He’d been in Montana for six months when Kimberly Crepeaux was released from the Knox County jail without much fanfare. Liz wrote an article noting the release and recapping her role in the murder stories, but by then police and public opinion had been settled: samples of blood taken from the bed of Jeffrey Girard’s truck matched Jackie Pelletier’s and Ian Kelly’s DNA. Kimberly was viewed as a liar, not a murderer, and the only national attention the case got had one theme: Rob Barrett. He didn’t read the stories. The headlines were enough.
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The good news was that his colleagues in Montana either weren’t aware of the case or didn’t give a damn. They had thousands of square miles to cover and no shortage of investigations—there was real estate fraud, regulatory fraud, and all flavors of embezzlement; there were interstate opioid traffickers, motorcycle gangs, and militias. The Wild West had not quite been tamed. He tried to throw himself into the work. Give it time, Roxanne Donovan had said, and he was trying his best to do that.
Then, five weeks after her release, Kimberly Crepeaux called.
Barrett was driving through the flatlands between Billings and the Beartooth Mountains en route to interview a high-school student who’d been making repeated bomb threats to the sheriff’s department, which was interesting because the sheriff was his uncle. Then the phone rang and he saw the 207 area code, which covered the entire state of Maine, and his mind was out of the mountains and back on the coast.
He let the call go to voice mail, then played the message.
“Barrett, it’s Kimberly Crepeaux. I wanted to ask you about something. You’re not the right person but I gotta figure out who the right person is.” Her voice was shaking and slurred. It was evident that she’d been drinking and that she was scared.
“Nobody believes me, and nobody cares,” she said. “Call me back, please.”
He didn’t call back. He’d already been taken for a long and painful ride by Kimberly. He knew better than to give her another chance.
She called again two weeks later, and again he didn’t take the call but listened to the message.
She was sober this time, and she had clearer requests. She demanded compensation for the way she’d been badgered and intimidated and coerced by the FBI—by him, specifically—and in exchange, he would avoid a “big-ass lawsuit.”
All she wanted, she said, was a decent house and a decent job someplace warm. Oh, and ideally the house would have a fence. She’d like to bring her dogs, and Sparky and Bama needed room to run.
He did not return that call either.
In March, a blizzard swept down out of Canada and blasted Bozeman for three straight days, a howling, relentless wind that seemed determined to peel the houses right off their foundations. It was during the worst of the storm that Howard Pelletier called, and Barrett never saw the number, just received the message once his signal was back.
Howard wanted to tell him that he thought people were wrong about Girard and that maybe Barrett had been right the whole time.
For an instant, this was a whisper of validation for the theory that Barrett had never been able to clear completely from his mind. Then Howard explained his reasoning.
He’d had a dream, he told Barrett. In the dream Jackie was in the water, not a trash bag or a barrel, she was down in the water and the water was still, not like the ocean but more like a pond. She was down in the weeds and even the tops of the weeds didn’t move, so Howard knew that it was calm, inland water. A fish had passed by in a flicker of white belly and dark spine, and he was sure that it was a smallmouth bass and not a saltwater fish. Jackie’s eyes were wide and alert, and right before Howard woke up, she’d opened her mouth to speak to him but only bubbles came out.
“I’m thinkin’ maybe you were right all along,” Howard said. “Maybe she was down there, and then he moved her.”
That night Barrett walked to a bar and drank bourbon with beer chasers until the floor was unsteady beneath his feet, and then he stumbled back home through the drifting, blowing snow and fell asleep on the living-room floor, still wearing his boots and his jacket. In the morning, he threw up, chewed Excedrin, and went back to work.
He did not call Howard Pelletier.
The snow had melted and spring rains fell and then burned off beneath an ever-warming sun before he heard from Maine again.
First, it was Kimberly.
“Barrett, I don’t blame you for not wanting to talk to me, but…he’s gonna come for me. He’s angry because I told the truth, and he’s gonna kill me for it.” She was crying, her voice low and choked with tears. “If you could just…if there’s anybody who could help me out here, I really need it. I really need some help.”
He didn’t call her back, but this time he made a recording of the message so it couldn’t be deleted or lost.
For three nights after Kimberly’s call, he played her message back, listening to the panic in her voice and wondering whether there was any legitimacy to it, then cursing himself for being fool enough to let her words drag him back in.
On the fourth night, he found himself playing old recordings of their early interviews. Only the first rounds; he couldn’t listen to the confession again. Not to her coersed words. Not yet, at least.
Then, on the fifth night, Liz called.
“Kimmy Crepeaux was arrested yesterday,” she said. “Up in Bangor. She tried to buy heroin from a police informant.”
He felt strangely pleased by this report, because if Kimberly was using again, then he could dismiss all her paranoia as a product of the drugs.
“I’d love to say I’m surprised,” he said. “But I know better by now.”
Liz went silent. Where he’d expected agreement, there was only a pregnant pause.
“What?” he said.
“She’s out on bail.”
“Of course she is. Her grandmother will go bankrupt getting her out of jail. She probably has a reverse mortgage on the house by now or some high-interest line of credit with a bondsman.”
“Her grandmother didn’t bail her out,” Liz said. “That’s why I’m calling. I thought you’d want to know who put up the money to get her out of jail.”
“Who was it?”
“Howard Pelletier.”