Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Harriet
Ilie in bed awake. My brain won’t stop spinning through everything that happened. Razor Johnny who, yes, was in a motorcycle gang and ran over Jerome’s grandmother’s flowerbeds, but he didn’t deserve to die. The man accepted cookies as his payment for his protection racket after all.
So who killed him?
And then there’s Dooley Brogan being so weird and evasive about his prison visitor, but Alexandru says he seems genuine when he says he didn’t kill Razor Johnny.
And then there’s Jerome, and Sloane, and Granabelle… and of course, Alexandru.
He is such an unbelievable jerk. And he is literally my overlord—forever, if he has his way, and he always gets his way, being that he’s a murderous vampire with no moral center.
I need to figure out how to get free of this.
Some way where he won’t, or ideally can’t, threaten innocent people as a way of dragging me back.
It’s not as if I hate solving mysteries with him.
I like it more than I should. I like matching wits with him.
And his whole Gothic manor is growing on me in a Stockholm-syndrome kind of way, but a girl likes a bit of autonomy and the ability to exit.
Every scenario I run ends with someone getting hurt who isn’t me.
So for now I stay, and I make myself useful, and I wait for him to show me a crack I can work with.
He was human once. There has to be something left in there.
My mind drifts to the fervent way he grabbed my hand after Bo Richardson almost killed me; he just grabbed it and turned my palm up, and before I could even think to pull away, he pressed his lips there, cool and soft against my skin.
It was...a lot.
I go sit down in my office and wake up my laptop.
Before I can think about it, my fingers are moving—the muscle memory of twenty years.
NamUs notifications: nothing. Google Alerts: three hits, all irrelevant.
Ohio BCI database: no new unidentified remains matching James’s profile.
The whole ritual takes maybe ninety seconds, and then I close the tabs and push my glasses up, ignoring the hollow feeling.
I didn’t really expect to find anything on James, but I keep checking. I will always keep checking.
Someday, somehow, I’ll figure out what happened to him. I need him back. I need to see his face again, to hear his laugh. He’s out there somewhere; I just need to find the right thread.
And then I get the extremely dark urge, which is happening more and more lately, to make Alexandru tell me where he keeps my father’s weird mystical ledgers. The ones that have nothing to do with business and accounting.
I can’t shake the sense that those ledgers could help me find James. I don’t know how or why they could help, but there’s some knowing there. Some perspective on the fabric of things. Connective material. Invisible noise.
Which is ridiculous on a million woo-woo levels.
I sit up and force myself to do what I actually came here to do—get a jump on filing the FOIA. When that’s done, I hop onto my favorite place in all of the internet, the true crime forum, thinking to troll for potential future murderers on the loose for my jackhole of an overlord to drain.
The forum loads with its familiar white text over dark blue background, so very 2010. I’m logged in as Rooster5. The main page shows the usual mix of threads, but one catches my eye immediately, pinned at the top with a red “HOT” tag: “JUST RELEASED: Dawson Trial Transcripts—20 Years Sealed!”
Someone named Justice4Sadie has uploaded everything and is asking if anyone can make sense of the witness timeline.
It has absolutely nothing to do with anything, but I can’t help but check it out.
Just to blow off steam.
I scan through the comments and then download the PDF and start skimming.
Before I know what I’m doing, I’m copying relevant sections and wrangling timestamps, locations, and witness names into a structured format.
I add columns and color coding. I notice a time discrepancy pattern, and I create a visualization involving concentric circles of memory reliability.
I screenshot it all and write a post explaining what I’ve done and how to interact with the documents I’ve created.
I hit submit and lean back. At least I nailed one thing.
I refresh the page. My post appears. Both spreadsheets look professional and clear.
A few minutes later, responses start coming in. Glendale129 posts an impressed emoji. TheTorvald says, “Nice geometric analysis.”
I refresh again, and there’s a new response.
Sherlocksmith.
My stomach tightens. Sherlocksmith has been on the forum for years, and he loves showing up in my threads as a condescending jerk.
This response is true to form, trying to punch holes in my work and make me feel inferior. He drops a link to an article entitled “Cognitive Psychology of Eyewitness Testimony” as his final word.
I start to compose a long, ragey post informing him that I’m already very familiar with that article, but then I just shut the laptop. Because what am I doing?
I sit back in my chair. What I’m doing is trying anything to get away from the fact of how much I wanted to kiss Alexandru.
I wanted to kiss him. And I think he wanted to kiss me.
He’s a monster.
A monster!
Who I wanted to kiss.
I finally move to DEFCON one, my ultimate mind-calming activity: building towers out of quarters.
Sometimes I make stepped pyramids. Sometimes little skylines. Today I’m making a stepped pyramid.
Quarter towers calm me on a level nothing else touches.
I don’t build them on my desk, obviously. This is not my first coin-tower rodeo. I had a special table brought in just for quarter towers. Level surface, no wobble. You can’t stack quarters on a surface that wobbles.
It’s three in the morning when I finish tonight’s construction.
Everything lines up.
Everything is where it should be.