He lifts a shoulder in a half shrug. “Nope. But I’ve had a few days to process things—and to be honest, the trip here helped.”
Of course. Logan, a medalist in cross-country running during both high school and college, did marathons during most of our marriage, and for him, motion was always a kind of balm when life got crazy. And he needed it more than ever after Mel died. At first, we were weirdly in sync, like two people trapped in one of those horrifying bullet rides at a carnival. But while I soon found myself sucked into a sinkhole of depression, totally immobilized, he became a gushing fire hose of grief and fury—flailing around the apartment, jogging endless miles a day, always desperately trying to stay busy. To say nothing of fucking his employee.
His drive to set up the scholarships in Mel’s name has seemed like the last gasp of all that frantic forward motion.
Resting my elbows on the table, I massage my forehead roughly with my fingertips. I’m flooded with so many emotions right now—exasperation, rage, sadness, confusion, as well as discombobulation from having my former husband sitting across from me—that I can hardly sort them apart or light on one for long. I have no clue how to handle any of this.
“What are you going to do?” I ask finally.
Logan lifts both his shoulders this time and then glances quickly at his watch.
“Hit the road, I guess. The hotel I booked is in Punta del Este, which according to GPS, is only forty minutes from here.”
“When do you fly back?”
“Tomorrow tonight around nine. I paid for an extra night at the hotel so I could hang there during the day.”
I make a nearly instant decision, not giving myself time to debate it.
“You should stay here tonight, Logan,” I say. “It’s offseason, which means the roads will be deserted at this hour. If you have any kind of car trouble, you’ll never find anyone to help, and even if you did, they wouldn’t speak any English.”
That’s not an exaggeration. Though I don’t relish the idea of him here in my home for a night—with Bas away, no less—it’s really not wise for him to be driving at this hour.
“Thank you, but it’s too much to expect, Bree,” Logan says. “Really.”
“It’s not a problem. We have a guest room with its own bath at the other end of the house.”
His shoulders sag a little, as if in relief. “If you’re sure it’s okay, I’ll gladly accept. I didn’t sleep well last night, thinking of having to lay all this on you, and I’m pretty fried.”
“Okay, then. But that’s not what I meant before. What are you going to do about the letter?”
“You want to hear tonight?”
“Of course I want to hear,” I snap, then quickly lift my hands, palms forward, as an apology.
He nods and takes another swig of wine before speaking.
“I called the state police right before I came down here. Tim Caputo, the guy we dealt with the most, has retired, but the younger detective, Brian Halligan, is still there, and he’d already spoken to David Schmidt. And unless he was just blowing smoke at me, the situation has his full attention. He’s going to meet with me when I’m in Cartersville for the reception.”
“Will he make an attempt to speak to Ruck, despite the odds?”
Logan’s expression turns even grimmer. “Ruck is dead. He died five days after Schmidt went to see him.”
The news jolts me even more than I would have thought. I suppose I should be elated that the universe is rid of him, but this means Ruck, thirty-eight at the time of his arrest, won’t spend decades rotting in Dannemora.
“So now what?” I ask.
“Halligan plans to comb through the New York State files again and also take a look at the files from Ohio and Pennsylvania. As of now, he’s betting that Ruck was yanking our chain, just like you said, but he wants to review everything and see if something doesn’t make sense.”
“Doesn’t make sense how?”
“He wants to compare Mel’s file to the two new ones and also see if the similarities between her case and the Plattsburgh ones were less remarkable than the cops thought at the time.”
That’s ridiculous,I think. The Plattsburgh college student Ruck killed first, Sailor Abbott, was struck on the head with something hammer-like and repeatedly strangled, just like Mel was, and that was exactly what happened to Amanda Kline, murdered three weeks after Mel.
“Those similarities seemed pretty damn remarkable at the time,” I say. “Are we supposed to now believe it was all a coincidence?”
“Not necessarily.”
