Chapter 18 Probably Isn’t Certainly
I wrapped the blanket around my shoulders and settled against the headboard, the laptop balanced on my thighs. Its glow cut through the dark room in a single hard rectangle of light.
I typed fast, opening tabs across the browser.
The earliest article had gone up three hours and twenty minutes ago.
The police press release it quoted was only forty minutes older than that.
Four hours. Not enough time for real reporting.
The articles were thin—little more than a headline and a paragraph or two.
The internet was only just starting to catch up.
There was a limit to what tonight could tell me. I worked with what there was anyway.
Local news had two short pieces, nearly identical, lifted straight from the release.
Body found in a residence. Possible link to the earlier death. Investigation ongoing.
The regional paper had added only a sanitized paragraph about Richard, hometown, age, employer, and nothing else. No mention of a witness. The police bulletin was the same: tip line, case number, and a careful absence of any public reference to someone having seen something.
I would have been surprised if there had been. Police never announced witnesses in public statements. They kept them close.
I moved to social media next. The local subreddit already had three threads running. Town Facebook groups were buzzing. Even the Discord server a girl from my Criminal Procedure class had shared was churning with speculation. The same rumor threaded through all of them.
"I heard there was a witness."
"Where did you hear that?"
"Someone said it on Reddit."
"My cousin's friend works dispatch."
"My roommate's dad is a cop. He says it's real."
It was the same shape every time. Someone heard someone say. The chain never resolved into anything solid—no names, no screenshots, no specific claims about what the witness had actually seen. Just the word itself, passed hand to hand, growing heavier with each repetition.
That was not how real witness information moved in a small town. Either the police clamped down hard enough that nothing leaked at all, or a specific detail raced through someone’s brother-in-law and hit every group chat within the hour. This felt different—manufactured, detached, purposeful.
It could still be real. I wasn’t ready to dismiss it on a feeling alone.
But it felt exactly like something Thomas Black would plant. Two men dead in three weeks. He would not sit back and wait for the police. A rumor about a witness cost him nothing, spread itself, and was designed to make the killer panic.
Designed to make me panic.
I sat with that for a moment, then kept working. Probably was not the same as certainly, and I had learned long ago that the difference between those two words was how people got caught.
I kept digging.
I slipped into places I was not supposed to be.
Brian had spent a year teaching me the basics—not because he thought I would ever be good at hacking, but because he knew I would need it, and medium knowledge beat none.
I was medium. Good enough for systems set up by people who had checked a box instead of doing the job.
The hospital outsourced its IT. Someone had left default admin credentials in place. Easy way in.
Richard wouldn’t be in patient intake. He’d been dead before anyone with a stethoscope ever reached him.
Checking the ER was a long shot, but I pulled the log for the last twenty four hours anyway, scanning for anything that might point to a witness—someone brought in shaken, injured, or asking for protection.
Broken wrist. Kid with a fever. Drunk with a head laceration.
Pregnant woman with cramping. Nothing that read like a frightened witness.
The regional dispatch log showed one ambulance run to Richard’s address. He’d been pronounced at the scene and transported straight to the county ME. Nothing else had gone out in that quadrant.
I left the police systems untouched.
I had considered them carefully over months.
Small-town departments had weak security—getting in would have been easy.
Getting in without leaving a trace was harder.
State auditors who reviewed departments after high-profile cases were a different problem entirely.
Two bodies would pull attention from above.
Anything I touched could surface later, and my access pattern would point straight back at me.
So I stayed out. Other people’s brothers-in-law could leak from inside. I could not.
I returned to the public material.
Richard had lived on a modest street on the north side of town.
Older houses, mostly human owners—a few retirees, a family with two kids three doors down.
Not pack territory. That had been part of why I moved him up the list. Pack houses had ears.
Human ones had earplugs and Netflix. The neighbors had been a calculated risk, and so far it looked like the calculation had held.
Twenty posts down in a subreddit comment section, a man claimed he’d heard a scream from that street around midnight.
He didn’t name the house. Said he’d assumed it was a TV or a fight and gone back to sleep—just a man realizing too late he should have called the police.
His profile looked real. Years old. Dog photos.
Comments on the high school football team.
Not the kind of account someone built to invent drama.
He had probably heard something. Then gone back to bed.
Exactly what I had counted on. Richard occasionally threw loud parties and got into screaming fights with whoever he brought home. His neighbors had learned long ago that strange noises from his house were normal. I had built the plan around that fact, and it had worked.
The Reddit guy wasn't a useful witness. He’d heard a noise through a wall and seen nothing. If the police ever spoke to him, his statement would amount to almost nothing—just that he’d heard a sound and had no idea what it was.
I made a small mental note anyway. If the post stayed up, fine. If it disappeared in the next twenty-four hours, that would be interesting.
I checked the pack-adjacent chats I had lurked in for months. Wives' Facebook circles. The hunting club forum where pack men talked without their women looking over their shoulders. Nothing new. No mention of a witness. No mention of anything.
In a pack that had lost two men, that silence from the wives was not ignorance. It was obedience.
I noted it.
There was more to do. The press would run follow-ups over the weekend, and the forums would keep chewing on the rumor until it either sharpened into something useful or dissolved completely.
Monday would give me better material for a second pass.
Rushing it now would only leave me with the same thin picture I already had.
No witness I could confirm. A rumor without a traceable source. Not enough to be certain.
The clock in the corner of the screen read 1:27 a.m.
I closed the tabs one by one and shut the laptop. The room went dark. My eyes burned, and when I tipped my head from side to side my neck cracked in protest. I set the laptop on the desk and let sleep finally pull me under.