Chapter 7
Vague news headlines flash in and fade out, too: Man Gunned Down in Alleyway
Teenager Accused of Stabbing Stepmother
Serial Rapist Suspect Arrested After Police Showdown
But the audience is spellbound, attention on their phones.
The latest sketch. And why not? The Confession Artist killings tick all the right sensational boxes, and Americans gobble up the theatrics. Jess was right—what better place to discuss the latest phenom than at CrimeCon?
Conference goers brought it up in the only panel we attended after we arrived this morning, the panel with the Interstate Killer victims’ family members.
Jess wanted to go to it. Audience members shed tears under the cruel lights of the seminar rooms, but soon the topic switched to the Confession Artist. One posited that the new killer was after a different type of control.
I rolled my eyes at the obviousness of the statement. Well, of course. Tapping into shame, seeking confessions. Of course. When I was little, my dad told me that guilt was simply a ticket to repeat the things that you’re ashamed of. The thought now almost makes me want to throw up.
Leon strobes through my mind. It’s like this. He comes knocking when I’m least expecting it.
I try to tune the image of him out. I listen to all the whispering around me.
Nobody seems to be noticing me, thank goodness.
I don’t need to get caught up in my own disturbing Black Mirror episode while attending Jess’s talk.
I keep my attention on the crime photos and headlines making the rounds on the screens.
Serial Rapist Suspect Arrested After Police Showdown flashes again as if on cue for Jess.
Because that’s the moment she strides onto the stage.
The crowd stills. I’m pleased to see she’s found her old confident gait. It matches the music. Her bobbed, sleek blond hair I helped her curl into beach waves shines.
Jess has striking, large brown eyes and a luminous smile. Her entire aura is genuine, including her friendly, not-too-silky-smooth voice, which is why so many people love her podcast. The ache for the victims she projects is always heartfelt and real.
When the music stops and the clapping dies, Jess faces the audience.
And freezes.
Her face wilts.
The audience waits.
I sit up taller, willing her to glance at me.
She knows I’m in the front row, as we planned.
As I have been so many other times in her life—sitting in audiences at school plays, at her volleyball games, at her band concerts, when our mom was at work and couldn’t make it, or later, in college, when Mom was too wasted to make it.
I’m not sure when that sense of duty started, probably when Dad checked out of our lives.
When our stepdad, Les, entered the picture.
When Mom took to drinking. And Jess . . .
she wasn’t just younger than me, she was smaller, more sensitive, more fragile.
Prone to huge mood swings as quickly and as frequently as the Montana mountain ridges catch clouds.
It may as well be me up there standing at the podium.
She’s not sure if her mouth will work. Humiliation waits in the wings to upend her career even more.
Come on, Jess. You’ve got to push through or we’ll both drag ourselves home feeling worse than when we came.
If you fail now, so do I. If you break more, I’m implicated further.
And neither of those scenarios is good for Sam.
Someone whispers, “What’s going on?”
Another image pops into my head. It’s a clip from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.
My mom and Les took us. The clip was Michael Jackson at the Super Bowl.
He stood with his hand touching his dark-lensed sunglasses for what felt like an eternity, until finally he whipped them off, and the crowd erupted.
But Jess is not working the crowd. Usually, she shines. Not now.
Come on, Jess. Her forehead glistens with sweat. Her chest rises and falls.
People begin to whisper. I shift in my seat and wave my hand discreetly in front of my chest, trying to catch her eye without too many others noticing.
Jess takes a breath in the microphone, a rasp of air punching abrasively through the anticipation. She glances back offstage as if she wants to flee like a startled doe.
Oh no you don’t. I shoot both hands up to get her attention. She spots me. Our eyes lock. I give one slow nod and mouth, “Talk.”
She stands a little taller and swallows. Her shoulders drop. She whispers one word into the microphone: “Secrets.”
She scans the sea of faces. The crowd exhales.
“Secrets,” she repeats with more force, “are rarely better kept locked away. Knowledge and truth are powerful tools to begin the healing process.” Her deathly pale face gains some color in the overhead lighting, as if each word fuels her, one at a time, like gasoline.
“When someone discovers who killed one of their family members—a child, a sibling, a parent—much of the guessing game about the monster in the dark dissipates. And that alone is an incredible relief to loved ones who have suffered deep loss.”
Now that the sunglasses have come off, I realize how tense I am. My neck and shoulder muscles are rock-hard. I’ve considered myself her protector for so long, even though I’ve proved to be a failure.
My phone vibrates in my pocket.
Jess explains how she’s assisted the police in finding a serial rapist from the 1990s in Salem, Oregon, a case that had gone cold but was revisited after genetic research helped find the Golden State Killer.
My phone nags. I resist pulling it out and studying the picture, afraid I might look uninterested in Jess’s speech and throw off the delicate balance she’s found, but I keep picturing the woman in line doing a double take of me and the others whispering and lifting their chins to me.
The concern in Wallace’s voice also niggles.
Wallace is not a worrywart. He’s calm and poised.
A performing pianist and a teacher of the instrument.
A composer, too, involved in too many musical endeavors for me to list. His suggestion to visit authorities seems like overkill and makes my breath catch, but maybe he’s just being thorough. Careful.
More careful than I ever was. That’s his nature. A perfectionist.
And he’s loyal. He doesn’t fail people, like I did with him. Like I did with Sophie. Like I did with Jess. Like I did with . . . No. Not now. I can’t let myself think of him.
I train my eyes on my sister.
I insisted that Jess report the assault after she told me about it, several weeks after it occurred.
But she refused. It didn’t matter how much I hounded her about doing it for her own sanity or how much I reminded her that pursuing a legal avenue might prevent him from doing the same to someone else.
She said that she would not destroy what she’s built up by turning the press loose to pursue her during the investigation and eventual trial.
She refused to be trapped forever in the public’s mind as a victim, to be told that she’d been careless, that she’d drunk too much, that she’d been stupid for not keeping a close eye on her drinks in that bar.
Or that she’s a liar, an exaggerator, or an opportunist. She knew exactly how it would go.
She insisted that if she reported, her life would come under constant scrutiny, especially among the crime junkies who made up her core audience.
She’d become a huge story, since she worked in the cold case and podcasting industry, and since her podcast was focusing more and more on victim advocacy.
She’d be accused of all sorts of things: that she made it all up for more press, that she’d do anything to be in the limelight and increase her numbers.
Any press is good press, she swore they’d say.
“Think of Sophie,” she said.
Sophie. Hearing her name always feels like an angry bruise is being jabbed.
Sophie. As if I’ve ever stopped thinking about my college roommate.
Jess cited studies on how some crisis centers have ceased recommending to all assault victims that they go to the police, demonstrating that for some, engaging with the criminal justice system only further traumatized them—severely, and for life.
I couldn’t say she was wrong about any of it. I’d been through it all before.
But I truly believed she should get it on the record, even though I knew firsthand that police department bias was strong. Unavoidable, even.
Still, many improvements have been made, and I told her so. And trying to push that progress along was the main reason—the big shining marker in my life—I went into law enforcement, even though it all ended up going terribly wrong.
“Jess,” I had implored. “Things are different than they were ten years ago, when this happened to Sophie. Law enforcement is trained to take it seriously, to treat all victims fairly.” I said this to her knowing that when I was on the force, even something like harassment wasn’t handled all that well.
But this was rape. It was different. The department has an entire dedicated program and physical space in the hospital, the Sane Suite, staffed by a sexual assault examiner to provide care for victims and conduct interviews.
Still, incredibly, my bighearted little sister also didn’t want to ruin Mark Coleman’s life. He needs help, not prison, she said. She was determined to talk to him when she felt ready. To tell him that if he agreed to seek counseling, she would not go to the police.
And now he’s gone, and she’s backsliding.
That part scares the crap out of me. I’ve seen it before, when Sophie became unreachable. And once again, I feel responsible, just as I did back then.