This has beenThe J & J Hour.
Episode 41:What Happened to Allison Finch?
If you have tips about Allison Finch, you can contact me through the usual channels or leave an anonymous voice message using the link in the show notes.
r/TrueCrimePodcasts
Thread:Did anyone listen to the new J & J episode about Allison Finch???
u/cryptidman: Okay, I’m so ready! The police chief already sounds dirty. Let’s get cracking.
u/SpilledAudio: It’s probably the husband. Let’s all be real here. They should be investigating the hell out of that dude.
CHAPTER 10
Kipp
I was just keeping an eye on her.
That was the lie I told myself as the lights in her cabin stayed on long after the woods went quiet. I had my own place less than a hundred and fifty yards away, my own bed, my own business, but there I was on my deck with a warm beer in my hand, watching the glow through the trees as if it meant something.
Fish was collapsed next to me, snoring after he chased pinecones for an hour back and forth in the fading light over at the Annex property. I’d made sure not to come back here until it was almost dark. The temptation that was everything Hattie with those lush curves was too great for me to resist during the day.
There had been a tube of caulking at my door with a sticky note that just had an ‘H’ on it. It was tempting as fuck to use it as an excuse to go over and ask her what shewas thinking leaving it for me. Was something broken in her cabin?
Instead, I propped my feet up on the railing and watched her.
She was sitting back at her table, laptop open, headphones on. Tonight, she was focused. I could tell by the way she leaned forward when she was concentrating, the crease between her brows catching the light each time she paused to think. Now and then, she’d hold all that hair in one hand and pull it off the nape of her neck before letting it fall back down. It made me think about gathering it in my hand, running my hands through it … and doing other things.
She spoke softly into her mic, measured and calm, pressing a button every once in a while before leaning forward and speaking again.
True crime.
The words scraped against me every time I thought them. I’d looked up her website and felt a little mollified. All of her cases were serious and weren’t any campy joke shit. There were some pictures on her website, but they were generic when you clicked through them.
OSP handled all kinds of cases, and before I moved to Fish and Wildlife, I worked homicide. It meant that I’d watched families fall apart more often than I liked while strangers leaned in around the edges of scenes. There were those moments when I’d zipped up the classic blackbody bags over faces that were swollen by heat or ravaged by animals and learned how quickly people forgot themselves when their curiosity turned ugly.
Death was something I was used to, and it prepared me well for my current job. Being a game warden meant that if someone went missing, I was sometimes part of the team that went searching, and it also meant that we were sometimes the ones who found people who chose to end their lives in the woods. It was often on us to bring them home to their loved ones for a proper burial and to respect their privacy while we did so.
Hattie made a living telling true-crime stories, and that should have been enough to shut down whatever this was. A clear line. A professional red flag waving in my face.
Instead, I was out here on the deck letting the dark stretch while I sipped my beer, letting my attraction towards her braid together with frustration at my inability to pretend that I was above it.
CHAPTER 11
Kipp
Today was an office day, and I hated the necessity of it with a fiery passion. I always preferred being outside doing something, even if it was just patrolling, rather than filling out paperwork or dealing with Roger, who seemed never to leave. He was the quintessential cop you thought of — fucker always had a doughnut in his hand. If you needed a partner out in the field, he wasn’t the guy you’d ask for, and if you needed someone to watch your back in a shootout, he definitely wasn’t your man. The guy had a mile-wide cowardly streak.
My biggest issue with him was that he knew he was incompetent and didn’t care. There was no pressure to improve or to accept help. Hell, I had offered multiple times to work with him on his tracking or his shooting, but he had declined. That was something I couldn’t support. If someone wasn’t good at something, that wasokay as long as they were willing to try, but Roger was content to be shit.
My mind was already cloudy as I waited for Fish to finish his kibble, the bad mood I woke up with settling around me like a fog.
Clipping my badge to my belt, I shrugged into my uniform shirt and tucked it into my jeans, the spot between my shoulder blades tingling at the thought of Hattie sleeping in a cabin on my property.
Fish trotted ahead of me as I locked up and we headed down the stairs, his tail wagging, making his whole butt move as if the world was simple and good. For him, everything was easy and straightforward. He had shelter, food, and someone who loved him. I guess it was simple.
The woods were already leaning toward a hot day; August here was blistering, and I was already looking forward to late fall when we’d finally get some moisture. It was hard to believe that summer could be so dry when we’d had such heavy rains earlier in the year. The creek on the property had slowed to a trickle, and even the falls stopped flowing. There were good things about the seasons, of course, from my perspective, but it did mean we had to be on the lookout for fire danger.
