Chapter 33
Two Days
I wake up early. Pale light has erased the first layer of darkness, leaving my yard still and dusky, the mountains in the distance barely discernible.
I brush my teeth with haste, dress, gather my waves into a bun, barely toast an English muffin for breakfast, and get to work.
I hop back onto LinkedIn, scouring profiles for faces that resemble the third sketch.
I can hardly believe it, but within ten minutes, two-thirds of the way down the long list of Carssen Pharmaceutical employees, I get lucky.
The hair and eyes are strikingly similar.
The face in the photo is broader, the cheeks in particular fuller, like the guy was heavier when the photo was taken, but everything else fits—the slant of the left eye, the texture of his hair, the shape of his jaw.
Plus, the man is from Spokane, where Alderson said the potential, would-be third target contacted the police.
Timothy Mooney. His profile says he is an appliance salesman for a small company in Spokane, but he used to be a sales rep for Carssen, which is why it came up under my search for Carssen staffers.
I get his email off the appliance company’s website and a phone number to the sales department he works in.
I call it and get a recorded message, so I leave a voicemail for him to call me back.
As the world begins to wake up, my phone pings steadily.
I ignore it until I can’t. I have shrapnel notifications from every app.
There’s a text from Wallace, too, screaming at me in all caps: Keep Me Updated.
I guess he didn’t hear a word of what I said about needing some space.
Suspicion shoots through me, but I tell myself this situation is making me crazy.
I have another voicemail from my stepdad and, worryingly, one from Linda Holbrook from Graham Insurance, the company that hired me to check out Aaron Lasserio’s claim. I call the agency back since it’ll only take a minute.
“I’m glad you called, Linda. I can have Aaron’s report by the end of the day.”
“Listen, that’s not why I’m calling.” She clears her throat like she’s nervous.
“Oh?” I sense bad news, but I’m hoping she wants me to start on another workers’ comp case.
She says, “We don’t think we’ll be in need of your services anymore.”
My fingers tighten around the phone.
“We’re cutting back,” she adds.
I close my eyes. “Is this about this sketch business?”
“We think you need to focus on that right now. You know, keep yourself safe.”
I also need to pay my bills! I want to shout. But even more, I ache to unleash a string of curses on Trey and Fiona.
Instead, I take a breath. “Okay,” I say. “I’ll be sending you the report before the day’s over, and I think you’ll be happy with what I’ve discovered about Lasserio. And as far as this other situation, I won’t need more than a few more days to focus on it. Let’s chat again then.”
After what feels like an endless silence, she says, “I suppose, but, you know, it’s not just about your safety. I mean, it is, of course, that’s the most important thing, but it’s also that, well, you know.”
“No, I don’t,” I say and wait.
“Well,” she finally adds. “It’s also about what it says. You know, about you.”
“What it says about me?”
“I don’t know how to say this, so I guess I’ll just come out with it. But what it says about your integrity. Or lack of it. There must be some reason you’re being targeted.”
I feel a sharp sting right to my solar plexus that settles into a deep ache in my belly.
The comment hits dead-on. Linda’s right.
It’s not that I don’t know it, it’s just hearing it from someone I rely on for my bread-and-butter work assignments makes me shrink even more, like I’m sliding and fading into the floor.
“Linda, please, let’s chat again in a few days. ”
“Okay, I guess,” she mutters. She offers, “Stay safe.”
“Will do,” I say. “Bye-bye.” Like we’ve had an entirely normal conversation, like she’s told me to have a nice trip, instead of suggesting I’m a terrible person while telling me to stay alive.
I’ve shifted my focus back to Randal Askens when my phone vibrates again. It’s Paxton Rhoads.
“Hard to tell given how far away the image is,” he says about the pack in the video I sent him. “But from what I can see, it looks familiar, like it could be Clarissa’s. Is there any way to get a closer look?”
“Possibly,” I say. “I have a few connections. Do you recall if there’s anything distinguishing on her pack, like had she written her name or initials on it or something?”
“I know she ironed on a patch of our tribal flag on the canvas flap.”
“That’s something.” I replay the video, enlarging it and trying to see a spot of sky blue, the color of the Blackfeet Nation flag, but it’s too grainy and I can only see one side of the pack. “I’ll see what I can do and call you later.”
I pivot back to Randal Askens. It’s finally late enough in Washington, so I call the high school in Snohomish.
It’s an hour earlier there, only seven a.m. I figure school starts around eight, but someone might be there.
No answer. I hang up on the recorded voice that comes on the line and go get another cup of coffee.
I do another half hour of research, and as soon as the clock hits seven thirty Pacific time, I try again.
This time a woman answers with a chipper voice. “Becca Parson.”
“Hi,” I say. “I’m Randy’s sister, Ellen Atherton, formerly Askens.”
I made a note from Facebook that Randal has a sister who lives in Texas named Ellen Atherton.
She called him Randy in her post and said that they should talk more often, so it seems a safe bet that chipper-morning-person Becca has never met her.
Also on Facebook, I saw that the service for Randal has been postponed until later in the fall, when more of Randy’s family members, including a brother who lives in England and a favorite uncle in Tokyo, can attend.
“Oh,” Becca says, surprised. “Randy mentioned he had a sister. Are you in town?”
“I’m in Dallas. Just calling to, well, I don’t know. I guess it’s been so hard to wrap my head around all this craziness. I was thinking if I called and spoke to someone where Randy worked, it might help me process, you know.”
“Of course,” she says, heaving a richly empathetic sigh. “I’m so sorry for your loss. We all miss your brother so much.”
“Thank you. I appreciate that.”
“So how can I help?”
“I don’t know. There’s nothing specific, really. It’s just, you know, the FBI . . . they’ve been grilling me, and they’ve asked all sorts of stuff about your school.”
“We’ve been bombarded with calls, too.”
“It’s so hard, but it’s understandable. Right?”
“It’s the reporters who are the worst,” she says.
“They’ve been calling me nonstop, too. Some of them are asking about this . . . this recruiting scandal thing? Randy never mentioned a word about that to me.”
“He didn’t?”
“No, and I, well, I thought that maybe someone there, at your school, could talk to me about that to help me process. It’s so awful, to know that he was targeted like that and to not understand the kinds of things he was wrapped up in.
” My own words ring in my ears and remind me again of Linda’s assumptions about my character. “Did you know him well?”
“A little. We dated once.”
“Oh.”
Crap. Becca might be a little too familiar with Randy.
“It was a while ago. It never went anywhere, but we were pretty good friends.”
“That’s right. I think he mentioned you.”
“He did?”
“Yeah, but like you said, it’s been a while.”
“It has.” She sighs again. “I was mad at him at first. You know, your brother could be quite the player.”
“I hope he didn’t hurt you.”
“No, it was fine.” She’s brushed it off, but I can tell she wasn’t over him.
“What exactly was Randy’s role in this scandal thing that the FBI keeps asking me about? I don’t understand. Was he more involved than the head coach?”
“I wouldn’t know about that, even if he was.”
I don’t believe her. She seems well plugged in. “Yeah, I’m sure the higher-ups have kept a tight lid on it.”
“They have,” she says, and sighs loudly.
“What?” I push.
“Nothing,” she says. “It’s, well, for years, we’ve run this place like a tight ship and rarely ever had a glitch.
It was such a pleasant place to work. And now, for the past two years, it’s been crazy.
We finally put that recruiting thing to rest, and then the Petronis thing happens, and now, for God’s sake, one of our very own coaches is the target of a serial killer.
You couldn’t even write that in a book and have someone believe it.
How does that happen, for goodness’ sake?
Hopefully, bad luck really does come in three and we’re done now.
But gosh, I’m sorry. Here I am droning on about our problems when your family—”
“It’s okay,” I say, tingeing my voice with as much sorrow as I can muster.
“I’m sure things will get better from here on out for your school.
But you mentioned the second thing. The Petronis thing?
” I google the name Petronis plus the school’s name while I ask.
A few social media hits and other links, including an obituary, pop up. “What was that about?”
She goes quiet, as if she realizes she’s said too much, and I think she’s going to cut the call short, but she adds, “He didn’t tell you about it?”
“No. I mean, we didn’t talk as much as we should have. Just every few months. You know? Siblings. It’s something I wanted to change, and now . . .” I let my voice falter like I’m too choked up to go on.
“So much tragedy,” Becca adds with a thick voice like she might cry herself.
“With this Petronis thing, too?”
“Oh God, yes. It was another very sad thing. A student took his own life.”
“Oh.” I pause for dramatic effect. “Yes, maybe Randy did mention that. How that rocked the school and the community.” I scan the articles that have loaded on my screen and see an obituary for Ryan Petronis.
“So, so sad,” I say, scrolling farther down and stopping at a photo of the boy in a football uniform.
Such a little guy. “He played football, right?”
“Yeah, he did.”
“Randy knew him?”
She goes silent. Finally, she says, “Ryan was a JV player. Randy often worked with and supervised the JV team. But don’t you worry, Ellen. Your brother was nothing but a good coach and a good friend to all the boys.”
“Of course,” I say, thinking that response is oddly defensive. But that might stem from all the press that’s been hounding the school, looking for reasons for a killer to target him, as Linda at my soon-to-be ex-client’s firm was doing with me.
“Look, I should get back to work now. If you need to talk more, you can call anytime,” she says sweetly.
I stare at my phone, swiping away all the announcements that I can tell involve me. I see blips of the headlines with the words Confession Artist, Sketch, Victim Revealed, and, last: Crosbie Mitchell and Her Traumatic Past.
Ughh.
I focus on Ryan Petronis’s social media.
Photos and comments reveal he was involved in science club, enjoyed chess, played trumpet in the band.
An interesting, curious, creative kid. I can’t find anything that mentions Askens’s name in relation to Ryan, but the tingle in my spine tells me to not give up.
I add Ryan Petronis’s suicide under Askens’s column.
There are few high schools in America that aren’t experiencing an alarming number of suicides, so it seems unlikely that this is the link.
Nonetheless I jot down Other suicides and add the names of two students who have taken their lives at both Askens’s high school and one at Loman’s community college.
I also list the ones from my orbit: Greer Mathews, a kid who shot himself in the basement of his parents’ home, a case I was called to while on patrol with the force.
And a few years earlier, Sienna Peterson, a high school senior who crashed her car into a rock divider.
I was first on the scene for that one, too.
Sienna had sent a text to a friend saying she’d decided to take her life in that precise manner.
And . . . Leon. The unintended, unexpected fatality stemming from Coleman’s death.
I can barely summon the courage to even think about it. It’s too devastating. Too raw. I don’t think even time will ever distance me from the crushing pain of knowing I had a hand in it.
A friend found Leon hanging from a beam in his basement apartment.
Ewing handled the scene because, clearly, it would have been a conflict of interest for either Railes or me to be called in if we’d even been on duty and in the area, so I was not involved.
Though of course I tormented myself then—and not a day goes by that I don’t still—with the thought that I very much was.
I write Leon’s name under my column. I find that Leon Spencer’s mom died when he was seven and he was left with his dad, a guy named Burt Spencer, who liked his booze—a detail I had already gleaned after Leon hanged himself and I tried to figure out if there was going to be a service.
When I checked, the guilt crushing me so heavily that I wasn’t even sure I had it in me to attend, I was selfishly relieved to see that there was no service open to the public.
That, if there was anything at all, it was private.
There was nothing in the local paper about it other than the mention of a young male adult dying by suicide.
But at the time, I gathered from my search that his father, Burt Spencer, had accrued two DUIs.
I don’t let myself wonder about what kind of life Leon had very often. It’s too painful. My throat constricts like it’s gathering in and molding all my mistakes into a hard, twisted ball of barbed wire.
And now, I don’t have a second longer to think on it either because my phone buzzes.
It’s Jess.
“Oh my God, Cros. You have to get over here.”
I begin to remind her that I don’t want to draw attention to her place, to her, to Sam, but I stop. Dread tightens my stomach. She sounds frantic. “What is it?” I ask. “Is the media harassing you?”
“No. But someone’s been here.”
My insides go cold. “Who’s been there?”
“Someone’s written something on my windshield.”