The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,93

my heart of hearts, I am a Low Country girl in a pickup truck and cutoffs, the sweet briny smell of the marsh filling my lungs. I did not look forward to meeting with Anne Chambers’s parents, but how I longed to put my bare feet on Jekyll’s dark sand.

I was driving over the causeway bridge toward the Jekyll Island entrance when my phone went off.

“This is Mirror Chang, Dr. Street. Jacob Dobbs was my husband.”

I waited a second or two, but she didn’t say anything else. “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said awkwardly. It seemed an inadequate response and horribly unequal in empathy to what she must have felt in pain, but I didn’t know what else to say to her.

“I know you worked with Jacob recently in Atlanta, and that you were a colleague of my husband’s at BAU.” Her voice was even and betrayed no emotion.

“I was more of a student than a colleague.”

“My husband is gone, Dr. Street. So I’d like to know the truth. I’ve heard so many things.” For the first time, I detected an edge of pain in her tone. “What is it in us that needs to know if we’ve been betrayed even after we lose someone?”

“It’s a way to postpone grief,” I answered softly.

A small, humorless laugh. “That’s something Jacob would have said. So tell me, Dr. Street—what happened between you and my husband?”

“At the Behavioral Analysis Unit? I lodged a complaint. It wasn’t taken seriously—”

“Because he had their loyalty and you were a drunk. Is that correct?”

I swallowed. “That was my take on it, yes.”

“I remember his anger at you during that time. Too much anger. I sensed there must have been great feeling between the two of you.”

“I can assure you there was not, Ms. Chang. Not like that.”

A few seconds ticked by. Then, “His personal effects were returned to me. Isn’t it interesting that one day your husband has clothes and things in his pockets and the next they’re just personal effects?” It must have been agonizing for her to share with a stranger the things that had to have been so deeply painful in private. “I found some of Jacob’s notes. Your name was there. The usage was … well, sexual in nature. Did you sleep with my husband, Dr. Street?”

“No. Not ever.”

“Some men aren’t capable of fidelity,” she said. “Jacob might have been one of them. My husband was not a perfect man, but something you may not realize is that he was a good father and a good companion to me for thirty years.”

I thought about all the times I’d seen Dobbs take off his wedding ring and drop it in his pocket when he was flirting with someone—the new girl in the unit, a woman in the cafeteria, a contact when we were on assignment, someone in local law enforcement. He’d once slept with both a female deputy and the sheriff when we were on a serial case in Wyoming. I’d said something to him back then about a tan line on his finger, and he’d laughed at me. “Only a sociopath could be unfaithful to a devoted wife while wearing a thing like that, Keye. I don’t remove it to disguise my marital status. I remove it out of respect.”

“I’m so sorry,” I told Mirror Chang. “What you’re feeling must be excruciating.”

“You must have been very angry at him for costing you another job. In fact, you must have hated my husband.”

I waited, stung by the venom in her voice.

“Did you kill Jacob, Dr. Street? Were you the whore who murdered my husband?”

I pulled over before I reached the guard shack where I would have to get a pass to enter the island. “Ms. Chang.” I hoped I could disguise the shock and offense in my voice. She must have been crazy with grief. “I have worked for my entire adult life to stop the people who inflict this kind of pain on others. It’s no secret your husband and I had a toxic history. Yes, I disliked Jacob. But he didn’t deserve what happened to him. And you and your children don’t deserve the misery you’re feeling now. If it helps at all, we have capital punishment in Georgia. And the Atlanta Police Department won’t stop until this bastard is on death row.”

A red-tailed hawk was circling above the wax myrtle and white oleander on each side of the two-lane, surveying the marsh and mud flats for prey. I didn’t think