Chapter 14
He figured she’d be asleep for a few hours yet, so he left a note saying he’d be back soon.
He put Stella’s pistol in his belt and the foil brick of phones in his jacket pocket, then headed out the back door, locking it behind him.
He considered driving, but didn’t want to wake the girl by starting the Tahoe’s big engine.
Instead he walked down the block on foot, heading for a coffee shop he’d spotted last night.
The clouds were low overhead, their hanging tendrils shrouding the houses in mist.
With a large coffee in hand and a bag of pastries tucked inside his jacket, he jogged across the busy street to a bank branch with a decent overhang. Then he set his coffee on the pavement and took his phone from the foil.
Once it found a signal, the notifications began to pile up. Captain Durant had called six times and left four voicemails suggesting with increasing urgency that Peter get in touch. June had sent eight texts, each more profane than the last.
He texted back, “Call when you can.” She’d have premium Wi-Fi on the plane and would use Signal to reach out.
Thirty seconds later, his phone rang. “Marine, where the motherfucking fuck have you been?”
June’s vocabulary would make a drill sergeant blush.
Like KT, her first job as a journalist was on the police beat, and she claimed she’d learned to swear so both cops and fellow reporters would take her seriously.
That might have been true, but mostly Peter thought June cursed for the sheer joy of it.
“Sorry,” he said. “I had to go dark for a while.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” she said.
“The cops were going to make Ellie go with someone from Child Protective Services. She really didn’t want to. And I was worried about her safety. So she went with me instead.”
“She went with you?” June groaned. “You mean you took her. Bad idea, Marine.”
“I know,” he said. “I just couldn’t leave her there. Her mom is dead. She’s all messed up. I couldn’t protect them. It’s all my fault.”
“CPS is set up for kids with trauma, Peter. You’re not. You have to take her back.”
“It’s complicated.” He picked up his coffee and took a sip. “She said her dad’s somewhere in China, that she hasn’t seen him in years. That he doesn’t want her. She’ll end up in the foster system unless somebody steps up or KT made some kind of plan. Did you two ever talk about this stuff?”
“We talked about a lot of things, but not her ex. She sent me a copy of her will after they split up, just so I’d have it.
I dug it out of my hard drive. Turns out her brother was supposed to be Ellie’s guardian in case something happened.
But he’s dead. So like it or not, until the court figures things out, CPS is it. ”
Peter sighed. “I just feel so bad for Ellie. She doesn’t deserve this.”
“Nobody does,” June said. “Listen, Lewis is sitting right next to me. You’re still meeting us at the airport?” One of her profane texts had included her flight information.
Having Lewis in Seattle would make it easier to convince Manny that Peter had things covered. “I’ll be there,” he said. “Did you have time to dig into Reed and Enderby?”
As an investigative journalist with the nonprofit Public Investigations, June had access to multiple subscription databases that contained every scrap of information that money could buy, which was quite a lot.
It was often more recent and more accurate than law enforcement databases.
The only details she couldn’t legally obtain without someone’s permission were criminal histories and medical records.
If the person was dead, however, she’d been known to find a way around the rules.
“There wasn’t much on Geoffrey Reed. His online presence was faint at best. He was twenty-eight, worked part-time at a convenience store by the airport, and lived in what appears to be an apartment over his sister Sylvia’s garage.
No college, long periods of unemployment.
His only significant job was eighteen months as a contract employee for a software staffing company, but that was years ago.
Never married, no kids, no car. That gray hatchback was owned by an elderly neighbor who probably didn’t even know it was missing.
No bank account or credit card. He was on Facebook, but not particularly active. Mostly reposting other people’s stuff.”
“That threat letter had this odd line. We are Legion. It sounds familiar.”
“I looked it up. It’s from the Bible, Mark 5:9. Although it’s not accurate. The real quote is My name is Legion for we are many.”
“Why would he get the quote wrong when he went to all the effort of cutting and pasting words from magazines?”
“You got me,” June said. “The quote is spoken by a man possessed by demons. Maybe that’s how Geoffrey Reed thought of himself.”
“Was he religious?”
“Judging by his social media, I would say no. Although we should ask his sister about that.”
“What about the other killer, Scott Enderby?”
“Far as I can tell, Reed and Enderby were complete opposites. According to Enderby’s LinkedIn profile, his current profession is ‘investor.’ Before that, he’d been a senior VP at a social startup called Chatrbx.
His financials are strong, with more than a hundred grand in his checking and about twenty-five mil in his investment accounts.
The house in Magnolia is paid off and valued at two million bucks.
He had two school-age kids and an ex-wife who works in business development at Adobe. He was forty-seven.”
“Did you find any points of connection between the two?”
“Not yet. But they had to know each other, right? Two attacks on the same person on the same day, that’s not just some fucked-up coincidence.”
Peter thought of Enderby in his wide-brimmed hat and black windbreaker and textbook two-handed shooter’s stance, firing at him in the rain. He’d killed two people and was doing his best to kill two more. It made no sense at all. Enderby had too much to lose.
Then Peter wondered why a guy with twenty-five million dollars would drive a beat-up Toyota pickup that stunk of cigar smoke. “What vehicles did you find registered in his name?”
“Let me check my notes.” He heard her flipping through the pages of her notebook. “A sporty little BMW Z4, a Dodge Ram 2500 truck, and a Rivian SUV. All between two and four years old.”
“No Toyota?”
“No. Why?”
“Because that’s what he was driving at the motel,” Peter said.
“I don’t suppose you got the plate number.”
Peter pulled it from his memory. “Can you check the registration?”
“Doing it now. The Toyota? It’s not Enderby’s.
It’s registered to a guy named Gerald Latimer.
” She gave Peter a street address in Tacoma, a city south of Seattle.
He heard her fingers on the keyboard. “Looking up Latimer, I’m not seeing any activity for the past five years.
Which means he’s either dead or missing. The cops will know for sure.”
“Huh,” Peter said. “How did Enderby get the truck? Did he steal it from Latimer? Or buy it under Latimer’s name?” Either way, it meant there was more to Enderby than his life in tech.
It also meant that, unlike Geoffrey Reed in his easily traced elderly neighbor’s car, Scott Enderby had tried a lot harder to get away with murder.
Peter thought again about that threat letter. “Did you start looking into the stories KT was working?”
“I didn’t get everything. The upload quit.”
“Enderby shot up her laptop and phone,” Peter said. “Very convenient.”
“I guess he didn’t want the cops looking at her files.”
“Did she keep anything online?”
“I’m sure she did, but she didn’t share her passwords. KT was my friend, but she didn’t always play well with others. I did get her tickler list, a half dozen story folders, and another folder with a bunch of interview audio and transcripts.”
Peter knew the terminology because June used the same system, which she’d learned from KT.
A tickler list was a document listing every story she was working on, whether nearly finished or still in development, along with every other idea she was considering developing, no matter how small or unlikely.
A story folder held the collected background notes, audio interviews, emails, images, and web links already accumulated for a given story.
It also included a master document with an ongoing summary of key details and links to the other items in the folder for easy reference.
“I’ve already been through her tickler list and story folders,” June said.
“Her current projects seem pretty straightforward. There’s a CEO profile for the Journal, a postmortem on a failed device startup, something about startups that get bought by big companies, and early reporting on OpenAI’s huge spend on data centers. ”
“Is there anything on the whistleblower she was supposed to meet yesterday?”
“Just a few lines,” June said. “She didn’t know the whistleblower’s name or what he wanted to talk about. Apparently he sent something to her PO box, but either she hadn’t gotten it or hadn’t updated the list.”
“None of that seems worth killing for.”
“Maybe, maybe not. With that failed device startup, a lot of VC money went down the tubes. A whistleblower can cost companies millions or billions, and their information can lead to criminal prosecutions. I could see Enderby having some investments he was trying to protect, or secrets he wanted to keep. But Reed barely had a pot to piss in. What’s his connection to this? ”
“Good question,” Peter said. “Did you get through the folder of audio transcripts?”
“I did. More than a hundred interviews conducted over the past nine months for at least a dozen different stories. Which was strange, because usually an interview would land in a particular story folder, not be thrown in with all the others. It took me a while to find the common thread. Which was another strange thing, because KT was usually very direct. If she wanted to know something, whether you worked for a tiny startup or ran one of the Big Five, like Apple or Google, she always went straight at you. It was part of what made her a legend, that fearlessness. It also made her a lot of enemies. Her reporting actually helped tank multiple companies. But this thing she was looking into, whatever it was, she’d wait until the end of the conversation, then drop in a question out of the blue.
She did it in a whole bunch of interviews on a whole bunch of topics over the course of maybe a month. ”
“What was the question?”
“ ‘When did you get involved with Gun Club?’ Kind of like, when did you stop beating your wife? Which was also a classic in-your-face KT question.”
“Huh.” Peter remembered KT mentioning this to Durant. Something about tech bros with an interest in guns. “What kind of answers did she get?”
“Straight denials, all the way through. Denial of the premise of the question, in fact. What gun club? I don’t even own a gun. You can’t get tone of voice through a transcript, though, right? So I went back and listened to that part of those interviews. I believed almost all of them.”
“Almost?”
“Except for three guys. Each of them paused just a little too long. As if they had to think through their answer. But in the end, they didn’t say what everyone else did. Instead, they said, I’m not involved.”
“Like they knew what it was. But didn’t want to say.”
“Exactly. So those guys are the first people we want to talk to. One is relatively small-time, but the other two are serious industry players. Maybe asking those questions is what put KT on the killer’s radar.”
“Are you following up with those contacts?”
“Emails already sent,” she said. “If one of them had something to do with KT’s death, I’m going to put his head on a spike.”
Peter got it. He felt the same way. But there was a problem with June taking over KT’s stories. “You’re putting yourself at risk,” he said. “If you touch a nerve with one of those guys, they’ll come after you next.”
“I sincerely hope they do.” He could hear the fierce smile in her voice. “Because my boyfriend’s gonna kick their ass.”