Chapter 18
But I tell none of this to Greene and Alderson of the FBI.
They’re much more interested in my investigation for Paxton Rhoads into Clarissa’s death and Ridgefield.
Alderson tells me to make a list, for my own reference, of anyone who comes to mind, including clients of mine, even if I can’t release that information due to confidentiality.
Let it “percolate,” he suggests. As if we have time for percolation.
I tell him I will.
Nervous energy pulls me up out of my seat to my kitchen window. Pale light hangs over the surrounding landscape. I catch a glimpse of a fox darting across my lawn and back into the fields, its bushy tail bright like a statement. I turn back to the agents.
“So, what’s next for people like me, who fit the CA’s target?”
“First, we’d like to find your earrings.” Alderson takes the lead. “If you don’t mind us looking. If we can’t find them, we’d like to dust, see if anything turns up.”
I groan, knowing the mess it creates.
“Does Wallace Scott have a key to your place?”
“No. And I’ve never told anyone where I hide my spare.”
“Which is where?”
“I brought it in the minute I got home.” I fish it out of my pocket and lay it on the table between them.
“Okay if we look around?” Greene asks again.
“Yes, but first, can you tell me how the killer did it? As you know, the police have kept it fairly under wraps.”
Greene and Alderson look at each other for a long moment. Finally, Alderson gives a shrug. Maybe potential victims get special privileges.
Yay for me.
“The man, Askens, the first, was execution-style in an empty park where he jogged in the morning,” Greene says. “Three shots. One in the back, two in the head. The second, the woman, Loman, was approached from behind and slit across her throat. In her garden.”
I stare at them both. A sick pit forms in my stomach.
“Why—different? Do you know?”
“We’re not sure,” Alderson says. “Convenience? Or they cared more about the sound with the second in a much more populated area. Or, the rage is growing, and the knife is more personal, more vicious. Worst case, there’s more than one person behind this.”
I swallow hard. I have three days and change left to figure this out. “Do what you need.” I motion to my place. “And I’ll help in any way I can.”
Finally, when they’re done making a mess of my house and come up empty, they take my spare key and mention they’ll send someone from the county’s CSI team to dust obvious places like doors and windowsills. They tell me they’ll post someone from the local force to sit in the drive as a precaution.
When I say not to bother, that I’m sure the locals don’t have the resources, Greene says, “Oh, they’ll find them.”
As if pressure from the Bureau makes everything possible.
And he’s not wrong. When I was on the force, we pretended that we didn’t jump when they called, but we always did.
Now that I’m alone again, my mind buzzes.
I go into my bedroom, where clothes on hangers lay strewn across my bed. I step around plastic sweater bins pulled from my closet, kneel before my safe, open it, and grab my gun. I remind myself to hit the shooting range. I take the gun upstairs to my home office and get to work.
First, I google the CA’s first victims—the man from Snohomish and the woman from Santa Monica—to remind myself about them.
I’m looking for any common thread I can find.
The two cities are eleven hundred miles apart, but who knows?
It’s a stretch to think one rookie PI can spot something the FBI might have missed, but it feels good to be doing something.
To get the best sense of their lives, I start with their social media.
No surprise: Their pages are overwhelmed by sympathy posts from friends and strangers. I scroll and scroll until I get to personal posts written by the victims themselves.
Randal Askens from Snohomish was an avid bird hunter.
Photo after photo of his hunting trips with a group of guys dressed in brush pants and orange vests, holding their shotguns over their shoulders.
A photo of a pheasant he’d mounted serves as his profile picture, the image not doing justice to the long green-and-gold tail feathers.
His feed is full of comments from friends about hunting and football.
His bio boasts he was a football coach at a local high school.
When I cross-check his name plus the school’s name, I come up with something that raises a thrum of interest—a scandal where the head coach was accused of recruiting underprivileged students of color from Mississippi who were good ballplayers.
He promised them food, rent, supplies, and pathways to college, and then left them high and dry with no support when their seasons finished.
I wonder if the assistant was in on the racket and if this is what he was supposed to confess. But that makes no sense. Why target the assistant and not the head coach, the one doing all the recruiting?
I go back to his feed and keep scrolling. I see that Askens has a sister in Texas named Ellen Atherton, who commented on one of his photos taken on the field after a win against a local rival: So good to see your smiling face. We need to chat more than once every few months.
I jot her name down.
I move on to the second victim.
Vonda Loman from Santa Monica clearly enjoyed surfing, cooking, and gardening. Well, at least she enjoyed watching other people surf: many photos of the beach, the ocean, and people riding waves in the distance.
The cooking and gardening she handled herself. Loman’s social media includes photos of tasty-looking drinks in crystal tumblers, dishes of exotic food, flowers in her garden. She worked at Santa Monica Community College as a counselor and went to high school and college in San Diego.
The two victims have nothing in common that I can see beyond both working in education. Neither appears to have had children, which is a relief. Maybe the killer only picks people who don’t have kids, perhaps because he lacks an appetite for stranding them.
Some of Vonda’s last posts are about the sketch that resembled her: To everyone out there who thinks it’s me: It’s not. I have nothing to confess. I have lived a clean, honest life.
I shake my head. The poor woman. No matter what she did or didn’t do, she surely didn’t deserve to die at the hands of this psycho. She was someone’s daughter, someone’s friend, maybe someone’s significant other.
Psycho.
But before Railes took care of Coleman, hadn’t I myself imagined obliterating him? Putting a bomb under his car, maybe, and blowing him to a million pieces—that was always a special favorite, right down to imagining the red cloud of flesh and bone spraying in all directions.
It’s one thing to fantasize about it, and another to do it. I got to watch Coleman die and I made sure his murderer was never prosecuted. But the moment was wholly unsatisfying. I try not to think about it, so I refocus on my attempt at looking for common threads.
I spend the next two hours digging through check-cashing and credit-application data on IRBsearch to see if the victims had similar major purchases or investment projects, ever applied to live in the same apartment or condo complexes, or bought houses in the same neighborhood at any point. Nothing hooks up.
I am as good at digging for key tidbits online as I am at looking for my lost earrings.
It’s late and I can hear the wind soughing through the tops of the pines. I take a break and go into the kitchen. I study my sad refrigerator’s contents to see if I’m hungry, but I’m not. I fetch a glass and run the tap.
When I look up, someone stares back at me through the window above the sink.
I jump back, dropping my glass just as Jess did the other day as I go for my ghost gun in its ghost holster before I quickly realize it’s just my own reflection.
Enough, Crosbie. Get it together. I see myself in the glass, my chest still rising and falling from the jolt. I’m wide-eyed and wired, my face tight with worry. Even if it is you, in the morning, you’ve got three more days.
But maybe it’s time I carry my gun everywhere, even if I am in my own home, at least until I pick up a security system.
The Rolling Stone reporter I met in the hotel and ran into again at the airport pops into my mind, sending a frisson of fear straight up my spine.
“Why did I see you twice?” I whisper to the wraith in the window.
“Why were you in Dallas and then on my flights of all things? And how could I have not seen you in Denver? Granted, it was brief, and Jess and I did get that coffee, but still. Could it be coincidental?”
Jeremy Fisher.
I clean the broken glass, go back to my office, and look him up.
Jeremy K. Fisher. The K stands for Kyle.
Jeremy Fisher, Rolling Stone. Reporter-at-large.
There are links to articles he’s written, everything from finance to violent crime, sports, media, environment, and gender politics.
From Riverside, California. Graduated from Victor Valley Union High School. Graduated from the University of Montana in Missoula, where he studied journalism.
So, he does have a connection to Montana. And he went to the same university I did, but I graduated in criminology and he in journalism. But he’s older. He graduated three years ahead of me. Could he have known Sophie, though? It seems unlikely. She would have been a freshman when he was a senior.
He then went on to Northwestern University’s journalism grad school, one of the best in the country, I’ve been told.
He has a younger sister who lives in Culver City—not far from Santa Monica, where the second victim was found. Which means nothing. Fiona has a sister who lives north of Seattle, near Snohomish—is she a suspect now?
Any number of people have connections to friends and relatives in either area, including myself. Hell, one of my good friends from my younger elementary years lives in Seattle.
Jeremy K. Fisher has no Facebook account, but he’s on X and Instagram. On X, he mainly reposts stuff from Rolling Stone or links from fellow writers. He’s coy, low-key. His takes are sharp, short, and to the point.
One post: Left, right . . . The division politicians have sown is in their interests, not yours. Meanwhile, they and the big business they’re associated with are laughing all the way to the bank.
The thread following that post goes on with bickering about the state of neoliberalism, free speech on social media platforms, and censorship. Jeremy Fisher replies to none of the follow-ups.
One of Jeremy’s other posts reads that he’d like to be in sync with the National Resources Defense Council but that they’ve abandoned their mission, which leads to more squabbling about global warming, the oil industry, and a post comparing Jeremy’s face to cat vomit.
On Instagram, very few selfies or photos of him at all—only shots from his travels. I use an app to set up a phony number so he can’t trace the call back to me and use to bypass the ringing on Jeremy’s phone and go straight to his voicemail.
Hey, this is Jeremy Fisher with Rolling Stone. Leave me a message and I’ll get back to ya.
That cinches it. At least, a little. My radar is still up. Way up. I hope he’s not lying. His message is generic enough, but his voice is as smooth as whiskey, and it sends the strangest opposing sensation down my spine: part warm tingle and part cold dread.
I brush the warm-tingle part away. Be smart, Cros. Ted Bundy was a charmer, too.