Chapter 2
ASHA
“It’s now forty-seven days since fifteen-year-old runaway Sierra Witkowski disappeared. No contact with friends or family and no activity on her phone or bank accounts. But people don’t just vanish. Someone did something to Sierra, and I intend to find out who.”
I paused to take a breath. The sounds of Philadelphia and my neighbors in the apartment complex were mostly muted in the closet space that doubled as my recording studio.
Fine. Studio might be an exaggeration. My closet looked more like a preschooler’s art project, with its egg-carton-clad walls for soundproofing and cables dangling from clothes hangers, but until the podcast gained traction, I was living on a tight budget to make ends meet.
The freelance articles I wrote under a pen name barely covered my rent.
I was about to wrap up the episode, but something compelled me to push for more. To reach inside my listeners’ minds and make them understand why Sierra’s disappearance was so important to me and should be to them.
The teen’s case had gotten under my skin, and I needed answers.
“Maybe some of you are wondering why you should even care about a kid who made bad decisions and mixed with shady people. Sierra’s record isn’t clean, and if she hadn’t left home, perhaps none of this would’ve happened.
But her family is stuck in limbo between grieving the loss of their daughter and clinging to the slightest hope that she’s still alive.
Each day they wake to no news is torture.
And if someone has murdered Sierra, that means there’s a killer in our midst. Maybe you’ve walked past them in the street or brushed shoulders with them on the El.
Maybe next time their victim will be someone you love. ”
I paused again, this time for dramatic effect.
“If you’re listening on YouTube, drop your thoughts in the comments. And if you have information about Sierra’s disappearance, slide into my DMs. The rest of you? Stay sharp and stay safe. Because out there in the shadows, someone could be watching. This is Inferno, signing off.”
I ended the recording and shut my laptop. When I removed my pawnshop headphones, the electrical tape holding them together caught on my hair and tore a few long red strands out from the root.
“Oww. Son of a bitch!”
Things wouldn’t be this way forever. And it wasn’t like I was flat-out broke.
On a scale of filthy rich to homeless, I sat somewhere around splurges on sushi but not booking a vacay to Cabo anytime soon.
On the upside, my followers were steadily increasing, and once earnings from the podcast improved, I’d pimp out my studio so the quality of my shows could mix it with the big kids like The Kill File and Buried Secrets.
I rose from the three-legged wooden stool, rearranged my hanging clothes so they weren’t squished to one side, and packed my microphone into a shoebox for safekeeping.
Later, I’d edit the audio and run it through an app to disguise my voice. There were three benefits to doing that.
One: There was no way I wanted the murderers and rapists I hunted to find me first. Those creeps belonged in prison, not on my doorstep.
Two: The chatter on Reddit and Discord about who Inferno was had shrouded Captive Audience in secrecy, and boosted listeners. People ate that mysterious shit right up.
And three: No one recognized me as the washed-up investigative journalist whose promising career at Philly’s biggest newspaper had taken a monumental fall from grace. I didn’t need my tarnished reputation tainting the podcast.
Getting fired from my dream job had been bad enough. Listening to the HR manager tell me I was lucky Greg Holbrook had decided not to press charges was probably the cherry on top of the shit sundae that had caused my mental health to collapse.
After that, no one would hire me. Not that I wanted to work in the journalism game again. It was too triggering.
But I still had investigative skills, and I wanted the same thing now as when I’d first started my career—to raise awareness of the cases neglected by the cops.
The ones that slipped through the cracks.
The ones people forgot about because there was some shiny new crisis in a city with one-and-a-half-million people.
Because the most vulnerable needed someone to fight for them.
Each victim I helped, each family I made a difference to, made all my hard work on the podcast worth it.
I checked my phone to see if the guy I’d been chatting with on Tinder had replied to my message confirming our date tonight. Nothing.
I opened the app to make sure I’d actually hit send on my message, but his profile had vanished.
Again? Are you kidding me?
That made seven guys in a row who’d ghosted me after making plans. Did they really have to block me instead of sending a quick message with Sorry, not interested?
Fucking men. Lying, untrustworthy assholes. Good for one thing and one thing only, and I didn’t need dick that badly.
Although it’d been an alarmingly long time since I’d ridden a real one.
An email notification popped up on the screen from an address I didn’t recognize. When I clicked on it, I saw an anonymous tip that a girl fitting Sierra’s description had been spotted near a known sex-worker hangout.
Okay. That could be worth looking into.
I texted my cousin Jake to see if he’d accompany me on another walk through one of Philly’s seediest areas.
He didn’t want me to go without him. Kensington wasn’t a place to wander alone at night, and Jake was big, burly, and had a Don’t fuck with me look about him, even if he was a giant teddy bear on the inside.
A couple of minutes later, Jake replied with a thumbs-up emoji.
I stepped off the El at Kensington-Allegheny along with a group of fledgling gang members and several weary-looking factory workers. Pigeons scattered across the cracked concrete platform as stragglers rushed to board the train before the doors closed.
I zipped up my thick coat to stave off the cool evening air, wishing it could also protect me from the sour stench of urine.
Jake would be here soon. I pulled my phone out to let him know I was here already, and found an unread message.
Jake
Sorry cuz. Got called in to work. Rain check?
Sent eighteen minutes ago? Shit. Why hadn’t I seen the notification? There was something weird going on with my phone lately.
Sure. Talk to you soon.
I glanced around the empty station. It wouldn’t be long before another train turned up on the opposite platform to take me homeward.
But since I was here, maybe I could take a quick walk. The location given in the tip wasn’t far from the station. And it was only seven forty-five p.m. Not exactly the witching hour in these parts.
If Sierra was in the area, I needed to act fast before she moved on.
It wasn’t unheard-of for street kids to get manipulated by pimps and forced into work to pay off a never-ending debt.
If that had happened to Sierra, she could be rescued.
She might be traumatized, but that was better than finding a body.
Fifteen minutes. That was all I needed to ask a few questions, and then I could be on my way.