The Funeral Was Ready to Start… Until the Man Everyone Buried Walked Into the Church Alive.

Chapter 5

The arrest happened in the church, which was a thing that Miriam did not think happened often and which she hoped to never experience again.

She watched it the way she watched the rest of that day — from a slight distance, as if she were standing just behind herself and observing a woman she recognized having an experience she could not yet fully claim as her own. She had Daniel’s hand in both of hers and Lily on her hip and she watched Warren Gibbs be read his rights in the nave of St. Augustine’s church, and she thought: I have been sitting in this church for years and nothing in my previous experience of it has prepared me for this afternoon.

Reyes was efficient and contained and handled the process with the practiced professionalism of someone accustomed to difficult circumstances, though she suspected he was not accustomed to this particular combination of circumstances. The notebook was bagged. Warren was escorted out. The remaining congregation sat in the pews in the charged, strange air of people who had come for one thing and found themselves inside something entirely different.

The notebook, Reyes explained later, was detailed.

Warren Gibbs had been Daniel’s colleague for four years and his friend, or what Daniel had believed was his friendship, for most of that time. He had introduced Daniel to the insurance agent. He had suggested the policy, framed it as prudent financial planning for a man with a young child and a working spouse, and Daniel had agreed because the suggestion had seemed reasonable from a friend whose financial sense he trusted. The secondary claimant provision had been added later, to a document that Daniel had not reread because Warren had said it was only an update to the beneficiary contact information.

Warren had been in financial difficulty for two years. The firm knew the edges of it. Daniel did not know the full extent. The debt was the kind that accumulated quietly and then suddenly was not quiet, and Warren had looked at the people in his life and made a calculation that was, Reyes said, unfortunately not unprecedented in financial crime, though the specific method here showed considerable planning.

He had planned it for six months.

The boat’s engine housing had been accessed and partially disabled, not enough to prevent the boat from leaving the dock but enough to ensure it would not survive rough water. He had checked the weather. He had watched the forecast build for that weekend and had suggested the fishing trip on Thursday with the timing calculated. He had not anticipated the fast current, the specific geography of where Daniel went into the water, the fishing brothers from the northern run.

He had not anticipated Daniel surviving.

The body in the casket — the John Doe recovered from the water — was, Reyes confirmed, not connected to Daniel’s accident. It was a separate matter, a separate tragedy, a person who had been in the water for reasons that were still being determined and whose family was still being sought. He said this with the specific care of a detective who understood that this person’s story was not a detail in Daniel’s story but a story of its own, with its own weight and its own grief.

Miriam absorbed this.

She thought about the casket in the front of the church. She thought about the family somewhere who did not yet know. She thought about the closed casket and the flowers she had specified as white because Daniel had said white was for the truth of things, and the truth of things was more complicated than she had understood on Thursday when Mrs. Alvarez brought chicken.

“What happens to him?” she asked Reyes, when he had finished, when they were standing in the vestibule with the congregation slowly beginning to filter out around them, quietly, with the subdued consideration of people who understood they were leaving something that needed space to breathe.

“The John Doe?” Reyes said.

“Yes.”

“We’ll work to identify him. It takes time sometimes. But they find most people eventually.” He paused. “When we do, his family will have a chance to give him what today would have been for you.”

Miriam thought about this.

She looked at Daniel, who was standing a few feet away with Marcus and his sister and Lily, all of them in a configuration that looked like what it was — a family that had believed it was broken and was discovering the geography of itself again, checking where the parts were, finding them.

“We’ll be there,” she said. “When there’s a service. We’ll come.”

Reyes looked at her.