CHAPTER 34

Ridley dropped me off at the Times office even though it was after business hours. I had texted Holman and told him to stay there until I got back. When I walked into the office, Kay Jackson was waiting too.

“What did you learn?” Holman asked before I even had a chance to take off my coat. “And why wouldn’t you tell me over the phone?”

Call me paranoid, but after realizing how vulnerable we all are due to the technology we rely on, I was hesitant to talk about any of this stuff over the phone—and I certainly didn’t want to put any of my suspicions in writing over text. For all I knew, Shaquille O’Neal could somehow be listening to every word I say. Granted, that was a crazy thought, but this was nothing if not a time of crazy thoughts. Ash had put it perfectly: All of this felt very cloak-and-dagger. Nothing seemed out of bounds.

As soon as I started to explain what I’d learned, a crease appeared between Kay’s eyes and stayed there throughout the telling of my entire story. The more I talked, the more nervous I became. I knew it sounded bizarre—a half-century-old identity theft and two murders to cover it up were just way too far-fetched. Kay and Holman were journalists, first and foremost; they weren’t exactly big supporters of wild conspiracy theories. When I finished talking, they both gaped at me.

“Well?” I said. “Say something. Do you think I’m crazy?”

“You’re definitely crazy,” Kay said, and my heart sank. “But it fits.”

I looked up at her, then at Holman.

He blinked at me, twice. “The problem is going to be how to prove it.”

Thank the Lord, they believed me. Or at least were willing to follow the theory to see where it led. I was so happy, I felt like I might float up to the ceiling. I opened my notebook to check the list I’d made during the car ride home from Silver Meadows. “I’m going to contact Greensville Correctional to make another appointment with Tackett. We definitely need to see him again. I want to tell him I know about Bethany Miller and lay out my identity-theft scenario for him.”

“And you think he’ll tell you if you’re right?” Kay looked skeptical.

“If we’re on the right track about Bethany, he may get scared that we’re going to discover who killed Albert and Flick without him. The more we know without him, the less useful he becomes—and the less likely it becomes that he’ll get a sweeter deal out of Lindsey.”

“What about the recording that supposedly proves who the killer is?” Holman asked.

“Yeah,” Kay said. “We need that tape.”

I tapped my pen against my lip as I thought that through. Kay was right. We needed that tape, but Tackett wasn’t going to give it up easily. “I wonder if we could come at this from the other direction, by putting pressure on Shannon. I have half a mind to call her and just tell her I know about her secret,” I said. “That would at least force her to do or say something.”

Holman, ever the rational one, said, “I think we should be cautious about whom we share this information with.”

Kay, equally as rational but more economical with words, simply said, “That is a dangerous idea.”

“Fine, then we’re going to need to get documents,” I said. “Everything we can find relating to Bethany and Shannon Miller—a picture of Bethany Miller before she went to juvie would be ideal, but something tells me we won’t be able to find that. I also want to see if we can access any newspaper stories mentioning a Charlie or Rebecca Miller back in Hudson Falls. Small town, maybe they had their photo in the paper at some point?”

Kay and Holman took notes as I spoke, and it occurred to me (in a very meta-moment) that it was like I was the assigning editor in this case. I was telling them what information was needed, what leads to track down, what sources to hit up. And they were listening. The me of one year ago would never have believed it. A warm glow flared deep inside me and I had to fight to keep the happiness from showing up on my face.

“Should I ask Lindsey to come by?” Holman asked.

“The DA could be a big help in getting some of those arrest records you’re talking about,” Kay added.

“Good idea.” I got out my cell. “I’ll call Carl too. No point in explaining this thing a thousand times.”

Pizza never tasted so good. Lindsey ordered in from West Bay Pie, and the five of us sat in the conference room figuring out what our next steps were going to be. To my surprise, no one rejected the premise that Shannon Claremore had stolen her cousin’s identity and was really Bethany Miller. Where we diverged, however, was on how that figured into Granddaddy’s and Flick’s murders.

“I just don’t see a woman like Shannon Claremore being a cold-blooded killer, Riley,” Carl said. “She doesn’t fit the profile.”

“Even if her secret coming out would mean she could lose everything—her husband, her children, the life they’d built together? She’s broken like a million laws, right?”

Lindsey was sitting next to Holman at the far end of the table and they were deep in private conversation. “Right, Lindsey?” I said, slightly louder.

She looked up when she heard her name, a blush spreading across her cheeks. “What? Oh, right. Well, I don’t know about a million laws, but yes. She would definitely be looking at fraud charges, and possibly more depending on whether or not she had any financial motivation in the crime. But it’s important to note that identity theft didn’t become a federal crime until the Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act of 1998. It carries a maximum prison term of fifteen years and 250,000 dollars.”

I looked at Holman, whose eyeballs practically turned into little red hearts as he listened to Lindsey reciting statistics.

“The legal ramifications aren’t even her biggest problem,” I said, ignoring Holman’s lovesick gaze. “Can you imagine what it would do to her husband’s reputation if it came out that he married a felon who had spent years lying to him and everyone else? It would be a scandal for sure.”

“I wonder how much Wyatt Claremore knows about her past,” Kay said.

“I wondered that too,” I said. “But there’s really no way to know.”

“There’s one way,” Holman said. All eyes turned to him. “We could ask him.”

“Oh no.” Kay was shaking her head from side to side. “Way too early for that. We are not about to start making wild accusations about a very powerful religious leader’s wife without proof.”

“Kay’s right,” Lindsey said. “We have to get Tackett to tell us what he knows—and better yet, give up that recording he has. If it’s Shannon Claremore admitting to a role in Albert’s death, then there would certainly be cause to move forward. We need something concrete—either proof of her identity theft or proof of crimes committed to conceal that—before we can take any sort of prosecutorial steps forward.”

“But we’re not prosecutors,” I said, gesturing to the side of the table that Kay, Holman, and I were sitting on. “What if we told Tackett that we found his tape—even if it’s not true—maybe that’d get him to slip up and say something about where it is or what’s on it?”

“We are journalists, Riley, not the gang from Scooby-Doo,” Kay said with more than a little judgment in her tone. “Our job is to report the facts of a story, not get involved in altering them.”

My cheeks stung like I’d been slapped. She was right, but still. I got up from the conference table to fill up my water bottle (and hide my humiliation), and a few seconds later Holman joined me at the sink. Our backs were to the others, who carried on with their conversation.

He lowered his voice. “We will figure this out, Riley. We have the resources of law enforcement behind us. Going off and doing something impetuous would only harm our chances of bringing those responsible to justice.”

I titled my head to look at him. “But we’re so close… don’t I owe it to Granddaddy and Flick to do whatever I can to find their killer?”

Holman’s eyes were magnified by his thick glasses, and at this close proximity they looked about three times bigger than they actually were. “They were both scrupulous journalists; you owe it to them to be one too.”

Damn, I hated it when he was right. We rejoined the others and spent another hour or so talking through what we knew, what we suspected, and what each of us was going to do in service of finding the truth. Carl and Lindsey were going to Greensville first thing in the morning to interview Tackett. They debated whether or not to include Sheriff Clark in the interview and ultimately decided not to.

“I’d like to ask Tackett what he and Clark talked about today, if they did indeed talk,” Lindsey said. “If Clark is working on behalf of the DEA to try to persuade him to flip on the Romeros, we need to know that.”

Kay told Holman to try to schedule an in-person interview with Shannon Claremore. I tried not to be offended when she gave him that task instead of me. I knew it was because she didn’t trust me to stay within the lines on this case, which I guess was fair, but it still hurt. This whole investigation had been my baby so far. We were working off leads I’d chased down, theories I’d pieced together. My earlier sense of pride and accomplishment evaporated, leaving a dull resentment in its place.

Kay assigned me the job of digging into Charlie and Bethany Miller’s past to see what information could be found on that branch of the Miller family in Hudson Falls in the late 1960s. I was to try to determine what became of Bethany Miller after she was released from the juvenile detention facility. I would do my best to find any old friends from high school and see if they knew what became of her, but I had a feeling this would yield nothing. If Bethany Miller had gone to all the trouble to steal a new life—and had killed twice to protect it—I imagine she cleaned up her trail of breadcrumbs long ago.