MONTHS BEFORE—IN THE LONG-ago when Sennott hadn’t yet called to say that he would be announcing a break in the case, and Don hadn’t texted, and I didn’t know how long five days could feel—I committed to going to a bachelorette party that weekend in Miami. Now, as I pack my computer and my reporting notebooks next to my bikinis, I can’t imagine anything I would want to be doing less. I email Don from the airport:
Could you sleep last night? I woke up at 3 in the morning with a feeling that’s a cross between Christmas morning and a bad dream. How indescribable it is to be excited for an unknown.
In Miami, I get fingerprinted for keyless access to the apartment of a friend of the bride. I try to be a good guest, but carrying the weight of these suspenseful five days pulls me out of the group. I pour myself a glass of wine and pretend to sip it. I can hear their heels clacking on the marble floor in one of the bathrooms, the whir of the blow dryer. I’m on the couch in the living room, my flats kicked off to one side, studying the evolution of forensic DNA technology, creating elaborate if/then charts for what to do depending on the outcome of Monday’s call.
I become the watcher I had been in middle school again––the one on the outside of the party, stone-cold sober, unable to lose myself in the fun. We have Moët and lobster on the beach and take Ubers for four blocks, and they talk about DUIs and Ambien addictions, and ramming a Vespa into a Bentley in a parking lot and getting away with it. The reckless hedonism they’re able to pull off makes me sad that the universe wasn’t as lenient with Jane.
In the afternoons, I escape to my room and try Sergeant John Fulkerson, hoping he’ll have gotten word, too, and will let something slip. But as has been the case for the last three months—since April, when he told me he was finally retiring from Cambridge PD and that I should try again in a few weeks—he doesn’t pick up. Instead, I draft my next public records request in anticipation that the case might soon be closed.
On Sunday night, the girls and I have our final dinner at Joe’s, an old-school steak house on Miami Beach where the waiters are all men who wear tuxedos and whirl trays of stone crabs and tie you with a bib. My mind is preoccupied with how the humidity must be making all the wood in the place decay. I apologize to the bride that I’ll be leaving for the airport at 6:30 a.m.; I changed my flight to the earliest one out, assuming that if there’s a press conference and I haven’t heard about it yet, I’ll at least get to hear Don’s reaction as close to live as I can get.
The crabs come, and I jam the tiny fork into the stone crab claw. It refuses to break loose and turns to pulp, and with the metal of the fork hitting against the hard shell, creating a cavity, I imagine all too easily that it’s a skull, and I’ve just turned its gray matter to soup. I feel nauseated and stop eating.
We go home, and I head upstairs before midnight, saying goodbye to the girls who are dancing to the Backstreet Boys. I try to make myself realize that this may be the last night I go to sleep not knowing who Jane saw just before she died.