Chapter 1
ANGEL
Lauren Robbins cried for seven minutes.
I knew it was seven because I’d glanced at the clock on her kitchen wall when her tears started.
I always did that when I was interviewing loved ones.
That way I knew later where to cut the recording.
I never used any audio of them crying. Their grief was not content.
It was the reason I existed, but it was not content.
My followers didn’t need to hear their sobbing. They would already hear the anguish, and the sadness that gutted families who were left behind when someone was taken from them in such cruel ways.
I’d made a promise to myself ten years ago that my Avenging Angel podcast would bring light to their darkness. Not just for these families, but for my hundreds of thousands of followers too. People needed hope. Sometimes that was the only thing that got them through the day.
It certainly was for me. Hope was what I’d been relying on since my sister was murdered eleven years ago.
I pulled another tissue from the box and handed it to Lauren. And I waited. People reacted differently when they finally had the truth. Some cried. Some got angry. Some sat stunned, unable to comprehend what they’d just learned. Some were a mixture of all three.
“All my life,” Lauren said between shaky breaths.
She pressed a balled tissue under each eye carefully, like she’d learned the trick of crying without wrecking herself.
“All my life I thought Dad had just left us. Mom told me he walked out when I was four. That he didn’t want us. I spent my whole life hating him.”
“Now you know the truth. He didn’t leave you,” I said.
“No.” She released a wet sob. “He was dead the whole time. They left him in that cave. For decades. Who does that?”
“A very cruel man.”
Frank Branson’s cruelty was staggering. First, he’d watched Joseph “Joey” Robbins die after Joey’s small plane crashed on Frank’s sprawling outback cattle property, Koolaroo Ranch.
And then Frank had hidden the pilot’s body in a cave for thirty-seven years.
But Joey’s murder was tangled up with a story so much bigger and uglier than one missing pilot.
Joey wasn’t the first person Frank killed. And he wasn’t the last.
Lauren had already been contacted by the authorities about her father’s body being discovered, so she didn’t need the story again from me. My podcast was about giving those with missing loved ones a voice. And those victims whose cases were never solved.
Lauren’s story was a bit different from those of most of the family members I interviewed. She’d never grieved her father because she’d thought he was alive. Until a few weeks ago.
“Your dad didn’t abandon you,” I repeated, because that was the important part of this story.
That undid her all over again, but it was a different kind of crying this time.
I’d seen the change multiple times over.
In the last ten years, I’d interviewed hundreds of families whose loved ones had become cold cases.
The ones who felt let down by the system.
Abandoned by those who were meant to give them closure.
Like me.
I reached across Lauren’s laminate table and pressed my hand over her arm. “When you’re ready, call me. Anytime. I mean it.”
She raised her bloodshot eyes to me. “I’ve waited thirty-seven years for my father to step back into my life. Can you tell me again what stopped him from doing that?”
I nodded, understanding. She would have been in shock when she’d been told of her father’s remains being found, so she probably didn’t hear half of what the police had told her. “Do you mind if I record this?”
She nodded, and with my little recorder sitting between the sugar bowl and the salt, I told her all about the unscrupulous woman who’d hired her pilot father, Joseph “Joey” Robbins.
I detailed the crash, and how the woman and Frank didn’t help Joseph with his head injury.
But it was what came next that was the hardest. The lying.
The secrets. The cruelty of leaving Joseph’s family to suffer for decades.
Who does that?
Monsters. And monsters don’t always look like they should.
These cruel bastards can live among us, pretending they’re decent human beings. They can be married. Have children. Act like they’re normal. Just like the bastard who killed my sister.
But nobody believes me that he did it.
When I left Lauren an hour later, she walked me to my Kombi and stood in the scrubby front yard with her arms wrapped around herself. “Why do you do this? These interviews? I mean, you don’t even know me.”
The truth was too long and too much about me, so I gave her the short version.
“Because every victim deserves to have their say. Your father was murdered. But he wasn’t the only victim when he died. You were too.”
A tear spilled over her lashes and she wiped her cheek. “When will you do the podcast?”
“In about a week or so. I’ll let you know when I have it ready. And, like I said at the beginning, if you don’t want to go ahead with it, I promise you, I won’t release the podcast.”
She sucked her lips into her mouth, fighting another wave of tears.
I pulled her into a hug. “I’m sorry we had to meet like this. But if you ever want to chat, give me a call.”
She nodded as she eased back. “Thank you.”
I squeezed her bony shoulder. Stepping back, I reached into the front pocket of my jeans and pulled out a little firefly keyring that I gave to everyone I interviewed. “This is for you. I hope finding out the truth has brought a little light to your darkness.”
“Oh, thank you.” She raised the keyring, and the little crystal on the firefly’s back shimmered in the afternoon sun. “It’s beautiful.” A tiny smile touched her lips.
“I hope you can put this behind you now, Lauren. You have so much more life to live. Your father would have wanted that.”
Lauren heaved a breath. “Do you know if that woman who watched Dad die will go to jail?”
“She’s already been arrested. She’s been charged with manslaughter, and if that doesn’t stick, she’s also been charged with perverting the course of justice and interfering with a corpse.”
Lauren frowned. “But she didn’t move Dad’s body. Frank did.”
“Correct. And that’s probably why she thought she did nothing wrong.
She counseled and procured Frank to dispose of your father’s body.
That makes her a co-conspirator. So she’ll be convicted of the corpse-disposal crime as if she’d done it herself, plus conspiracy to defeat justice.
No matter how fancy her lawyers are, she’s not getting out of these crimes.
She’ll probably spend the rest of her life in prison.
And believe me, she will suffer, big time. ”
“Good.” Lauren nodded. And for the first time since she’d opened the door to me, she looked like some of the weight on her shoulders had been lifted.
The driver’s side door of my Kombi creaked as I opened it. “Call me. Okay?”
“I will.”
I climbed in and the engine did that same crunch it had been doing for years as I kicked it into gear.
Lauren watched me reverse out of the drive, and in the mirror she got smaller and smaller as I drove away. It was a relief that she finally knew her father hadn’t left her on purpose.
I had given her that. It was a good way to start my journey north to Rosebud.
Although the interview with Lauren was still bittersweet, my chest was both warm and aching in equal measure… the same way it always was when I interviewed the family of a victim.
Because Lauren Robbins now had justice for the senseless death of a man she didn’t even remember.
I just couldn’t do the same for my own sister.
While the interview was still fresh in my mind, I always recorded a quick teaser for my podcast. So once I merged onto the highway, that endless ribbon of asphalt I’d driven dozens of times before, I hit record on my phone mounted to the dash.
“Hey there, fireflies.” I kept my eyes on the road and raised my voice over the engine’s rumble and the hum of tires on asphalt.
“Remember that episode a couple of months ago about the rogue cop who was on the run, and his asshole buddy Frank? The one who helped cover up a death and got away with it for decades? Well, today I sat across from a woman who only just found out her father died thirty-seven years ago, when she was four years old. She spent decades believing he walked away and never looked back. Thirty-seven years living with that pain, you know? The kind that makes you wonder what you did wrong. Or why you weren’t good enough to make your own father stay.
“Turns out her father never left her at all. He died, and that bastard Frank Branson made sure no one found his body. This little girl grew up thinking her daddy didn’t love her.
“Giving her the truth today and watching her realize he’d never abandoned her after all, that’s why I do this. But it’s bittersweet. Because no amount of truth can give her back those lost years. No conviction can undo that kind of grief.
“And this is just the beginning of this criminal saga. I won’t stop until every single person hurt by Bob Ackerman and Frank Branson’s crimes gets their story told. Every victim deserves to be seen. To be heard. To matter.
“I’m in my Kombi now, heading north to a seaside town that has suffered more than enough crime and corruption to find more stories like this one. More truth.
“Take care of each other out there, fireflies. Stay safe.
“This is Avenging Angel, signing off.”
I tapped the screen and hit replay. It always amazed me that I could nail these quick recordings in one take when the full podcasts took hours of editing and re-recording.
Using voice commands, I uploaded the file and pushed it out to all my social media channels. Then I plucked the phone off its magnetic bracket and tossed it facedown onto the passenger seat.