been able to keep a better grip on my feelings. After all, she was dead and feeling no pain. But there was her father Zach Robertson to keep me ever mindful of that event.
Zachariah Robertson had been a decent dentist in Santa Fe with a wife who loved him enough, a son who didn’t give him any trouble, and a daughter who had just joined the FBI. I never told him how much I regretted recommending Jessica for fieldwork too soon because I was eager to get her trained as my replacement. How I regretted I was a little too old to pose as a convincing teenage hitchhiker. As with all of my victims’ loved ones, I just told him to call anytime of the day or night.
He did. After Jessica’s disappearance that night on Route 66, seventy-nine miles west of Tucumcari, New Mexico, his calls went from hopeful shortly after zero hour to despairing after six months. He started showing up at his dental practice still too drunk from the night before to keep his hands from rattling around in his patients’ mouths.
Even after two years went by, he kept calling me. That’s how I found out Elena and his son Peter had left him, about three years sooner than it usually takes for the family of a murder victim to break apart. Then Elena got cancer and died without seeking treatment. Zach didn’t stay in touch with Peter much after her funeral.
Last time I talked to him he was mostly a drunk hermit who seldom bathed in a cabin in the upper peninsula of Lake Michigan.
I tossed off the remaining wine, took a deep breath, and called him.
He answered on the first ring, just the way he had when all this first started. “You always wait for me to call you,” he said straight off, and then with a wobble in his voice, “You must have found her.”
“We did.” I didn’t tell him everything right away, wanted first to gauge how much of it he’d remember in the morning.
“What, what about who did it? Do you know?”
“We do. We know everything now, Zach.” He sounded only moderately soused so I told him everything I knew, everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, and in the time before that what I knew of it. I didn’t pull any punches, hadn’t in years. And he didn’t need to ask any questions because I anticipated all of them.
When I finished speaking, I heard what I thought at first were ice cubes sloshing in his glass, but then realized he was typing on his computer while he listened to me.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Damn, you can’t get to Tucson direct from anywhere,” he said, after the typing finally went quiet. “American Airlines Flight 734 arriving at two P.M.”
“No, Zach.”
“If you’re not there I’ll take a taxi to the medical examiner’s office.”
“Zach, listen.”
“I won’t be any trouble. I never once, once blamed the Bureau, even right at the start, did I?”
He had told me so many times how he never blamed the Bureau, by which he meant me. “No, Zach. You never did.”
“Even that night, that night you spent with me.”
It was more like forty-eight straight hours I spent talking him up from suicide when he called from halfway across the country and told me his sweating palms were stained white by the fistful of sleeping pills he was holding.
“No, not even then. But you don’t want to see her, Zach. Not this way.”
“Oh yes I do.” His courage failed him, finally, and he started to cry. I don’t have much respect for whiskey remorse, except when it comes to someone in Zach’s shoes, so I waited patiently until he was finished.
Then, wiping my own nose on the palm of my hand, I said, “I swear to you, when this comes to trial you’ll get your day in court. You can read that statement you wrote such a long time ago. Remember that statement? Keep thinking about that. You still have it, don’t you?”
He hung up.
And that’s what happens to many victims’ loved ones, the part you never see after the media gets bored, or after the movie when the credits roll. When the bad guy is caught, the actors playing the family have Closure, knowing justice has been served. The actors playing the detectives turn their back and walk triumphantly off camera. People watching the show throw out their popcorn, wipe off their greasy fingers, and go home, maybe