Chapter 94: Proximity

The AUSA call lasted ninety minutes.

The prosecutor's name was Reyes—a woman who operated with the specific efficiency of someone who had been handed a major federal case on four days' notice and was performing the rapid intake of evidence required to not look unprepared. She had questions about the interview record, about the evidentiary chain for the workshop evidence, about the admissibility of Hayes's statements given that he had waived Miranda voluntarily. She had fewer questions about the personal dimensions of the case than Sarah had expected. Either Walsh had briefed her thoroughly or she had decided the personal dimensions were not her concern until trial preparation.

"We'll proceed with charges under 18 U.S.C. 1111 for the documented murders," Reyes said. "Starting with the seven cases we have the strongest forensic evidence for. The additional counts can be layered in as processing continues. Hayes's interview statements are admissible—he was clear, cooperative, and had been advised of his rights."

"The paper analysis," Sarah said.

"The collagen source—I've seen Tanaka's preliminary report. Until the DNA comparison confirms identity, I'm treating that as a secondary evidentiary track. If it confirms what the preliminary suggests, we add those charges to the indictment separately." Reyes paused. "The personal connection to you—Dr. Chen, I want you to know that I am going to need you to step back from the primary case as a witness. You can continue consulting, but formal evidence processing from this point should go through Drake or Tanaka."

"Understood," Sarah said.

"The third letter from the box—I'll need that for the record."

"It's in the chain of custody. I've flagged it as sensitive material."

"Sensitive or not, it's evidence." A brief pause. "I read your report from this morning's session. You believe Emily Chen is alive and in voluntary hiding."

"I believe the evidence is consistent with that."

"If she's alive and voluntary, she's a witness, not a victim. That changes her legal status considerably." Another pause. "It also changes the complexity of the case. A defendant whose 'victim' chose her disappearance is going to argue consent. I want to be prepared for that argument."

"Hayes's crimes and Emily's choices are separate matters," Sarah said.

"In moral terms, yes. In trial terms, a defense attorney will try to conflate them. I want the evidentiary foundation solid before that argument can be made." Reyes's voice had the precision of a person who had thought about this already and was informing rather than exploring. "Find Emily Chen. Her testimony—whatever it contains—is more valuable than her continued absence."

The call ended.

Sarah sat at the conference table with her legal pad and considered what Reyes had said. *Find Emily Chen.* As though the finding were a procedural step. As though the finding were not twenty years in the making and more complicated than any trial preparation.

Marcus came back with coffee. Sat across from her. His wedding ring caught the overhead light as he picked up his own cup. He did not look at it. He did not look away from it either—he looked at Sarah the same way he'd been looking at her all morning, with the calibrated attention of a person who has made a decision and is waiting to see what happens with it.

"Margaret's phone," Sarah said.

"Tommy's on it." Marcus set the cup down. Picked up his legal pad. "She stopped overnight in Missoula. Moving again this morning. At her current rate she'll be in Wyoming tonight, which puts her in the eastern time zone by tomorrow afternoon."

"She's two days out."

"Maybe less if she pushes it." He paused. "Do you want to go toward her, or let her come to you?"

Sarah thought about it. The two days. Her father in the hospital in Woodbridge, stable, waiting for additional test results. The DNA comparison running at the Richmond lab. The charging timeline that Reyes was building. The evidence boxes in the Winchester field office. The lotus unfolded on the conference table, the three sentences visible to anyone who came into the room.

*Find the fold, and you will find me.*

"Let her come," Sarah said. "She's not running. She's driving at highway speeds with regular stops. This is a person making a deliberate approach. I'm not going to disrupt that."

"Walsh isn't going to like waiting."

"Walsh can redirect her concerns to the charging timeline, which is generating about eight hundred legal questions for Reyes." Sarah picked up her pen. "Has Tommy looked at the archive for any location data? The photographs in the 2019-2024 folders—can he pull any geographic metadata?"

"He's working it." Marcus paused. "Chen. The DNA result. When it comes back."

"When it comes back."

"If it confirms—if Emily is the source of the paper—that's a charge. That's the use of a person's biological material without—"

"Without her consent, in the legal definition, yes." Sarah looked at her legal pad. The blank page. The pen she hadn't moved. "Which is where Hayes's argument that she consented collides with the law's definition of what consent requires. A seventeen-year-old can't legally consent to that kind of arrangement, regardless of what she chose."

"So even if she chose, it doesn't protect him."

"Even if she chose, it doesn't protect him from the charges related to her. He is still a murderer. Thirty-one confirmed deaths. Whatever Emily did has no bearing on that."

"It has bearing on you."

She looked at him.

"You've spent twenty years on a case that you understood one way," Marcus said. "And now you understand it differently. That's not nothing."

"No," she said. "It's not."

She didn't say anything more. Marcus didn't push. Eight years had given them enough shorthand for the things that didn't need words.

Tommy knocked on the conference room door. "I've got something from the archive metadata."

He had a printout. A list of GPS coordinates extracted from the EXIF data embedded in the photographs in Hayes's archive folders. Not all of the photographs had GPS data—many of the older ones were from digital cameras that predated GPS embedding—but the post-2012 photographs, the ones taken with smartphones or modern digital cameras, carried the data.

"The Portland photographs are exactly where you'd expect—Portland, various neighborhoods, consistent with Margaret's known address." Tommy put the printout on the table. "But there's another set of GPS coordinates that appears in about sixty photographs between 2014 and this year. Not Portland. Not any of Hayes's known locations." He pointed to a cluster on a rough map he'd printed. "Central Montana. Rural area. Outside a town called Havre, on the high-line near the Canadian border."

Sarah looked at the map. The cluster of coordinates. Rural, remote, north of the interstate.

"He's been there," she said. "Hayes has been to that location at least sixty times in the last ten years."

"The photographs taken at those coordinates are—" Tommy hesitated. "They're of a property. Buildings. An outdoor workspace. And a person. The same person across all sixty photographs. I haven't identified her yet."

He handed Sarah the last page of the printout. A photograph, extracted from the archive, taken at the Montana coordinates. Late afternoon light. An outdoor workspace—a table, paper, tools. And a woman standing at the table with her back partly to the camera, working with paper, the fold in process visible in her hands.

The woman had dark hair. The posture was the posture of someone who had been doing this for a very long time.

Sarah looked at the photograph for a long time.

"That's the location," she said.

"You think she's there?"

"She's driving toward her phone being traceable. She stopped using that phone the moment she knew we could trace it—she'll ditch it at some point. The location in Montana is where she's been for years. It's where she's going back to."

Marcus was looking at the map. "That's not toward us. Montana is northwest of here."

"She's not coming to us," Sarah said. The realization settling in as she said it—the shape of what Margaret's drive actually was. "She drove east to get out of Portland before we traced her Portland address. But she's not coming to Winchester."

"Then why did she make contact?"

"Because she wants us to come to her. To Montana." Sarah looked at the photograph again. The woman at the table. The outdoor workspace. The fold in process. "She gave us the location through Hayes's archive. She sent the crane to confirm she was alive and watching. She's been telling us where to go since the first message."

Marcus sat back. The chair. The overhead light. The sound of him thinking through what this meant for the logistics of a federal investigation. "We'd need Walsh to authorize travel. We'd need a warrant for the property if we want to search it."

"We don't want to search it," Sarah said. "We want to talk to her."

"If Emily is there—"

"When Emily is there, I am not walking in with a warrant and a tactical team." Sarah kept her voice level. The mechanism held. "Emily is a witness and a voluntary adult who has been in a legal gray area for twenty years. She is not a fugitive. There is no warrant for her. If she is in Montana on a property she has legal occupancy of, I am going to drive to Montana and knock on the door."

Marcus looked at her. "Walsh—"

"Can authorize a travel order for two agents to conduct a witness interview in Havre, Montana, which is standard procedure and does not require an explanation of the personal dimensions until we have the DNA result confirming the connection."

"You want to get there before the DNA result."

"I want to get there before anyone decides this requires a larger response." Sarah set the photograph down. Flat on the table. The woman at her work, folding paper, twenty years into a life that everyone in Sarah's world had assumed was over. "I need to see her before the institution gets there. She gets to decide how much of this becomes a federal matter."

"She's a witness to thirty-one murders and a knowing participant in—"

"I know what she is." Sarah looked at Marcus. The partner. The only person in the field office who understood what she was asking. "She's also my sister. And I need to see her first."

Marcus was quiet for a long moment. The wedding ring. The overhead light. The photograph on the table.

"How many miles to Havre, Montana?" he said.

"Tommy," Sarah said.

Tommy was already pulling it up on his laptop. "Approximately 1,900 miles from Winchester. Roughly twenty-eight hours by car. Or—" He checked something. "There's a regional flight to Havre. Out of Dulles. One stop in Denver. Gets you there tomorrow morning if you leave tonight."

"Book it," Sarah said to Tommy.

"Chen." Marcus. The voice he used when he was about to say something she didn't want to hear. "Walsh."

"I'll call her from the car." Sarah was already picking up the case file. The photograph from Tommy's printout. The legal pad. The evidence of a case that had, over four days, become something no case had been before. "She'll authorize it. Because the alternative is waiting three more days for a DNA result and then sending a tactical team to a remote Montana property based on a genetic match to a woman who has been voluntarily absent for twenty years. That creates a media event. This does not."

"And if Emily doesn't want to be found?"

Sarah paused. The conference room. The printout. The woman at the outdoor table, her back partly to the camera, folding paper in the Montana light.

"Then she'll tell me that herself," Sarah said. "And I'll respect it."

She walked toward the door. Stopped.

"Marcus," she said. "Are you coming?"

He looked at the wedding ring. The table. The photograph. The overhead light. The career history of a man who had spent eight years making the decision Sarah was asking him to help make one more time.

"Yeah," he said. "I'm coming."