“Is Dodson happy with your posts? He certainly should be.”
“Yes, though speaking of him, I could use your help. He’s making me do a video tomorrow, giving an update, and I’m dreading it a little.”
“You’ll be great, Bailey. You handle TV really well.”
“But I’ve never had to do anything straight to the camera. Any advice?”
“Up your energy to about fifty percent more than feels natural, otherwise it can seem flat. And don’t worry about memorizing anything. It’s fine to glance at your note cards or iPad when you’re talking. If you own the fact that you’re using them, it’ll end up looking more authentic.”
“Great tips. Are you almost ready for bed? Though, wait, it’s an hour earlier there, right?”
“Yeah, but I’m beat. By the way, I’d love to come back to Bogotá with you on vacation one day, and then head up to the beach in Cartagena for a few more days.”
It wasn’t unusual for the two of us to brainstorm travel plans for the future, but we were still sorting out how our relationship would be defined down the road. This past summer Beau had been pretty clear that he wanted us to make things official before too much more time passed. I loved him in a still-giddy way, and from the day we met, I’d sometimes imagined us married. But I was divorced, from a guy who had turned out to have a secret, disastrous gambling issue(read: bookies calling our apartment in the dead of night and threatening him with tire irons), and though I really trusted Beau and wanted to be with him, the idea ofmarryingagain had begun to make me skittish.
“That would be awesome,” I said. “I’d love to go back with you.”
He smiled so broadly at the response, I felt a pang of guilt over the part of me that had grown mysteriously commitment-shy.
“Have a good night, Bails. And stay safe.”
“You too, babe.”
After signing off, I inhaled another handful of crackers and reviewed my notes for the video tomorrow. Though I probably would never feel totally at ease in front of a camera, I was at least less terrified than I used to be. I could still recall the excruciating morning of my first appearance on theTodayshow, when my body seemed weighted down with dread. Friends had advised me to just be myself, which seemed ridiculous. I mean, it wasn’t as if I planned to go on the air impersonating someoneelse. The irony was that by the time the show’s stylist finished with my short, flat, blond hair that morning, wielding a curling iron and a silo-size can of extra-firm-hold spray, I actuallydidresemble another person, someone with a do so high I could have been hiding a litter of kittens in there and no one would have guessed.
I’d simply have to suck it up tomorrow and do the best job I could. And it was only a web video, I reminded myself.
Though it was still fairly early, I stripped to a T-shirt, ready for bed. Before slipping between the covers, I pokedopen the curtain and peered across the parking lot. Besides the Camry, I could see two other cars, both of those parked in front of units in the butt end of the L-shaped building. No one skulking around tonight, at least as far as I could see.
I let the curtain drop, grabbed my laptop and notebook, and climbed into bed. I checked my email one last time for any alerts from the sheriff’s department, but if there was news, they weren’t sharing.
Law enforcement could very well be closing in on the killer without dropping hints, but the direct opposite could be true too. There was more than an outside possibility that the person who’d slain the three women would never be apprehended, that the crime scene wouldn’t cough up the kind of forensic evidence that would point anywhere.
And though the killer might murder again down the road, there was a chance he’d lie low for a while again, living what appeared from the outside to be a normal, ordinary life.
If there were no developments, I would probably be back in the city by midweek. It would be tough, I realized, to leave without seeing any resolution or justice for the three dead women—and knowing there mightneverbe.
Before I switched off the bedside lamp, I thumbed through my composition book, rereading the day’s notes. Elements continued to unsettle me. How had a girl like Amy, who reportedly wasn’t an outdoorsy type, ended up pitching a tent in a remote campsite? And why had she and Page later chosen a place as skanky as Muller’s for a drink? Perhaps the camping had been an experiment, and the two had wandered into the bar after not finding anything else. But it all felt off to me.
I dragged my laptop across the comforter and typed the wordsFort Anninto the search bar, in case I’d missed something on my last search, but nothing struck me as relevant.
Just for the hell of it, I also googled Route 149, the rural road I’d been traveling on today. And suddenly, things turned interesting.
According to reports in both thePost Starand a Vermont newspaper, there had been a slew of drug busts along the road over the past dozen years, most of which occurred after the police pulled over vehicles for routine traffic violations. It turned out that sleepy Route 149, as well as Route 4, where Muller’s was located, were thoroughfares for transporting heroin, fentanyl, cocaine, and prescription painkillers from New York City and downstate regions to Vermont, a state that had been ravaged by an addiction crisis.
What if Amy and Page had been involved in drugs, even operating as mules? They might have gone to the campsite and/or to Muller’s as part of doing business.
Did that mean the killer was a drug user or drug dealer? Or—as crazy as I knew it sounded—was he a religious obsessive who targeted the girls because drug users and dealers were sinners and needed to be punished?
The question that tugged at me even more was this one: How had Shannon managed to cross paths with the same person who had killed Amy and Page? In so many of the serial killer cases I’d either read about or covered, there’d been apatternto each killer’s choices. Victims were snatched when they were hitchhiking, for instance, or working as prostitutes, or had made the mistake of agreeing to help anaverage-Joe-type guy—or average-Ted type, as in Bundy—because he was feigning vulnerability with something like a (fake) cast on his arm. In this situation, though, there didn’t appear to be any pattern. Shannon had either been jogging or still at home when she was attacked, and Page and Amy had come from a dive bar.
Maybe the killer had targeted Shannon for being a sinner as well. If so, what in the world had her sin been?
Chapter 14
IWOKE THE NEXT MORNING TO THE SOUND OF RAIN COMINGdown in sheets, splattering across the parking lot and dripping hard from the narrow overhang above my unit.
The rain, I realized, was not only going to make shooting the video a bitch but was also going to make me look like a soaked yak on camera. I decided to hold off on washing and blowing out my hair until right before the shoot.
