by Emily James
Given her history, it wasn’t likely she would have gone to the room with him unless he’d given her a good reason or they were dating and planned to use a guest room that they knew would be empty for the night. I couldn’t see Becky dating a man like Vilsack, who seemed to want only one thing from his relationships. Rape victims usually struggled with intimacy even in stable, loving, long-term relationships after their assault.
I borrowed Mark’s phone and logged in to my Facebook account. Becky had accepted my friend request a few days ago, so I now had access to her timeline and photos.
I scrolled through them. Family shots from a child’s birthday party. Becky with her arms around Penny and another woman. Sunsets over the lake. Becky and her dad building a deck.
Becky seemed to like to memorialize things in photos, but there weren’t any of her with Bruce Vilsack…or any other man who wasn’t obviously a family member, for that matter.
I clicked away. “It’s a long shot, but we could show her picture to Vilsack’s roommate. He didn’t know many names, but Elise said he might recognize faces of the woman Vilsack dated.”
“I don’t have any better suggestions,” Mark said.
I called Elise and explained my theory.
“The chief is going to call you a troublemaker.” She sounded almost gleeful at the idea. “I’ll text you the address for his job. But you’re not going alone. Not even with Mark. I’ll meet you there.”
A few seconds after we disconnected, Mark’s phone pinged with a text from Elise with the address for Lakeside Realty. Mark glanced at it. He changed directions.
One of the benefits of being a long-time resident. I still often needed my GPS to get around, but Mark knew where to go without external help.
Elise beat us there. She was already waiting on the sidewalk out front when Mark and I pulled up.
Elise introduced me as a consultant. She didn’t introduce Mark, and he stood behind me like he was my bodyguard rather than the county medical examiner.
I logged back in to my Facebook account and brought up Becky’s pictures.
The man glanced at my forehead before taking the phone from me. I couldn’t blame him. The mirror on the truck’s visor had shown me that my forehead looked like it belonged to Frankenstein’s monster. He was probably also wondering why it took three of us to show him a picture.
He pinched and spread his fingers on the screen like he was enlarging one of the photos. He shook his head. “Sorry. If Bruce was with her, I didn’t see them together.”
If he was looking at the photos of Becky at the birthday party, none of them were clear images of her face. I held out my hand for the phone, and he returned it. I quickly scrolled through to the one of her with Penny. It was from the waist up, and Becky faced the camera straight on.
I pointed. “What about this one?”
The man shook his head again. “I don’t know her.” He squinted and pinched the screen again. “But I do know her.”
At first I thought he was pointing at Penny, but his finger hovered over the face of the other woman in the photo.
My grab for the phone might have been a little abrupt. I tapped the woman’s face, and my browser opened her profile—Julia Herndon.
Julia, the co-founder of the PTSD support group, had dated Bruce Vilsack. Julia, who was also “out sick” from the group meeting the night Penny’s abusive husband had died.
“Thanks,” I said to Vilsack’s roommate.
I could hear the shellshock in my voice, but I didn’t care if he heard it, too. I stared down at the enlarged photo on my screen, at the women’s smiling faces. I thought about the strength of their bonds and how hard they’d probably worked to earn those smiles back.
I could understand how that might warp over time, as two of them had to continue to live in fear of their abusers. They could have developed a pact to see “justice” done and to do it in a way that’d be hard to trace. Penny hadn’t killed her husband. Julia hadn’t killed her rapist. But both men were dead nonetheless.
And, for a split second, I wanted to hide the phone and convince Mark and Elise to look the other way. If Mandy hadn’t been currently accused of killing Vilsack, I couldn’t be sure that I might not have done it.
I also wasn’t sure what that said about me, but I was pretty sure it said that, no matter how scared I was of becoming the target of another murderer or other criminal in the future, I couldn’t defend them. I couldn’t turn away from the victims and pretend that someone shouldn’t be punished for their pain. I couldn’t help set men like Penny’s husband and Bruce Vilsack free so that they could hurt others.
I had to continue to fight for what I knew was right, including making sure someone innocent like Mandy didn’t go to prison.
When I looked back up, Vilsack’s roommate was gone, and Elise and Mark exchanged a look that suggested they weren’t sure whether I’d had an epiphany or was showing the aftereffects of a head injury.
I explained who Julia was and my theory. “We need to find out if Mandy’s key worked in her car or not. If Becky didn’t have time to replace it, it might be enough to get us a warrant.”
21
Elise called Chief McTavish while Mark called my mom, and I nestled into Mark’s truck in the puddle of warm afternoon sun shining through the window. I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I knew Mark’s hand was on my shoulder, and I didn’t recognize the landscape around me. For all I knew, we weren’t even in Fair Haven anymore.
“We’re at the impound,” he said.
I blinked out the window. Two police cruisers sat beside the truck. Elise, my mom, and Chief McTavish already stood beside the gate leading inside the chain-link fence.
My body ached and screamed at me as I made it climb out of the truck, but I had to see this through. Then I was asking Mark to take me home to sleep until tomorrow—or at least until Mark or my mom had to wake me up to make sure I wasn’t exhibiting worse concussion symptoms.
Inside the fence, I recognized Mandy’s car, but it looked nothing like it had the last time I saw it. Her hood had bowed up like a tent, the left corner of her bumper hung loose, and one of her headlights was missing a large chunk of glass, leaving the bulb exposed to the light.
A shiver skittered over my body. I pointed at the fractured headlight. “Did you find the missing piece?”
“At the sight of the attack,” Chief McTavish said. “It matches.”
It wasn’t simply that Mandy’s car had been backed in to by a car with the same paint color as Alice Benjamin’s, then. There was no way a piece of her headlight could be at the scene unless her car had been the one used in the attack.
Chief McTavish pulled on a pair of gloves and opened the driver’s door. “The car was unlocked when we arrived at The Sunburnt Arms, but we hauled it here on a flatbed. No one’s tried to start it.”
He held up a set of keys with a book key chain. They had to be Mandy’s. The key chain only held three keys. If I had to guess, they were for her car, the kitchen door of The Sunburnt Arms, and her private room.
Chief McTavish tried the two smaller keys even though it was obvious they weren’t car keys, probably so no one could question it later. He inserted the final key, and it turned in the ignition.
The car didn’t start.
He removed the key and straightened up. “I’ll call a judge about getting a warrant for any keys in Rebecca Holmes’ possession.”
Mark and my mom must have taken turns waking me up in the night to check on me. I had fuzzy memories of one or the other leaning over me and asking me a few questions, then leaving.
The final time, Mark came in with a cup of coffee, a muffin, and an I have news smile. “Becky had a key that worked in Mandy’s car.”
I accepted the coffee and gingerly prodded the edges of my wound. It was still swollen, but it seemed a bit less tender. “Did she confess?”
“Unfortunately not.” Mark sat at the foot of my bed. “The chief said her explana
tion is that Mandy gave her the key to go to the store and she just forgot to give it back.”
A good defense attorney could work with it. Along with the watch, it cast enough reasonable doubt to result in an acquittal.
The question I had to ask myself was whether I let it go at that or did I ask for a chance to talk to Becky and hope I could convince her to confess. On our drive together to that first PTSD support group meeting, Becky told me the group members understood each other in a way that other people couldn’t. I knew it was true. They were afraid. They wanted justice they hadn’t gotten through the proper channels. And the men they’d killed were a rapist and a wife abuser.
Those were all things I could understand, even sympathize with.
I touched my forehead again. They hadn’t stopped there, though. I hadn’t done anything to hurt them. Alice Benjamin certainly hadn’t done anything to hurt them. Neither had Mandy, and they would have let her take the blame for Vilsack’s murder if I hadn’t made the connection about the keys.
That was the problem with vigilante justice. In theory, it sounded like the right thing. When the law didn’t stop an evil person, didn’t someone have to? But the line was too easy to move, and any action became too easy to justify in the pursuit of righting a wrong. It was why the legal system was established in the first place.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed. “I need you to ask Chief McTavish to hold Becky, and then can you drive me down to the station?”
My mom decided to come along, and I could have sworn I saw Sheila hide a smile behind her hand as we filed into the station. Chief McTavish met us outside of his office.
When I told him what I wanted to do, he looked at me like I asked him to eat a plateful of worms. “Absolutely not.”
I planted my hands on my hips, realized how much it made me look like my mom, and dropped my arms to my sides. “She feels bad about hurting me. I know she does. I think that will make her more open to admitting the truth to me.”
In retrospect, I could see what she’d said to me at the hardware store for what it was. She’d tried, in the only way she could, to apologize.
Chief McTavish looked at me like my hard blow to the head yesterday had knocked out all my common sense. “You can’t be that naïve.”
“Chief.” The tone to my mom’s voice was the same one she used in the courtroom when she said objection. “We need to speak privately.”
He jutted his chin toward his office and let her lead the way.
It was a good thing my mom had her back to me as she went, because my mouth hung open. Chief McTavish might not have liked me prior to this, but at least he’d respected me. Now he’d see me as weak, just the way my parents did, because my mom had intervened.
“What do you think they’re talking about?” I asked Mark.
He shrugged. “Whatever it is, I bet your mom is winning.”
My mom always won, but this time, her win would still be my loss.
They were back out in less than five minutes.
Chief McTavish barely looked at me, but he hooked a thumb toward the interview room where Becky waited. “I’m going in with you.”
He stalked down the hall.
I paused beside my mom. “What did you say to him?”
“The truth. That you’re the best I’ve ever met at reading people, and if he wants a conviction on this case, you’re his best chance.” She made a shooing motion. “Now go.”
Maybe I’d once again misjudged my mom. That sounded an awful lot like praise.
Becky sat on the far side of the interview table when we entered. Her mouth turned down so far at the edges that it almost formed an upside-down U.
Chief McTavish immediately took a seat on the opposite side of the table from her.
If I sat next to him, it’d be the worst possible way to start out. It’d make her feel like I was siding with the police against her—which technically I was—but her friends had been betrayed by the police before. To win her over, I needed to show her I cared and I wouldn’t ignore or try to silence them.
I moved around the table, and pulled out the other chair on her side so that I could face her rather than sit next to her the way I would have if I’d been her defense counsel.
She looked at me like I’d randomly hauled out and kicked her anyway. I felt it like a punch to the throat, stealing my air and making me want to cry out.
“This isn’t what you think,” I said.
She crossed her arms over her chest. “You’re not here to try to trick me into confessing? Because that’s what it looks like.”
I didn’t dare look at Chief McTavish. Not even out of the corner of my eye. I could already hear him thinking about how he never should have let me come in here, and how I was going to do more harm than good.
Or maybe that was simply the voice in my head that always tried to tell me I wasn’t good enough.
It was time to tell that voice to buzz off.
“I’m not here to trick you at all.” I made sure not to flinch away from her glare. “There’s no need to trick you because we know what you did. I’m here to talk to you because I believe you only wanted justice.”
Her arms slid down from her chest to rest around her waist, but she didn’t release them completely.
She wasn’t arguing. That was a step forward. I had to keep building on that foundation. “The police didn’t bring charges against Bruce or Penny’s husband. They should have.”
“Bruce told her she couldn’t expect all the perks of a boyfriend and not put out.” Becky lowered her hands to her jeans, and her fingers curled into claws. “Then he drove her home like nothing unusual had happened. The police refused to charge him because Julia was dating him at the time.” She shot a reproachful look at Chief McTavish. “Like that made it all right. Chief Wilson said no one would believe she hadn’t wanted it.”
It wasn’t a confession yet, but she was talking now. My parents had taught me that if you could convince someone to talk, eventually you could also catch them in a lie.
“That didn’t make it right,” Chief McTavish said. “I would have encouraged her to press charges. She could have come in again after Chief Wilson was gone, or she could have talked to someone else. Did either of your friends try speaking to another officer?”
Becky’s headshake was subtle, but it set her earrings swinging, drawing attention to the motion. “What reason would we have had to think they’d be any different?”
I knew Chief McTavish was only trying to help, and possibly to see if she’d name a name he could use in his malfeasance investigation, but it showed how much he didn’t understand. What had been done to Julia, and to Penny, was humiliating enough without having to grovel to multiple people, hoping they’d be believed.
Besides, Chief Wilson was in charge at the time. They couldn’t have possibly known that if they spoke to someone like Erik or Quincey instead, they would have received different treatment.
Chief Wilson had built in them a deep distrust of the Fair Haven police department, and because it’d happened to both of them, their minds were set. If they wanted justice and to be free of their abusers, they’d have to handle it themselves.
Except Chief Wilson had been gone since last fall. That meant that all of this happened at least six months ago. “Did Bruce leave her alone after that?”
Becky nodded, then shook her head. “At first. But then a few weeks ago, she saw him with another woman she knew. Julia wanted to protect her, so she told her what Bruce did. The woman dumped him. Bruce was angry. He said he never raped her, but that he could show her what rape was if she kept spreading lies about him.” A visible shiver ran over her. “And I had to work with him, knowing what he was. Every time he looked at me…”
That explained why this happened when it happened. The thought of being around someone even related to the people who’d attacked me made me sick. I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for Becky, knowing that she was working with a rapist, for
Julia worrying that Bruce might hurt her again out of vindictiveness, and for Penny, whose husband wouldn’t stay out of her life.
“So you decided someone had to stop him—them?” I kept my voice as soft as possible. I didn’t want to seem like I was attacking her when she saw them as the victims.
Becky pressed her lips shut and leaned back in her chair.
There’d been a part of me that hoped she’d want to confess now. We’d given her a chance to explain why she felt they’d done the right thing. Oftentimes, vigilantes wanted to admit to their actions because, deep down, they believed no one would actually convict them for it.
Becky was clearly smarter than that. How carefully her part of the murders had been orchestrated spoke to that as well.
Maybe I was approaching this wrong. Maybe she didn’t care about what others thought about it. In her heart, what she did was right, and she didn’t need outside approval enough to risk her freedom over it.
But that only held if she’d only hurt the original perpetrators. She hadn’t. She’d hurt innocent people as well.
I felt my increased heart rate in the way my head wound throbbed like it was trying to break free from its stitches.
I didn’t want to talk about what Becky did to me. I wanted to shove it back into my personal Pandora’s Box where I’d shoved everything else terrible that had happened to me in the past year. But all that had ever gotten me was sleep deprivation and an extra five pounds around my hips.
The PTSD support group might fall apart if half its members ended up in prison, but that didn’t mean I had to go back to my old, defective coping mechanisms.
I could face this, no matter how much it scared me.
“I understand why you felt you needed to stop Bruce Vilsack and Penny’s husband. A lot of people will understand that. What I don’t understand is why you felt it was okay to turn other people into victims in the process.”
Something I couldn’t define flickered across Becky’s face.
I caught myself taking shallow breaths and forced them to go longer and deeper. No hyperventilating. I could be strong. My mom put her faith in me. I had to prove her right. “You knew how what I’d gone through already kept me awake at nights and made it hard for me to be alone. You attacked me anyway. I almost died. So did Alice Benjamin. How do you think she’s going to feel the next time she needs to climb into a car? You took two victimizers off the street, but you became one in the process.”
