But in the reflection, the officer wasn’t investigating a crime scene. He was pointing at Abby. Giving a signal.
The case file on Danny Winters was thin. Too thin. The driver was never found. The only witness recanted within 48 hours. The detective assigned? The same retired officer who had left Taggart the note.
Inside was a single photograph and a handwritten note from a retired officer, now deceased. The photo showed a girl, maybe seventeen, with dark hair cut bluntly at her jaw and eyes that seemed to look past the camera, through the lens, through time itself. She was standing in front of a crumbling stone wall, her arms crossed, a small silver locket around her neck. On the back, in faded ink: Abby Winters, Roxbury, April 2004. abby winters 2004
He opened the folder.
His first stop was the address in Roxbury—a three-decker that had been condemned in 2010 and now stood like a rotten tooth among gentrifying townhouses. The basement door was chained, but the chain was new. Too new. But in the reflection, the officer wasn’t investigating
He looked down at the evidence box again. Tucked beneath the photo, he now saw, was the locket itself—he had missed it the first time. He opened it.
Taggart pocketed the locket, checked his sidearm, and walked out into the April rain. The case file on Danny Winters was thin
He spent the next three days tracking down Abby Winters’s surviving high school friend, a woman named Lena Ortiz now living in Portland, Maine. Lena didn’t seem surprised to see him.
