his head and ran his fingers through his thinning salt-and-pepper hair. I thought about what he and his family must be going through, and as irritated as I was, I felt deeply sorry for him. But I couldn’t let him sway the investigation.
“Jeff, listen,” I said. “A few people, including Jacob’s parents, mentioned the relationship between Myles and Laurel, how they’d been in love since high school. And—”
At that, he apparently couldn’t hold back. He dropped both hands and they fell as fists on his knees. “You think I don’t know she was in love with Myles? You think that’s some kind of surprise?”
“No, I don’t. I know that you were well aware of their relationship,” I said. “But, Jeff, what I’m saying is—”
“Girl almost starved herself to death over that boy,” Mullins said. “Would’ve died if we’d let her. She was so in love with that young guy that her mothers and me thought she’d run away.”
“But she didn’t,” I said.
A long sigh, and when it ended Mullins’ eyes filled with tears. I grabbed a tissue out of the box on the gray metal credenza behind me, but by the time I had it ready to hand to him, Mullins had a well-used white cotton handkerchief he’d pulled out of his pocket. He ran it over his cheeks, wiped his nose and upper lip, and looked like a man who’d lost everything he loved in the world. “Chief, you’ve gotta listen to me. Myles is a dead end.”
“How do you know?” I asked. “You heard about the boot print?”
“Yeah, I heard,” he said. “I can’t explain that, but…”
A beaten man, he stopped talking. Mullins was a veteran officer, one who’d had years of experience at another department before coming to Alber PD nearly a decade earlier. I wondered how many parents and spouses, how many family members and loved ones had sat across from him over the years in similar situations. It must feel like the oncologist who gets cancer, the lawyer who becomes the defendant. I thought about how fickle life could be, and how quickly it could change.
“Mullins, we’ve got the blood evidence on Myles, and that’s powerful. We’ve got a motive, that he loved Laurel,” I said.
“That’s why he couldn’t have done it,” Mullins said, the tears flowing hard, but his jaw anchored in determination.
“Sadly, people kill those they love way too often,” I said. “How does that clear Myles Thompkins?”
“Because he truly loved Laurel,” Mullins said. “Myles loved her like no man I’ve ever seen love a woman. And she loved him as passionately in return.”
“But she married—” I started.
“Yes, she married Jacob Johansson,” he bellowed. I would have bet that he’d thought about this often in the preceding twenty-four hours, and as he talked, it sounded almost as if he were trying to work his way through it, to reassure himself that he and his wives had done the right thing when they forced Laurel to marry Jacob.
“Laurel married Jacob not because we wanted her to. She married him because the prophet commanded it.” Mullins talked to me as if I were one of the uninitiated, someone who didn’t understand the laws that governed Elijah’s People. “Emil Barstow had a revelation, a sign from God that told him that Laurel had to be sealed to Jacob. When that happened, her mothers and me, we couldn’t do anything else. We weren’t in control. We knew Myles and Laurel loved each other, but they weren’t destined to be together. It wasn’t…”
Mullins stopped talking. He sat back as if unable to go on. I thought of my father, my mother, the day they announced who I would marry. I thought of the way those in charge ran Max out of Alber to keep him away from me.
“It wasn’t what?” I asked.
“It wasn’t ours to decide,” Mullins said, his hands turned over, palms up, as if pleading for understanding. “It was the prophet’s call, Chief, not ours. And we had to follow it, and we trusted that if we did, Laurel would have a good life and glory in the afterlife.”
It could have been my father’s voice, my parents’ reasoning, but it wasn’t. I felt anger at Mullins, at his wives for not listening to Laurel, just as my parents ignored my wishes. But this wasn’t about me. None of it. It was about the young mother lying on Doc Wiley’s autopsy table, perhaps at this very moment having her organs removed, the slit in her throat examined