I pick it up and see a message. I know who it’s from.
Open me, it says.
There’s an attachment. An image, which I open. It loads slowly because this is a burner phone and it doesn’t connect to the internet. I see the walls and the furniture, then the body, lying still on the sofa, covered with a quilt.
I can’t believe what I’m seeing. It’s a picture of me, asleep in the study. It’s from the first night. The night of the shooting. I know because of what I’m wearing and the quilt I’d brought from the closet upstairs.
No, I think. This can’t be right.
The photo is taken from inside the house.
I remember the next morning, the open window I couldn’t explain but was too preoccupied to think about.
Wade was in my house that very first night. The 404. And he was here again, planting this phone.
When? How?
My head spins as I stare at this picture of me, sleeping, this person standing over me. A new kind of violation covers me head to toe, and I shiver from the disgust. The repulsion.
And then another buzz. A new message.
Sound asleep, it says.Just like ababy.
And then,
Like little Baby Doe.
Baby Doe—the name given to a case decades old but solved about a year ago. A newborn baby girl was found in a dumpster outside an apartment complex. We extracted DNA from a sample of blood that was still in the file, something they couldn’t do back then. We tracked down suspects who had since scattered far and wide and found a match to the mother. Once we had her, we got a confession and arrested the father, an older married man who lived down the hall. He’d picked up his newborn baby daughter and literally threw her away.
How does Wade know about a case we solved a year ago? I was a stranger to him then. My name wasn’t in the news about the story. I never give interviews or statements to the press. I don’t like to come up in Google searches.
Think!How does he know?
I stare at the phone, waiting for a new message, but nothing comes.
Hands shaking, I unlock the box that holds my gun, then race through the house, checking locks on doors and windows, checking room by room, top to bottom like I would a crime scene. I’m careful not to wake my girls or Mitch as I look under beds and in closets. Searching for the boogeyman the way I sometimes did as a child when my parents went out and my brother left me alone.
It doesn’t occur to me to wake my husband. This feels like something I need to contain inside myself before I tell anyone else. Mitch. Rowan. Aaron. I need to understand what it is and what it isn’t. This is the curse of anxious people, prone to overreaction, overthinking. Everyone is safe, so I give myself the time to settle my nerves and let the thoughts fall into the right places.
It’s 5:14 when they finally do, bringing the answer. I make my way back down to the study and sit on the sofa. I find my laptop in the kitchen and pull up the portal where I post cases for the college. And there it is—Solving Baby Doe. I’d shared the case with students, past and present. Anyone can sign up for a class and gain access. And Wade told me he’d found my class. He’d said it was clever.
Wade is not going anywhere. He’s been on my street. In my home. And now in my head. He’ll know everything I’ve ever done with forensic evidence. Something tells me he’ll be a quick study.
Wade. The 404.No—Wade—the name sticks in my mind because I’m still on that road, letting him into my life.
I think about the plan we made today with Aaron. How they’re watching my phone, searching for clues. Wade has found a way around that now, which means he knows the protocol.
And he’ll know what comes next.
Chapter Twelve
the kill room
The “situation” with the raked path leading to the shelter and the similar story from Colorado cannot be mere coincidence. Using a pull rake to remove tire tracks from a crime scene is so unusual that they have still only found this one prior case. They decide that whoever planned and executed this crime that has left them with a burned body has been using the internet for information about forensics and evidence and, more specifically, how to evade detection. The case from Colorado made the local news, but they have yet to find it in other online sources. They consider the possibility that the killer moved to Connecticut from Colorado, where he first learned about the rake. They wonder if he has killed before, using knowledge he acquires as needed. They work quickly as the leaves fall, searching the other, smaller shelters, the woods in between. After the leaves will come the snow, and then any evidence on the ground will be buried.
They gather a small team to do nothing but search for online materials that match the forensics found at the shelter and inside the Kill Room, but just like the evidence, it’s either too much or too little to be useful. For example, when they search for ways to dispose of a body, cremation is right at the top, along with acid and in large bodies of water.
One of the investigators recalls a story from thirty years ago when he worked homicide in New York. Yes, he should be retired, but after trying it out for six months, he decided to take some of his pension from New York and workpart-timein Connecticut. It was that or his marriage, his wife told him. He wasn’t built to play golf or fiddle with shit in the garage.
