CHAPTER TEN
Kate had taken over a corner of the conference room on the second floor, where someone had left a half-full pot of coffee on the warmer.
She poured herself a cup and sat down with her laptop.
She took a deep breath and a small smile crept across her face before she dove into the research she’d been planning on the way to the field office.
She started with Carol Paige. She already had the basics from the case file, but basics were not what she was looking for.
She went deeper, pulling up property records, civic registrations, memberships, subscriptions, anything that had generated a paper trail in the last eighteen months.
She knew this sort of thing might seem daunting to some, but it was always where she’d excelled.
She simply knew her way around the databases and had always been good at sniffing out little morsels that others might have either never seen or disregarded.
Within just twenty minutes, she learned a great deal more about Carol Paige.
Carol had lived in the same house for eleven years.
She had a library card, a gym membership she had signed up for eight months ago, and a subscription to a meal delivery service she had cancelled after three months.
She had donated to two local charities in the past year, both modest amounts.
She had attended a neighborhood association meeting in the spring, according to a public attendance roster attached to meeting minutes on the city's community board website.
The picture that assembled itself was of a woman who had spent the last two years quietly rebuilding.
Carol Paige had not made large gestures.
She had made small, incremental ones. The gym membership.
The meal kit service, abandoned but attempted.
The part-time job at the library. The dating app her daughter had installed for her.
Each one a small, careful step back toward a second act.
Kate recognized that shape, and not just professionally.
She had been through her own long stretch of solitude before Allen.
There had been years of coming home to a quiet house and learning to be comfortable in it.
She had never gone through a divorce, but she understood the effort it took to choose, day after day, to keep moving forward when staying still would have been so much easier.
The recognition sat in her chest in a way that was both tight and familiar.
She pushed it aside and moved on to Donna Holt.
Donna's trail was somewhat fuller, or at least more visible.
She had a stronger social media presence than Carol, though she had not posted in several weeks.
Her most recent posts were photographs: a meal at a restaurant, a weekend trip to see her college-age son, a snapshot of a book on a nightstand with a cup of tea beside it.
The comments underneath were warm and easy, the responses of a woman who was genuinely liked by the people around her.
Kate scrolled through them without lingering.
The divorce had been finalized fourteen months ago.
Prior to that, Donna had been largely absent from social media for almost two months, which told its own quiet story.
After the divorce she had reappeared gradually, posting more, engaging more.
She had signed up for a pottery class at a community arts center, according to a registration list Kate pulled from the center's public event archive.
She had joined a book club that met at a wine bar on the north side of the city.
She had taken up running, logging short routes through her neighborhood three mornings a week according to a fitness app that synced publicly to her profile.
Kate sat back in her chair and looked at the window for a moment.
Two women in their fifties. Both had ended long marriages and come through the other side into the same careful, deliberate project of rebuilding.
Pottery classes and book clubs and gym memberships.
Dating apps installed by well-meaning daughters.
These were all small, brave attempts at trying to reclaim a life that felt full again.
Both of them had been doing it well, by every measure she could find.
Both had found someone they liked enough to meet for dinner and to feel something for the first time in a long time.
And now both were dead.
She thought about Allen again, briefly and without meaning to.
She thought of the years before him, the long flat stretch when the job had been everything and the rest of her life had existed in the margins.
She had never been as isolated as these women appeared to have been, but she had known that particular loneliness well enough to understand what it cost to climb out of it.
The courage it took to decide, after years of a marriage going quietly wrong, that you still had something left to offer and that someone out there might want it.
She pulled her attention back firmly to the screen, doing her best to shake how targeted she felt while working her way through it all.
She had been at it for nearly two hours and had not found a single point where the two women's lives visibly intersected. They’d lived in different neighborhoods, had worked for different employers, had orbited different social circles as far as she could tell.
There had been no mutual connections on social media, and their divorces had been handled by different law firms on opposite sides of the city.
Their children had not attended the same schools.
Their grocery loyalty cards placed them in different parts of town.
As far as Kate could map it, the paths of Carol Paige and Donna Holt had simply never crossed.
She refilled her coffee, stood for a moment to stretch her back, and sat back down.
She went back to Donna's financial records and started working through a different layer, looking not at what Donna had done publicly but at what she had signed up for, registered for, and paid for out of pocket.
Credit card statements, direct debits, recurring charges, and things of that nature.
She was nearly twenty minutes into this when she found it: a line item in Donna's bank statement from nine months ago.
A single payment of two hundred and forty dollars to an entity listed as Fresh Horizons LLC.
She typed the name into her browser.
Fresh Horizons came up immediately. It was a locally-based life coaching service.
It was described on its website as a program designed specifically for women navigating the transition out of long-term marriages.
It offered group sessions and one-on-one coaching.
The site was clean and professionally done, with a short paragraph about the founder, a man by the name of Richard Hale.
Hale himself had gone through his own divorce fifteen years ago and built the program in response to what he described as a shortage of resources that actually helped.
Fresh Horizons had been operating for six years.
Sessions were held out of a suite on Caldwell Street.
Kate found it odd that a man would be running and operating such a service, but she noted that the vast majority of other employees, counselors, and managers were mostly female. It made her wonder if maybe Hale was more of a monetary source who’d happened to have the originating idea.
Kate went back to Carol Paige's financial records without pausing.
She found it in under five minutes. A payment of two hundred and forty dollars, eleven months ago, to Fresh Horizons LLC.
She sat still and looked at both entries side by side on her screen.
Both payments made within a month of each other, roughly a year ago.
She was looking at two women who shared no visible social connection, no overlapping geography, no common professional or personal circles…
but yet they had each written a check to the same local program within weeks of one another.
It wasn’t proof of anything. Kate knew that simply enough.
Fresh Horizons had been operating for six years and could easily have served several hundred women over that time, most of whom were presumably alive and going about their lives without incident.
The overlap might be exactly what it appeared on the surface—just two women in similar circumstances who had each found their way to the same local resource.
But it was a connection. Tangible, specific, and documented. After two days of confirmed alibis and neighbors who had heard nothing, a real connection between the two victims was not something she could sit on and examine at her leisure.
She found the Caldwell Street address on the Fresh Horizons website and entered it into her phone. Then she opened her text thread with Sloane.
Might have a potential lead. Meet me at the car in 5.
She closed the laptop and gathered her things. Both of their victims had written a check to the same organization within a month of each other, and both were now dead.
She didn't know yet what that meant, but she was going to find out.