‘Drinks.’ Kristin claps her hands. ‘We need more than the coffee from the filter pot. Can we order something at the cafeteria and one of us can collect it?’
‘They’ll deliver it down here.’ Travis goes for the phone. ‘Orange juice and water all right with everyone?’
‘Fine.’ Emma pulls out a chair at the desk.
He holds the receiver in his hand as he dials. ‘I’m kinda missing the pierogis Horner’s team used to order in Pittsburgh.’
‘I don’t know what those are, but they sound lovely,’ Kristin says. She bypasses the desk and goes straight for the couch. ‘Shall we flop, instead of sit at the table? I think I might, at least. Oh, this is very nice. Much better than those horrible desk chairs.’
Travis turns on the heating, and the room seems more comfortable still. He returns to the desk and digs through files in his satchel. ‘We’ll cover more territory separately. Kristin, I want you to keep looking at the press coverage of the Huxton case in ’79. Find out what information about Emma’s identity was covered by the media. I’ve got a stack of press reports here, and there’s copies of all the newspaper cuttings, plus some radio report transcripts.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Kristin asks, bouncing a little on the hard couch cushions.
Travis shoves a stray folder down. ‘I’m gonna check all the details of the crime scene after Huxton’s death, and anything new or related that I can find on Huxton himself.’ He passes her a couple of manila folders, plus a legal pad, before turning back to the desk, and to Emma. ‘You want to wait for drinks before we get started?’
She returns her gaze from elsewhere. ‘Nope.’
‘You gonna be okay with this?’
Her voice is deadpan. ‘You really need to stop asking me that.’
‘Okay, fair.’ He backs off, tries another angle. Right now, she’s eyeing the Huxton files like she’d rather take a gutshot than read any of them. He thinks it might be best to give her options. ‘I figure we need to curate all the connections between this case and the Huxton case, from your own memory. What specific aspects of the profiles match up and which ones diverge. Similarities, differences. Can you do that?’
‘I think so.’
‘Great. And can you tell us what information specifically about you was released by the police and the FBI in ’79?’
‘Some, while it was treated as a missing persons case,’ Emma says as she arranges her folders and notepad on the desk. ‘More during the investigation. But after it was over, there was additional information released during the inquiry.’
‘Okay, that should help Kristin chase all that stuff.’ He nods at Kristin, then passes Emma a relevant file. ‘I want you to give me a list of anything you think might connect, anything you’ve noticed, any details you judge important.’
It’s not a total reprieve, but she looks relieved. He thinks it will be strange and difficult to go through the Huxton files with Emma participating. But he also thinks she’d probably prefer to do this research herself, here among friends, than have strangers do it.
He makes another call, to confirm with Kirby that they’re dug in here. Kristin fluffs her skirts and finds a comfortable position on the couch. Emma reaches over and pulls the Pittsburgh autopsy file out of his satchel, sits forward on her hard chair, and gets to work.
Travis grabs his own pile of Huxton folders – the report detailing the police assault on the mountain house, the evidence logs, the scene photos – and pulls a chair closer to the table. He and Emma are sitting opposite each other. The room is developing a library quiet: just the hum of the heating, the sound of pages turning and paper flicking. He can hear Emma’s soft breathing.
He opens his folder, tries to ignore Emma and focus on the work.
The first two hours are okay. The drinks arrive, and Kristin makes the occasional comment to interrupt the quiet – ‘I’ve only found one photograph so far. Oh, tabloids … Why do theyexist?’ But after the drinks are depleted, and the coffee has cooled, all that’s left are the typed lines of print, the photographs, Travis’s hand moving with the pen as he takes down anything relevant.
He’s gone through this material before. But the Cool Room is like a timeless cocoon that seems to create echoes. By the third hour, the low reverb of what he reads, what he sees, blows through his skull like wind through a dark tunnel. The photographs from Huxton’s basement are the worst. They make him feel greasy, and there’s a limit to what he can look at.
This task is important, and they’re on a deadline, so he can’t walk away. He tries to compartmentalize, but it’s either a skill he hasn’t mastered or one he’s simply not engineered with. The latter idea he finds unnerving. A good LEO can wall himself off –this I witness, which I can now put aside.
But Travis is too inexperienced to have effective boundaries, and he cannot be clinical in Emma’s presence. Here is a photograph of asoiled sheet; here, a clump of hair. Here are the cages the girls were kept in. Except one of those girls is sitting at the desk opposite him, and hour after hour, the awareness rasps against his mind.
How in god’s name did she survive?
Emma was imprisoned in the ribcage of evil. How she escaped is a miracle to him. But he can’t ask her about it. He knows she’s haunted by the fact that two other girls had their throats cut when she got free.
He also knows she doesn’t really believe in her own bravery. Travis’s models of courage include his father stepping forward to bargain himself in a hostage situation, his mother gathering them all to hold together and pray. But Emma’s courage was born from a different place: a place of terrified desperation, like a primal scream.
‘Lewis?’ He clears his throat. ‘Uh, some of the stuff in the backgrounds of these pictures I can’t identify. This looks like a surveyor’s tripod. What job did Huxton do again?’
‘He was a TV and projector repairman.’ Emma puts a folder aside and straightens, kneading her lower back. She rubs her hand across her shorn head in a way he’s familiar with. Her silver earrings glint in the low light.
Travis sighs. ‘Okay, I’m gonna have to go back through the evidence logs.’
