Blinking her eyes open, she willed herself to focus. “Alex told his sister he realized that his decisions fifteen years ago had forced other people to live their lives in limbo. He must have been talking about you. Whatever happened back in Wichita, you must have left town together and then gotten in that car accident. The car was stolen, and so he just bailed.”

“I was the one he left behind to pay the price,” Hope said. “Being in a constant state of limbo is the perfect description.”

“When you showed up on his boat, and then ended up moving to town, he must have thought you were running some kind of con. Maybe he thought you were going to blackmail him. Or sell whatever he thought you knew about him and Mullaney to Melanie Locke. But once you were in the house together, and you tried to explain the memory loss, he could have realized the truth about the long-term repercussions of whatever happened back in Wichita. He called his sister and said he was going to turn himself in.”

“But now he’s dead,” Hope said.

“He couldn’t admit to killing Richard Mullaney without explaining his motive. It would have exposed Melanie Locke as the wife of a sex offender and a pedophile.” Lindsay recounted the online conspiracy theories speculating that Melanie had the Wichita police on her payroll.

“So is it possible Melanie somehow found out that Alex was planning to confess?”

“It’s even possible that she was the person he tried to call at LockeHome’s offices—maybe to apologize or tell her he was planning to come clean. She could have been talking to him directly after that with a burner phone. If so, she might have preferred to shut him down rather than have the truth about her husband’s death come out.”

“Especially now that she’s running for office,” Hope added.

“I wonder if the police are even considering the possibility.”

Lindsay opened the browser on her laptop and searched for “Richard Mullaney murder lead detective” and found a Wichita Eagle article that mentioned a Detective Steve Thompson. It was too generic a name to be memorable, but now she wondered if she had seen it before. Was it possible?

She searched for “College Hill Strangler detective suicide partner.” The very first hit was the newspaper article she was thinking of. Same guy.

It made sense. Lindsay’s father would play a role in any major crime that went down in Hopewell. Wichita was bigger than her hometown, but small enough not to have many longtime, go-to homicide detectives.

“Earth to Lindsay. What exactly are you looking at?”

Lindsay pulled up Ellie Hatcher’s number.

34
Wednesday, June 23, 1:05 p.m.

Ellie Hatcher heard a crack as she rose from the floor of her brother’s apartment and arched her back.

Jess apparently heard it, too. “You’re getting old, little sister. Welcome to the club.”