SOMEWHERE IT SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN
SOMEWHERE IT SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN
MORGAN
Morgan was on her second cup of coffee when she decided to check her phone. She’d heard the quiet vibrations of notifications several times over the course of the morning and had wanted to be sufficiently caffeinated before dealing with her mother.
Worse, it could be her supervisor, telling her they’d decided to make the temporary leave of absence permanent.
But it wasn’t her mother firing off texts, or anyone from the Medical Examiner’s Office telling her not to bother coming back. It was the true crime forum she’d joined years earlier, notifying her that someone had posted a new case thread.
Intrigued, she set her mug down and unlocked the screen.
Because clearly, dealing with crime and death every day simply wasn’t enough for her. It had to be her downtime focus too.
The new thread had been posted sometime the previous night and had accumulated responses while she slept. She started at the beginning and read through the updates in order, her interest growing as she went.
Because it was the same case she’d been thinking about since she read about it in the Ridge Courier.
DeepTrace had opened the post. She'd read DeepTrace's work before on other cases and thought highly of their work. He or she was a methodical poster, strong on pattern recognition and data sourcing, not given to speculation.
The thread was clean, and included location, date, confirmed facts, and documented gaps.
It noted the absence of personal and identifying effects, along with the preliminary medical event ruling with no supporting specifics.
Then, because DeepTrace was extremely organized, they’d included a list of questions the available information didn't answer.
Everything was presented the way it always was: objectively and factually, without editorializing.
Morgan read it twice.
It was good work. Precise, restrained, with the right questions in the right order. She'd had the same questions herself, sitting at Frank's kitchen table. There was something quietly affirming about seeing them laid out by someone else who’d noticed that the information didn't add up.
She couldn’t help wondering how DeepTrace had picked up on the incident, however. The Ridge Courier was a local paper, covering local events. Was it possible that DeepTrace was in the area? Or did they have some sort of crawler trolling the internet, flagging potential cases of interest?
Probably the latter, she realized with some disappointment. Pine Ridge was a small mountain town that most people had never heard of, and coverage of the discovery had been minimal at best.
Which was suspicious in itself. Did medical events resulting in death warrant front-page headlines? No. But John Does found dead in cabins during the off season deserved something more than a mere mention at the bottom of page three.
Another Thread contributor had followed DeepTrace’s original post with property maps and a detailed timeline.
Again, the data was clean, thorough, and well-sourced.
The map showed the full property layout—the main cabin cluster along the lake's eastern edge, the rental dock and shack near the water, public showers and restrooms. Other members of the group had weighed in with questions about financial patterns, geographic precedents in adjacent counties, and whether standard identification procedures were being actively pursued or quietly deprioritized.
She looked at the map for a long moment. The campground was on Route 9 East. She knew that road. She'd driven past the turnoff twice since arriving in Pine Ridge without registering what it was.
It wasn't far from Frank's.
She scrolled on. NorthStar—the group’s moderator and overall mentor—had posted as well: Who owned the campground before?
Morgan paused on that. It was a reasonable question. The right question, actually, because it pulled the ownership thread farther back than the current unresolved estate.
She didn't know the answer. The Ridge Courier’s article hadn't addressed the campground's history, and she hadn't gone looking yet. Whoever NorthStar was, they had good instincts.
She scrolled back through the thread one more time, then set the phone face-down on the table and gazed out the window.
Should she contribute? After all, she was right here.
She had professional context, having four years of experience reading scenes that were fundamentally inconsistent with preliminary rulings.
Her administrative leave didn’t apply to this, and even if it did, no one in the group knew her real identity.
Members were known only by their handles.
Except… she didn’t have anything to contribute. DeepTrace and the others had done an excellent job of laying everything out.
She picked up the phone, looked at the map again, and put it back down.
Outside, the sun was shining. The tree line was awash with autumn color against a sky that was once again, a clear, brilliant blue.
It would be a shame to spend such a beautiful day cooped up inside reading.
Suddenly a walk seemed like a really good idea.
Morgan had been to plenty of scenes off the beaten path, but few were as scenic. As she went deeper into the forest, the world around her went quieter, and she couldn’t help wondering if there were still patches of earth that hadn’t yet been trod upon by human feet.
The campground wasn’t hard to find. About a mile of forested land separated Frank’s property from the back edge of Sulley’s campground, the border line marked with faded but still readable signs.
She was able to make out a snaking gravel-covered road flanked by occasional wood cabins and small clearings, presumably for tents and campers.
She followed the tree line along the property's eastern edge, getting a feel for the flow of the place, all while looking for potential alternate entry points, tire tracks, foot prints—basically anything that might provide insight.
She paused when the lake appeared between the trees. Took in the rising slope of the mountains on the other side, recognizing it as the same lake in the photograph on the guest room nightstand.
Setting that aside for later contemplation, she continued on.
The campground had been something once. That was obvious, even empty and going to seed as it was.
Fire pits with proper rings of stones, the kind that had seen years of use, sat cold and ignored, now filled with leaves and detritus.
Docks still jutted out into the lake, the wood and ropes weathered but sound.
Some sites still had wooden lounge chairs arranged around the fire pits, though most had tipped over and not been righted.
Near the front entrance, a rental shack that appeared to have been looted at some point.
It was easy to imagine families here. Dads commanding the cast iron grills, brandishing long metal spatulas. Moms spreading checkered cloths over wooden picnic tables and laying out bowls of potato salad and chips. Kids squealing and running around in bathing suits and flip-flops.
Someone had built a good place here, once. What had happened? How long had it been going downhill? In another year or two, most of it would be reclaimed by the surrounding woods.
A vague sense of melancholy settled over her as she continued on. She’d never visited a place like this as a child, but she could grieve its loss. Bad things weren’t supposed to happen in places like this.
It wasn’t hard to determine where the body had been found. Ribbons of neon yellow police tape flapped in the light breeze, and the ground showed signs of recent foot and vehicle traffic.
She noted the placement of the cabin. Not too far from the entrance. Not too close.
Great. The vic was a Goldilocks.
She stopped and studied the scene from a distance before moving in for a closer look.
In her head, she overlaid the sparse details described by the article, mapping out possible angles of approach.
Wondered what had drawn the unlucky teens to this cabin over the others.
Was it the door that now hung open, beckoning them in with the soft tap of wood against wood in the breeze?
Had they felt the same haunting presence of wrongness she did now, the kind that lingered after something wrong had happened? Intangible and yet unmistakable. She felt it calling to her in her bones, just as she had at nearly every scene that had involved an unnatural death.
The operative word was unnatural.
This wasn’t the result of a medical event.
There was no evidence-consistent scenario in which a man dying alone in a closed space produced an open door.
He'd either tried to get outside—which meant he'd felt something coming and had no phone to call for help, and no vehicle to drive himself to help—or someone had opened it and left it open deliberately.
Neither version was consistent with what the preliminary ruling was implying.
The lack of identification was still the biggest puzzler, though.
She stood at the tree line with her hands in her jacket pockets and let her brain do what it did.
Entry points from the road: one visible, possibly others through the far tree line.
Ground condition around the cabin: deplorable, thanks to the first responders who didn’t know the first thing about how to handle a crime scene.
The notebook was in her hand before she'd decided to take it out, her pen clicked and ready. This was what four years of field work did. Her hands knew the job even when she'd told them firmly that it wasn't their job today.
She made notes, brief and precise, in the shorthand she'd developed over years in the field. Then she heard it.
Footsteps. Heavy and confident, they moved with the unhurried purpose of someone who knew where they were going.
She shoved the notebook and pen into her jacket pocket and moved back into the tree line, two steps, three, until the shadow of the canopy swallowed her. Then she went still and waited.
The footsteps moved off the gravel and onto the soft ground, and then slowed, to the careful placement of someone walking the space in a pattern.
Starting near the cabin, then working outward in precise, concentric circles.
Morgan stood in the shadows and watched the figure come into view through the trees.
He was tall. Dark-haired. Well-built.
She sucked in a breath, because she’d seen him twice before. Once at the café on the day she’d arrived. Then a few days later, standing in the town square, staring at her through the diner window.
What was he doing here? Was he with local law enforcement? Or just a curious local?
He paused at the sight line she'd been standing in sixty seconds earlier and looked at the cabin the way she'd looked at it—not with the casual glance of a curious local, but the sustained, systematic read of someone who didn’t believe the brief news coverage was telling the whole story.
Then he crouched, reaching for something in the leaves near where she'd been standing. He picked it up and turned it over in his hands. It was small, dark, and impossible to make out from where she was standing.
Morgan grimaced, watching him look at whatever it was for a long moment. What had she missed?
He straightened, did a slow scan of the clearing with the deliberate attention of someone who had realized he wasn’t the first here today.
Morgan didn't move. Didn't breathe more than she had to.
His gaze moved toward the tree line, passing over the shadows where she was standing without stopping. She exhaled slowly and carefully, watching in frustration as he pocketed what he'd found. He took one last look around, then disappeared back the way he came.
She waited until the sound of his footsteps receded before she turned and walked quietly away, using the damp leaf cover to muffle her light steps.
She didn't run. She didn't have to. She was just out for a walk on a beautiful day, nothing more.
Morgan was back at Frank's before she reached for her notebook, finding her pocket empty. She stood in the kitchen doorway and checked the other pocket.
It, too, was empty.
She mentally retraced her steps.
The man had crouched in the leaves near where she'd been standing. He'd picked something up. Something small and dark.
Like her notebook.
It was small. Dark. Had a Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office seal on the cover—embossed, professional, and unambiguous about where it came from and therefore who was likely to be carrying it.
“Problem?” Frank said, breaking into her reverie.
She hadn't heard him come in. She looked up.
“No,” she said. “I just… misplaced something.”
Frank regarded her for a moment, then said, “I’m sure it’ll turn up,” and continued on his way.
Morgan stood in the kitchen doorway and thought about a man with dark hair and blue eyes crouching in the leaves. More specifically, she thought about the expression on his face when he'd looked at whatever he'd found.
Intrigued.
So much for keeping her head down and staying off the radar.