Randal Askens from Snohomish was an avid bird hunter. Photo after photo of his hunting trips with a group of guys dressed in brush pants and orange vests, holding their shotguns over their shoulders. A photo of a pheasant he’d mounted serves as his profile picture, the image not doing justice to the long green-and-gold tail feathers. His feed is full of comments from friends about hunting and football.
His bio boasts he was a football coach at a local high school. When I cross-check his name plus the school’s name, I come up with something that raises a thrum of interest—a scandal where the head coach was accused of recruiting underprivileged students of color from Mississippi who were good ballplayers. He promised them food, rent, supplies, and pathways to college, and then left them high and dry with no support when their seasons finished.
I wonder if the assistant was in on the racket and if this is what he was supposed to confess. But that makes no sense. Why target the assistant and not the head coach, the one doing all the recruiting?
I go back to his feed and keep scrolling. I see that Askens has a sister in Texas named Ellen Atherton, who commented on one of his photostaken on the field after a win against a local rival:So good to see your smiling face. We need to chat more than once every few months.
I jot her name down.
I move on to the second victim.
Vonda Loman from Santa Monica clearly enjoyed surfing, cooking, and gardening. Well, at least she enjoyed watching other people surf: many photos of the beach, the ocean, and people riding waves in the distance.
The cooking and gardening she handled herself. Loman’s social media includes photos of tasty-looking drinks in crystal tumblers, dishes of exotic food, flowers in her garden. She worked at Santa Monica Community College as a counselor and went to high school and college in San Diego.
The two victims have nothing in common that I can see beyond both working in education. Neither appears to have had children, which is a relief. Maybe the killer only picks people who don’t have kids, perhaps because he lacks an appetite for stranding them.
Some of Vonda’s last posts are about the sketch that resembled her:To everyone out there who thinks it’s me: It’s not. I have nothing to confess. I have lived a clean, honest life.
I shake my head. The poor woman. No matter what she did or didn’t do, she surely didn’t deserve to die at the hands of this psycho. She was someone’s daughter, someone’s friend, maybe someone’s significant other.
Psycho.
But before Railes took care of Coleman, hadn’t I myself imagined obliterating him? Putting a bomb under his car, maybe, and blowing him to a million pieces—that was always a special favorite, right down to imagining the red cloud of flesh and bone spraying in all directions.
It’s one thing to fantasize about it, and another to do it. I got to watch Coleman die and I made sure his murderer was never prosecuted. But the moment was wholly unsatisfying. I try not to think about it, so I refocus on my attempt at looking for common threads.
I spend the next two hours digging through check-cashing and credit-application data on IRBsearch to see if the victims had similar major purchases or investment projects, ever applied to live in the same apartment or condo complexes, or bought houses in the same neighborhood at any point. Nothing hooks up.
I am as good at digging for key tidbits online as I am at looking for my lost earrings.
It’s late and I can hear the wind soughing through the tops of the pines. I take a break and go into the kitchen. I study my sad refrigerator’s contents to see if I’m hungry, but I’m not. I fetch a glass and run the tap.
When I look up, someone stares back at me through the window above the sink.
I jump back, dropping my glass just as Jess did the other day as I go for my ghost gun in its ghost holster before I quickly realize it’s just my own reflection.
Enough, Crosbie. Get it together.I see myself in the glass, my chest still rising and falling from the jolt. I’m wide-eyed and wired, my face tight with worry.Even if it is you, in the morning, you’ve got three more days.
But maybe it’s time I carry my gun everywhere, even if I am in my own home, at least until I pick up a security system.
TheRolling Stonereporter I met in the hotel and ran into again at the airport pops into my mind, sending a frisson of fear straight up my spine. “Why did I see you twice?” I whisper to the wraith in the window. “Why were you in Dallas and then on my flights of all things? And how could I have not seen you in Denver? Granted, it was brief, and Jess and I did get that coffee, but still. Could it be coincidental?”
Jeremy Fisher.
I clean the broken glass, go back to my office, and look him up.
Jeremy K. Fisher. TheKstands for Kyle.
Jeremy Fisher,Rolling Stone. Reporter-at-large.
There are links to articles he’s written, everything from finance to violent crime, sports, media, environment, and gender politics.
From Riverside, California. Graduated from Victor Valley Union High School. Graduated from the University of Montana in Missoula, where he studied journalism.
So, he does have a connection to Montana. And he went to the same university I did, but I graduated in criminology and he in journalism. But he’s older. He graduated three years ahead of me. Could he have known Sophie, though? It seems unlikely. She would have been a freshman when he was a senior.
He then went on to Northwestern University’s journalism grad school, one of the best in the country, I’ve been told.
