To everyone's surprise, Barasa flew to Los Angeles. He wanted to clear his name.
When he walked into the FBI's office, Agent Howard asked if he could help him. The man looked lost.
"Yes, I believe the FBI is looking or me."
"And why would that be?"
"My ex's body was found recently. My name is Jacob Martin, but they used to call me Barasa."
Ah. Agent Howard led him to the lead investigator's office. "You can stop looking for Barasa," He told the man hunched over his desk.
"Why?"
"Because he came looking for you."
Right away, they got him into an interview room and they had many questions to ask. When did you see her last? What happened when you broke up? Where have you been since you've seen her last?
"We were together for three years," he told the agent. "We went to a lot of parties together, so my memory of the time is not the clearest. We both used to smoke a lot of weed. Anyway, she decided that she wanted to make up with her parents. She said she felt bad for just leaving them to deal with her children and her life. She got clean, but we didn't have the money to fly her to Los Angeles. She took a job as a stewardess for a cruise line. She was going to either save up the money to go home, or visit her family when she was on a ship that docked in Los Angeles, whichever happened first. The last time I saw her, she got on a ship and sailed away."
"And did you keep in contact with her?"
"Not really. I didn't know where she was going and it seemed like our journeys were diverging. I was just glad to have had some time with her at all. She was quite the woman, don't tell my wife I said that."
"And what have you been doing since?"
"Well, I kept partying, but then I overindulged and blacked out in the street. A woman found me and brought me to her church. I found Jesus and I stopped with my partying and philandering ways. I met my wife there after I became a deacon." He had moved from Fiji to New Zealand, for work and he raised his family there.
They would contact the authorities in both Fiji and New Zealand with his new name to see if he had a record, but for now, they had no evidence that he had done anything.
"Did she talk to you about reconciling with her ex?"
He shook his head. "She said their auras didn't match up at all. She thought he would be better off with a woman with a more stable lifestyle, probably someone like the girlfriend he has."
"And what about her children?"
"I think she wanted to see how they turned out, but I don't think she really saw herself as their mother, more as their life granter."
How incredibly odd?"
"Thank you for your time."
"I'll be on vacation with my wife and children here. We're staying at the Hyatt if you need to find us. They've never been to the states before."
"That was anti-climatic," a team member said as they discussed the interview.
"I have an officer from New Zealand faxing over his record. Apparently, he's only been arrested for a sit in to protest the way the Australian government treats refugees."
"Why would he get arrested in New Zealand for that?"
"The sit in was staged around the Australian Embassy, preventing the workers from entering or leaving the premises."
"His wife was arrested too. Apparently, they are civil rights activists."
"Hardly sounds like the type to kill an ex over jealousy," one commented.
"If he had, it would give him a reason to find Jesus."
When the FBI called off its search for Barasa, everyone wanted to know why. They only said that he made contact with the FBI and came in for a voluntary interview. "At this time, he is not a suspect."
Two plausible persons of interest, one, they know everything about and the other they know nothing about. The media went crazy with this.
"Have you ever had a case where both persons of interest turned themselves into the authorities and voluntarily talked to them only for neither to be declared a suspect?"
"It happens, but sometimes the authorities play their hand closer than they let on. They may favor one as a suspect more than the other, but not have enough proof yet. We will have to watch them closely."
The media was hounding Agent Howard, even though he wasn't on the case. He had been with Major Crimes and he was at least an acquaintance with one of the possible killers.
Every day, they asked him questions as he went in and out of his office. Often times, they were the same questions just different reporters.
"Have you had any contact with Mr. Archibald since the Jane Doe was identified as his ex-wife?"
"No."
"Has your wife?"
"I don't eavesdrop on her phone conversations. I'm not the NSA."
The reporter was stunned as he walked away.
"You're not the NSA!" His boss was not amused.
"I couldn't take it anymore. They ask me the same things every day. I give the same answers every day. I got a little snippy."
"And now everyone from the NSA to the DEA is in a rage because now government surveillance on private citizens is the next big hot topic."
"Well if the NSA didn't illegally give evidence to the DEA only for them to lie about it at trial, then they wouldn't be upset."
"Don't you dare say that on TV. First Amendment my ass I will can you."
Fritz got put on paid leave until this was over, for his sanity.
"You're in the dog house too," Brenda noted when he came home. "I already got a call from my boss and a warning not to do whatever you did."
He laughed. "They just don't give up, do they?"
"Neither do we. They'll catch the guy who did this, find out it wasn't Craig and we'll all be able to move on."
The FBI checked the immigration records now knowing that the victim had wanted to return to LA by boat. For some reason, the records weren't as consolidated as one might have expected. Their previous search attempts had assumed she would have flown back.
"Now they had it. On October 4th 1990, Madison Kate Meyers came back to Los Angeles. There wasn't surveillance footage that went that far back, but they could look for the crewmembers who also came back into the city that day.
One week later, they found a woman who had been a stewardess at the same time.
The FBI sent an agent to Kentucky, where the woman now lived, to speak to her as soon as possible.
"Maddie was nice," the woman told him. "She was the kind of girl who'd cover for you if you had a date with another employee (that was frowned upon). She took an extra shift for me because I was too hungover. It was just a terrible thing to hear she's been dead all this time. I wanted to think she didn't come back to the boat because she fell in love or made up with her family."
"So she was still looking for her family?"
"Absolutely. She wanted to show them that she had changed and she was responsible now. She had taken their earlier kindness for granted."
Unfortunately, the parents were dead now. They didn't know if she had found them or not and if she didn't, they wouldn't know what happened along the way.
"Did she mention her ex-husband?"
"She said he had her kids, but she didn't talk too much about him. She only said the marriage was all wrong. He was the perfect man to bring home to her parents, but he wasn't matched for her at all."
"So her parents liked him."
"She said they loved him more than her."
He wasn't sure what to make of this information. He could only try one more question. "Did she have a new boyfriend?"
The woman gasped. "I almost forgot. She had been dating another crewmember. What was his name? Derek … was it Wilcox. It was Derek Wil something."
"I think we can comb the records for that. You've been most helpful."
They now were looking for a Derek Wil…
Craig had another grueling day at work. UCLA hired security to help keep a buffer from the media, but since it was a public university, there was only so much he could do.
He couldn't wait for this all to be over. His girlfriend couldn't work. Her friends were starting to get put on leave. "I don't know what I can do at this point. I'm losing it," he admitted to his secretary.
She didn't look at him. She had her own secret to bear. Unsure of what she should do, she went to the school's pastor.
"Forgive me Father for I have sinned."
"What happened child of God?"
"I lied, well I didn't quite lie, but I never told the truth."
"The truth will set you free."
She explained her own encounter with Madison Meyers. "All this time, I knew she had come back to Los Angeles and I never told him." At the time she met the woman, she had no idea who she was, but when she met Craig, she figured it out. She never told him. "I don't even know if this information is helpful."
"You never know. The police are trying to retrace her steps."
She decided to talk to the FBI.
"I met Madison in the park about 20 years ago. She showed me two pictures of her boys, taken when they were babies. She said, 'they're older now and they live with their father.'
'Do you get to see them?' I asked her.
She shook her head. 'To be fair, I haven't tried. I just left him with them.'
'Why?'
'I was scared of being a mother, of being tied to a husband who was tied to the military. I thought I'd never have my own life and I was too young. I only wish I could say I'm sorry.'
'I told her it's never too late.' I asked her if he was a kind man and she said that he was. I told her that 'she should send him a letter, see if he would let her visit the boys.'"
"Did she send the letter?"
The woman shrugged. "I only saw her that day. I don't know."
Craig was adamant that he never received this letter. "I never knew that she came home." He had waited for so long. He wished she had just come to his door. He would have let her in. His polygraph didn't show any deception.
"Maybe we're looking at this all wrong," one of the agents said. "We assumed that he would have snapped if she had come back. What if he would have forgiven her? It might have been a reason for this Derek, Wilsomebody to snap."
"He might have thought that she was getting back with Craig if she was writing a letter to him."
"He might have killed her and destroyed the letter."
Dr. Wick had sent the bones to Dr. Hodgins in DC to see if he could find any minute particulates. Imbedded in the bone were flecks of metal, the kind that would be found on a standing post office box, "the kind you would use to send a letter."
"Of course, she didn't have a mailbox in the city, so she went to a box. Derek went with her. He shoved her into it, killing her and he dumped the body."
The boxes were rarely replaced. They searched them one by one and found one with a weird dent. They showed the pictures to Dr. Wick. "This is consistent with her being smashed into it."
They found out who he was. Derek Wilson was a sailor on the same cruise ship as Madison Meyers. An old roommate of his confirmed the relationship and also added he quit his job in Los Angeles. "At the time, I thought he had run off with Madison. Neither of them returned."
He died of a heroin overdose six months later. No one had ever claimed his effects. When the FBI got there, they found a suicide note. "It said, Madison forgive me."
"News just in. The investigation is officially over. The FBI has concluded that a jealous ex-boyfriend, Derek Wilson murdered Madison Meyer. According to the lead investigator, she had decided to try to reach out to her ex-husband and see her children. Sure that she would leave him, he killed her only to commit suicide six months later."
The killer's face was plastered all over the city. Mark almost threw up when he saw the man, the monster who had taken his mother away and he'd never answer for it.
Christine was sitting on his doorstep when he got home from work. "I already talked to your boss. You're going on vacation."
"Where he asked?"
"Anywhere but here."
It was a smart move. The media wanted to hear from Madison's family now that the case was closed.
They went to Fiji. He wanted to see where his mother had gone when her life had become too much for her.
"It's gorgeous here," he admitted as he sat by one of the waterfalls.
Junior just wore headphones everywhere he went. If people tried to talk to him, he'd pretend he couldn't hear them.
There was one woman, however, who would not be ignored. While he was walking home from work, she snatched the cord out of his iPod. When he turned to yell at her, he saw, "Kelly?"
"It's hard to get your attention." She had called out to him and had to chase him down.
"I've been on media avoidance. What are you doing here?"
"I decided I needed to do something for me."
"And your firm doesn't mind?"
"I'm up for my sabbatical year anyway. I told them I'd only take off for six months if I could leave now instead of waiting until January 1st."
"An offer they couldn't refuse."
"I thought so."
"And you came to find me?"
"I did."
"Why?"
"You asked me if I thought my fiancée came across as more of a lover or a husband, and I said neither. When I look at you, I see the potential for both."
"You want to marry me," he teased.
"I said potential, no guarantees."
"How about we start with dinner?"
Craig had his ex-wife buried next to her parents in Florida. It seemed like she should get a reunion with them somehow.
He told his kids about it and they offered to come, but he thought they should stay where they were. They were young. They should enjoy their new loves while everything was too good to be true.
Sharon came with flowers.
"I never knew where she had gone, but I never thought she was dead."
"I know."
"I hope she found peace."
"I think she did. They say the truth sets you free." And now that the truth was out, they were all free.
Over the next few weeks, everyone found himself (or herself) in his proper place. Sharon took over Major Crimes again. Fritz was finally allowed back at work. Barasa and his family flew back to New Zealand. Daisy Wick was back in DC and the FBI was (sort of) sad to see her go.
Provenza only said, "I thank her for every day she made those FBI agents miserable."
Fritz pretended he didn't hear that.
David moved in with Angela. Given their busy schedules, he would only see her regularly if he moved in with her and he was okay with that.
Craig's secretary finally told him about meeting his ex-wife. "I didn't realize it was her, until I saw that picture of her holding your sons. I didn't know what to say at that point. Clearly, she had never written you. I didn't want to open up old wounds."
"It's okay. Even if you had told me, it's not like I would have figured out what happened to her any sooner. I'm just glad you told the FBI, so they could put this all to rest."
"She did care about you. She just didn't think she could be the woman you needed her to be."
"I know."
He thought she would have been a better mother than she had given herself credit for even if she wouldn't have been able to stay with him. He had started writing a book about their life when they were married. He never finished it. It felt incomplete to just say that she ran away to Fiji the end. Now that he had a real ending, he had a manuscript to go back to. He had one more story to tell.
The End