She nods. “Yeah. In the ignition.”
So he wiped those down as well, I think.
His thoroughness is both satisfying and disturbing. It makes me feel less of a failure to see that he’s having to work this hard to evade detection. But then it terrifies me that he’s succeeding.
I’m about to leave when she stops me.
“Hey,” she says.
I turn, distracted, thinking about how I need to get home and lie to Mitch about what I’ve been doing at the office and lie to Rowan about what I did over the weekend with my family. But she quickly brings me back to Wade.
“I know where I’ve seen that bag. It’s from a Getaway Inn.” She pulls out her phone and does a quick search. Then she shows me the photo. “See—the bright green square with the giantG?”
I look at the logo. “It’s a laundry bag. The ones they leave in the closet for wet clothes or shoes.”
“We used to stay there in high school when we’d travel for hockey tournaments. We always used the pool if they had one. They’re so gross. I don’t know what we were thinking. It just seemed cool, you know? Staying in a hotel with a pool.”
“You put your wet suit in the bag.”
“Right! Then we’d shove them in our duffels.”
I try not to get too excited as I thank her and say goodbye and walk to my car. But this is something I didn’t have before. A lead he may not know I have. I get to my car and search for Getaway Inn locations within fifty miles.
This is another mistake he didn’t need to make. A loose end that wasn’t necessary. And I’ve found it. He’s not as good as he thinks. He may be a fast learner, but he’s still the student and I’m still the teacher.
No tattoos. No logos. Nothing the eye will catch and remember.
That was an essential step—knowing what catches the eye and causes the memory to stick. We erase on average fifty percent of what we see every day. Cars we pass on the road. People inside them or standing at the gas pump or a pickup line. We are still primitive creatures built to assume there is danger around every corner, and therefore we focus on what is new or different. The images from the past have left us alive and safe so they fade into the background.
Wade must have missed this when he was studying my materials. If this was a test, he would have failed.
Knowing this feels so damned good it scares me.
Chapter Twenty
the kill room
A new lead comes in while they investigate the materials they find online—the supplements to a class on forensic evidence that looked through the lens of the criminal. They have a call into the head of the school. They have another call into the tech department that manages the school website and the portal used for class materials. They build a spreadsheet matching the topics of the posts and original curriculum with the facts relevant to the shelter killing. Some things are distinct, like the rake and the shelter itself. But others are not. Cremation. Leaving too much evidence. Plastic used to catch blood spray.
Once they have all of the relevant posts, they hope to trace the IP addresses of people who have read them. It’s a ridiculous long shot, but it keeps them busy enough to remain in a state of denial.
The new lead has nothing to with any of that. It comes in the form of a missing persons case. The woman’s name is Laurel Hayes. Oddly, she is also from the neighboring town where Billy Brannicks was seen dealing shit under the bridge by a girl named Honey and where they had that department store shooting. They find her name in the FBI database.
The first call they make is to Sergeant Aaron Burg, who runs the department where the case originated. He lets out a heavy sigh when they tell him they have a body. That it’s been cremated and so all they have are teeth and evidence of drugs in the hunting shelter where the remains were found. Burg says he remembers that place and the execution from three years ago. They talk about the scourge of OxyContin and commiserate about their difficult work trying to wrestle it to the mat. The state investigators tell him which cities have been hit the hardest, and Burg tells them it’s everywhere, and they all agree that if they could stem the traffic in the larger cities, that would probably trickle down to the smaller towns, but there would always be communities like “the one under the bridge,” and if it isn’t one thing like Oxy, it’s another. They all recall the crack epidemic in the 1990s, except one guy on the state team who wasn’t born until ’95.
It does not occur to them to discuss Billy Brannicks because he lived in New York and just because he was seen under the bridge in Burg’s town doesn’t mean he’s connected to Laurel Hayes. They do not think to compare the guns found in Brannicks’s apartment to the gun used by Clay Lucas.
They finish exchanging war stories about the drug trade and circle back to the missing woman. Burg tells them he doesn’t have any leads. Her parents have been staying in her apartment for almost two weeks after leaving a hotel, hoping she’ll return. Forensics found no prints that match in any database, and there were no signs of a struggle. Friends say she was doing some online dating, but nothing that sounded risky. Just the usual shit—guys lying about their looks and money, texting and disappearing.
Their working theory is that she left on her own after the shooting at Nichols. Burg tells them that she had gotten close to the gunman, Clay Lucas, while he was a patient at the day care facility where she was a social worker. Yes, of course, they’d been over the security footage at her apartment building and the day care, Clear Horizons. And yes, they had entered all of the interviews in a digital file.
Burg has the team heading up Laurel’s case send that file to the state investigators. He also agrees to ask the girl’s parents for dental records. There’d been no point in asking them before. They had no body. No abandoned car. It still seemed likely she had run away. Burg confesses he worried about suicide, but she was close to her parents. Surely if that had been her mental state, she would have at least done it in a way that allowed them to find her body so they could grieve properly. But young people these days—hard to say whether they give a damn about things like that. Probably doesn’t even cross their minds.Gen Z, youknow.
When the file comes, the investigators are not looking for Clay Lucas, though his photo is in the digital file. Burg’s team had already done that, hoping to find some contact between Hayes and Lucas outside of Clear Horizons. Something to shore up their theory that she felt responsible for what he did that day and what it cost him. Instead, they look for other men. She was a single woman. Young. Attractive. Most women are hurt by a man.
They also find the notes from the interview with her closest friend from college—a young woman who lived up in Bridgeport. She had little to offer, and yet Laurel Hayes’s phone records show numerous calls between the two women up until the day she disappeared—the same day as the shooting. That was also the last day Laurel Hayes used that phone.
A woman on the team picks up on this.No way they talked that much and she doesn’t know more.This friend in Bridgeport had been Laurel’s confidante. And the calls increased in length around the same time the text messages started to fade. They went from texting to calling, which is significant. When people stop putting things in writing, even private texts, there’s a reason.
