It’s been less thantwenty-fourhours since I followed a blue truck to a back road where I laid myself bare to a stranger. Where I was assaulted and left choked out in my own car. I can still smell the flowers he left in my lap. And now this. The texts. He isn’t going away. I think about the moment I walked out of Landyn’s office. How the shooting was already being forgotten since no one was shot besides the shooter. How everyone was satisfied with the conclusions about the kill—my kill—and had moved on. Except for me and my inability to live with the unknown. My unrest. The emotional turmoil that caused me to follow that truck and engage with an unstable man. This was my doing. I brought this man into my life. Our lives.
“I’m okay,” I tell him. “Where are we in finding Wade Austin?” I realize I called him Wade, but that’s not his name and a gust of concern passes through the room. “What are we calling him, then?”
No one’s decided this because it’s only just begun, this new investigation. A moment passes before Rowan finally breaks the silence.
“He’s a 404,” he says. A 404 is a missing person. But it also has another meaning in our squad: someone who is worthless or pathetic. We throw it around here as a joke among colleagues or to derogate a suspect. Rowan is taking this personally, which means we’re both emotionally charged. I don’t know where that leaves us. One of us has always been on steady ground. We usually aren’t triggered by the same types of cases. But this one has us both unhinged.
Aaron motions for us to sit, and we all take chairs. Rowan leans forward, elbows on knees, fists laced together and punching the air. His anger has nowhere to go. I sit perfectly still as my mind spins, searching for rabbit holes.
“First things first,” Aaron says, “Vera Pratt is coming in this morning to help with the facial composite.”
Vera Pratt is the pregnant woman who was in the dressing room with Wade.
“Between the three of us, we should have something close,” Rowan adds. I remember now that Rowan saw him briefly, just before he left that last stall, the one with the closed door.
My phone chimes.
“Is it him?” Aaron asks as I pull up the screen.
“More of the same,” I tell him. “They’ve been coming in pretty steady all morning.”
Rowan catches him up. “It’s a burner. Untraceable.”
Aaron nods, tells me my number is now being fed to a technical unit that will monitor the messages. They can look for patterns in his words, check each phone he sends them from. “Just let them come,” he tells me. “Let’s keep him talking, try to get a profile. Maybe he’ll give us something we can use.”
I nod and silence the phone.
“For now, do not respond. Nothing. Let’s see what he does. If we can’t get an ID from the composite, we’ll move to a protocol for engagement.”
Yes, I think. This is all by the book. All of the things I know to do as a cop but now have to live as a victim. A target. First came theself-loathingbecause I’d made myself vulnerable. Then the humiliation of a forensic exam. Then the anger. Now the fear. The helplessness. It overwhelms me as I try to focus on the instructions and the case I am about to dive into. They push and pull inside my head. Raw, hot emotions and the knowledge of what needs to be done, calmly and with precision.
There, too, is the uncertainty about Clay Lucas and whether I needed to take that shot, but that is now pushed aside to make room for these new emotions. I know it will come back.
Aaron continues, “We’ve got nothing from the station lot, but the blue truck was parked in the Nichols strip mall. There’s a nail salon and toy store that might have more security footage. We’re going to see what we get from that. Maybe there’ll be a better angle of the plate number through the back window.”
I’ve gone through the images Rowan sent me last night of makes and models and shades of blue and haven’t been able to narrow it down to a remotely useful range. I wasn’t looking at the truck, even as I drove behind it. My mind was on the man inside and the answers he might have to ease my suffering.
There were four doors, I remember that. An open flatbed. It looked new or well maintained. Mostly what I see when I remember yesterday is the man who stepped out from the driver’s side after we stopped on that back road near the park.
“When we have the composite, we’ll send it to the press and also have a team go back through the witness list. Someone else might have seen him coming or going.”
We cover all of the dead ends. The flowers and the gifts I’d dropped at Goodwill, which then either got tossed or sent to stores across the state. They were long gone and, in any case, had been unopened. They could have been candles or coasters or chocolates. None of my neighbors remembered the truck on our street. No one knew to look, and besides that, maybe he drove a different vehicle or dropped the gifts off after dark.
None of the images from the cameras at Nichols had a clean shot of his face.
Rowan jumps in now. “There’s something else,” he says. “It may not be related but worth checking out.”
This is the first I’m hearing about anything related to the case. Rowan has kept me at bay, thinking I should focus on my family and the sessions with Dr. Landyn. He had no idea how hungry I was to know more about Clay Lucas, what he was doing in Nichols that day, and how he got his hands on that weapon.
“We’ve put together a list of everyone Clay Lucas may have had contact with after leaving his home three weeks before the shooting—old friends from school, doctors, caregivers, roommates at the facilities he spent time in.”
Aaron leans forward. “I thought we’d been through all that,” he says.
“Yeah, we have. But there was one woman, an employee at the adult day care center the family used until early last year—we haven’t been able to make contact. Her name is Laurel Hayes, and she hasn’t been to work since the day of the shooting. They didn’t think much of it at first. A lot of people from the center were upset about it and scared to come back. Clay Lucas had been going there for months, and they have other patients with similar conditions.”
“But she’s been gone this whole time? Over two weeks?” Aaron asks.
Rowan tells us that her parents live in Oregon, and they were the ones who finally called the department. They spoke to her the day of the shooting to make sure she was all right. But she hadn’t returned their calls seven days later, and now fourteen. That wasn’t like her. They said it wasn’t unusual to not hear from her for a while, but she always replied when they reached out.
