Chapter 2 — Claire

Her full name was Claire Denise Ashford and she was thirty-six years old and she was not, it turned out, anything I had built in my head.

I had built a woman in expensive shoes. I had built somebody who laughed at a kitchen table.

What Deputy Barrett would not tell me, and what I found in an afternoon because a retired surgeon in a small county has favors owed to him going back forty years, was that Claire Ashford had been the scheduling manager at Daniel’s firm for nine years, that she had been let go eleven days after the arrest, and that she was living at her sister’s house on the north end of town with two suitcases and a cat.

The county had not charged her with anything. That is not the same as leaving her alone. Daniel’s attorney had already filed a witness list with her name on it, and a defense theory does not need to be true to eat a person’s life.

She agreed to meet me at a laundromat on Route 6 at ten in the morning on a Thursday.

I asked why a laundromat and she said because it’s public, it’s loud, there’s nobody in it before noon, and if this goes badly I can leave without anyone watching me leave. She said it in the flat way a person says something she has already had to work out.