“That was twenty years ago. It’s not our case.”
“But it feels like the beginning of everything. As if her disappearance was the first domino to fall, setting off what followed. Lizzie goes missing. Her hat turns up on Martin Stanek’s school bus. Suddenly the accusations start flying. The Staneks are monsters! They’ve been molesting kids for months! Why didn’t any of that come out earlier? Not even a hint of it?”
“Someone had to be the first to speak up.”
“And the very first kid who did speak up was Holly Devine.”
“The girl you keep insisting is strange.”
“Whenever I talk to her, I feel like she’s calculating every word. Like we’re playing a chess game and she’s five moves ahead of me.”
Frost’s phone rang. As he turned to answer it, Jane paged through the Lizzie DiPalma documents, wondering if any progress on the case was possible after so much time had passed. The grounds of the Apple Tree Daycare had been thoroughly searched for the girl’s remains. While microscopic traces of her blood were found on the bus, it was explained by an injury a month earlier, when Lizzie had cut her lip. The most powerful evidence against Martin Stanek was Lizzie’s beaded hat, found on the school bus. The hat she’d been wearing when she vanished.
The killer had to be Martin Stanek.
And now he’s dead. End of story. With a sigh of finality, Jane closed the folder.
“You’re not gonna like this,” said Frost, hanging up the phone.
She turned to him. “What now?”
“You know that glass of wine that Bonnie Sandridge sent to Holly in the pub? The lab says there’s no trace of ketamine.” He shook his head. “We have to release her.”
ONLY TWO DAYS AGO, BONNIE Sandridge had been handcuffed and booked as an accessory to murder. Now she swaggered into the Boston PD interview room as if she were the one in charge. Although her red hair was streaked with silver and decades of sun exposure had freckled her skin and etched wrinkles around her eyes, she carried herself with the athletic confidence of a woman who had always been handsome and knew it. She sat down at the interview table and regarded Jane and Frost with a look of scorn.
“Let me guess,” she said. “That glass of wine turned out to be nothing but a glass of wine.”
“We need to have a little chat,” said Jane.
“After the way I was treated? Why should I cooperate?”
“Because we all want to know the truth. Help us figure it out, Bonnie.”
“I think I’d rather expose your incompetence.”
“Ms. Sandridge,” Frost said quietly. “At the time of your arrest, we had every reason to think you were a threat to Holly Devine. The killer had already established a pattern, and when you sent Holly that glass of wine, it fit the pattern.”
“What pattern?”
“On the night Cassandra Coyle was murdered, a waitress at a nearby cocktail lounge thought she saw Cassandra having drinks with a woman.”
“And you thought I was that woman? Oh, dear, but you can’t prove it, because that waitress couldn’t ID me. Am I right?”
Jane said, “Still, you can understand why we arrested you. The night we saw you with Holly, we had to move in fast. We believed she was in imminent danger.”
“Holly Devine in imminent danger?” Bonnie snorted. “That gal could slither out of anything.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Why don’t we ask a man?” Bonnie turned to Frost. “What do you think about Holly, Detective? Let’s hear the first words that pop into your head.”
He hesitated. “She’s intelligent. Attractive—”
“Aha! Attractive. For men, it always comes down to that.”
“Resourceful,” he added quickly.
“You forgot seductive. Manipulative. Opportunistic.”
“What are you getting at, Bonnie?” asked Jane.
The woman turned to Jane. “Holly Devine is a textbook sociopath. Not that I’m being judgmental or anything. Sociopathy must be within the range of normal human behavior, since there seem to be so many people like Holly in this world.” She gave Jane a dismissive look that said: You’ve got some catching up to do. If there was anyone as dogged as a homicide cop, it was an investigative journalist, and Jane felt a grudging sense of respect for the woman. Bonnie wore her crow’s-feet like battle scars, with pride and an attitude. “Don’t tell me you didn’t realize that yourself about Holly? Come on, you’ve talked to the girl.”
“I found her…different,” said Jane.
Bonnie gave a bark of a laugh. “That’s a charitable way of putting it.”
“Why do you think she’s a sociopath? The only time you actually spoke to her was that night in the pub.”
“Have you interviewed her colleagues at Booksmart Media? Asked them what they think of her? Most of the men in her office are just hot to get into her pants, but the women are wary. The women don’t trust her.”
“Maybe they’re jealous,” said Frost.
“No, they really don’t trust her. Cassandra Coyle certainly didn’t.”
Jane frowned. “What did she say about Holly?”
“Cassandra’s the one who brought her up. She bluntly told me not to trust Holly Devine. At Apple Tree, the other kids thought Holly was a strange girl and they avoided her. They sensed there was something not right about her. The only kid who played with her at all was Billy Sullivan.”
“Why did Holly spook the other kids?”
“That’s what I wondered. I wanted to see for myself why they thought the girl was strange, but no one knew how to find her. It took me months to track her down to Booksmart Media. I wanted to interview her for the chapter I’m writing about Apple Tree. She was the first child to accuse the Staneks, and I wondered if she told the truth.”
“There was physical evidence,” said Frost. “She had bruises. Scrapes.”
“She could have gotten those anywhere.”
“Why would she lie about being molested?”
Bonnie shrugged. “Maybe she did it to get attention. Maybe her crazy mother planted the idea in her head. Whatever the reason, Holly chose precisely the right moment to come forward. Lizzie DiPalma had disappeared and all the parents in the neighborhood were scared and searching for answers. Holly gave them one: The evil Staneks did it. Then Billy Sullivan claimed he’d been molested too, and the Staneks were doomed, just like that.” Bonnie snapped her fingers. “Frantic parents questioned their own kids, planting ideas in their heads. No wonder the other children began to repeat the stories. If you’re asked about an incident again and again, you start to believe it happened. You actually start to remember it. The youngest kids were only five, six years old, and every time they were interviewed, their stories grew more bizarre. Flying tigers! Dead babies! The Staneks soaring through the air on broomsticks.” She shook her head. “The jury sent that poor family to prison based on tales told by brainwashed children. Cassandra Coyle was already doubting her own memories of abuse. She said she’d contact the other children, see if they’d be willing to talk to me, but the only name she’d reveal to me was Holly Devine. Who’s now the sole remaining source for my book.”
“What’s the point of this book you’re writing? To exonerate Martin Stanek?”
“The more I learned about the case, the more angry I became. So, yes, proving his innocence was important. It’s still important.” Bonnie blinked and turned away. “Even if he’s dead.”
Jane saw a brief glimmer of tears in the woman’s eyes. Quietly, she asked, “Were you in love with him?”
The question made Bonnie’s chin snap up. She looked at Jane with an expression of surprise. “What?”
“It’s obvious that you’re emotionally involved.”
“Because it matters to me. This story should matter to everyone.”
“Why to you, in particular?”
Bonnie took a breath and sat up straighter. “To answer your question, no. I was not in love with Martin, but I did
feel sorry for him. What was done to him, to his family, makes me so fucking—” She stopped, suddenly too agitated to speak, her hands balled into white, bony fists.
“Why does it make you so angry?” asked Jane.
Bonnie’s fists balled tighter, but she didn’t reply.
“There’s got to be a reason why this matters so much to you. A reason you haven’t told us.”
For a long time Bonnie did not answer. When she finally spoke, it was barely a whisper. “Yes, it does matter. Because it happened to me too.”
Jane and Frost exchanged startled looks. Frost asked gently, “What happened to you, Ms. Sandridge?”
“I had—I have—a daughter,” said Bonnie. “She’s almost twenty-six. Her birthday’s in three weeks, and more than anything I want to be there to celebrate with her. But I’m not allowed to see Amy, or call her, or even write to her.” She squared her shoulders, as if preparing for battle, and looked at Jane and Frost. “When Amy was a freshman in college, she started having panic attacks. She’d wake up at night in her dorm room, convinced that someone was in her room, about to kill her. The attacks were so terrifying, she had to sleep with the light on. The student health service referred her to a therapist, a woman who claimed to be an expert in age regression. The therapist used hypnosis to explore Amy’s childhood memories, trying to find the reason behind these panic attacks.
“For eight months, Amy returned again and again to that…doctor.” Bonnie spat out the title like an epithet and ran a hand over her lips, as if to wipe away the taste of the word. “As the sessions continued, Amy started to remember things. Things that she’d supposedly suppressed. She remembered lying in bed as a child. Remembered the door opening and someone creeping through the darkness. Someone who pulled up her nightgown and…” Bonnie paused. Took another breath and plunged on. “These weren’t vague memories. They were extremely detailed, right down to the objects that her molester used. A wooden spoon. The handle of a hairbrush. The therapist concluded that Amy’s panic attacks resulted from years of abuse she’d suffered as a child. Now that Amy remembered it, it was time for her to confront her attacker.” Bonnie looked up, lashes sparkling with tears. “Me.”
Jane frowned. “Did you really—”
“Of course I didn’t! None of it was true, not one goddamn detail! I was a single mom, and there was no one else living in our house, so of course the guilty party had to be me. I was the monster who sneaked into her room at night and molested her. The monster who turned her into such an emotional wreck. The more sessions Amy had with that therapist, the more anxious she became. I didn’t realize what was going on until one night when it all came to a head.
“I got a call from the therapist to come in for a meeting. I went to her office thinking I’d hear an update on Amy’s progress. Instead, I found myself in a room with my daughter. As the therapist sat listening, encouraging her, Amy proceeded to tell me all the horrible things I’d done to her when she was a child. She’d suddenly remembered the rapes, the abuse, the times I’d shared her with mysterious other people. I told her she’d imagined it all, that I’d never done any of those things, but she was convinced it happened. She remembered it. And then she…” Bonnie wiped away tears. “She told me she would never see or speak to me again, not for as long as she lived. When I tried to reason with her, tried to convince her that these memories were false, the therapist told me I was lucky to get off so easy. They could have called the police and had me arrested. She said Amy was being generous by letting it stay in the past. I was sobbing, pleading with my daughter to listen to me, but she just stood up and walked out of the room. And that was the last time I saw her.” Bonnie ran her hand across her eyes, leaving wet smears on her face. “That’s why the Apple Tree case matters to me.”
“Because you think the same thing happened to the Staneks.”
“Cassandra Coyle thought so too. She told me the case haunted her so deeply that she was inspired to write a movie about it.”
“Her horror film? Mr. Simian?” said Frost.
Bonnie gave an ironic laugh. “Sometimes the only way to tell the truth is through fiction.”
“But her colleagues told us Mr. Simian is about a girl who goes missing. It has nothing to do with kids being molested.”
“The movie is also about how memories get twisted over time. How the truth is simply a matter of your point of view.” Bonnie sat straighter. Back in control. “Have you heard of Dr. Elizabeth Loftus?”
“The psychologist?” said Frost.
Jane glanced at her partner. “How do you know that?”
“Alice told me about her,” said Frost. “The subject came up in one of her law school classes, about witness testimony and whether it’s reliable.” He looked at Bonnie. “Alice is my wife.”
Was your wife, Jane wanted to say but didn’t.
“Back in the mid-nineties,” said Bonnie, “Dr. Loftus published a groundbreaking article in Psychiatric Annals. It described an experiment she conducted using twenty-four adults. In the study, her subjects were reminded of four different events from their childhoods, as recounted by close relatives. But only three of those four events actually happened. One was purely fictional. The subjects were asked to recall details about each of the four events. As the weeks went by, they remembered more and more, and their details became quite elaborate. Even for the event that never happened.
“After the study was over, five of those twenty-four people could not identify which of the four events was the fictional one. They still believed it had really happened to them. In those five people, Dr. Loftus had successfully implanted a false memory. All it takes to implant a memory is to keep telling someone that an event actually occurred. Talk about it as if it’s real, and refer to it again and again. Before long, your subjects will start filling in their own details, adding color and texture, until the memory is as vivid to them as real life. So vivid that the subjects swear it’s true.” She sank back in the chair. “Dr. Loftus’s study was done on adults. Imagine how much easier it would be with children. You can make a young child believe almost anything.”
“Like flying tigers and secret rooms in the basement,” said Frost.
“You’ve read the children’s interviews. You know how outlandish some of their claims were. Animal sacrifice. Devil worship. And, remember, some of those children were only five or six years old, hardly a reliable age, yet their testimony helped send the Stanek family to prison. It was the modern version of the Salem witch trials.” She looked back and forth at Jane and Frost. “Have you met the prosecutor, Erica Shay?”
“Not yet,” said Jane.
“The Apple Tree trial made her career. She couldn’t get a guilty verdict for the Lizzie DiPalma abduction, but she still managed to send the satanic Staneks to prison. Winning was all that mattered to her. Not the truth. Certainly not justice.”
“That’s a pretty serious accusation,” said Frost. “You’re saying the prosecutor knowingly sent innocent people to jail.”
Bonnie nodded. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
—
“TRUST ME. MARTIN STANEK WAS guilty as hell,” said Erica Shay.
At fifty-eight, the prosecutor looked even more formidable than she had in the news clippings from the Apple Tree trial twenty years earlier, when she’d cut a steely figure in tailored skirt suits, her blond hair swept back in a severe chignon. Two decades had whittled away any trace of softness from her face, carving it into sharp angles with jutting cheekbones and a beak-like nose, and her gaze was direct and battle-ready.
“Of course Stanek claimed he was innocent. All the guilty ones do.”
“So do the innocent ones,” said Jane.
Erica leaned back in her chair and gazed coolly across her oak desk at the two detectives sitting in her office. It was a nicely appointed room, one wall covered with her diplomas and awards and a gallery of photos: Erica with a succession of Massachusetts governors. Erica with two senators. Erica with the pr
esident. The wall announced to everyone who entered: I know important people. I’m not to be trifled with.
“I simply did my job. I presented the evidence against Martin Stanek in court,” said Erica. “And the jury decided he was guilty.”
“Of molestation,” said Jane. “But not of Lizzie DiPalma’s abduction.”
Erica’s eyes flashed with annoyance. “That was the jury’s mistake. I didn’t doubt for an instant that he killed her. We all know he did it.”
“Do we?”
“All you have to do is look at the evidence. Nine-year-old Lizzie DiPalma goes missing on a Saturday afternoon. She leaves her house, wearing her favorite knitted hat with silver beads. She gets on her bike, rides away, and she’s never seen again. Her bike’s found at the roadside a mile and a half away. Two days later, Lizzie’s hat—very distinctive, bought during a family trip to Paris—is found on the Apple Tree school bus by one of the kids. Now tell me, how does that hat end up on a vehicle that only Martin Stanek drove? A vehicle that was supposedly parked and locked in the Stanek driveway the entire weekend? Traces of Lizzie’s blood were found on the floor of that same bus.”
“Lizzie cut her lip on the bus a month earlier. Her mother shared that detail at trial.”
Erica gave a snort. “Lizzie’s mother was an idiot. She never should have revealed that information.”
“It was the truth, wasn’t it?”
“All it did was put reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors. It made them question everything else we presented. Then the defense concocted the absurd theory that someone else abducted Lizzie. That the girl might still be alive.” Erica shook her head in disgust. “At least we got a guilty verdict for the abuse charges. Twenty years in prison was less than I hoped for, but that’s twenty years when Stanek couldn’t hurt anyone. As soon as he walked free, it didn’t take him long to go right back to killing. He wanted revenge. Those children told the truth, and it sent him to prison.”
“The truth? Some of the claims were pretty far-fetched,” said Frost.