1
Katelyn
Katelyn Thorsen, known as KT to friends and enemies alike, stood inside the glass doors of Anchorhead Coffee, just down the way from Pike Place Market, staring out at the rain pouring down. She’d come for an appointment, but the anonymous whistleblower she was supposed to meet never showed up. Her next stop was Queen Anne Hill, a mile away, to pick up her daughter from school.
But she couldn’t make her hand reach out and open the door.
It wasn’t the weather. This was Seattle in November. Rain came with the territory, and KT was prepared in a bright orange hooded waterproof jacket that went down to her knees. She even had a collapsible umbrella tucked into her messenger bag, just in case.
It wasn’t the fact that her appointment, whoever he or she was, had ghosted her. It happened all the time. People reached out to a journalist, wanting to spill the tea about something, then got cold feet. KT had pinged the other person’s anonymous Signal account several times but gotten no response. Waiting for an hour in the coffee shop, she’dspent the rest of the time reviewing her notes on the half dozen other stories she was working on.
She certainly wasn’t hesitating because of the afternoon traffic clogging every possible route to Queen Anne Hill, the sleepy neighborhood where she lived with her daughter. Like the autumn rains, Seattle traffic was both legendary and unrelenting.
In other words, this was a November day like any other.
Except for the feeling that KT couldn’t shake.
She was being watched.
—
It had started that morning. She’d woken at five-thirty, her mind already thinking about the two in-person interviews she had scheduled, plus the countless calls and emails.
As usual, she’d made her daughter breakfast and driven her to school, the chatty thirteen-year-old always quiet and self-contained at that early hour. Then KT had returned home, parked in the driveway, unlocked the front door, and walked inside.
Her plan had been to check out the material the whistleblower had sent in preparation for their conversation at the coffee shop. Instead, she looked down and saw, on the floor below the mail slot, a plain white envelope.
She picked it up. There was no address, no stamp. The flap hadn’t even been glued down, simply tucked inside.
Probably a neighbor, she thought. Although she couldn’t think of a neighbor who wouldn’t simply text her.
She untucked the flap and pulled out the contents. A single piece of white printer paper, folded in thirds like a normal letter.
It was not a normal letter.
It was a message made from partial words cut from magazines andpasted to the page, all different colors and sizes and fonts. Like the ransom notes inColumbo,her favorite TV show as a kid.
But it wasn’t a ransom note.
The cut-up words read,Stop your investigation or we will stop your heart. We are watching. We are Legion. If you contact the police, we will kill Eleanor, too.
Her daughter.
—
She pulled open her door and stepped out into the morning drizzle, the letter in her hand, hoping to see the person who’d left it. Aside from parked cars and the steady stream of traffic that flowed down Queen Anne Avenue, the street was empty.
Although what she would do if she saw someone, she had no idea. She was a journalist, and a darn good one, but the risks she took were professional, not personal. According to a recent visit with her doctor, she was thirty pounds overweight and pre-diabetic, plus her cholesterol and blood pressure were too high. One of these days, when work slowed down, she’d start exercising more than her voice box and her typing skills.
She told herself the letter writer was just a crank. She’d gotten mail like this before. Almost every investigative journalist she knew had gotten mail like this, especially the women. Vague threats, often expletive-laden or outright obscene, from people who were clearly off their meds. Her old copy editor would have had a field day with the grammar and spelling choices.
In the old days, they’d been actual letters sent to her desk at theStar Tribune, where KT had gotten her start covering the cops so many years ago. Now it was a nasty email sent to her public-facing address, or a text to her Signal account, or a DM on one of her obligatory socials.Her current outlet, a nonprofit group of investigative journalists that worked internationally and published online, didn’t even have a physical office.
But this was different. Even after thirty years of first covering crime, then Wall Street, and then the tech industry, she’d never gotten anything dropped off at her home. And this was definitely the first mention of her daughter.
Unspoken was the fact that they knew where she lived, which was not publicly listed anywhere that she was aware of. Nor was her daughter’s name. Reporting on the sad remains of the Chicago Outfit, she’d learned the hard way to safeguard her privacy. It had not been fun to meet a couple of pissed-off Italian-American tough guys waiting outside her South Loop apartment.
Although she was not in Chicago, and it was not twenty years ago. Today, every piece of information was available somewhere. Reporting on tech had taught her that. Any crank with mediocre online skills could find a way to dig up those details, or pay for them. So somebody in Seattle had found her address and left a note. So what?
