Chapter 5
Sam’s excited to tell us about his day while we eat, how he and his friend Oliver gathered tomatoes from Oliver’s mother’s garden and dropped them into her yard from high up in his tree house simply to watch them splat.
I’m happy to have him take my mind off the sketch. I smile at the image of the tomatoes in a mushy pile and the boys giggling uncontrollably.
Jess asks Sam if he got permission from Oliver’s mom for the tomato mess. When he says they didn’t, she scolds him, then turns to me because I’m still grinning.
“You’re encouraging him,” she says.
I shake my head, grab another spoonful of rice from the serving dish.
“And you’re in law enforcement?”
“Was,” I say. “Key word.” I brush away the sense that something has broken inside me—something fundamental that can never be fixed no matter what field I’m in.
“Still are,” Jess says.
Sam finishes up his food and asks to be excused, and Jess tells him to rinse his plate and put it in the dishwasher.
The two of us stay at the table.
I can tell she’s still bothered by this sketch business, but I want to preempt her and inquire about when she’s going to get back to the podcast. As if she’s read my mind, she looks down at her plate and says, “With all this going on, I’m canceling tomorrow.
I’m sorry, I know you’ll be out the airfare, but at least the room is on the conference, not us. ”
I want to say, Are you kidding?
“Come on, Jess. I told you. It’s not me.”
“Well, even if it isn’t, I want to cancel. It’s not about the sketch.”
Because it’s the anniversary of that awful night? I want to ask it, but I don’t. I’m very careful with her, even with Sam out of the room. I respond with two monotone words: “Then why?”
She glances at me briefly before looking down, as if to say, You know why.
Instantly, the mood shifts to something heavy and dense, like an old scratchy wool blanket thrown over us. I want to toss it off, let the dust flick away. I want my old sister back—the self-assured one.
A revving dread overcomes me. Is it seeing Jess like this?
Or is it that silly sketch? Has my usual mad (which a therapist I saw in college told me had transformed from sad following the loss of my dad years ago, then of Sophie, then of my mom) turned to fear?
What’s a person supposed to do with all that sorrow?
It’s bound to turn to either kindling or fire suppressant, fueling flames or snuffing them out and making you depressed. I go one way. Jess goes the other.
“I don’t feel up to it. I just don’t feel like going,” she says. “I’m not sure why I even agreed to it in the first place. That was before—”
She doesn’t finish. She doesn’t have to. I look down at my food.
But backing out now? The very evening before we’re flying out?
“It will be good for you,” I force lightheartedly and take a bite of my chicken. “Get you back on the horse, you know. Your fans miss you.”
She goes silent.
“Besides, you can’t leave the organizers in the lurch.”
“People cancel all the time. And COVID’s going around again. I could say I’m sick.”
“You’d just lie like that?” Listen to me, all angelic. The chicken I’m chewing goes tasteless and mushy in my mouth. I swallow and take a sip of water. As if she’s not talking to a sister whose words led to someone’s death and whose silence led to another’s. But Jess? She’s honest.
The image of the woman with the earrings flashes through my mind again. Could it be?
“With this new sketch out,” she says, “there will be only one topic on everyone’s minds anyway.
Trying to talk about victim advocacy and the families of victims will be the last thing people will care about while everyone’s blathering on about this.
Not to mention all the strange confessions that will start pouring out, just like they did with the last sketch. Do you know they’ve given him a name?”
“I heard. On my way over.”
When the first drawing was released three and a half months ago in mid-May, not many people paid attention to it.
Someone dropped a photo they’d taken of a pencil sketch of a middle-aged man with a beard and mustache vaguely resembling a younger Harrison Ford on several anonymous, untraceable social media accounts like Facebook, X, Reddit, and Instagram.
Full head of dark hair, smoldering eyes, two frown lines between his eyebrows, a mouth that angled slightly upward into a half smirk.
In yellow block text, all caps, the command Confess, Or Die.
You Have Six Days screamed out from under the photo.
At first, few people noticed. The accounts didn’t have many followers. And the people who stumbled across the posts assumed they were random nonsense, a bad joke.
But a little over a week later, an astute Seattle reporter who knew of the random posts wrote that law enforcement had found a man who looked like the drawing who’d been fatally shot near Snohomish.
When the story got legs, the original post got more consideration.
Some said it was a colossal stretch to claim it was the same man from the drawing.
But others bought it. Social media camps formed—trenches dug, positions staked out.
So many “experts” who knew nothing. There was a resemblance, I always thought, but it was likely a coincidence.
The cops denied any connection. They insisted there was no way to conclude the victim matched the depiction. People assumed the journalist was making it up, trying to cash in on a little sensationalism. But because of the reporting, the anonymous accounts generated a ton of new followers.
A month later, a second sketch. It was paired with the same demand, to confess or die.
And it went viral. A brooding woman with short hair tucked behind her ears, a down-turned mouth, narrow eyes, and a prominent nose.
This time, way more press. Several big influencers in the true crime arena started discussing it.
By the end of that week, a woman looking a lot like the second drawing turned up murdered in Santa Monica, California. The police were vague on details.
By the third sketch, which dropped sometime in mid-July—another man, with one angled-down eye—viral took on a whole new meaning. Worldwide attention. All law enforcement agencies went on high alert in every town in America, especially in the West.
But after the days passed, no one turned up dead.
“Everyone’s obsessed with it,” Jess says with more energy than I’ve heard from her in a long time.
“Social media is buzzing. Everyone’s wondering if there’s some dead body out there rotting away that they haven’t found.
Or,” she adds, “the man dished out the correct confession and wriggled off the hook.”
I may not be into social media as much as she is, but I’m fully aware of the frenzy.
“All these frantic confessions from people who think they’ve been sketched keep popping up all over the place,” she continues.
“Guess there are more than a few slightly cockeyed men out there. Who knew?” She pops a hunk of broccoli in her mouth.
“Did you hear about that guy from Hamilton?” She points her fork at me.
I did. A well-known businessman with uneven eyes from a town not three hours from us, who sort of resembles the sketch, fessed up to poisoning his neighbor’s trees so he’d have a better view of the mountains.
It made the local paper, and the city fined him, but no one besides him really seems to think he—some nobody from an afterthought state like Montana—was the actual target.
“Jess, we already have our flights booked,” I say. “You know money is tight for me. And I was looking forward to spending some time with you.”
She looks at the open kitchen window as if she longs to be somewhere else. The evening has cooled with the storm, and the sharp smell of wet pine steals in and mingles with the smell of garlic from her cooking.
“And Patrick’s already lined up to watch Sam. Come on, how often does that happen? And he’s looking forward to spending time with his dad.”
She half smiles.
“It’ll be fun. We don’t even need to stay for the entire conference. We can cut it short, go for just a night instead of two . . . grab a nice dinner out. I’ll change our flights right now.”
“You really don’t think that sketch is you?”
“I don’t.” I grab her hand. It feels bony. Small.
“It is a crazy thought, isn’t it?”
“Yes, absolutely crazy.”
Jess presses her tongue against the inside of her cheek. When she turns back from the window to look at me, the lurking worry has momentarily sneaked away. “I’ll go finish my packing.”