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“Which brings us to two and a half weeks ago.” Raheem tapped the keyboard on his laptop.

Another map filled the monitor. Crudely drawn.

Not much detail. Jude had watched Freddy mark the X in the middle with a shaking, arthritic hand.

They were in the hospital wing at Folsom.

Jude had pulled a chair up to his bed. For the past year, she had watched the cancer eat away at his body.

Maybe if Freddy had been on the outside, there would have been aggressive treatment options, but he was inside, so there weren’t, which meant that it was all over but the dying.

She hadn’t asked him to clear his conscience.

He was a psychopath. He didn’t have a conscience.

But he didn’t want to be alone, and Jude was there, and that had meant something.

An hour before he’d passed, he’d waved her to come closer.

Asked for a pen and a sheet of paper. She could feel his reluctance like a sickening miasma, but in the end, he’d resigned himself to the inevitable.

All right, doll, I guess what they say is true. All bad things must come to an end.

Now, Raheem pointed to the shakily drawn X on Freddy’s deathbed map. “This is at the mouth of Bear Gulch Cave. As you know, Darlene’s remains were located between small pockets of talus boulders.”

Jude looked down at the carpet as the sound of weeping filled the room. She could hear the distant whir of a drill from the end of the hallway. She tried to remember how many times during her twenty-seven-year career at the FBI the building had been remodeled.

They were upgrading the electrical system for desktop computers the first time she’d walked into the San Francisco field office.

Jude had been a thirty-two-year-old smartass fresh off her PhD and sporting a black checkered skirt, a leather biker jacket and chunky Doc Martens.

Bill Clinton’s photo was on the wall. The Olympic Park Bomber was still on the loose.

The Ramones had performed for their last time at the Palace.

As an academic, she’d had no clue how to work within the rigid FBI system.

Jude dressed too grunge. Talked too bluntly.

Wore too much make-up. She’d mouthed off to the wrong people, pissed off her boss, then his boss, then nearly gotten fired, then leveraged the fact that she was one of the few women in the building to hang on, then been relegated to kidnappings and missing persons in hopes that she would either put a gun to her head or end up on a milk carton.

There was no one more surprised than Jude to find that she was actually good at the job.

Not just good. She fucking loved it.

The monitor showed a slide of DNA matches.

Raheem was reaching the end of the briefing.

Jude caught his attention, holding up her phone, pretending she had to take a call.

He looked nervous when she left. Jude silently made a note to shore him up later.

Then she realized there wasn’t going to be a later.

This was the last day she would walk the halls of the thirteenth floor of the Phillip Burton Federal Building.

The mandatory retirement age for the FBI was fifty-seven.

Jude had managed to get another two years out of them, but there was no more negotiating.

The Freddy Henley case was finally closed. They were putting her out to pasture.

“Jude?” Darlene’s mother had followed her out of the room. Lara was gripping a tissue in her hand. She looked distraught.

Jude asked, “Too much?”

“No, I needed to know. They needed to know. It’s good to understand what happened. What you did.” Lara pressed the tissue to her mouth. “I’m sorry, Jude. I should’ve trusted you. I should’ve listened when you promised you’d find her.”

Jude remembered making that promise. It was the kind of rookie mistake that years of experience had taught her never to do again. “We really got down to the wire.”

“But you did it,” Lara insisted. “You found her. You found my baby. And I treated you so bad. I hated you. Why did I do that? Why did I blame you?”

“Listen,” Jude said, “there’s no wrong in these situations. Everything you did was exactly what you were supposed to do.”

“I screamed at you. I wrote hundreds of letters trying to get you fired.”

“It’s good to write things down. Gets it off your chest.” Jude knew her bosses had never cared about the letters. The multiple warnings in her file were for violating the FBI’s dress code and swearing like a sailor. She nodded toward her office. “Let’s go in here.”

She felt a moment of surprise when she saw the empty room.

The furniture remained, but all of her personal items had disappeared.

The shelves were bare. The photos had been taken off the walls.

Her record player was gone. Only her purse hung on the coat rack.

Everything else had been packed up by security to ensure she didn’t purloin a stapler.

“What’s this?” Lara asked. “Are you being promoted?”

“I’m taking retirement. Today is my last day.”

Lara’s quizzical expression quickly turned to heartbreak. “You waited until you found my baby?”

Jude reached into her purse for a packet of tissues.

“You know what? I was just thinking about the first time I walked into this building. Thirty-two years old. Thought I was a hotshot. There was a bunch of old farts telling war stories about Patty Hearst and Jim Jones. That’s why I’m leaving.

I don’t want to be the old fart to this new batch of hotshots. ”

Lara made a tutting noise as she dried her eyes. “Please, talk to me when you’re my age.”

Jude knew that they were around the same age, but Lara had been worn down by nearly thirty years of stress and uncertainty. She asked the woman, “What about you? What now?”

“What now?” Lara let out a heavy sigh as she sat down on the couch. “I don’t know, to be honest. Who am I without the struggle to bring Darlene home?”

Jude leaned against her desk. She knew that Lara wasn’t looking for an answer.

“I’ve always had hope. That’s what’s kept me going.

” Lara’s voice took on the tone of a confession.

“Even after Freddy admitted that he killed her, even after you told me about those photos he took. It’s not that I didn’t trust you, but there wasn’t a body.

All the other girls were found, but not Darlene.

Every time there was a new one, every time it wasn’t her, it gave me hope that she was still alive. ”

“I know,” Jude said. Lara Talbot wasn’t the first mother to tell her this secret.

“Everyone keeps talking about closure, or forgiveness, or moving on, and I just want to scream in their faces. Freddy Henley doesn’t deserve forgiveness.”

Jude told her the brutal truth. “He’s dead, and even when he was alive, he didn’t care whether or not you forgave him. He never thought about any of you.”

Lara nodded, but not in agreement. “He told you how to find her. There’s redemption in that.”

“He didn’t do it for redemption. He did it because we played a game, and I won because he was dying.”

She looked stunned. “It’s that simple?”

“Psychopaths don’t worry about right and wrong. They make their own rules. Freddy was transactional. I visited him. I talked to him. I was interesting. He gave me enough information to keep me coming back.”

“How did you do it all these years? I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with that maniac.”

Jude never shared personal information on the job, but this was her last day, and she had spent almost the entirety of her professional career working to bring this woman’s child home.

She sat down on the couch beside Lara. “My brother died when I was little. He drowned in the river.”

Lara’s lips parted in surprise.

“His friends saw him go under. He didn’t come back up. The current took him away.” Jude felt a rustiness in her throat. She hadn’t told the story in years. “There was no doubt that he’d drowned. But it took six days to find the body.”

Lara’s bottom lip started to tremble. “So, you know.”

“I know what those six days felt like,” Jude said.

“I was sick with hope. We all were. Without a body, there was no proof. What if he managed to grab a branch downstream? What if he was stranded in the forest? What if he was injured and alone? My mother fell completely apart. My father drank himself into a stupor. Everything was so dark and oppressive. Like a boulder was pressing down on each of our chests. The not knowing felt like it was going to suffocate us to death.”

Lara had started nodding. It was a terrible club to be in.

“When the police finally found him—I don’t know.

It’s almost indescribable. The weight came off.

We were still devastated, but we could breathe again.

My father backed off his drinking. My mother got out of bed.

She showered. She started to arrange the funeral, pick out what to dress him in.

I heard my aunt ask her how she was managing to carry on, and Mom said, ‘I just needed a place to bury my grief.’”

Lara’s tears ran freely.

“That’s how I was able to stand being in the same room with Freddy Henley. I wanted you and the other families to have somewhere to bury your grief.”

Lara dabbed at her eyes with the tissue. “I hope your mother is proud of you.”

“I like to think she would’ve been.”

“Oh, no. I’m sorry she’s gone.”

“Me, too.” Jude stood up from the couch. Raheem was probably finished by now. “You want me to walk you back to the conference room?”

“No, you’ve done enough for me already.” She started to leave, then turned back to Jude. “God bless you.”