But I haven’t told Rowan. He hasn’t been taken from me. I think that maybe, just maybe, I’ve shifted the scales again, made a move he didn’t see coming, and now I have the advantage. I don’t know how to use it. I need to get through what waits for me at home. I need sleep. I need the thoughts to settle and rest so they can find their right places in my mind.
Still, I know I’m right about this. The end is near.
ChapterTwenty-Eight
the kill room
The woman on the team still doesn’t like the notes from the interview with Laurel Hayes’s friend in Bridgeport. Her story doesn’t add up.
The friend’s name is Kendra, and she works as a nurse in a pediatrician’s office. She and Laurel went to school together. Laurel was studying to be a social worker, which is what she did at Clear Horizons. The phone records for Laurel Hayes go back two years. They’ve already established a close connection through texts and calls—and later many more calls than texts. And the calls suddenly got longer. The woman on the team continues to be suspicious of this change of behavior. Something was going on that required conversations, either because it was serious or because Laurel didn’t want to leave a written trail.
She’s finally cleared to go to Bridgeport to speak with Kendra, which she does. One on one, at a coffee shop. Plain clothes, concern on her face. She is straight with Kendra but delivers the message “woman to woman.”
She gets more of the same—nothing was wrong, Laurel was just upset about the shooting and having worked with Clay Lucas. Not depressed, but you know, sometimes friends need a little morehand-holding. This was one of those times. So on and so forth.
It goes on like that, with the investigator hiding her frustration, until she asks about the man with the red jacket. “Did she ever mention a man watching her at work from across the street—he sometimes wore a red jacket?”
It is so subtle, she thinks. The way Kendra’s eyes widen and how a breath rushes in the way it might when you’re taken by surprise, which she is. It happens in a split second. That magical moment when a cop knows they’ve found an opening and has the experience to work it.
Now, to be clear, they still aren’t sure this man was watching Laurel Hayes at Clear Horizons. The young male investigator spotted the jacket on the surveillance feed and remembered the red jacket from the shelter, so it became a possible “thing.” From there they focused on that bench and that man and saw him several other times, right up until the day Laurel disappeared. Then he disappeared as well. He didn’t always wear the red jacket. Sometimes abutton-downshirt. Sometimes a sweater. But the red jacket he did wear was the same style and color as the one at the shelter.
“He stopped watching the day Laurel Hayes disappeared,” the investigator pushes gently. “We think he knew her and she knew him and that she told you about it during your conversations.”
Now Kendra looks down into her latte, blushing. Both indications a witness is lying or hiding something.
“Kendra, this man is still out there. If he was watching her there, he could have been watching her anywhere, which means he could have followed her anywhere.”
At this point, all Kendra presumably knows is that Laurel is missing. The shelter investigators have not told her about the remains or that they are waiting on dental records to determine if the victim is, indeed, Laurel Hayes. Which means Kendra is presumably still worried about her friend and, now, if this man with the red jacket might be after her. Still, she doesn’t speak, though she seems confused and undecided, which means there is something she has to decide. Which means she knows something she’s not saying.
The investigator gives it one last push. “When we got her phone records, the carrier told us someone had been accessing her account from a different device. They had the password and her social security number—they were able to see what we saw, which were the calls to your number, which means we aren’t the only ones who might be paying you a visit looking for your friend.”
This, of course, is a lie. But cops are allowed to do that. It’s a useful perk.
And this time, it is used perfectly. Kendra is pushed right over the edge of her indecision.
“There was a guy,” she begins. “They met at a coffee shop. He was handsome and polite. Not like the jerks she was meeting online. He said he worked in a building across the street, but Laurel later found out he was lying. He said his name was Fisher Brand.”
That’s a hard name to google, the friend and investigator both agree. Thousands of entries about the brand nameFisherblanket the screen.
He said he worked in insurance, and Laurel had no reason to doubt him. He was staying in a residence hotel because he’d just moved to town. She dated him for about two months before she got “weirded out.” It was too much too fast. He was talking about their future like it was a done deal. He wanted to see her every night and all weekend. He never met her friends and didn’t have any of his own.
He was obsessed with his own behavior and how he was being perceived by her. He would bring up conversations from days before, ask if he’d sounded stupid. Every time they were talking, he would study her words and thoughts and then always have a similar thought or feeling. His stories started to mirror hers.
She said she felt like she was dating a ghost. Not a real person. She couldn’t find anything about his past and, finally, when she went to the place he said he worked, there was no one there by that name.
“He should have at least used the name of someone on the company directory,” Kendra says. “She was bound to check sooner or later.”
She broke it off that same day—about a month before the shooting at Nichols and her disappearance.
“How did he take it?”
Kendra shakes her head. “Not well.” He begged and pleaded, which, both women agree, is not very attractive. He sent messages to her phone that swung wildly from desperate pleas to threats and vulgar name calling.Bitch, whore, cunt.Kendra says that’s when Laurel started calling her, asking for advice, seeking comfort. “I told her this guy sounded dangerous. But she thought he would go away.”
“Did he?”
“No. She started seeing him everywhere. Outside her apartment. In the grocery store. A few rows away in a parking lot. Just far enough that she felt she couldn’t go to the police. He never approached her.”
The investigator notes that he must have known that was enough—what he was doing. He knew he was causing her distress, and this made him feel powerful.
