Possible victims:
Billy Brannicks—suspected drug and gun dealer from New York; possibly the same motive and players as the shelter killing three years ago.
Laurel Hayes—missing woman from neighboring town; no apparent connection to shelter; killer assumed to be local.
The trouble with the Brannicks theory is that the killing three years ago wasn’t all that similar. The only similarity, in fact, is that Brannicks presumably dealt drugs and traces of drugs were found at the shelter—in the well and the pockets of the red jacket hanging on the back of the door. The killing three years ago was an execution. The body left to be seen. To be identified. Drug killings usually serve more than the obvious purpose of taking a life. They send a message about power. It’s business. There are things to sort out, like territories and loyalty. Why kill this kid called Nix and then go to the trouble of hiding it by burning his body?
As for Laurel Hayes, the dental records take longer than expected. Her parents, it turns out, have returned to Oregon. They’ve cleared out her apartment, settled up the lease, and gone home. They have trouble finding her new dentist in Connecticut where her records have all been transferred. Her childhood dentist made copies before sending them to her new one, but the copies are in storage with a company that handles thousands of practices. A request like this can take weeks. Richard Hayes promises to do what he can, but he lacks the urgency they are expecting under the circumstances.
The woman on the team wonders if he doesn’t want to know. If maybe he’s delaying the identification of the body so he can hold on to hope that his daughter is still alive.
Others think it might be shock or the manifestation of a passive personality—the kind that succumbs to any and all authority, including the receptionist at his daughter’s old dental practice.
Regardless, they are stuck with two possible victims, each seemingly unrelated to the other. Of course, there are other possible victims who have yet to be reported missing. So they stop waiting around and work with what they have.
And then lightning strikes.
The class is called Leave No Trace: How to Commit the Perfect Murder. They find it by tracing the IP address from the Quora chat discussing the disposal of bodies—the member who said she’d taken a course in college and wrote about what she learned.First, you burn the body.Her name is Bethany, and she works as a clerk in the county court. She took the class when she was in college over nine years ago. At the time she thought she might go into forensics, but it never panned out. Working in a criminal courthouse was as close as she was going to get. Now she feeds her interest in crime through chat sites like Quora and listening to podcasts.
The portal is open to faculty, students, and alumni. It has materials from classes going years back. They can be anything—from old tests to curriculum outlines to lecture videos. The portal has a search engine so students can look by class name, topic, teacher—anything, really. As an alumna, Bethany has access to the portal. She says she uses it just to read the posts linked to this one class but isn’t sure who’s posting them. She assumes it’s the teacher. But really, it could be anyone with access. Including former students.
Bethany has a long list of gruesome crimes she is following on her podcasts. She says she never forgot that class and thinks about what she learned when she listens to the evidence used to track down criminals. She distracts the investigators longer than necessary. People get sucked in by stories of crime and criminals. Career criminals. Sociopathic criminals. Everyday people criminals. Crime is inherently fascinating.
Once they have the name of the class, they are able to search the portal for every entry posted under the class name. The last time it was held was five years ago. Since then, there have been twelve new entries. They are case studies, some pages long, with facts and news articles, but also an analysis of each crime and criminal. And, of course, a detailed breakdown of the evidence.
Just like they suspected, the materials tagged to this one class contain information that could be connected back to the shelter killing.
First, the case from Colorado involving the pull rake. Takeaway:Don’t use your own computer to research yourcrime.
Second, a case involving a dead baby found in a dumpstertwenty-sevenyears before the mother was finally found. There was no DNA at the time. Takeaway:Never leave thebody.
Third, a case about a husband who killed his wife wearing a different size shoe. Takeaway:Don’t buy your supplies in person near yourhome.
Fourth, the drug killing from three years ago at the hunting shelter with a room designed for dressing a kill, the floors covered with plastic sheeting, a cremation oven in the basement. Takeaway:Kill where there’s been other killing.
The materials from the course itself include extensive notes about every piece of evidence a forensics team could find. It’s both fascinating and disturbing to read—all told through the eyes of a criminal. A killer planning to kill.
Bethany say it was “awesome,” that it was her favorite class in her four years at the school.
This lightning strike does two things. First, it narrows the search for the killer. The tech department gathers IP addresses for anyone who has read all of the posts submitted for this class. Bethany is one of them, but she is easily eliminated.
Second, it gives them a name. The professor who taught the class. She doesn’t appear on the portal, not for the original class or the twelve subsequent entries. Bethany doesn’t remember it, but the school has records.
Detective Elise Sutton.
The young man on the team puts the next piece together. Elise Sutton is the officer who took out the gunman at Nichols Depot—the cop who killed Clay Lucas. And wasn’t Clay Lucas the patient at Clear Horizons, the place Laurel Hayes worked? Wasn’t he the reason the cops down there thought she’d left town on her own?
They make a call to their new friend, Sergeant Aaron Burg. They ask about his officer, Detective Elise Sutton. They tell him about her class and the posts she’d made to the portal since she stopped teaching and how they link back to some pretty specific pieces of evidence they’ve found at the shelter.
Burg is both alarmed and concerned. He tries to reach her, Detective Sutton, who’s gone back on leave. He calls her cell. The tracker is off. He leaves a message with her husband. Has a unit stop by her house. This isn’t like her.
He doesn’t know what else to think. Except that Elise Sutton has disappeared.
ChapterTwenty-Five
The plan to find Wade by calling insurance companies and agencies takes longer than we expect. We assumed he worked as an agent because his alias, Wade Austin, worked at Shield Insurance—an agency. What we failed to consider was that he might work in a different sector of the industry.
We get a lead from an agent outside of Hartford, who says an employee at a small shop called Astor Life Insurance was fired a few months ago for sexual harassment. It’s thefifty-seventhcall we’ve made for this query, and Rowan reminds me of this as we drive north.
