Chapter 12
Penguins Are Birds
I’m curled on the couch under a blanket with my laptop balanced on my thighs, a glass of cabernet on the coffee table in front of me, and Rhys Steichen’s address book held open in my left hand as I awkwardly type addresses from it into Google Maps with my right hand so that I can look at them in Street View.
Katie is on the couch next to me, and we’re ostensibly watching March of the Penguins.
“Did you know there were people who didn’t know penguins were birds before this documentary came out?” Katie asks distractedly.
“You’re kidding, right?” I reply as I zoom in on the map.
“No. I was reading a conversation about it on Reddit earlier. That’s what made me think to put this on.”
“What did they figure they were?”
“I dunno. Mammals, I guess.”
“Weird,” I mutter. The house I’m looking at right now is large and gated.
It’s got to be worth a couple of million.
I type the address into Zillow. The estimate is $2.
3 million. It must be one of his teammates’ houses.
I keep looking and run across several more multi-million-dollar addresses.
Eventually, I go to the county records website and try to look up the property owners for the addresses, but every address over a million dollars is listed as being owned by an LLC.
The LLC varies based on the address, but no individuals’ names are listed.
I try to look up who owns the different LLCs on the Oregon Business Registry, but most of them don’t provide any information about the LLC members, and the ones that do are filled with names I don’t recognize.
I’ll have to meet up with Vaughn and give him a list of the addresses so he can see if he can figure out which houses belong to which players.
Vaughn has a private investigator’s license, which gives him access to a lot of information I don’t have.
I’m guessing Rhys Steichen has every player’s address but his own in here.
“Are you coming to my mom’s for Sunday dinner?” Katie asks after several minutes have passed.
“Sure.”
“Okay. Good. She’s going to want to talk about it.”
“‘It’ what?” I probe, glancing up to find her chewing on her lip, her eyes unfocused on the TV screen.
“Joey Carmichael dying,” Katie says neutrally.
“Oh. And you don’t want to?”
“No. Not with her. You know how she is. Once she brings it up… She’ll just make me feel bad for being happy he’s dead. She won’t mean to, but she will.”
“Okay,” I acknowledge, making a mental note to talk to Jeanette prior to tomorrow night.
Katie’s not wrong. Jeanette will probably begin talking about how unexpected deaths in young people are always difficult to process.
She means well, but Jeanette is an optimist with a bleeding heart who’s made of steel.
It’s a rare combination that creates resilience that borders on fanaticism.
I’m certain it’s why she went into pediatrics.
In med school, it was all I could do to survive my pediatrics rotation.
It takes a special kind of person to go into work every day knowing they might see a child die, and I am not that kind of person.
Unfortunately, the same characteristics that make Jeanette great at her job will likely end up making Katie feel guilty for wanting to throw a party celebrating Joey Carmichael’s demise.
I continue flipping through Rhys Steichen’s address book.
The other addresses listed are all for normal-sized houses and apartments.
They’re mostly local addresses, spread all over the city, but there are a few out-of-town addresses scattered throughout as well.
I keep turning the pages, and toward the back of the book I find Katie’s address—the address where she was living prior to breaking her lease and moving in with me—and my blood runs cold.
That son of a bitch. I bet at least some of these addresses belong to other women he and his hockey-douchebag friends have done this to.
I close the address book and text Vaughn. Can we meet during the day tomorrow? I have something I need to show you
A moment later, a response appears on my screen. Sure. 1pm at Eastside Coffee Joint?
Yeah. Sounds good. Thanks, I reply.
My phone vibrates as I drop into the chair across from Vaughn.
I glance at the screen. Mark is FaceTiming me.
I think they’re playing somewhere on the East Coast today, so their game is starting in an hour or whatever, but I don’t have time to talk to him now.
I decline the call, then send a text telling him I’m busy.
Vaughn’s eyes are boring into me as he waits for me to finish.
Are you free after the game? Mark replies.
What time will that be?
Around six for you. Maybe a little after
Yeah, I should be free then, I respond before setting my phone down.
I won’t be having dinner with Katie and Jeanette until seven, and I already called Jeanette earlier to ask her not to bring up Joey Carmichael’s death around Katie.
Mark and I have talked every day he’s been out of town, and I gave him a video tour of the condo yesterday when Katie ran to the grocery store. I’m hoping that’ll buy me some time and stop him from wanting to see it in person, but it probably won’t.
“Hey Vaughn. Thanks for meeting me,” I finally say. “That was Mark,” I explain, nodding toward my phone.
“Sure. No problem. What did you want me to see?” Vaughn asks, not wasting any time.
I pull the address book out of my jacket pocket. “I took this from the arena the other night. It’s Rhys Steichen’s.” I flip the book open and turn it to face Vaughn. “And this,” I say, pointing at an address halfway down the page, “is Katie’s address. Or it was anyway. Before she broke her lease.”
Vaughn’s eyes move from the page to mine. “And they never met before that night and haven’t talked since then,” he states.
I nod as Vaughn pulls the book toward him and flips through the pages.
“Some of the addresses in there are for multimillion-dollar homes owned by LLCs. I’m assuming they’re his teammates’ houses. But there are a lot of regular-people addresses too.”
“And you want to know who lives in the houses.”
“Yeah. And maybe for how long. He probably added Katie’s address that night last year when they raped her, so everything before that is most likely older. People could’ve moved.”
“There are a lot of addresses. It’ll take a while.”
“That’s fine.”
“Okay.” Vaughn pulls a beige folder from his bag and slides it toward me. “This is everything I’ve been able to find out about Matt Davidson. He’s allergic to bees, so I’m not sure how helpful that is. There’s also a copy of his daily schedule, as near as I’ve been able to nail it down.”
“Thanks.”
“Marjorie wanted me to invite you over for dinner on Saturday next week,” Vaughn tells me.
“Yeah, I can do that,” I agree. It’s been several months since I last saw Marjorie.
“You should bring Mark.”
“That sounds like a terrible idea. You seriously want him to know who you are—where you live—after this is all done?”
“If you do it right, it’ll be nothing more than a standard breakup.”
“And if I screw it up?”
“Don’t do that,” Vaughn says, like it’s just that simple. “Besides, supporting characters help to sell the con. He’s going to want to meet your friends and family before too much longer, and you’re not going to introduce him to Katie or Jeanette, so unless you’ve got someone else in mind…”
I roll my eyes. “Okay. I’ll come on Saturday. I’ll let you know about Mark,” I say as I stand.
At six, Mark calls again. It’s been gloomy and drizzly here all day, but it’s still daylight outside my windows, however murky it might be. The windows behind Mark show nothing but gaping darkness. Evidently, the man doesn’t close the blinds anywhere, ever.
“Hi. How do you not feel like people are watching you all the time?” I ask.
“Hi,” he replies, his brows drawn together, confusion marring his face. “What are you talking about?”
“The windows behind you. You realize they have curtains, right? And you can close them, and then that way people can’t look in.”
“Oh. I don’t care. I don’t ever really think about it, honestly.”
“So I see. How was your game? Did you beat whoever you were playing against?”
“We won in overtime.”
“That’s good. Do you get back into town on Friday or Saturday?”
“Late Friday night. Technically, early Saturday. Around two in the morning. Why?”
“I was having lunch with Vaughn earlier, and he invited me—well, us really, if you want to come—to dinner with him and his wife, Marjorie, on Saturday. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.
I just figured since you’d asked about him, and he said you were welcome to come…
” I trail off. I’m still not sure this is a great idea.
“You talked to Vaughn about me?”
The question catches me off guard, and I can’t completely fight down the grin that wants to stretch across my face. Mark has no idea how much I’ve talked to Vaughn about him. But I merely say, “Yes. Is that a problem?”
“No. It’s just unexpected. You don’t strike me as the type to…” Apparently it’s his turn to trail off.
“The type to?” I ask, eyebrows raised. I’m sure he stopped talking because he thought better of whatever he was going to say, which makes me curious.
“Discuss your personal relationships with people. Even with people you’re close to.
You seem like the type of person who would move in with someone, and people close to you would only find out when they tried to visit you and found you were no longer living at that address,” he tells me, apparently deciding to be honest about what he was thinking.