Chapter 32
I stop dead, then take a step back.
Wallace stares at me with a look I can’t parse. Could be, How in the world have you become some sicko’s target? Or, just as easily in the senseless world I’ve been thrust into the last few days, I could shoot you right now.
It’s just Wallace, I tell myself, but the hairs on my arms stand straight up. I’m holding my breath.
“It was right there on the counter,” he says.
“All the times I’ve been over, I’ve never seen it out.
” He’s inspecting it now, turning it this way and that.
His blue eyes are intense, but focused, like when he’s composing or playing.
Has he held a nasty grudge against me for convincing Sophie to go camping?
Did she share with him that I encouraged her to be more free-spirited?
If she did, he never breathed a word about it over all these years.
“You know how I feel about gun safety,” I say, holding my hand out. “A gun is never a solution to any situation when I’m off the job. Rarely on the job, either.”
He inspects it some more. I can see the tension in his jaw, the muscles tightening under the pale skin of his throat.
“Wallace.” I shove my hand closer. A sick sensation mixed with dread rushes to my head. Could it be him? Has he hung on to and nursed resentments over Sophie until they reached a breaking point? Could he just pull that trigger right now here in my kitchen? “Give me the damn gun.”
He pulls his head back in surprise. A nervous laugh escapes. “Jesus, Crosbie. What? Oh my God. You really think I could hurt you?”
“No,” I say. Maybe. I don’t know what to think, who to trust, anymore. “But give it to me.”
He shakes his head in annoyance and sets the gun on my palm, but his eyes stay on mine.
It’s so much more than irritation. In the sharp, bright blue of his irises, I see the rage.
Even hate, like the teeth of an open-mouthed shark breaking up through dark waters.
I pull my head back, oddly even more shocked with this than at the gun pointing at me.
“Wallace?” I whisper it more than say it, like I’m trying to understand if he’s the same guy I’ve always known standing in my kitchen.
“Crosbie,” he says firmly, like a parent scolding a child. “What have you done? What do you need to confess?”
“What?” Hearing these two questions leave his lips—the sureness that I’ve done something awful—jars me horribly, goes right to my deepest shames.
I can practically see him thinking, What has this person who I’ve been involved with—intimate with—done?
Or maybe, I know what you did, how you lured my sister out to those woods with a pack of guys, encouraged her, for God’s sake, to not be guarded, pushing her right into the arms of that monster so her first time was fucking assault.
The pain is unbearable. I feel lightheaded.
More nausea climbs. I take a strained breath.
But then the anger trails. The damn anger.
But it’s easier, so, so much easier than the agony.
I curl my fingers so tightly around the handle of my gun that it feels like they might break.
How dare he ask me that right here, right now, after fondling my gun.
Does he not realize how insensitive it is?
Or is that the point?
“Wallace,” I say as calmly as I can muster. I need to get him out of here. “I get you’re trying to help. But I’m exhausted. I need a shower and some sleep. Also, I think it’s best for you to stay away from me for a bit, you know, for your safety.”
“I’ll be fine. You don’t need to worry about me.”
My anger—and worry—keeps rising.
“I need some space.” I bark it out. “You know, to focus so I can figure this thing out and to be there for Jess, too. It’s not like this has been easy for her, either. As if she hasn’t had enough going on and to have her sister thrown into this mess.”
He gives me a cold, hard stare. His lips whisper something I can’t make out. For a moment, I think he’s said, Fuck you, Crosbie.
“What did you say?” I ask.
He glares at me for a moment. “I said, fine, Crosbie.”
He wheels away with one hand over his shoulder in agitated farewell and storms out the front door.
I let my body fall back against the counter. I suddenly feel heavy, shattered.
Wallace is a good person, I tell myself.
He’s Sophie’s brother. He’s a decent man.
Who am I—the guilty one, the bad one—to get mad at him for asking me what terrible things I’ve done? For asking me for the truth? It’s my pattern. Remorse. Then rage. Then guilt crashing right back in because I don’t like who I am in these moments. Or maybe in any moment at all.
And behind it all, Alderson’s words still ring in my ears: Trust no one.
I lock the house. I check every window. I check the security cameras. Once, twice, three times.
In the bathroom, I turn the water on scalding hot and let it run until the room is thick with steam.
I lather up and let the water prick and sting my skin.
I will what happened at the dump site to wash down the drain with the suds and try not to feel like Crosbie Mitchell, woman in crosshairs.
Failed ex-cop. Bruised from the guilt of not protecting her college roommate.
Betrayer of Leon’s trust in the system. The very cause of his suicide.
And someone who caved hard when it came time to fall in line with Code Blue because secretly, I was fine with my sister’s attacker being eliminated from the world.
I make myself stand under the water without flinching. I let it sear my skin, desperate that it might burn away all that I hate about myself. When the tears finally come, they’re not just for Sophie and Jess, they’re for Leon.
With cheeks flushed and my skin red and enflamed from the hot water, I throw on a T-shirt and some pj bottoms, pull my hair into a tight bun, and go into my office. I’m exhausted and wired, but fatigue won’t win this battle.
I get to work catching my killer.
First, I pull up the video I took at the storage facility of Lasserio exiting with the backpack and doing a one-eighty.
The pack is difficult to see in the distant footage, and when I enlarge it, it’s grainy.
I send the video to Clarissa’s brother, Paxton, asking him if he recognizes the pack.
It’s late, so I don’t expect an answer right away.
I switch gears and find pictures of the previous Confession Artist victims and tape them to my office wall.
I find as many family members and friends of the victims as possible from their Facebook and Instagram interactions and write all their names down.
I print out all the articles I can locate related to Randal Askens’s high school and Vonda Loman’s community college, as well as everything I can find related to Askens and Loman on a personal level.
There’s not much of the latter beyond some address listings and divorce announcements on both.
That’s something, I guess. Besides working in education, divorce is another thing they have in common.
I study my prior list titled “Commonalities” and write down Occupation: Field of Education and Divorces. West Coast as residency. I cross-reference their lists of family members and friends to see if there’s any crossover.
No such luck.
I start another spreadsheet with the four of us.
Yes, us. I write my own name out in full at the top of one column, pretending I’m a dispassionate investigator, not someone desperately working to manage their own fate.
It’s a queasy feeling, lumping myself in with the victims or would-be victims.
Under Loman, I write Counselor, college students.
Under Askens—Coach, high schoolers.
Under Unnamed survivor—Pharma sales rep.
Under Crosbie Mitchell—Ex–police officer, PI.
I study the articles, looking to highlight the ones that contain something at least a little scandalous.
For Askens, it’s clearly the recruiting scandal. I jot that down in his column. It’s clear to me that Askens was not the lead in the recruitment process—the head coach was—but still, I decide to call the school in the morning.
For SMCC, Loman’s school, I find two vague references to a scandal, professors who maintained personal web pages that condoned teenage sex and military violence on one of the college’s servers for game-authoring courses.
But most of the information comes from blogs, so it’s difficult to tell if any of it is legitimate.
No official complaints have been filed with authorities.
I pull up the third sketch again and resume my search of Carssen sales reps on LinkedIn.
I keep at it until my eyes are gritty with fatigue.
I rub them and think about going to bed, but first, I plug in the title Jeremy Fisher jotted down for me and up pops the link: Crimes Without Leads in Jurisdictional Minefields.
The summary reads: “On Montana’s Crow, Blackfeet, and Flathead reservations, families of missing and murdered Native women ask, ‘Where’s the attention for our young women?’”
I click the link, and my fatigue fades rapidly.
Jeremy’s prose dances, keeps me flowing paragraph to paragraph.
The research is impressive. He’s not only spoken extensively to parents and grandparents of those who’ve gone missing, but he’s interviewed the US Attorney for Montana, Justice Department officials in DC, local sheriff’s departments that share jurisdiction of the Blackfeet, Crow, and Flathead reservations.
He’s interviewed Native American sociologists from Stanford and Harvard, tribal police, tribal councils, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, the FBI, and more.
He adds specifics that show he’s paid careful attention to their culture, noting that the drummers sometimes use fishing rods instead of reeds on their drums because the touch is better, that dropping a feather from one’s headdress brings bad luck.
Most importantly, he discusses the effects of such tragedies on the families and the tribes, on a people who feel unseen, unheard, and powerless within the US.
He discusses how the tribes’ lack of access to technology continues to keep them under the thumb of the US government and even US businesses who track everything they do and purchase, and the crimes they commit.
About two-thirds of the way down the article, he quotes Palmer Edmonds, an elder, as saying, “Until our tribes acquire our own technology to track our own crimes and our own missing persons, we’ll never be able to solve our own problems.” Edmonds is the very man Paxton Rhoads told me I should speak to because Edmonds had breakfast with his sister, Clarissa, the morning of the day she drowned.
But when I contacted him, he blew me off, saying he was too busy.
And Paxton can’t get me in front of him either because Paxton dated his daughter, and they were slated to get married, but Paxton ended up cheating on her and broke her heart.
The wedding was called off, but Edmonds has never forgiven Paxton even though Edmonds remained friendly with Paxton’s sister, Clarissa, until the day she died.
But Paxton has told me that Clarissa mentioned to him that Edmonds told her to stay out of the Ridgeways’ affairs, that they were bad people, that he’d gotten sideways with them in the past and they’d made his life miserable.
Several years before, when he’d led a protest against drilling that the Ridgeways backed on sacred land butting up against their private acreage, one of their henchmen roughed him up badly.
They told him if he ever got involved in their affairs again, the beating wouldn’t stop until he was dead.
I suspect it’s also part of the reason Edmonds doesn’t want to speak to me, and not just that he has a bone to pick with Paxton.
He doesn’t want to get involved, knowing it relates to the wealthy, powerful Ridgeways, and wants to avoid getting roughed up again.
Selfishly, I wonder if Jeremy might be able to help me more than I initially thought since he’s obviously trusted by the Montana tribes, including the Blackfeet Tribe. And by Palmer Edmonds.
When I finish reading, I shut down my computer, feeling raw.
Jeremy wanted me to read this to show me that I’d be in good hands with him.
And he has achieved that. I am impressed.
At the bottom of the article, it mentions that he’s won several awards for the piece, which doesn’t surprise me.
But what he doesn’t know, couldn’t know, is that he has also pinged a bruised chord inside me by discussing sexual assault against these women.
In the article, he points out what I already comprehend from my law enforcement work: that Native women are three times more likely to experience sexual violence compared to white women, that homicide is the fourth leading cause of death for those under twenty, and that those numbers are surely skewed by the fact that it’s estimated that the causes of untold numbers of those deaths have always been misclassified as suicide, overdose, or exposure to the elements.
I place my forehead against the butts of my palms, squeeze my eyes tightly shut, and press for all I’m worth, trying to squash away all this madness.
Here are all these literally lost women, including Clarissa, who receive no attention, and here I am, popping up on people’s screens across the nation because I’m a white woman who might happen to play into a sensational, viral-ready string of crimes.
And Jess, a white woman raped by a white man, was afraid to press charges, scared to prosecute because bringing something like acquaintance rape to trial rarely works in the victim’s favor.
Yes, she had a better chance of getting something done than most of the women Jeremy writes about, but still, she refused because it’s so difficult and uncertain.
I shake my head like a dog to clear my thoughts. I must think about the now and protect my own world, so it doesn’t fall to pieces.
I look at my thumb. It’s red and mangled by my own self-induced damage. Worn down as I am, I wonder if maybe I should let Jeremy interview me, not to disclose what happened with Sophie or Mark Coleman, but to share something, anything, to appease the killer.