They don’t deserve you.
I am disturbed by the video of my husband and his mistress. I can still feel his body wrapped against mine just a few hours ago. But this photo from the parking lot causes a different reaction.
I study the angle just like we did at the school. Where he must have been in the parking lot with the median. Then I think about where I’d left a bicycle, chained to a rack, with a camera attached beneath the seat. I told no one. Not even Rowan. I’ve already kept so much from him, gone down this road too far.
I can tell from Wade’s picture catching our team outside the diner that I have also caught him on my camera. He’s in a car. I can see a piece of the rearview mirror in his photo. I am not arrogant enough to think that having this information will lead me to his door. But it is something. A loose end he never should have risked.
The only calculation devoid of emotion would have been for Wade not to come near that place. But he did. He needed to see me, and he needed me to know how smart he is.
Emotions. Feelings. Fucking up his perfect plan and feeding right into mine.
Chapter Sixteen
the kill room
The state team puts eyes and ears under the bridge by the river in the neighboring town. They continue to work the theory that the remains found in the cremation oven belong to a drug dealer. It’s a good theory, which they have little trouble selling to their commanding officer, a young lieutenant with a lot on her plate. They tell her about the murder three years ago and the traces of Oxy found in the red jacket and the balloons in the well. Now they want to investigate a dealer who might have gone missing. If they can get an ID, maybe they can track down dental records. They need to identify the victim.
The lieutenant is impatient with them, so they do not linger on the details—how there is too much evidence or not enough. How the killer knew what he was doing. Knew about the unpaved road leading up to the shelter that would need to be raked and the cremation oven and, of course, the Kill Room. They don’t tell her about the team they have scouring the internet for a source that might contain all of this information. A website or forum. Maybe on theso-calleddark web, which isn’t all that dark anymore when it comes to stuff like this. There is a newfound sense of freedom in the world, awhat the fuck are you gonna do about itsentiment. The only things that stay buried, or at least try to, involve money and sex—child pornography, human trafficking, tax evasion. It feels like a long shot. Likely to fail. No point drawing attention to how quickly this case is getting cold.
The missing dealer goes by the name Nix. The CI who gives them the lead describes him as young, definitely under thirty, maybe even in his late teens. Pinpointing age within a pool of criminals is harder than people imagine. The distinctions that can serve as starting points are often absent—clothing, grooming, gait, speech. There is a tendency to conform, to fit in. No one wants to stand out and later be identified by a witness, surveillance camera, or undercover cop. Some things really are the way they’re depicted on TV. Nix wears loose jeans, sneakers,T-shirts, and hoodies. Sometimes a denim jacket, but then with a baseball cap. No team logo. He is like background music, the CI tells them.
It only takes a day to find someone who knows where he lives.
The girl won’t give her name. She is somewhere between a runaway and homeless—not that there is a clear line. It has to do with time, really. And hope. The runaways still think they can get out from under the condition of not having a place to stay, their addictions, their poverty. Like somehow this is only a temporary situation. The brain isn’t fully developed until well into the twenties, and the last part to finish forming is the part needed to make decisions. Executive function.
The girl calls herself Honey, which of course is not her real name. But they call her Honey and give her some cash, and she leads them to an apartment over the border in New York. She doesn’t know how old Nix is or his real name. Just that he shares this apartment with some other guys and let her stay there a few nights when she first left her shitty home. She has turned eighteen and has big plans now that she is an adult. They don’t ask Honey what she does in exchange for the shelter or what drug has sucked her in and has yet to spit her out. They buy her lunch and give her a blanket and deliver her back to her new home under the bridge.
With the help of the local NYPD, they sit on the apartment for eight hours—enough time to get a warrant. The application cites behavior that indicates drug trafficking, including a visit from a “known offender.” They are not asked how they made this identification and will have to come up with something more than they have, which is a visual ID in the middle of the night from across the street. The apartment surveillance shows that this man also wears a hoodie covering most of his face, so if a lawyer ever got into it, the whole case could go up in flames. A bad warrant would negate whatever evidence they find in that apartment. But they don’t want evidence to use against the tenants. They just want to identify a possible victim of a homicide. They are trying to help this young man who goes by this strange name, Nix, so they are not concerned with the legality of their search.
It is late afternoon and the place is empty when the super lets them in, opening the metal door with two different keys on two different locks. The smell nearly knocks them off their feet when the door cracks open.
Some of it they can place—the stale meth residue, the kitchen filth, the lingering stench of unhygienic humans. One of them asks, “What the hell is that?” And the other shrugs as they step inside.
The super is the one to answer. “There,” he says, pointing to a cage in the back corner. Inside are several puppies. “Pit bulls,” he tells them. “The kid found them on the street and brought them home. The owner of the mother dog probably didn’t know what to do with them. Easier to dump them on the street than find a shelter, I suppose.”
Whatever the situation, there they are—seven pit bull puppies shitting and pissing all over each other in a crate meant to hold maybe onemedium-sizeddog. That is the smell that makes them pull their shirts over their noses.
They move quickly, one of them searching for mail and papers labeled with names and the other grilling the super about who is on the lease and does he know the other tenants and what about someone who goes by the name Nix?
They leave with more than they bargained for. First, the kid’s real name: Billy Brannicks. He isn’t on the lease, but one of the bedrooms has a letter with that name, and it clicks instantly. Brannicks. Nix. He istwenty-fouryears old. Later, they trace him to an address in the Bronx and, from there, to his mother’s house in Queens. He had been to a dentist, she thinks, when he was a kid, but the practice closed and she never asked for the records. Still, they had to be somewhere, and this feels like a significant lead.
As exciting as this is, matters are complicated by the stash of guns, drugs, and cash found in a hole behind a bathroom mirror. Later that day, New York cops arrest two men connected to the apartment. They are not told Nix might be dead. They are interviewed separately and wonder if, perhaps, their third roommate has also been taken in and is pointing fingers at them. Naturally, they both claim ignorance. It must be one of the other guys, they each say.
Lastly, the team at the apartment leaves with seven pit bull puppies, which are brought to a shelter.
The mess with the drugs and guns and the possible issue with the warrant are left to New York. The investigators working the shelter in Connecticut have their possible victim and get busy tracking down the dentist who closed his practice and might still have his patients’ dental records that are now a decade old.
It is not long after that the other team working the case finds something else. It starts with a chat on Quora. A question about “disposing of a body” asked by a podcast narrator who is following a “true crime” disappearance in Montana. He needs to fill some airtime and thinks he could bring on a few experts to talk about possibilities if this missing person has been murdered. Answers come in from several members, but one entry catches the attention of the team working the shelter killing.
I took a class in college, it begins. The member says she never forgot this one thing. When a student asked the teacher how to commit the perfect murder, she said:
First, you burn thebody.
Chapter Seventeen
It’s difficult to be at the station. The adrenaline has subsided now that the driver of the blue truck is a dead end. We cut him loose, then explain to Aaron how the operation got so fucked up.
“And you’re sure he wasn’t there, maybe in a different car?” he asks.
