December’s visit with Detective Reynolds came a week before Christmas, our last meeting before we started our semi-annual meetings. Hannah was at school in the morning, and I settled Leah in front of the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse while I made coffee.
Matt was fifteen minutes late, but I forgave him when he handed me a brown paper bag, the scent of sugar and cream drifting up as soon as I unfolded the top. He settled at the kitchen table and opened the file he usually brought with him to review latest developments with me. I had always thought it pathetically thin. It looked almost… thick.
True to form, he did not mince words. “Claire, there’s been a development.”
My heart thudded. I sat in a chair across from him and stared at the file.
“I don’t beat around the bush, so I’m going to start the story and tell it to the end. You can interrupt if you have questions, but try to wait until I’m done, okay?”
I nodded. I glanced at Leah sitting on the floor in the living room, absorbed in the television.
“About a year ago, a car went into the Onondaga Lake. Do you know where that is?”
I shook my head.
“It’s north of Syracuse, New York, about an hour and a half drive from Rochester. Two people were in the car, a woman and a man. A few months ago, I began researching unidentified deceased males in a concentric pattern around Rochester. I had a few leads, but none of them panned out. Eventually we identified them all, except for the passenger in this car. Their bodies were found about three months ago, in the car at the bottom of the lake. The police were trolling the lake for a teenage girl missing from the Syracuse area, believed to have drowned. They found the car at the bottom. The lake is sixty-five feet at its deepest. It was a rental car, leased to a woman named…” He consulted his file. “Melissa Richards. Does that name sound familiar to you?”
“No, I’ve never heard it before.”
“Basically, they located two pelvic bones held in place by seatbelts and the crushed car. There was a femur and a tibia found in the car, but no other bones. They believe the driver was a woman and the passenger was a man, based on the width of the pelvic bones. Do you have any questions so far?”
“What happened to the rest of the bones?” I asked, curious as to how two whole skeletons could just disappear.
He coughed and looked down at the file. “When the car went into the lake, the passenger broke the window, trying to get out, which had to have happened prior to the car sinking, otherwise, the pressure would be too great. Apparently, neither could get out of their seatbelts, so they drowned.” He averted his eyes as he said the last words. “And the Onondaga Lake is unique in that it is the fastest flushing natural lake in the United States, about four or five times in a heavy rainfall year. The lake discharges into the Seneca River and the water eventually ends up in Lake Ontario. So with that depth, and that level of water exchange, we wouldn’t expect to find intact skeletons nine months after they were submerged.” He spoke in a clinical voice, devoid of emotion.
I pushed images of Greg in a sinking car out of my mind. I thought back to the hairbrush and other personal items of Greg’s that the police had taken from the house. “What about DNA?” I read the news, and knew they could do amazing things with bones.
“Normally, yes, we could work on that, but contrary to what you see in the movies, it’s nearly impossible to extract a viable DNA sample from bones that have been underwater for almost a year. So we went back to Melissa Richards. Richards had been reported as missing around the same time as your husband, and her case was closed a month ago when it was concluded that she was in the car. She was from Syracuse. Did Greg have any connection to Syracuse at all that you can think of?”
I shook my head. “Nothing other than the obvious connection to Rochester.”
“I’ve been working with the Syracuse police, and they’ve dissected every avenue of Richards’s life. We looked into boyfriends, family members, and friends. There is no other person in her life that would be an obvious candidate for the passenger. She was last seen alone.”
“Matt,” I began finally, not exactly sure what I was going to ask with the questions tumbling fast and furious over each other in my mind. “Do you really believe Greg was in the car with her?”
“It’s worth considering,” he replied heavily. “But I don’t know that we’ll ever know for sure.”
After Detective Reynolds left, I called Mom and relayed the whole conversation.
“How are you? Are you okay?” she asked.