The Outsider

July 18-20

Ralph is on mandatory leave. He is thinking of retiring because his misjudgment helped get Terry and Ollie Peterson killed. Samuels tells him that Terry’s death was just frontier justice; his dying declaration of innocence doesn’t prove anything. Samuels then tells Ralph they have tracked the white van used to abduct Frankie. It was stolen in New York and dumped in Dayton, Ohio, at about the same time Terry was visiting his father in the memory care facility.

To Ralph and Samuels, finding the van doesn’t seem important; Terry’s death effectively closed the case, and all the remaining questions will have to go unanswered. Samuels recounts a story from an old magazine about a woman whose husband goes missing. She follows his footsteps across the sand until they disappear; she never sees him again. Samuels says that’s what happened with Terry, who disappeared before they found all the clues. They will never know all the answers, but they know the truth.

Ralph counters with an episode from his childhood. He cut open a perfectly fresh cantaloupe—his favorite fruit—and found it full of maggots. For him, the Maitland case is like that. It looked perfect on the outside, but when they opened it up, it was full of maggots.