How It Happened Read online

  The path through there is real rough, rocky. We were bouncing like crazy—my ass was literally in the air half the time, and Mathias was barely in control of the truck, and I was glad he’d turned off the paved road, because there wasn’t anybody else to hit. At least whatever happened, it was only going to happen to us.

  That was the last thought I had before I saw Jackie.

  She was standing in the middle of the path, facing the water. The sun was coming up. Everything was pink and gold. We flew up over the hill and she turned and she was smiling. I remember her face changing, and that seemed slow. You know those blinds where you turn the rod and they shut the light out? It was like that.

  I don’t think she ever quite…comprehended it. I mean, we didn’t belong there, right? I think she was confused the whole time. Like, What is going on?

  She moved either too early or too late, depending on how you want to look at it. She tried to avoid us and Mathias tried to avoid her and they both went the same direction. Well…let me stop. I think he tried to avoid her. I want to believe that. Because otherwise it means that when he swerved…you know, he was trying.

  When he hit her, she popped up in the air and hit the windshield hard enough that it cracked, and then she was gone and Mathias slammed on the brakes and we spun and that’s when the back of the truck hit one of the old stones. The one that split right in half, that you all took pictures of and put in the paper and people were saying it was a satanic cult killing or whatever. Really, it was just that the bed of the truck hit that stone when we spun.

  There was a moment when it was real still. Real quiet. Nobody was even breathing, it seemed. I was just staring through the windshield at the hood and there was more red on it now, and I knew that was blood but somehow it blended in, almost. Like it was part of the design with the cat. Like it had always belonged there.

  I started to get out of the truck to go help her, right? Mathias got out too. Cass stayed in a little longer. I could see where Jackie had landed and then I saw him too. Ian Kelly. Didn’t know his name then, of course. He was just a guy. He was coming down the path behind us, but as fast as we’d been going, we must have passed him and missed him. It was easy to do. We were driving so fast and heading right into the sunrise.

  He was up above us a little bit. Standing there, staring. Jackie’s body was between us. It was like a standoff. Then he started shouting. He was shouting What the hell are you doing? and I had this weird thought that it was a strange question, because it had already happened, you know? It wasn’t, like, in progress. Not something we could stop.

  He started walking toward us. He wasn’t running, just walking. Mathias was moving too, and I saw he had something in his hand. This bar or pipe or something. And they’re walking toward each other, Jackie right in the middle, her blood all over the place. Cass was finally out of the truck by then and I was kind of frozen. I didn’t want to go near all that blood. The guy kept walking toward us, and he was sort of in shock.

  They were almost right beside her body when Mathias hit him with the pipe. He just swung it once, right at the guy’s head, and the guy never so much as got a hand up. I remember the sound it made. It was like a fist going through drywall. Wet drywall.

  I screamed then. I was still screaming when Mathias turned around and looked at me, and then I stopped real fast. The way he looked at me…I knew he would kill me.

  He walked back to us and he looked at us and told us to help him put them in the truck. Everybody in the world will say, Why did you do that? Why didn’t you say no, why didn’t you run, why didn’t you call the police? But no one saw the way he was looking at us. It was do what he said or die. That was clear. That was the choice.

  I only half remember picking them up. Mathias got in the truck and backed it up and got these tarps out of the bed. Not tarps, but the clear kind, like they put over broken windows. And then we, um…sorry. I need a second. Sorry.

  We…uh, we…kind of…folded them up. Wrapped them up. I was trying not to look. Mathias was yelling at us to hurry before somebody came along. We’re in an old cemetery out of sight of the road and it’s like six in the morning—who is going to come along? That was the first time I wondered what they had been doing out there. So early too. Then later, it was all over the news, of course. That made me feel even worse, knowing why they’d gone out there. I mean, that was real sweet, you know? That was a real sweet thing. I never dated a guy who’d get up so early to do something like that. Shit, I’ve never even met a guy like that.

  We got them in the bed of the truck, and Mathias told us to get back in. I don’t think either Cass or I had said a word. I couldn’t stop crying. I was having trouble breathing. I was just going to do everything Mathias told us to do until it was over. I was more scared of him than anything. I hadn’t even thought of you guys yet, to be honest. Hadn’t thought about anything bigger than that little stretch of road. That was the whole world right then. The world was gone and it was just that road and the truck and Mathias. That’s all that was left.

  People won’t understand that.

  Cass asked where he was going, and he said we had to hide them. He drove away like he knew exactly where he wanted to go. He was driving fast but not the same way he had been before. Under control, staying in his lane. He said we were going to dump them and get the hell out of there and clean the truck, bleach it down. Then he said that if either one of us told anybody, he’d kill us. That was the first time he said it, but it didn’t really have any impact because we already understood that. At least I did.

  He took us back to the camp by the pond. Pulled us all the way down to the water, right where he’d been looking for his keys just a few minutes earlier.

  When I found them in the ignition.

  We took her first. I couldn’t see much of her face. There was too much blood. Mathias used duct tape to wrap some of those pipes he had in the truck bed around her. So she would sink. When I realized we were going to put them in the water, I thought it was a real dumb choice. Because if we’d just walked fifty yards or so down from where we’d hit her back at the cemetery, we’d have been at the tidal flats. It was high tide too. Wouldn’t have had to go far. And then with the current…they’d have been carried right out. All the way to the ocean. Unless somebody pulled them up with a lobster trap or something, nobody ever would have found them. If we’d done that, I could tell you exactly how it went, and you’d still never find them. But instead, Mathias panicked, and we took them away from the ocean and back to a pond. That was pretty stupid, when you think about it. And he put them in the truck. He didn’t have to do that either. All we would have had to do was drag them down to the tidal flats and let the current do what it does.

  Instead, we went back to that camp, and that pond. We waded out until it was up to my neck and then he swam a little farther, dragging her out toward the raft. Then he let her go. She sank pretty easily. I remember you could see some blood in the water, but it was gone fast.

  Then we went back for the guy.

  We had him out of the truck before we realized he was moving. I think I felt it first, but I didn’t want to believe it. Then I looked up…I remember that when I looked up at where his head was, the plastic sucked in and moved out and then sucked in again, and I realized he was breathing. Trying to breathe, at least.

  Cass said, Oh, shit, then. That was all, just Oh, shit.

  And Mathias stabbed him. I never even saw him get the knife out. I just saw him lean over and stab him through the plastic, right where his heart had to be.

  I started to freak out. Mathias stood up and looked at me and he held the knife out. I kind of jumped back, because I expected him to cut me. Kill me. And he said—his voice was calm; I’ll never forget how steady his voice was, like he was explaining the rules to a game—he said, You’re both going to do that too. Because we are all in this together now.

  He was waiting on me, but Cass took the knife. She…she didn’t really hesitate. She just stabbed h
im. He wasn’t moving anymore then. The plastic over his mouth wasn’t moving either.

  She held the knife out to me. She looked at me and said, Kimmy, we gotta hurry. Mathias was watching. I didn’t take the knife, and he said, Either you do it or you go into the water with them. Make a choice, Kimmy.

  So I…um, I took the knife. I dropped it, because I was shaking so bad. I got down on my hands and knees and picked it up and I…I reached out and jabbed it in there and then I crawled away. Mathias picked the knife back up and said I hadn’t done it hard enough. He told me to do it again.

  So I did it again.

  We took him out into the water. Same way, same place. As far as I can wade up to my neck, and I’m five one, and then Mathias swam him out maybe ten feet farther. They’re down there between the raft and the dock. Closer to the raft. You’ll find them there. I don’t know how deep. They aren’t down there very far, though. It’s just dark water, and a lonely place.

  You’ll find them easy.

  Mathias drove us back to my car. The whole time he was giving us instructions, what to do with our clothes and how to wash the shower with bleach and use rags with bleach on everything we touched, and also threatening us, promising us he’d kill us if we talked to anyone and telling us how he’d know as soon as we went to the police and he didn’t care about going to prison, he’d stay out long enough to kill us first. It was back and forth with that—what we needed to do and what he would do to us if we didn’t listen.

  The rest of it, I don’t know about. What he did after, and what happened to the truck, I don’t know. I can’t even make guesses about that stuff, no matter how many ways you try to get me to.

  But that is how it happened.

  Can we stop now?

  2

  Rob Barrett was the only one in the room with Kimberly Crepeaux, a five-foot-nothing, 102-pound woman who was twenty-two years old but already had five arrests and one child when she confessed to her role in the murders of Jackie Pelletier and Ian Kelly.

  Other investigators were watching on a live video feed, and once Kimberly was gone, one of them joined him. Lieutenant Don Johansson of the Maine State Police was ten years older than Barrett and had been around more murder cases—which was to say he’d been around any—but when he walked into the room, his eyes were wide and he said, “Ho-ly shit,” like he couldn’t quite believe what he’d just watched and heard.

  They’d been talking to Kimberly for months, and nobody had expected her to confess today.

  “You got her,” Johansson said, sitting down. “You actually got her.”

  Barrett only nodded. He was still in his chair, but his heart was pounding with adrenaline and he felt physically drained, as if he were in the locker room after a playoff game. For the past twenty minutes, he’d worked on keeping his face steady and his body still, afraid any disruption might cut Kimberly off in midstride. He’d long been convinced that she both knew the truth and wanted to confess, but even so, he hadn’t been entirely ready for what he’d heard.

  “It was the card,” Johansson said, staring at Barrett with a bit of disbelief. “That’s how you got her. How in the hell did you think to go to the card?”

  The card was still on the table. Barrett picked it up now, handling it gingerly. It was made of folded construction paper and featured a crudely drawn cross beneath a rainbow. Inside, the message She was a nice mom and you were lucky to have her and I am sorry she is gone but do not forget that you still have a good dad was printed in pink Magic Marker and signed in blue by an eleven-year-old Kimberly Crepeaux.

  Barrett had found a reference to the old handmade card in a list of possessions put together by the investigators who had searched Jackie Pelletier’s home after she disappeared, and he’d asked her father if he could see it. Nobody understood why he wanted it. The card was, as Kimberly had noted, completely irrelevant to any of the horrifying events that had happened more than a decade later.

  And yet it was the card that finally got her talking.

  “It gave them a relationship,” he told Johansson as he looked at that child’s drawing of the rainbow over the cross. “Her knowing that Jackie kept that card gave them the type of relationship Kimberly didn’t want to admit that they had. I thought if I brought Jackie home like that, if I made Kimberly think of what they shared, then maybe she’d give me something, finally.” He let out a long breath and shook his head. “But I sure as hell did not expect her to give me that.”

  Johansson nodded, ran a hand over his jaw, and then looked away when he said, “Do you think it’s true?”

  “Hell yes, I think it’s true.” Barrett was almost surprised the question had been asked. Johansson had heard the same words he had; he’d even gotten to watch her face on the video feed as she told the story. Barrett wasn’t sure how there could be any doubt.

  “I’m just saying, Kimmy’s not known for honesty,” Johansson said.

  “She just confessed to murder, Don. It’s not like she gave us a tip about someone else.”

  “Plenty of people have confessed to murders they didn’t actually commit.”

  “I know that better than anyone. This is what I do. This is what I spent ten years studying and teaching.”

  “Oh, I’m aware of that.”

  Barrett felt a flash of anger. He’d been brought in from the Boston division of the FBI precisely because Johansson and his team hadn’t been able to make any progress getting Kimberly Crepeaux to talk, despite numerous accounts of her implicating herself to acquaintances. Now that Barrett had gotten the confession, Johansson seemed reluctant to believe it. There had been friction between them ever since Barrett arrived, and he understood that—no local cop liked a fed looking over his shoulder—but still he was stunned that Johansson could offer resistance on this of all days.

  “The dive team ought to be able to settle the truth of it,” Barrett said, fighting to keep his tone measured. “If she’s lying, then that pond will be empty. If she’s not, then they’re down there. So let’s get a search team assembled.”

  “Right. And I’ll need to get Colleen looped in, obviously.”

  Colleen Davis was the prosecutor.

  “And the families,” Barrett said, and Johansson seemed to wince a little.

  “It’s your confession,” Johansson said. “You were the one who finally got it, and I’ll let you share it with them.”

  As if that were a privilege and not a burden.

  “Thanks,” Barrett said, and if Johansson heard the sarcasm, he didn’t show it. He was looking at the chair where Kimberly Crepeaux had sat as if she were still in it, and he shook his head.

  “I’m still surprised that it was Mathias,” he said. “Kimmy? Sure. Cass Odom too, may her troubled dead soul rest in peace. I’ve got no problem buying the two of them being involved. But Mathias Burke…what Kimmy described just does not fit the man I know. Or the man anybody around here seems to know.” He shook his head once more, and then he got to his feet. “I’ll update Colleen and then get the divers together. I guess we’ll know by morning, won’t we?”

  “Yes,” Barrett said, the construction-paper card still in his hands. “I guess we will.”

  Johansson clapped him on the shoulder. “Nice work, Barrett. You just closed one. This is your first, right?”

  Was that a question or a reminder?

  “It’s my first,” Barrett acknowledged, and the older cop nodded and congratulated him on his fine work once more before leaving the room to update the prosecutor and assemble the dive team, and then it was just Rob Barrett sitting there with the old sympathy card in his hands, a card written by one eleven-year-old girl to another eleven-year-old girl whose body she would later help wrap in plastic and sink in lonely, dark water.

  I’ve got to tell their parents, he thought, and suddenly he wished Johansson were there, since he wouldn’t have minded passing the buck back to him on this one, even if it meant he had to kiss Johansson’s ass and praise his superior experience. />
  The truth was, Barrett had no experience. At thirty-four, he wasn’t particularly young for an FBI agent, but he’d gotten a late start, spending more than a decade in school before moving into law enforcement. He was in only his ninth month with the Bureau and had worked precisely zero murder cases. That wasn’t abnormal; FBI agents didn’t tend to work murder cases, with some notable famous exceptions: serial killers and profiling. What the FBI offered to homicide detectives was, technically, assistance.

  Rob Barrett had volunteered his assistance in this case. It had taken a little work to convince the Boston special agent in charge, Roxanne Donovan, that her young agent could be spared to rural Maine, but he’d had a few points in his favor. First, one of the victims was the son of a prominent Washington, DC, attorney, and he wanted help from the Bureau. Second, Rob Barrett’s specialty was confessions, and the state police hadn’t been able to crack a potential witness. And finally, Rob Barrett had what he’d termed a familiarity with Port Hope.

  In the end, he suspected the last two elements didn’t matter nearly as much as the first. The Kelly family was influential in DC and angry at the pace of the investigation. When Barrett went to see Roxanne and make his case, he did so knowing that she was already getting requests from DC for some support from her office. During his sales pitch, he’d probably undersold his real interest and his history—check that; familiarity—with Maine.