The next morning, Travis was invited to a meeting at One Police Plaza at the request of Bowners. The meeting started at 11.30 a.m. and was still going two hours later. He sat in a conference room with people he barely knew as Bowners, on a video feed from Suffolk County Police HQ, described what she and Travis had talked about the day before: the dream.
As soon as they’d realized that Rebekah’s dream was a memory, that Daniel Foley wasn’t some harmless ladies’ man but a rapist, potentially many times over, Travis had floated the idea to Bowners that maybe he should be the one to tell Rebekah. They had established a relationship, it felt to Travis like she trusted him, and it wasn’t arrogant to suggest that it might be better coming from him. But Bowners had shut him down, perhaps understandably: he wasn’t a cop any more. At best he was a consultant, at worst just a civilian. So Bowners had gone to the house last night, and on the way back to Long Island she’d called Travis and told him how it had gone: ‘She’s in shock, as you might expect. She’s angry, confused.’
‘I’ll give her a call.’
‘No,’ Bowners had said. ‘Hold off for now. It’s important we don’t overload her. I’ve spoken to someone on the CVAP team and she’s going to call Rebekah tonight, then go to the house in the morning.’
The Crime Victim Assistance Program. It was the right thing to do, the correct procedure, and if Travis was still a cop, he would have done exactly the same thing. Even so, he still wanted desperately to talk to Rebekah. He couldn’t make any of this better, but he wanted her to know he was around.
‘One of the theories we’re running with at the moment,’ Bowners was saying, her voice bringing him back to the insipidity of the conference room, ‘is that Daniel Foley either didn’t give Louise enough of the Rohypnol the night he killed her – or she came around much quicker than he’d expected.’
Travis looked at the faces surrounding him.
Some were making notes, some just staring at the image of Bowners on the screen. He turned further in his chair and looked out at the floor. There was no one he knew out there either. Anyone he knew in this building was on the level below, although – as he thought of Amy Houser, of his suspicions about her – he realized that might not be true anymore.
‘After that,’ Bowners was saying, ‘things got out of hand.’
Out of hand.
Three words so insufficient, so utterly inadequate in summing up what had happened to Louise Mason the night she was killed, they were as worthless as no words at all. And even if it had gotten out of hand at the fundraiser, it hadn’t gotten out of hand the night Foley raped Rebekah. His actions weren’t an accident. They were done lucidly, deliberately, and with pre-meditation.
Travis tuned out the rest of the meeting.
And then he started to think about Amy again. Was she involved in all of this? Did he know her at all? Could he trust her?
At 2 p.m., the meeting finished. Travis took the elevator down to the Cold Case Squad, and as he came out, he almost collided with Captain Walker.
‘Mr Travis,’ she said.
Mr again, Travis thought.
‘Captain,’ he responded.
‘Are you here to see Amy?’
Travis glanced across the floor and saw Houser at her desk, hunched over a keyboard. ‘I am,’ he said, stepping past Walker.
‘Look, uh, Frank, I apologize if I was a little short with you the other day.’ Travis stopped as she ground to a halt again. It was obvious that apologies didn’t come easily to her. ‘When you asked about my accent.’
‘Forget it.’
‘It’s been a stressful initiation.’
‘Honestly,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
She nodded her thanks.
‘New Zealand.’
Travis frowned. ‘Pardon me?’
‘I was born in New Zealand, not England, and moved here with my family when I was eight. Some words still slip through, I guess – although I can’t hear them myself any more.’
They talked politely for a while longer, then Travis headed across the floor to Houser while Walker returned to her office.
‘How you doing, Ames?’
Houser startled at the sound of his voice. ‘Trav.’ She snapped closed a file on her desk. ‘Did we have a meeting today?’
‘No. I was upstairs on that other thing.’
‘Oh.’ She nodded. ‘Right. The woman on the island.’
‘Rebekah.’
Houser nodded again. ‘Rebekah. Right.’
They looked at each other for a moment.
‘You okay?’ Travis asked.
‘I’m good,’ she said, breaking into a smile. ‘Sorry. You just caught me at a bad time. I had my head in a million different things.’ She looked at the desk again, and Travis wondered if she was checking to see what she’d left out. His eyes followed hers, pinging between various pieces of paperwork. Nothing immediately registered with him – except, perhaps, for the file she’d closed.
She looked at her watch. ‘You wanna take a walk?’
‘A walk?’ He frowned. ‘Around the office?’
She smiled. ‘No. I thought we could grab a coffee.’
He looked at her desk again.
At the file she’d closed.
‘You’re not too busy?’
She glanced at her watch once more, then stood, sliding the file under another and putting both into the top drawer of her desk.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I can always make time for you.’