Mathias Burke addressed the media on the jailhouse steps after his release.
He faced the cameras with poise and reminded the reporters that everyone’s heart should be with the families of Jackie Pelletier and Ian Kelly today and that the injustice Mathias had endured was nothing compared to what they were going through.
But what if the bodies hadn’t been found? a reporter asked. What if there had been no tip, and they’d pressed on with the prosecution based on Kimberly Crepeaux’s confession?
“That’s God’s hand,” Mathias said.
They asked Mathias if he was angry.
“I’m angry with the FBI agent,” he said. “Rob Barrett. Barrett didn’t want the truth. He just wanted to hang me. He accused me of terrible things, and probably a lot of people believed him. Now people know the truth. I’m grateful for that. For myself, sure, but mostly for the families of those two who were killed. As far as what was said about me, the accusations that were made…if you ask me, that’s criminal.”
When questioned as to whether he would pursue civil charges for libel or slander, Mathias demurred.
“I’d win if I did, but I just want to get back to my own life, keep my head down, and put this behind me. It was a nightmare while it lasted, but I’m awake now.”
Kimberly Crepeaux didn’t give a press conference, and she wasn’t released, still serving time for her unrelated charges. Instead, she issued a written statement through her public defender explaining that she’d made up her horrific tale to appease the relentless pressure of Special Agent Rob Barrett.
I was coersed, she wrote. I talked to him over and over and told the truth but he didn’t want to hear the truth. Barrett wanted to hear a spacific story and finally I just told him what he wanted to hear, because I didn’t want to spend my life in prison. He told me if I gave him that story, the one he wanted to hear, then I’d be able to stay out of prison and see my little girl grow up. Who wouldn’t be willing to make that trade?
The dead man’s defense consisted of a single hollow excuse from his cousin.
Bobby Girard claimed that a man in Rockland had borrowed Jeffrey’s battered Dodge Dakota sometime in the summer or fall a year earlier because his own vehicle was in the shop. There was no evidence of this, but even if there had been, it wasn’t a threat to Mathias Burke, who personally owned a truck, a car, and a motorcycle and through his company owned an additional eight trucks and two cargo vans. He was hardly hurting for a vehicle.
The idea that the truck matched most of Kimberly’s description led to theories that she’d been with Girard at the time of the killings. She denied this, and the dead man couldn’t say otherwise.
Barrett’s requests to talk to Kimberly Crepeaux again were denied by Kimberly, Emily Broward, and Colleen Davis. As soon as the police in Maine were through reviewing the shooting at the body shop, he’d been recalled to Boston.
“Do not go back to Port Hope,” Roxanne Donovan said. When he said he still had to clear out his hotel room, she promised to have an agent from the Augusta field office ship his things south.
Boston felt loud and distracted and detached to him. He wanted everyone he passed on the streets to know of the case, the way they had in Maine. He wanted strangers to approach him and tell him a story about the time Howard Pelletier had made Jackie a rocking chair out of busted lobster traps or the time they’d seen Ian and Jackie walking hand in hand down the pier to the Marshall Point Lighthouse.
He wanted people to care.
Considering the kind of publicity he was getting for his role in the case, though, he should have been grateful that they didn’t.
Roxanne Donovan, who’d brought him to Boston because of his expertise in interviewing, interrogation, and confessions, now told him she needed him on document review for a case involving a pharmaceutical company that had endured a wave of citations from the FDA and drawn interest from the Department of Justice. His assignment: read seventy-three thousand pages of e-mails.
“Don’t rush,” she said.
He spoke to Amy Kelly once, and George Kelly didn’t join the conversation. Amy gave Barrett five curt minutes, and this time she did not thank him for his time and effort.
He called Howard Pelletier repeatedly. The phone was never answered, and none of his calls were returned. Barrett left a final message.
“I believed her, Howard,” he said. “And I’m sorry.”
He had questions that he was not allowed to ask, most of them for the medical examiner and some for Emily Broward, but any inquiries to those sources would boomerang back to Roxanne Donovan. He told himself to let it go, to respect the chain of command, but on one of his first days back in Boston, he found himself making a call to the only person in the Bureau he trusted to keep quiet about his interest.
Seth Miller was the first agent Barrett had worked with in Little Rock, and he had IT expertise. He also was due to retire, which Barrett hoped would make him more cooperative. Seth had less to lose than other agents from hearing him out.
“They sending you back to Little Rock?” Seth said, immediately removing any hope that he wasn’t aware of the mess in Maine.
“Not just yet.”
“Good. I’m gone in six weeks, off to the happy hunting ground otherwise known as Florida. It won’t be any fun here without me.”
“I don’t doubt that. Listen, Seth, I’ve got a question, and it needs to stay between us.”
“Oh boy.”
“If you don’t want to hear it, I’ll understand.”
“What are they gonna do, fire me? Let’s have it.”
“How could a man in custody who has absolutely no access to a computer or a phone send an e-mail?”
He was expecting Seth to either laugh at him or lecture him for going on a fool’s errand. He wasn’t prepared for the immediate answer.
“Easily,” Seth said.
“Really? How?”
“A half a dozen ways, but the most effective would probably be a dead man’s switch. You put your message and its recipient into an automated system and instruct it to be sent if you disappear. So every day or every twelve hours, whatever you want, the system sends you a link. If you activate the link, the system knows you’re good, and the e-mail stays on the shelf. But if you fail to interact with the link within a given time frame, the e-mail goes out.”
“Where do you find systems like that?”
“They’re all over. I believe one is literally deadmanswitch.com or something close. Google provides the service for free. You can pick what they call your digital heirs to receive your data, or you can have it all removed. They call that the Inactive Account Manager, which is a term I’ve always loved. So polite, considering the only people who need it are either dead or in prison.”
“In that case, though, I’d know who sent me the e-mail, right?”
“Sure. But it’s amateur hour to reroute that. And somebody good is going to code the switch himself using the same idea. You pick a system to interact with. Could be a text message, an e-mail, or a web page. Could be your Facebook or Twitter account. Then you write a code that watches for your interaction on the site, and if that stops for a prolonged period, an alert goes out. This alert could be an e-mail to one person, or it could be a file dump. You’d better believe the big-time hackers, Snowden, guys like that, have these set up. It’s a beautiful form of protection. If I go missing, your personal e-mails will appear on Facebook, that sort of thing. Makes people think twice about trying to take you out.”
“That sounds pretty sophisticated.”
“Sounds harder than it is. Is your suspect up there a techie?”
“I don’t think so. But he’s smart.”
“Then he could have done it. Give a smart person some time on YouTube, and they can learn how to do a lot of shit that seems out of reach.”
“It came in pretty quickly when he was arrested.”
“Would he have smelled you guys coming for him before the arrest?”
Don’t get your feet wet.
“Absolutely.”
“Then he could have set it up on a short timer, anticipating things. How much investigation have they put into that e-mail?”
“I don’t know. I’m being boxed out.”
“Well, all I can tell you is that the answer to your question is yes, it could have been done. But there’s another possibility too.”
“What’s that?”
“Someone outside of the jail walls sent that e-mail.”
“An accomplice.”
“Possibly,” Seth said. “But that’s not what I was suggesting. I mean the guy outside of the jail walls was the guilty party, Barrett. I’m not in the mix up there, so you tell me: Is there any evidence to suggest what you’re asking about is actually the way it went?”
“No,” Barrett said. “Not yet.”
He made it through the week in Boston, dodging some calls and making others. Liz gave him updates. She told him that Jackie Pelletier’s funeral would be on Saturday and was closed to the media. She was going out to take a few pictures of the headstone afterward.
Barrett knew better than to consider trying to attend. He bought tickets to a Red Sox game and tried to scare up some colleagues willing to go along. Out of pity for him or a love of Fenway, a few agreed.
On the morning Jackie Pelletier was to be laid in the ground beside her mother, Barrett rose early after a restless sleep and went for a run, five miles instead of his usual three, trying to purge all thoughts of Port Hope out in sweat. Afterward he showered and got in the car and turned the air-conditioning on high and angled the vents toward his face, as if he could blast prudence and good sense into his brain.
Then he called his co-workers, said he was feeling under the weather and would have to miss the baseball game, and put the car in gear.
It was a perfect summer weekend and people were scattering out of the city, loading up luggage and kids, throwing kayaks or bicycles onto roof racks, and heading north, some going up the coast, others into the cooler reaches of the mountains and pines. I-95 northbound to Maine was a logjam of Massachusetts plates.
His blended right in.