12

On the morning of their deaths, Jackie Pelletier and Ian Kelly had known they were bound for a graveyard.

They’d intended to meet at what was known locally as the Orchard Cemetery because they viewed it as a romantic spot. Jackie had been painting the old graveyard for years, and her favorite time was sunrise. The manager of the restaurant where she tended bar had put one of her landscapes on display, and that painting had transfixed Ian Kelly on a June evening when he stopped by for a haddock sandwich and a beer, taking a break from his summer internship with an environmental law center. The manager had seen him admiring the painting and introduced him to the petite young woman with uncommonly dark eyes who’d done the work.

Things had gone fast from there, the way they were supposed to with summer flings. With Ian due back in Virginia by September, and Jackie having no intention of leaving her beloved island, a fling was what it was supposed to be.

However, they both realized early on that there might be more than a surface spark to the relationship, and Ian, at least, had been scared by the idea.

I told my mother about this girl, he’d written in an e-mail to a friend back in Charlottesville. I’ve never talked to my mother about a girl, ever, and yet within a week of meeting Jackie, I’m calling internationally to talk to my mother about her? Tell me something wise about how summer love never lasts, would you?

Rereading that on the night after he’d led the search team out to find their bodies, Barrett felt the eerie prickle that could come so easily when you looked at the last words of the dead. The living had a strange desire to believe the dead had sensed trouble in the air before it landed on them. He thought this was an almost primal response, a desperate hope that there was such a thing as precognition and that tragedy could be averted if you paid enough attention. With Ian and Jackie, though, you didn’t need to cherry-pick anything to build the tragedy—their relationship had begun with the image of a grave.

E-mails, text messages, and witness interviews formed the timeline of Jackie and Ian’s story, and the records always left Barrett with a feeling of voyeurism, because the two had written intimately to—and about—each other almost from the start.

On June 15, Jackie to a friend who’d gone to college in Florida:

Two weeks with him and I am ready to say the unthinkable—I’ve already thought about leaving the island for him. Crazy, and I promise I won’t do it…but doesn’t it suggest something good that I could even let that cross my mind? Leaving this place seems unbearable, but having him leave without me might actually be worse. I want both. I want everything, all the time, is that so selfish? Ha-ha-ha.

On June 19, Ian to his roommate:

Sitting on the deck out here, watching the ocean and thinking about her and I realize that the damn house sits empty most of the year anyhow, and you can finish law school anytime, what the hell harm would a year off be? I can’t get the idea out of my mind. And I can’t tell her that I’m thinking about it. Good ways to ruin things: say I love you on a first date…or propose dropping out of law school for her in the first month. Come up to Maine and talk some sense into me. We’ll party and catch fish, I promise.

On July 12, Jackie to the friend in Florida:

Five Fridays, five walks at sunrise. Who does that? I mean, seriously, outside of a Nicholas Sparks book, what guy does that?

On July 12, Ian to his roommate:

Head…over…heels. I’m doomed.

By August, they’d made plans. Ian would go back to Virginia and complete the first semester of his second year of law school, Jackie would come down for prolonged stretches in October and November, and by December, Ian would be northbound again, transferring to the University of Maine.

His roommate objected strongly to this plan, and Ian responded with polite firmness.

I know you’re right. UVA law is a perennial top 10, and Maine is a perennial…top 200. Thanks for sending me those stats! Ha. I could make an argument that I’m going into environmental law, and Maine is more appealing in that arena than you’d think. I could make an argument that law school rankings are mostly bullshit. I could say a lot of things, but I honestly can’t muster the energy to even be concerned about any of that. I’m happier here than I ever was in Charlottesville, happier in one day with Jackie than I was in two years with Sarah, and I don’t think statistics and rankings and analytics should govern the choice. Life is short, love is rare, and time is easy to waste.

He’d written that sentence exactly three weeks before his death.

Life is short, love is rare, and time is easy to waste.

Barrett read that and Ian’s words began to blur with Kimberly Crepeaux’s.

I looked up at where his head was, the plastic sucked in and moved out and then sucked in again, and I realized he was breathing. Trying to breathe, at least.

He looked at the clock: three a.m.

At three a.m. on September 10, Ian Kelly would have been in his car, probably just crossing over the state line, paying the toll down at York. He’d left at five p.m. intending to drive straight through the night so he could meet Jackie Pelletier at her beloved Orchard Cemetery at sunrise. When police searched his car, they found a speeding ticket from a Massachusetts state trooper. At 2:37 a.m., Ian had been doing eighty-four in a seventy, hustling north. He’d no doubt dropped his speed after the ticket, and as a result, he’d been a little late. The sun was already above the water, and Jackie already walking among the tombstones.

If Ian had laid eyes on her that morning, she was already dead, according to Kimberly Crepeaux’s depiction of events. The place where Jackie had been struck was below a rise, meaning that Ian couldn’t have seen her until he’d crested the hill.

He was up above us a little bit. Standing there, staring. Jackie’s body was between us. It was like a standoff.

If he’d regained consciousness in the truck, he might have seen her again. He would have seen her through milky plastic and a sheen of blood as the truck that carried them rattled over the rural roads. If he was coherent enough to register these things, then his final look at his rare love would have come as three strangers slid her body out of the truck and carried it toward a lonely pond where the water was dark.

I never even saw him get the knife out. I just saw him lean over and stab him through the plastic, right where his heart had to be.

Life was short, love was rare, and time was easy to waste.

Barrett closed the old e-mails, poured his beer into the sink, and returned to the chair, this time carrying the digital recorder on which he’d stored the audio file of Kimberly’s confession and every other interview.

In the days when he’d thought he might remain in academia, his focus had been on interview and interrogation techniques—and particularly on false confessions. He’d come in at a perfect moment, as new technologies in the field and in the courtroom were pressuring law enforcement agencies to change their old approaches. Groups like the Innocence Project were discovering wrongful convictions with appalling ease, and while DNA evidence was often the critical element in winning those cases, false confessions made regular, concerning appearances in explaining how the innocent had ended up behind bars in the first place. Of the first two hundred and fifty people the Innocence Project exonerated through DNA evidence, an astonishing 16 percent had at some point confessed to crimes they hadn’t committed.

When you studied the way detectives were trained, that number became a little less stunning. For decades, law enforcement had taught techniques that were better described as intimidation than interrogation and that focused on nonverbal communication during suspect interviews. Rookie officers and veteran detectives alike were sent to seminars that encouraged them to watch confessions with the sound off in order to hone their ability to identify a lie without hearing the words.

Barrett’s thesis had been devoted to the risks of the Reid technique, one of the commonly taught interrogation methods, and then journal articles had followed, and he was asked to testify as an expert witness in a few trials. His testimony went over well with the jury because the gap between what the public expected and what the police delivered was, in many cases, shocking. In an era of iPhones and cloud computing, the nation’s foremost investigative bodies had long refused to require recording of interviews, asking the courts to trust handwritten notes and memories from field agents. As more juries struggled with this and more false confessions made headlines and evening-news features, prosecutors and judges begged for a change. In 2014, the Department of Justice finally issued a mandate to record interviews, but even then there was some bitter resistance to it.

Barrett’s argument was that the way a story took shape was of imperative importance, and the precise words mattered. Pay more attention to what the suspect said and worry less about whether he picked lint off his shirt or looked up and to the left while he talked. His crusade was academic, and he’d never expected his work to come to the attention of the FBI, but one day he got a call from an agent named Roxanne Donovan. She was on an internal review committee, and she wanted to discuss some of his thoughts. They’d had a good, if at times confrontational, talk, and when she told him that he might benefit from spending more time with the men and women who actually sought confessions, she’d hardly been encouraging him to apply to the FBI Academy.

The conversation had planted a seed, though. Or nurtured one. Barrett’s history of curiosity about police work went back a long way and to more personal places.

Now he sat with his feet up and his eyes closed and played Kimberly Crepeaux’s confession back once more, like a man relaxing to a favorite song.

Be the truth, he thought as Kimberly’s distinct accent took him on the bloody ride. Please be the truth.