Page 72 of Blade

“For a conference on childhood trauma. Not exactly a rock concert.”

“True,” he says.

I pull out my phone and find the message. I hold it up so he can see, squinting his eyes to focus.

He leans back, and I place it face down on the table.

“You think Emile sent that? The day before he died?”

“I don’t know. I’m asking you.”

Now a long pause. A deep breath. “Maybe. Emile was ...”

“Damaged.”

Westin nods. “And this exposé ...”

“It was about this place—now, but also fourteen years ago. It was about Indy.”

“Well,” Westin says. “I didn’t know anything about it. Not the exposé, not the text message.”

I study his face. I can’t decide if he’s lying, which is unlike me. I can read my clients, a judge, a juror—like the back of my hand.

“But I do know something you may not,” he says. “That’s what I was trying to get to earlier, when I asked you about Jolene and her experience here.”

“Why don’t you go first,” I tell him. Grace didn’t want me to tell him about Jolene. She must have known why he was asking. The dots he was trying to connect.

Finally, he tells me.

“Have you read her file? The one that came from her school back home? From her doctors?”

I think about the papers sitting on the passenger seat of Jolene’s car. How I was reading them by the side of the road when Jill called.

“I got through most of it,” I tell him.

“Well—you might want to start from the beginning.”

That night—that’s the piece to the puzzle I didn’t see until just now. Jolene went home, pregnant with Grace. A home that was filled with violence.

Violence begets violence.It was the first thing I learned when I started to work with child offenders.

Westin has been wondering the same thing. Trying to understand Grace’s behavior—he must have seen it before that video. The rage that was inside her.

I get up from the table, pushing out the chair. And do what I should have done that night fifteen years ago.

“I have to go,” I tell Westin.

And then I leave this place like it’s the black van in the field that night. Like a bat out of hell.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Excerpt from Testimony of Jolene Montgomery

Ada Olson: Isn’t it true that you were concerned about Grace before she was a suspect in Emile Dresiér’s murder?

Jolene Montgomery: In what way?

Ada Olson: You sought a psychological evaluation of your daughter when she was five years old. Isn’t that right?