I go into the hallway and the window that faces the street. I see the black SUV parked two houses away. I tell Rowan, yes, they’re here. Ask him what the hell is happening.
“I’m sending you something—open it.”
My hands tremble as I pull the phone from my ear and open his message. There’s an image attached—a picture of a man I’ve never seen before, with gray hair and a double chin, easily past sixty.
“Who is this?”
Rowan is back inside the station. I hear the familiar sounds of phones ringing and people talking.
“That’s Wade Austin.”
Chapter Eight
the kill room
The forensics team finds nothing useful at the shelter except the rifle under the counter and the red jacket. Traces of OxyContin are found in the pockets. There is no hair or other biological material on either.
The bones found in the cremation oven are damaged. They provide insufficient DNA sequences to run through CODIS. They have assembled the teeth and can match them to anX-rayonce they have a lead on the possible victim. They do this in a matter of three days, even with abacked-uplab.
They focus next on the behavior of the criminal because that’s all they’ve got. The execution of the crime was meticulous but also unusual. The way many surfaces were not wiped for prints—only those the perpetrator touched: the doorknobs at the entry to the shelter, the basement, the cremation oven, the rifle and mount beneath the counter. The only area wiped clean in its entirety is the Kill Room. That—and the removal of the plastic sheeting on the floor—solidify their belief that the victim was killed there, rolled into the plastic, and dragged down to the oven.
One of the state investigators is interested in the tire tracks—or the lack of them. So she has the team measure the marks that are left behind—the parallel lines spaced evenly five feet wide that pulled up the dirt and leaves along the clearing that leads to the shelter. She finds it “quirky”—and eventually discovers that the marks were left by a pull rake. These are used not by farmers, as the team initially presumed, but by homeowners with tractor mowers who want an easy way to remove debris from lawns. They are lightweight, and some are retractable—they can collapse into a small size and be stored in a shed. Or the back of a truck.
The team traces the manufacturers and retailers that sell them but finds the list prohibitively expansive. Anyone anywhere can order one online, brand new from Amazon or any major hardware store—Home Depot, Lowes, etc. Or used ones from an even longer list of sites—Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, eBay. There were also forums like Quora and Pinterest where people sell things to one another directly.
No. That was a dead end.
What becomes more interesting is the type of person who would know about using a pull rake to destroy evidence of tire tracks. It wasn’t an obvious choice. Most criminals altered their tread with chains or other devices. But, of course, those attract attention on awell-traveled, paved road.
The team searches for similar cases on every database they have. They call other departments and ask actual human beings if they’d come across something similar.
They find a hit in a newspaper article from theDenver Postseveral years back. It comes up with the key words “murder,” “tire tracks,” and “pull rake.” In that case, a man killed his estranged girlfriend and left her body in a pile of dirt off a highway. It was miles between exits, towns, rest stops. There was no reason for anyone to go looking. He didn’t even bother to shovel a little dirt over her, to show some effort at a burial for a woman he supposedly loved. When asked about this, he said he wanted the vultures to get to her. He said he thought about them pulling at her flesh, and this prolonged the revenge he had taken when she got the restraining order.Fuckingbitch.
But after he drove home and was cleaning off his truck, spraying down the dirty tires with a garden hose, having to work into each groove to get them clean, it occurred to him that if there was that much dirt caked into the tread of his tires, there would be tracks off the side of the road leading right to the body. If—and it was still a big if because his plan was so clever—someone did find the body, maybe because of the vultures, they would surely see the tire tracks.
He first returned at night with a hand rake, parked the truck a mile up the road, walked back to the place he’d gone off road, and started to erase the tracks by hand. Anyone who’s raked their own yard knows that raking is hard work, and he soon grew tired and frustrated.
Back home he went, to his computer, where he googled the problem and discovered the versatile pull rake. He picked one up at a nearby garden store, waited for nightfall again, then erased his tracks in under twenty minutes. One more cleaning with the garden hose, a trip to the local dump to get rid of the pull rake, and he figured he was good to go.
What he forgot to do was remove his search history from his computer.
Within two days of the girlfriend’s disappearance, he became the prime suspect as he knew he might, given their relationship. His house was clean. His truck was clean. Spotless clean, in fact. But then there it was—the Google search. After that, it was simple deduction. Finding the garden store. Searching the dump. Tracing the soil. It took six days of driving roads lined with that kind of soil to spot the parallel lines, five feet wide and evenly spaced. But once they did, it was game over.
The question that came next was this: who would know about this case all the way out here in Connecticut?
Chapter Nine
Reality sets in before the sun rises. The pain from the bruises wakes me. I sneak out of bed to see them in the bathroom mirror. They are darker today, which I expected. Still, it feels unexpected, exposing the chasm between intellectual thought and emotional turmoil. In my brief sleep, I had erased the facts that I did not want to be real. They are back now, bringing a new struggle between exhaustion and adrenaline. I feel like a fugitive who’s been on the run for weeks—first from myself, and now from this man who called himself Wade Austin.
I take two ibuprofen and get dressed for work, even though it’s only 4:00 a.m. I think I might get away with a silk scarf since fall is here. I have to dig it out from the back of my closet. I haven’t worn a decorative accessory since my teaching days, but it covers the discoloration around my neck. I head down to the kitchen.
I have not asked whether the attack has interrupted my plan to return to work. Whether it has raised new concerns about my fitness for the job. Whether I need to go back to see Dr. Landyn. Unlike the shooting, there is nothing in our guidelines that requires a delay or more head shrinking under these circumstances, and I suspect Rowan will advocate for my return. He knows I will fare much better if I’m allowed to help solve this new puzzle of Wade Austin.
Confusion has morphed into understanding about the situation. The real Wade Austin is an employee at Shield Insurance. The man in the blue truck, the man who assaulted me, the tall man from the shooting, is now a ghost.
The number he dialed from my phone was from a burner. Untraceable.
The man whose name he used has no digital footprint. No social media. And no photo on the firm directory. He was a bookkeeper, not a salesman, so there was no need to have him on the company website. As Rowan said yesterday, Wade Austin was “just a guy with a name that’s impossible to search.”
