CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
A bureau tech-head by the name of Dave Ferris appeared in the conference room doorway with a laptop under his arm and an energy drink in his other hand.
Kate guessed him to be about thirty or so, but he had a wiry sort of energy that made her think of teenagers pounding energy drinks for study sessions.
When he entered the room, he seemed to bring a whirlwind of energy with him.
He set his laptop down at the far end of the table without asking permission and dropped into a chair.
"Forty-seven accounts," he said, pulling up the list on his screen. "Zero engagement across the forum and the Facebook group. No posts, no comments, no reactions, no shares. Not even an accidental mis-click." He cracked the energy drink and took a long sip. "You're welcome, by the way."
Kate had already decided she liked him. Of course, she pitied anyone who had to work with him on a daily basis. He was probably quite exhausting.
“You should have it in your email, too, Agent Sloane.”
Sloane pulled the list up on her own screen and shared it to Kate's laptop. They looked at it together, eyeballing the forty-seven names. Kate looked at the top of the list and then at Dave.
"Walk us through the cross-referencing."
"Sure thing." He turned his laptop to face them slightly and nodded at the screen. “Click the second tab on the document I sent you.”
Kate clicked over. The same forty-seven names, now with columns added: program completion date, zip code, and a notes field Dave had partially populated.
Several entries already had short annotations.
Moved out of state. Completed program within last 60 days.
Account created but never logged in after initial setup and things of that nature.
"I pulled zip codes from the intake records and mapped them against the three victim addresses," Dave said.
"Anyone within a thirty-minute radius I flagged in yellow.
" He took another sip of his drink, swallowing it down quickly.
"I'd have done it in red but the color coding on this platform is, and I say this as someone who builds these things for a living, deeply depressing. "
Kate looked at the highlighted rows and saw only eleven names.
"Eleven," Sloane said. "That's workable."
"Oh, it gets better," Dave said. "Because I also filtered by completion date.
Anything in the last six months I'd set aside; that’s too recent to have developed the kind of familiarity with the platform and its members that you're describing.
" He leaned over and typed something into his laptop and said, "That takes you to seven. "
Kate worked through them one at a time, reading the names aloud while Sloane ran parallel searches. Dave seemed to pick up very quickly and, as they worked, began to pull whatever the intake records had on each one.
The first hit was a woman named Sandra Brixton.
She had completed the program sixteen months ago and lived in Henrico.
Sloane found a marriage announcement on her Facebook page from two months prior.
There was a wedding photo, a new last name, and a post that read Starting the next chapter with my person.
"She found her person," Sloane said. Kate wasn’t sure, but she thought she heard a bit of slight mockery to her tone… not at the good news, but at the my person.
"Good for her," Kate said. "Next."
“Donna Farwell, completed nearly two years ago,” Dave said as scrolled through her intake record. "She currently has a Tennessee zip code. So, I guess we can knock her off, too.”
A woman named Linda Chu was next. According to what Dave had pulled, she had completed the program eleven months ago.
Her account had logged in twice and gone dark.
Dave pulled her record and found a coordinator note indicating she had withdrawn midway through and never completed the program, but her forum account had remained open in the system.
"She’s not a fit, either," Kate said. "Just an open account."
"Correct." Dave crossed her off without ceremony.
The next two resolved quickly. One account belonged to a woman whose intake zip code placed her forty-five minutes outside the city. The other had a completion date of only eight months ago, well within the window they wanted to exclude.
After all of that, just one single name remained. Kate wasn’t sure if this was a good thing or a bad thing; the list they had pinned so much hope on had already come to an end.
“Ruth Calder,” Sloane said. “Dave, what do you have on her?"
Dave pulled the record and leaned back in his chair, reading from the screen.
"Looks like she completed the program eighteen months ago. And she’s a local.
Her zip code puts her in Midlothian." He kept scrolling, and Kate noticed that he was nervously tapping his foot under the table—no doubt the result of an energy drink this late at night.
"She's logged into the forum forty-one times in the past ninety days," he said.
He paused and looked up from the screen.
"Forty-one logins, with zero interactions. "
Kate looked at Sloane and they both nodded to one another. This could be it… exactly what they had been looking for.
"Pull the intake questionnaire," Sloane said.
Dave navigated through the backend and had it on screen in under a minute. He turned his laptop to face Kate and slid it down the table toward her.
She read it slowly, and sensed Sloane doing the same beside her.
The Fresh Horizons intake form was eight pages long, structured to guide members through their circumstances, emotional state, and what they hoped to gain from the program.
Most people answered with reasonable brevity.
Ruth Calder had filled out every field in full.
Her answers were long and careful, written with a painful earnestness.
If she was going to do this, she was going to do it completely.
She had been married for nineteen years.
According to what she’d placed in the form, her husband had left with little warning and, by her account, very little explanation.
She had written about her battle with not only depression, but acute insomnia.
She also wrote about her adult daughter who called twice a week and meant well but couldn't quite understand what she was feeling or what she was going through.
Kate thought it felt very genuine and touching, really.
This sounded like a woman who only wanted to feel like herself again and was ready to do whatever the work required.
And then, by every measure available to them, she had gone silent.
There were no posts, and no comments. No small victories shared with the group. No replies to the women celebrating first dates or promotions or pottery classes. Forty-one logins in ninety days, and nothing to show for any of them, except a timestamp and an IP address.
"She's still reading it," Sloane said quietly. She had come around the table to read over Kate's shoulder. "Every day, almost. She just never says anything."
"She put everything into that questionnaire and then stopped," Kate said. She scrolled back to the first page and read the opening paragraph again. "She came in hoping for something and it didn't happen. Or something happened that changed the equation entirely."
"Eighteen months is a long time to keep logging in without engaging," Sloane said.
“Seems suspicious as hell,” Dave offered, then took another swig of his drink.
"It sure does," Kate said. She wasted no more time and grabbed her phone, pulling up the address on a map on her phone. Midlothian was only a twenty minute drive away, after all. She saved the map on her phone and dropped a pin. She then plugged in the addresses of each victim. Doing this, she quickly found that Ruth Calder only lived twelve minutes from Carol Paige’s house.
From Donna Holt's, nineteen. From Nancy Briggs's apartment, twenty-three.
She set the phone face down on the table. It felt big but she also knew it wasn’t quite enough to go guns a-blazing into the night as midnight drew closer.
Dave had been quiet for the past few minutes, reading something on his own screen. He looked up now and glanced between the two of them. "So, what are we talking about here? Is this your person?"
"We don't know yet," Kate said.
He nodded slowly and then looked back at his screen expectantly.
Kate knew they were pretty much done with him but he seemed excited to be part of what was taking place.
She didn’t see the need to dismiss him so quickly.
There was no harm in having him hang around… maybe working off some of that energy.
The room was quiet for a moment. Kate looked at the clock on the wall and saw that it had come to be 11:34.
"It's thin," she said finally. "I want to be honest about that. Logging into a forum forty-one times without commenting is not a crime."
"Yes, but people don't read a support community for divorced people—primarily women—every single day for three months without ever once responding to anything," Sloane said. "That's not shyness. That's something else."
"I agree with you." Kate looked at her directly.
"But it's almost midnight and everything we have on Ruth Calder right now boils down to geographic proximity and a login pattern.
We have no physical evidence, and nothing that ties her to any of the three scenes.
" She sat back and looked thoughtfully at Sloane.
"But this is your call. I'll back whatever you decide. "
Sloane looked at the table for a moment. She picked up the intake questionnaire printout and looked at the first page without reading it, just holding it. Then she set it back down, her eyes unblinking as she processed everything.
"We've had three women killed in their own homes in the space of a week," she said. "I'd rather knock on a door at midnight and be wrong rather than wait until morning and find out too late that we were very right.”
“I think that’s some sound logic,” Kate said, getting her feet.
She grabbed her jacket, and they moved toward the door. Dave watched them go from the end of the table, his energy drink halfway to his mouth.
"Hey," he said. "You want me to stay? In case you need anything else tonight?"
Kate looked back at him and saw the excitement still there—excitement plus caffeine and chemicals. "Yes," she said, offering him a smile. "Please."
He set the drink down and turned back to his laptop without another word. And when Kate glanced back to him as she made her way out of the door, he was smiling and already pulling up something new on his laptop.