He had that last night.
He won’t again.
By the time we’re back upstairs, the deputy outside has been relieved by another one—a kid with a buzz cut and wide eyes who tries not to stare when Tallulah and I walk up together.
“You good, Ms. Gentry?” he asks.
“Living the dream,” she says. “You?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he says, like he’s not sure what else to say to the tiny gremlin with the death glare and the hoodie.
I open the door for her, watch her slip inside, then close it behind us.
She locks everything without being prompted—not once, but three times while I watch. She brushes by me with a defensive huff. “What?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Your face did.”
Her computer wakes up the second she touches it, screens flickering from dormant to alert like they’re happy to see her.
“Okay,” she says, fingers flying over the keys. “Here’s where we are on the online front.”
I take the chair opposite the couch, angled so I can see both her and the door. Habit.
“Hit me,” I say, mildly surprised that she wants to talk through whatever it is she’s discovered.
She launches into it.
It’s not an info dump so much as a controlled flood. She walks me through the chat thread from last night, the handle that popped in with the “source is good” detail, the way the rumor spread once she said Henry Thurston’s name. She shows me scraped content from three true-crime blogs, two local Facebook groups, and a subreddit that makes my teeth itch.
She’s made a color-coded spreadsheet, because of course she has.
“You did all this between Henry’s visit and sunrise?” I ask.
She shrugs, eyes on the screen. “What else was I going to do? Watch infomercials?”
“How about sleep?”
“Sleep is for pussies,” she replies.
Her cursor moves fast, highlighting, copying, sorting. Every so often, she mutters something under her breath—“liar, liar,”or “that’s not how levitity works, you idiot, it’s lividity”—then corrects herself without missing a beat.
I let the rhythm of it sink in. The way her brain moves. The way her body doesn’t, much.
Patterns. That’s what she’s really good at. Beyond the code, beyond the forums. She reads people through their text the way I read them through their weight and tell.
“Bottom line?” I ask when she finally takes a breath.
She leans back, rubbing at the back of her neck. “Bottom line is, nobody knows anything concrete yet. The guy who claimed ‘source is good’ bailed before giving details. The local gossip machine is divided between ‘drunk hiker’ and ‘Thurston’s back, lock up your daughters.’ The true-crime weirdos are excited in a way that makes me want to salt the earth.”
“And you?” I ask. “Where are you landing?”
Her jaw tightens. “It’s definitely him.”
“You’re basing that on…?”
“Time of year. Location. Victim age range, from what Brady said. And there’s the fact that Henry showed up at my window the same night a body turned up at the Falls.” She chews her lower lip. “He’s not subtle. That’s his whole thing. He likes the anxiety. The speculation. He likes watching people scramble.”
