Chapter 13 Hattie
Hattie
Mornings here in the woods were quiet. Almost too quiet if I were being honest with myself.
It was harder to get used to than I thought, after all the hustle and bustle of the suburban areas I typically stayed in.
My last assignment in Arizona, I’d been staying in a shitty motel right next to a highway where trucks buzzed through on the regular.
There’d been a constant chatter of people next door, and the doors banged all the time.
This was such a drastic change that it was almost jarring.
This morning, when Kipp started his truck, I’d woken up from a foggy dream, but had collapsed back on my pillow and fallen back to sleep.
Last night was one of those nights where I stayed up editing the podcast before finalizing it and putting it up to stream.
When I’d finally fallen into bed, it had been with utter exhaustion.
I wasn’t sure who had picked out the furnishings here or the bedding, but they’d done a top-notch job. No scratchy pillowcases here.
Now it was time to really dig into the case and learn what I could about the other key details.
Given what looked like blood in the photos bothered me, and the fact that the car hadn’t been processed was strange.
More than strange, even in a small town like Briar Falls.
Evidence should have been collected and treated as if it were a major crime, even if they didn’t have the resources to do so themselves.
They could have contacted another nearby department or even the state police.
My eyes shifted over to Kipp’s cabin while I poured myself the requisite bowl of Cocoa Puffs.
The air in the clearing around the little horseshoe of cabins was warmer now, even with the windows open.
Everything had settled into that quiet that was almost oppressive now that Kipp had gone off to his job.
I wondered idly whether game wardens had offices or just roamed the wilderness in their trucks, communing with the squirrels.
Part of me wished that I didn’t care so much that he was so turned off by my work, but it bothered me. If he had given me a chance to explain myself, then we could have gotten past it. Of course, I hadn’t stuck around long enough at the coffee shop to figure out why he’d had such a reaction to it.
I made coffee strong enough to bite back, opened my laptop at the small table by the window, and let the familiar weight of research pull me under.
Part of my process was making sure I had all the facts.
A lot of the research was done by the little squad I’d assembled, but double-checking it was important.
If you weren’t factual in what you were doing in my line of work, then you could get yourself in a lot of trouble, and the last thing I wanted to do was to be throwing around baseless accusations.
Opening the case file on the computer I’d been working on for the last week, I pulled up the folder I had been building for weeks and started again from the beginning, not because I thought I had missed something obvious, but because patterns hide in repetition.
Allison Finch stared back at me from the screen.
Her senior portrait showed a girl with undeniable natural beauty, a smile that looked practiced, as if she had done it in the mirror a thousand times.
There was still an innocence in her eyes in her high school photos, and her hair was its natural brown, tucked behind her ears.
We’d dug deep on Allison, everything on her, all the way back to the time she’d been born. Twenty-seven years’ worth of records that now seemed to hold almost nothing at all.
There was a copy of her birth certificate and school records that showed Allison had been a less-than-stellar student.
She’d struggled in school in every subject, but she also hadn’t always had a good track record when it came to attendance, and it didn’t seem like any of her schools had success doing much about it.
My hacker squad had also managed to dig up CPS reports that were careful with their language and brutal in their implications.
Her father, Richard Finch, had a well-documented file of being a fucking drunk for lack of a better term that went back decades.
There were DUIs and a handful of drunk and disorderly conduct charges.
But of course, there was nothing that ever stuck long enough to keep him off the streets for more than a night or two.
What was more telling were the hospital records for his daughter.
Each one that I scrolled past was a story of her abuse.
I already knew them by heart, but they told a story of a father who beat her and probably her mother, too.
There was a broken wrist that went unexplained, a concussion, and then a fractured rib—slowly, reading each admission summary even though I already knew them by heart.
Sure, there were all the mandatory reports, and then the follow-ups, but the system did what it always did when men managed to stay just inside the lines.
Nothing.
It was awful, but probably not the reason Allison disappeared as an adult.
While we always needed a complete picture of what shaped a victim, it didn’t mean I wanted their backstories to turn into sideshows where people picked apart their lives.
The real question was who benefited. There was always a chance that she left on her own and was out there living a new life…
we’d found a few cases like that, but we’d quietly let them go.
The last thing we wanted was to expose women who had left a domestic violence situation.
However, Allison’s case didn’t point in that direction.
The whole ‘she took off’ narrative wasn’t vibing with any of us.
My calendar reminder chimed softly, and I clicked into the video call, checking that my tits weren’t out or something even though no one on the other end cared. Still, I hated looking like a mess.
The laptop screen started filling, each square popping in as my squad joined.
We were an interesting bunch, that was for sure.
Nova came in first, her dark hair pulled into a ponytail that looked crooked, and a stack of binders was visible behind her on her bookshelf.
She was in her early twenties, as far as I could tell, and considered herself an enthusiast.
Nova had been part of our chats for almost a year under the username shootingstar45 before she finally took the step to join calls, initially with her face hidden and later shyly revealing it, as if she expected people to bully her afterward.
“Great podcast last night, Hattie. Sounded awesome. Please tell me you found something new,” she said, adjusting her neckline as she fidgeted on her chair. Nova was always a little nervous at first.
Stormtrooper (not his real name) joined a second later, glasses on, expression already sharp. “Or something boring that everyone else missed. I will take either. It’s been a shit day already, let me tell you. God save me from fucking politicians.”
“Hey, Storm,” Nova said, giving a little wave. She had a tiny crush on him, I thought. He was good-looking and often appeared on shadowed video calls, but he was clearly in good shape and handsome.
“Hey, Nova. Hattie.” Pushing glasses up on his nose, he began arranging his desktop the way he preferred. I appreciated his no-nonsense approach to things. These sessions weren’t necessarily about chit-chat, although sometimes a few of us indulged in conversations afterward.
He was one of our most interesting members of The J & J Hour squad and the one I hadn’t quite figured out yet.
Hacking wasn’t my strong suit, and I wasn’t interested in learning it.
Sure, I could leverage others to hack for me, and that’s what I’d done, but we had rules.
One of the biggest was that we were all off-limits to each other for safety reasons, plain and simple.
I didn’t want anyone thinking that one of the group members would track them down just for shits and giggles.
Safety mattered a lot to me. Of course, everyone pretty much knew everything about me since I’d basically thrown up on the internet when Jane had disappeared.
There was no getting around the fact that my life was in the public eye.
Poppy came in next, lounging back in her chair. “Hey, everyone.” She gave a distracted wave. “Sounded good yesterday, Hats.”
She was one of my favorites and had been with me almost from the beginning of my podcast. She was older, with greying hair, and reminded me a little of a sassy mom I would have loved to go antiquing with or watch trash TV. I smiled despite myself.
We were short a few members, but it wasn’t unusual for Leo and Abby not to join daytime video chats.
They had nine-to-five jobs and weren’t as flexible as the rest of us, but at the start of the case, we needed to hit the ground running so I could begin the interviews and get out into the streets (so to speak).
Tucking my legs under me, I got out a fresh pad of paper. “Okay, guys. Let’s walk through what we have to start with.”
We spent the next hour moving through Allison’s background piece by piece. Storm took the lead, discussing Allison’s early life, including Richard Finch’s arrests and hospital visits, while all of us winced through it.
“It’s bad,” Storm said carefully. I’d already seen most of it, but he put it up on his screen, running through each event again. “Everything that we have here is also documented fairly well, especially for something like this.”
Nova nodded. “What about the mother? Do we have anything else on her?” She’d been taking notes as Storm talked. “Was there domestic abuse with her?”