28. MEGHAN

Salt Lake Valley, Utah

Now

Domanska listened to her hunches.

Which was good. Because that's all I could contribute—aside from making her Weimaraner Joey uneasy when I got too close.

So when the nervous waitress from Gracie's couldn't conclusively identify James Carson in the photo lineup of dark-haired, handsome men in their late twenties, Domanska didn't give up.

She watched patiently while the skinny, blue-eyed woman scanned each photo, then nodded her head vigorously. "That one could be him. I think that one, maybe? I remember he was cute. He also had brown hair. So that guy fits the bill." Then she moved on to the next photo, frowned, and said the same thing.

I yelled at her. I sat on top of the desk with the photos and got right up in her eardrum when she scanned the actual photo of James—which had been plucked from his LinkedIn profile. "That's him. You talked to him! Look at it harder. That's the one. Remember."

All it seemed to do was increase her anxiety. By the time she left the police station, she was visibly shaking. There was no way that a judge was going to grant Domanska a warrant based on that ID.

Domanska, however, was unfazed. She thanked the waitress for her time, placed the photos back into a folder, and asked her assistant to find out whether the traffic cameras in Salt Lake and Cedar Fort still had backup footage stored in the system.

When James Carson had moved to Idaho, he'd gotten himself a bus-bench lawyer who ripped Domanska a new one and made a blistering call to her supervisor about harassing his client. She had patiently made a note on his file—but kept it open on her desk.

She wasn't going to let this go.

Which encouraged me to hold on a little longer, too.

When I wasn't peering over Domanska's shoulder at the computer or riding along on calls, I drifted. I spent more and more time with my memories as the days turned into weeks and Domanska worked on other cases. Twenty-six years holds a lot of memories. So there were still plenty of static worlds to explore that allowed me to come back to the land of the living. I savored each one like a rerun of a beloved TV show. But binge-watching memories or TV by yourself gets lonely. I thought about Grandma Rosie—and the others who had passed on—almost constantly.

At first, I stayed at the police station when Domanska went home at night. It never really closed down. There was always something happening. Always somebody waiting for the next bad thing to happen. It was interesting for a while. I saw a lot of things up close that I'd never seen—or wanted to see. A lot of screaming. A lot of crying. A little blood. A lot of phone calls. And a lot of questions with unsettling answers.

I went home with Domanska for the first time the night they got a call from West Valley about an endangered child—and arrested her parents. I didn't want to be in the same building as the quiet, bespeckled man with salt-and-pepper hair who had raped his ten-year-old daughter. Or the mother who knew about it. So when Domanska left for the night in her unmarked cruiser, I got into the passenger seat with her.

I wasn't comfortable staying at her house when she wasn't there. In large part because Joey, the Weimaraner, peed on the carpet then barked until I went outside the one time I tried.

The comfort of going home—to any home—at the end of the day was just enough to keep me going. At the end of every day, we microwaved one of those frozen meal subscription dinners. Then we took Joey for a walk (he tolerated me if Domanska was nearby), came back home, and watched an episode of Parks and Recreation. Sometimes Domanska's daughter dropped by with dinner, and we all went for a walk and ate dinner together.

I thought about my parents a lot. About whether I should have spent my last days haunting them, instead of Domanska and the Salt Lake City police department. I missed my mom and dad, but knowing that I'd see them again—that they would find me in their memories someday—kept me where I was. Grandma Rosie had made it clear that once I made the decision to cross over into that universe of untapped memories, I couldn't come back.

My unfinished business was here. And after months of being alone with my own bones in the mountain, Domanska's place felt like a home of sorts.

* * *

After a few months had passed, I finally won Joey over. When I sat down next to Domanska to watch Parks and Rec, he sometimes sat on my side of the couch, snuggling against the pillow and wedging me into the crack between the cushions. I loved it. It was the only thing that still made me feel like I still existed on this side.

The traffic cams had proven useless. And the woman who had called in the tip about James Carson the previous year didn't have anything more than a hunch to offer, either. She knew James's wife from church. She got a bad feeling about him and thought he looked like the photo that had run in the stories about my murder. But that was all. April Carson—James's wife—wasn't talking either. When Domanska called, she said she'd been advised not to answer any questions by her husband's lawyer. So that was the end of that.

All we had left were hunches. But hunches could only take us so far. Domanska kept my file on her desk. She followed every single new tip that trickled in periodically. She didn't know what I knew, though. And I couldn't tell her.

* * *

We were leaving the station for the night when the call came through on the tip line.

I knew it was different when Domanska's assistant Carly ran outside to the parking lot. With all of the previous tips, she'd sent an email with the information to be filed. The caller was still on the line, Carly said, raising an eyebrow and tilting her head toward the station. "I think you should talk to him if you have a second. He's calling about the KTVD article he saw."

I was out of the cruiser and back inside the station before I saw whether Domanska had decided to follow. Carly didn't get excited easily. And the KTVD article, which had been published a couple of days earlier, had already brought in a new trickle of dead-end tips. It happened any time something new was published about my case.

I watched the blinking red light on the phone in the empty room, waiting for Carly and Domanska to catch up to me and take the held call.

It was a 208 number: Idaho.

Domanska got there before Carly. Her expression was impassive, but I knew her well enough by now that she wouldn't have taken the call if she didn't sense the same electricity in Carly's voice that I had.

"Detective Domanska," she said evenly as she picked up the call. I leaned next to the phone and her ear.

The person on the other end of the line cleared his throat. "Um, hi. I'm really sorry to bother you. It's probably nothing. But I figured you're following up on everything. It might be a waste of your time . . ."

"Spit it out, man!" I yelled into the receiver.

Domanska patiently allowed him to finish then prodded, "You're not bothering anyone, and we are definitely following up on all tips. I appreciate the call. Can you tell me what prompted you to call in?"

The caller let out a rush of air. "Oh, okay. Cool. We got KTVD here a couple months ago—you know the buy-and-sell site? You probably know that. But they have articles in the sidebar, and most of them are total clickbait, but the rest are mostly about Utah—I swear I'm getting to the point—" He cleared his throat again nervously, and I imagined myself banging the phone receiver on the desk in frustration.

"Yes, I'm familiar with KTVD," Domanska responded. "You said you saw the article about Meghan?"

"Yes," he replied, sounding relieved. "And I think I've seen that guy before. I—I think maybe he murdered my friend."

I saw Domanska glance at Carly, who was listening in and recording the call on the other side of the room with a headset. She frowned. He was starting to sound crazy.

"Okay. Can you tell me your friend's name? And your name also, if you don't mind?"

There was another sharp intake of breath on the phone.

"Yeah, my name is Ken. And my friend Skye was murdered three months ago."