why she said three hundred steps, and only went two hundred and thirty. I worry that …” She sighed. “Shit, I’m not your mother. I just don’t want you to make yourself nuts, OK?”
He thought about that, and reluctantly conceded that Libby had a point. He’d been on suicide calls before without feeling a need to get inside the head of the person just before they did the deed. Examine the scene, piece together motive from a letter or those left behind—sure. No more.
But something about this case was haunting him. And even he could figure that one out. Bonnie Sabatola’s was the first suicide call he’d taken since he’d met Chloe. Since he’d learned that Chloe had, not so long ago, been in some dark emotional pit herself.
“OK,” he said, as he turned onto Libby’s street. “I will never know exactly what happened on that trail back there, or what Bonnie Sabatola was thinking in her last moments. I will stop wasting time trying to figure it out.”
“Good.”
“But I’m not done trying to find out if she was being abused or threatened, at home or elsewhere,” Roelke added. “Not by a long shot.”
_____
That night Chloe wandered in circles, played with Olympia, tried to read a book. Finally she called her best friend. “I think I screwed up,” Chloe told Ethan, a buddy from her forestry school days at West Virginia University. “Twice, actually.”
Small silence. “What did you do?”
She pressed the telephone to her ear, wishing they didn’t have half a continent between them. “First I met Markus. Then I agreed to go visit an elderly couple with him.”
A longer silence. Then, “How was it to see him again?