“So what do you do if you don’t know where home is? And you don’t know anywhere? She not only has no concept of why she was in the woods, but also no clue as to where she was, where she came from, where she was headed… any of it. She doesn’t know what she was afraid of. She doesn’t know what happened to her. And if she can’t remember who did any of that to her, how can she trust anybody? She said that she heard those men who found her talking and she couldn’t move. Can you imagine how terrified she might’ve been? Even if she doesn’t even know if it was definitely a man who held her captive and caused those injuries on her, just hearing another person’s voice had to be horrifying. She said when she came to, the first thing she thought of was that she needed to get away,” I say.

  “Like someone was chasing her.”

  “Exactly. She was still actively trying to get away from somebody in the deep recesses of her mind. But she couldn’t bring forward who that was. So when she heard somebody else talking, it had to flash through her mind that those men could be the people she was trying to escape from. There are very few occasions in my life and my career when I say something like this, but I am really glad she couldn’t move at that point.

  “She said she couldn’t move any part of her body, and I know if she were able to, she would have gotten up and run again. And if she managed to survive getting off the mountain on the road and in the storm, then she would just be vulnerable to whoever these people are hunting her down.”

  I open my door and lean in to start the engine so I can get the heater pumping. January always feels harsher and colder to me than December. Even if the temperatures hover right around the same level, January has a wet, raw feeling in the air. And with the holiday season and all its glow over, all that’s left is the slushy, gray end of winter.

  “Where are you going?” Noah asks.

  “I haven’t had a decent meal today, so probably that diner that you showed me last spring. Have you eaten? You want to come with me?” I ask.

  “Yeah, actually. I do. I want to say ‘No, there’s too much to do, and I’ll just keep working,’ but the last time I tried that, you didn’t let me get away with that. Since I have absolutely no reason to think anything has changed, I might as well take a break now while there is a lull.”

  “A lull?” I ask. “What kind of lull is there in a situation with a battered woman suffering extensive amnesia being found in the middle of the road?”

  “The kind that comes before you interview the men who found her,” Noah says. “I told the officers to let them go home last night with the understanding that they needed to meet us at the police station this afternoon to give formal statements.”

  “I guess you could consider that a lull. Let’s at least get a good meal in now. There’s no telling what the next few days will bring. Want a ride?” I ask.

  “No, I’ll take my car. The diner is closer to the station than here, so it wouldn’t make sense for you to drive me all the way back here to get my car just for the two of us to go to the same place in the opposite direction again.”

  I give him a nod. “Sounds good. I’ll probably get there first, so I’ll grab a booth.”

  “See you in a bit.”

  I get in the car and attach my phone to its holder before dialing Sam and putting the call on speakerphone so I can pull out of the parking spot.

  “Hey, babe,” my husband says on the second ring.

  “Hey, honey. I’m sorry I didn’t let you know when I got to the hospital. Noah was there, and I ended up getting started right away,” I say.

  “I figured that’s what happened,” he says. “You just said someone found a woman in the middle of the road. Who is she?”

  “Well, that’s the thing. We don’t know. Because she doesn’t know.”

  “She has amnesia?”

  “The only thing she remembers is waking up in the woods. She says she’s not even sure she was actually waking up. She might have just been coming to. Kind of like how Dean describes it after his blackouts. She’s in pretty rough condition. Somebody definitely worked her over. I haven’t talked to a doctor, so I don’t know the full extent of the injuries, but just from what I saw, she definitely went through some pretty terrible treatment. It looks like she was tied up. She’s cut up and bruised. She was barely dressed when they found her. But even with all that going on, she is cognitively in a good place. She can communicate and is far more put together than I would expect,” I say.

  “Just can’t remember anything.”

  “She sounds strong,” Sam says.

  “Or resigned. Probably both. Anyway, I just wanted to check in with you really fast. I’m grabbing some lunch with Noah, and then I’m supposed to talk to the men who found her. I’ll give you a call later. Love you.”

  I end the call just as I’m pulling into the parking lot of the diner. It’s busy with people getting lunch, so I have to put my name on a list when I get inside. I’m scrolling through emails when I notice a woman at a nearby table looking at me. I go back to my phone, but when I glance up again, she’s still staring at me. She leans across the table to the man she’s eating with, then gets up and comes over to me.

  “Hi. Sorry if this is weird. I just heard you put your name on the list. You’re Emma Griffin, right? The FBI agent?”

  “I am.”

  She smiles. “I thought I recognized you.” She closes her eyes briefly and shakes her head like she’s trying to get her thoughts in place. “Sorry, I’m not handling this well.” She takes a breath and lets it out in a firm puff of air. “I had to talk to you. My name is Agatha Collins.”

  The last name immediately strikes a chord. Not because it’s unusual, but because I’ve heard it so often recently. Just a couple of months ago, I sat in a courtroom and watched the beginning of a murder trial. Luther Potter is facing a long list of murder charges, but this case was for the deaths of four friends who left home to pick apples at Copper Mill Fruit Orchard and never returned. Among them was Ruben Collins.

  “Ruben was my cousin,” Agatha tells me. “When we were growing up, he used to come visit my family, and we’d go up to Copper Mill to pick apples or pumpkins. He probably recommended it to the others because of that.

  “Anyway, I was at the hearing, and I saw you, but I couldn’t get to you before you left. I just want to say thank you. I wish there was something else I could say that would really feel like it was impactful enough or good enough for this situation. But that’s all I can say. Thank you. My family waited so long to find out what happened to him. There were so many questions, and it was horrible. I don’t even know how to describe what it’s like to not know what happened to somebody you love. For them to just be going about their life and suddenly they’re just not there anymore and you have no answers.”

  “You don’t have to describe it,” I tell her. “I know.”

  She nods. “I really thought we were never going to find out. I thought I would go through the rest of my life having no idea where he was. We all already accepted a long time ago that he wasn’t alive anymore. Reuben wouldn’t have just disappeared. I’m sure you’ve heard that a thousand times, and you could probably tell me dozens of stories about families who have said that and were wrong.”

  “I could. But it doesn’t matter. I know what you’re saying.”

  She lets out another breath. “We already knew we wouldn’t be bringing him back home alive. But all that mattered to us was that we got to bring him home. And you made that happen. I can’t thank you enough, and I know my family thanks you too.”

  “I had a lot of help. But I’m really glad I got those answers for you. And I know this is just the beginning of the trials and everything. But I can promise you that I will be there. I will make sure that the full story is told.”

  She glances up over my shoulder and takes a step back. “Thank you… again.”

  As she heads back to her table, I look behind me and see that Noah has just entered the diner. Just as he’s stepping up beside me, the hostess takes two laminated menus from a stack on the podium in front of us and smiles at me.

  “Ready?”

  We follow her to a booth and order drinks.

  “Who was that?” Noah asks when the waitress walks away.

  “Agatha Collins. Ruben Collins was her cousin. She just wanted to thank me for finding out what happened to her cousin and the others. She was apparently at the hearing.”

  “That must have been hard for her. There were some things shown in there that couldn’t have been easy to see.”

  The full scope of the evidence against Luther hasn’t been presented, but there were displays of pictures, including several shots of the authorities recovering the car that the group was traveling in when they were abducted and murdered. It was recovered from a nearby lake. Though their bodies were not inside, seeing the car coming up out of the water after languishing there for so many years was stark and unsettling. It was also that specific detail that clinched Luther’s responsibility, proving the grizzly details of his crime that were described with great flourish and admiration in a book presented as fiction written by Lynette Mann, the woman who later became his girlfriend and literal partner in crime.

  “I think there’s a strong possibility that Doe will recover her memories over time. At least some of them,” I say when we’ve gotten our drinks and made our lunch order.

  “Why?”

  “She definitely doesn’t remember anything concrete. I asked a lot of questions, and I gauged not just what she was saying but how she was saying it. Her body language. All those things that could indicate that she was either holding something back or trying to present her answer in a specific way. I have no doubt she really is experiencing amnesia. It could very well be a fugue state in response to the extensive trauma she went through. But when we were talking, she mentioned something. I asked her to just let her mind wander and see if anything popped up. Pretty often, our brains just come up with something pretty much from out of nowhere, and I wanted to see if anything would do that for her. Something as simple as a TV show theme song or a quote she heard recently could help us understand bits about her life, not to mention help jog her memory.

  “She said she couldn’t think of anything. And when I asked her about TV and movies, the first thing out of her mouth was that she never watched TV. She said it without any kind of hesitation. It was just an answer that came out naturally. That’s a memory. She doesn’t know the context of it, but that gives a hint that those memories are just sitting there waiting to be recovered. It might take a while and a lot of work, but she might get them back. Unfortunately, I don’t think a lot of what she’ll remember when they do come back are memories she’ll want to recall. But if nothing else, it will tell us who she is and possibly who did this to her.”

  “It’s not much,” Noah says, “but it’s something.”

  I lift my drink in a toast. “And that’s a place to start.”

  We eat and head to the police station. I haven’t been here since last spring, and it’s nice to fill the time with catching up with some of the officers I worked with in the Cave Creek Ranch investigation. I’m chatting with one about his new baby when Noah lets me know the witnesses who discovered Doe have arrived.

  He has them set up in one of the soft interview rooms. As opposed to a hard room generally used for interrogating suspects, which is stark and usually contains a little more than a table and a couple of chairs, the soft room is meant to be more welcoming. Usually the place where we bring family members of the victim or witnesses, the room is equipped with soft furniture, more space, and subtle pops of color and details, such as a tissue box on the table and a lamp beside the couch. These are meant to put the people brought into them at ease and take away any anxiety and fear that understandably comes from being brought into a police station.

  We want the people in these rooms to feel like we are on the same team, that we are here for them and that they are helping us as much as we are helping them. Their comfort and relaxation are important to the effectiveness of the investigation, but it’s also just a way for us to take care of the people who may feel like they’re collateral damage in the instance of a violent and horrific crime.

  When I walk into the room with an armful of canned cola and snacks, I see two men, probably a few years younger than me, sitting on either end of the couch. Both are in the unofficial uniform of many men from around the area. Plaid button-up shirts tucked into jeans, brown belts, and baseball caps. They shift around uncomfortably when they see me. I already know they have been dealing with their fair share of accusatory glares. That’s to be expected. It shouldn’t be, but there’ll always be that initial gut reaction in some investigators when a person reports a suspicious crime.

  Someone just stumbling on a murder victim. A person supposedly just walking through an area and witnessing a break-in or vandalism. Young men in the vicinity of a mysterious battered woman. It’s easier to jump to conclusions when you have that information. The stark reality is that a lot of the time, when something seems far too convenient, it’s because it is. A person involved in the search party who comes upon a victim in a place nobody else thought to look, or who calls in to report suspicious or even frightening behavior, can all too often be the one responsible just trying to cover their tracks.

  Taking those leaps, though, is detrimental to an actual investigation. If you immediately close yourself off from other possibilities and focus only through a tunnel on the immediate suspect, you may miss the clues that point to the actual culprit. Right now I have no reason to believe that either one of these men had anything to do with what happened to the unidentified woman lying on a hospital bed. So that’s what I’m going with.

  The drinks and snacks are a way to break the ice. It’s a very rare situation when you can’t make a man feel more comfortable and at ease by offering him a soda and something to munch on. At least that’s my experience with the men in my own life.

  I grab a drink and a bag of salt-and-vinegar potato chips, then gesture over the rest of the assortment.

  “Help yourself.”

  They look at each other, then reach forward and grab selections. Noah comes up behind me and takes his own, then sits off to the side on one of the overstuffed armchairs. I’m not hungry right after lunch, so I leave the chips closed and take a sip of the drink.

  “All right. Back there is Detective White. I think you’ve already talked to him. My name is Agent Griffin. I’m with the FBI. And you are?”

  “Leroy,” the man on the left says.

  “Grant,” the other tells me.

  I point at them in turn, repeating their names to establish that I know which is which.

  “Okay, perfect. Like I said, I’m with the FBI. I’m investigating the situation that happened last night. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.”

  “The woman we found,” Grant says.

  “Right,” I say. “I know you’ve already talked to some officers about what happened, but since I’m just coming into this, I’d appreciate it if you told me what happened in your own words. Just give me a step-by-step from wherever you think the beginning is up until the police got there.”

  I listen as they describe driving down the narrow mountain road in the rainy darkness and being forced off by another car driving the opposite way in their lane.

  “But you don’t know who that driver was?” I ask.

  “No,” Grant says. “I got out to yell at him, but the guy didn’t get out of his car, and then he just drove off.”

  “Did you see any details about the car? Anything that would be readily identifiable? I know it was dark and rainy, and you probably weren’t thinking it was important to pay close attention to the car, but did anything stand out to you? Damage to the car? A strange color? Stickers in the windows? Anything?”

  Neither man can recall anything significant about the car.

  “Why does it matter?” Leroy asks. “I mean, she was already there when the car was driving toward us.”

  “They think we’re lying about there being another car,” Grant tells him. “They think we made it up.”

  “I didn’t say that,” I say.

  “It’s pretty obvious. You think we had something to do with her being there. Like we dumped her on the road and then called police to cover it up.”

  “Why would we do that?” Leroy asks. “We almost hit a tree. I had to crawl over the driver’s seat just to get out of the truck. Another car was there. The guy just didn’t want to stop because he saw her lying there.”

  “I’m not accusing anybody of doing anything,” I say. “I want to make that very clear. I’m just trying to get a full picture of what happened. The thing is, you don’t know where that other car was coming from. You don’t know if they could have driven down one direction, dumped her out, and driven back up the other way. We want to know everything that happened. I understand that this is frustrating. I’m just asking for your cooperation so that we can find out what’s happening.”

  Grant doesn’t look convinced, but they continue the story. They detail finding the woman lying on the ground, not moving. They don’t say it outright, but it’s obvious both were afraid she was dead when they saw her. It wasn’t until they got right up on her that they realized she was breathing. From there, they stayed with her until the police and rescue squad came, using a flashlight to draw attention to them being there so that any other cars that came by didn’t hit them.

  “Did you see anything else? Again, I know you were focused on her, and that makes absolute sense. If you didn’t see anything else, just tell me that. But I want you to think about while you were standing there. Did you notice anything off the side of the road in either direction? Did it seem like there might have been another person there?”

  “No,” they both respond.

  “Okay. I’ll ask for verification of where both of you were before this time. Again, I am not accusing either one of you of doing anything. This is just a basic part of an investigation. I have to eliminate people before I can count anybody in, essentially.”