The Stand-In Wife and His Only Obsession novel · Chapter 4 of 32

Chapter 4: The Thackeray File

I held the photo by its edges and counted the people who'd been inside that tape.

Six cops. Two EMTs. Marge.

And me.

【Okay who took that???】

【It's Lucas. Obviously. He was RIGHT THERE.】

【He was OUTSIDE the tape, genius. Read the chapter.】

I took it straight to Marge's desk.

She pushed her reading glasses down off her head and looked at it for a long time.

Then she looked at the envelope.

"Typed," she said.

"On a typewriter. Not a printer. See how the e sits low?"

She didn't answer.

She got up, walked to the file room and came back twenty minutes later carrying a dented banker's box.

THACKERAY, L. 2006. OPEN.

She set it on my desk.

"I was thirty-two," she said. "Second year as a detective. I caught this one."

I stared at her.

"You never told me."

"You never married into it before."

She sat on the edge of my desk and talked low.

A twelve-year-old boy taken from the family house in Litchfield on a Tuesday night in November.

No forced entry at the gate.

Nine days.

Four million dollars in cash, paid by the family against police advice.

The boy found at dawn on the Jersey shore, in a boathouse, with a broken left wrist and rope burns to the bone.

"He wouldn't talk," Marge said. "Not to me. Not to anyone. He just kept saying he didn't see a face."

"And then?"

"And then the family closed ranks and the feds lost interest and I got transferred." She tapped the lid. "Twenty years, Jules. I still dream about that boathouse."

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