“It’s complicated.” He picked up his coffee and took a sip. “She said her dad’s somewhere in China, that she hasn’t seen him in years. That he doesn’t want her. She’ll end up in the foster system unless somebody steps up or KT made some kind of plan. Did you two ever talk about this stuff?”
“We talked about a lot of things, but not her ex. She sent me a copy of her will after they split up, just so I’d have it. I dug it out of my hard drive. Turns out her brother was supposed to be Ellie’s guardian in case something happened. But he’s dead. So like it or not, until the court figures things out, CPS is it.”
Peter sighed. “I just feel so bad for Ellie. She doesn’t deserve this.”
“Nobody does,” June said. “Listen, Lewis is sitting right next to me. You’re still meeting us at the airport?” One of her profane texts had included her flight information.
Having Lewis in Seattle would make it easier to convince Manny that Peter had things covered. “I’ll be there,” he said. “Did you have time to dig into Reed and Enderby?”
As an investigative journalist with the nonprofit Public Investigations, June had access to multiple subscription databases that contained every scrap of information that money could buy, which was quite a lot. It was often more recent and more accurate than law enforcement databases. The only details she couldn’t legally obtain without someone’s permission were criminal histories and medical records. If the person was dead, however, she’d been known to find a way around the rules.
“There wasn’t much on Geoffrey Reed. His online presence was faint at best. He was twenty-eight, worked part-time at a convenience store by the airport, and lived in what appears to be an apartment over his sister Sylvia’s garage. No college, long periods of unemployment. His only significant job was eighteen months as a contract employee for a software staffing company, but that was years ago. Never married, no kids, no car. That gray hatchback was owned by an elderly neighbor who probably didn’t even know it was missing. No bank account or credit card. He was on Facebook, but not particularly active. Mostly reposting other people’s stuff.”
“That threat letter had this odd line.We are Legion. It sounds familiar.”
“I looked it up. It’s from the Bible, Mark 5:9. Although it’s not accurate. The real quote isMy name is Legion for we are many.”
“Why would he get the quote wrong when he went to all the effort of cutting and pasting words from magazines?”
“You got me,” June said. “The quote is spoken by a man possessed by demons. Maybe that’s how Geoffrey Reed thought of himself.”
“Was he religious?”
“Judging by his social media, I would say no. Although we should ask his sister about that.”
“What about the other killer, Scott Enderby?”
“Far as I can tell, Reed and Enderby were complete opposites. According to Enderby’s LinkedIn profile, his current profession is ‘investor.’ Before that, he’d been a senior VP at a social startup called Chatrbx. His financials are strong, with more than a hundred grand in his checking and about twenty-five mil in his investment accounts. The house in Magnolia is paid off and valued at two million bucks. He had two school-age kids and an ex-wife who works in business development at Adobe. He was forty-seven.”
“Did you find any points of connection between the two?”
“Not yet. But they had to know each other, right? Two attacks on the same person on the same day, that’s not just some fucked-up coincidence.”
Peter thought of Enderby in his wide-brimmed hat and black windbreaker and textbook two-handed shooter’s stance, firing at him in the rain. He’d killed two people and was doing his best to kill two more. It made no sense at all. Enderby had too much to lose.
Then Peter wondered why a guy with twenty-five million dollars would drive a beat-up Toyota pickup that stunk of cigar smoke. “What vehicles did you find registered in his name?”
“Let me check my notes.” He heard her flipping through the pages of her notebook. “A sporty little BMW Z4, a Dodge Ram 2500 truck, and a Rivian SUV. All between two and four years old.”
“No Toyota?”
“No. Why?”
“Because that’s what he was driving at the motel,” Peter said.
“I don’t suppose you got the plate number.”
Peter pulled it from his memory. “Can you check the registration?”
“Doing it now. The Toyota? It’s not Enderby’s. It’s registered to a guy named Gerald Latimer.” She gave Peter a street address in Tacoma, a city south of Seattle. He heard her fingers on the keyboard. “Looking up Latimer, I’m not seeing any activity for the past five years. Which means he’s either dead or missing. The cops will know for sure.”
“Huh,” Peter said. “How did Enderby get the truck? Did he steal it from Latimer? Or buy it under Latimer’s name?” Either way, it meant there was more to Enderby than his life in tech.
It also meant that, unlike Geoffrey Reed in his easily traced elderly neighbor’s car, Scott Enderby had tried a lot harder to get away with murder.
Peter thought again about that threat letter. “Did you start looking into the stories KT was working?”
“I didn’t get everything. The upload quit.”
