The Widow - Carla Neggers [5]
“Man, woman?”
“Could be either. Why, don’t you know?” She frowned, her black eyeliner giving her a dramatic but raccoonish look. “Maybe I should get the manager.”
“Sure. That’d be fine. In a sec, though, okay? While your memory’s fresh, tell me exactly what the caller said to you.”
“Exactly? Well—I picked up and said hello. I’m informal. And the person on the other end said, ‘I’d like to speak to Abigail Browning. Detective Browning.’ That’s you, right?”
“Just go on, please.”
“I said, are you sure you have the right number, and the caller said, ‘She’s dining alone. She has short dark hair.’” Lori shrugged, easing back from the shiny dark-wood bar. “I looked around, and bingo. There you were.”
“Then what?”
“I told the caller I spotted you and gave the phone to Trevor.”
The manager, a middle-aged man in an overly formal black suit, appeared and asked what was going on, and Abigail let Lori fill him in, watched both of them for any indication either one had been part of the setup. But they seemed as caught off guard by the call as she was. They didn’t know the caller. They hadn’t agreed—for money, for grins, for love—to tip off him or her when Abigail arrived at the restaurant.
And the restaurant didn’t have Caller ID, either.
Abigail called her partner, Lucas Jones, because he was experienced—if not as experienced as Bob O’Reilly and Scoop Wisdom—and because he didn’t live above her. While she waited for him, she pushed her wine aside and ate half a piece of warm bread, staring out at a young couple walking hand in hand down Newbury Street, the woman’s wedding ring glinting in the streetlight.
Abigail wanted to tap her on the shoulder and ask her what she would do if the man she loved was murdered four days into their honeymoon, if, after seven years, his murder remained unsolved, his killer at large?
Would she lie awake nights, worrying whether or not the killer no one could catch had killed, would kill, again?
Would she read about murders in the paper, hear about them on television, and wonder if they were the work of her husband’s killer—if she’d done enough, worked hard enough, fought hard enough, prayed hard enough, to find the killer?
Or would she put her husband’s death behind her and try to lead a normal life?
But the couple wandered out of sight, just as Lucas arrived. Lucas was in his late thirties—not particularly handsome. He had a wife in law enforcement, and a young son—a normal life. He sat across from her. “Abigail, what is it?”
“Probably nothing,” she said, and told him about the call.
The next day she burned her journals and made plans to go to Maine.
After she’d burned her journals and scooped their ashes into her coffee can, Abigail drove out to the gold-domed Massachusetts State House and parked in front of a brick townhouse across from Boston Common. She could still smell lighter fluid on her fingers. The elegant house had black shutters and a brass-trimmed glossy burgundy-painted front door, with just enough room on either side of its front steps for a rhododendron and a few evergreen shrubs.
Above the single doorbell was a discreet plaque. The Dorothy Garrison Foundation. Since it was Sunday, the offices were closed.
“Doe,” as her family called her, had drowned in Maine when she was fourteen. Owen Garrison had been just eleven and witnessed his sister’s drowning, helpless to save her when she slipped and fell off the cliffs, not far from where he found Chris’s body eighteen years later.
Abigail eyed the tall, spotless windows with their sheer curtains and heavy drapes, the old-Boston formality of the place a contrast to the physical, unrelenting, unforgiving work that Owen did as a specialist in disaster response. Three years ago, he founded Fast Rescue, a nonprofit organization that fielded highly trained, volunteer search-and-rescue teams prepared and equipped to arrive within twenty-four hours of any disaster, manmade or natural, anywhere in the world.
They weren’t spontaneous volunteers, and they didn’t respond to