Three days later, the police found the skeletal remains of Louise Mason’s body in salt marshes in Jamaica Bay. There were two other bodies alongside hers: a French exchange student called Mathilde Roux, twenty-two, whose parents in Paris had reported her missing seven days after Louise disappeared; and Carla Lee, thirty-three, who had worked in a bar in Tribeca and was reported missing by her husband three days before Rebekah went to Crow Island. When investigators spoke to family and friends, no one remembered either woman talking about a man matching Daniel Foley’s description, let alone the idea that they might have been raped. Like Rebekah, it appeared the other women had no recall of the night they’d spent with Axel – but Hain had killed them anyway, just to be safe.
Four days after that, a search team returned to Crow Island to recover Johnny. Both days they were there it was overcast, unseasonably cold for early April, and when a task force arrived in Helena, it began to sleet.
With them on that day was a detective called Robert Markowitz, who hadn’t buried Johnny himself but knew where Lorenzo ‘Lima’ Selestino had put him. To Katherine McKenzie, Markowitz had been ‘Bobby’; to the Detective Squad at the 46th Precinct in the Bronx – where he’d worked – he was ‘Mark’. Until that night in her kitchen, Rebekah had only known him as Hain.
He was still working at the 46th Precinct, in Homicide, until the end. The day he’d called Amy Houser’s phone, and Travis had picked up, it was in his capacity as a detective: he genuinely had no idea that Travis would be there. He was calling Amy Houser’s line to ask her about a cold case that might have had links to a murder he was working. The media speculated about how a corrupt cop like Hain could be missed, but particularly how he could disappear for three days after leaving the island. Yet it was easy enough: he didn’t disappear. There were 36,000 officers in the NYPD and 19,000 civilian employees. The day after he’d made it back to the city, he’d taken a sick day to go to the ER and get patched up from the car crash. The day after that, he returned to work at the 46th. His colleagues commented on his injuries, which he said were due to a car accident, but no one suspected a thing. He just did what he always did.
He vanished in plain sight.
And so Hain led the way – in prison greens, handcuffed, bandaged, his weight supported by two officers, slightly woozy from all the painkillers he was on – back to the island’s forest. Detective Bowners had assured Rebekah, before the search team left for Montauk, they would find Johnny and get Rebekah the closure she’d been longing for. And on the afternoon of the first day, she called to fulfil her promise.
‘We’ve found him,’ she said quietly.
Finally, Johnny was coming home.
Katherine McKenzie was primetime news for weeks. The media tore her to pieces, speculating on every aspect of her career, her personal life, the folly and arrogance of her future ambitions. Rebekah read and watched some of it, but much more she ignored. A lot of the time it was because she was fending off interview requests herself, TV appearances, magazine articles, emails from a publisher asking if she wanted to write a book about her experiences. It was the incessant nature of it, the repetition of the questions, the complete absence of empathy, just a sustained parade of faces trying to get her to break.
For weeks, news trucks camped at either end of her road, annoying neighbours, pressuring Rebekah, journalists from papers, websites and TV channels all across the country hounding anyone who strayed onto the block.
Throughout it all, as she left the house to walk Roxie, or took the girls to the park, she remained silent. If there was one thing she’d learned on the island, it was how to do that.
At night, once Gareth had moved out for a second time and in with his new girlfriend, she’d lie awake, or she’d go through to the girls’ bedroom and just sit quietly in the corner, watching them, and she’d think about Katherine McKenzie. And even after everything had come out, every awful detail had run in every news outlet in every city across the country, Rebekah would still feel a weird sense of discord: she hated McKenzie for all she’d been involved in, for every lie, every secret she’d helped conceal, every death; she hated her for all the pain she’d caused the family of Louise Mason, her complicity in the murders of Mathilde Roux and Carla Lee, for how she’d allowed Johnny to be torn away; she hated her for the way that countless women were living victims of Daniel Foley, and although they might have felt that something wasn’t right, that there was a shadow they couldn’t shake, they’d never be certain of why.
And yet …
Despite all of that being true, Rebekah couldn’t deny that McKenzie had had a conscience, a twine of good that had refused to snap, because if she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have sat at the kitchen table in Rebekah’s house and made her confession. All the ambition in the world, all the dirty tricks she’d pulled, all the things she’d allowed to happen on her watch, or turned a blind eye to, couldn’t permanently unbalance her sense of what was right. It had remained unimpaired, even if it had taken her too long to find its hiding place.
And, of course, there was Frank Travis.
They’d found him in the trunk of McKenzie’s Mercedes.
He’d been bound and gagged with duct tape.
McKenzie told the police that she and Hain had planned the day: in the afternoon, they were going to get rid of Travis; in the evening, at precisely the time that the changeover was happening outside Rebekah’s house, and the patrol officers’ guard would be down, they would take care of her too.
Except McKenzie had been lying to Hain.
She’d woken up that morning and decided she couldn’t do it any more. Her confessions, the ghosts she was exorcizing, first with Travis in Starbucks, and later with Rebekah at the house, had been products of that. She was done hiding, done killing. So, she’d talked to Hain, told him that he had too much blood on his hands already and that she would take care of Travis, and although she said Hain was suspicious – ‘because he was always suspicious’ – he agreed. McKenzie was a cop, after all. She might have spent the latter part of her career behind a desk, but she’d walked the beat, she’d been a detective.
She’d drawn her weapon thousands of times.
She’d killed in the line of duty twice.
She and Hain had got Travis into the trunk of the Mercedes, and then she’d said she would call Hain once the deed was done, and Hain could bury the body in the same place he’d put Louise Mason, Mathilde Roux and Carla Lee.
She called him at around 7 p.m. that night and told him it was done, that the Mercedes was parked in a Walgreens a block from Rebekah’s brownstone. That played well with Hain: he once told her that the worst place to leave a car with a body in it was in a deserted back alley. People would pay attention to it there. No one paid attention to it outside a Walgreens. It played even better when she showed him the trunk: Travis was on his belly, his face bloodied, duct tape over his mouth and around his wrists, which were bound behind him. The tableau was good enough for Hain: he said he would put Rebekah’s body inside the car too, once they’d killed her, and drive both her and Travis to Jamaica Bay.
But it was all staged.
Travis’s face was a mess because McKenzie had put a deliberate cut in it and spread the blood out. He was on his belly so it lessened the chances of Hain seeing him breathing. She’d selected a parking bay as far away from any lights as possible because she knew Hain wouldn’t want the trunk open for long in a public place. And all of that was why Rebekah felt so conflicted.
Because Frank Travis was still alive.
Because he got to tell Rebekah all of this himself.
And because they had Katherine McKenzie to thank for it.