“I understand that, but—”
“No.” He shakes his head in a way that makes me feel like a child. “We’re done.”
I stifle the urge to blurt out,You don’t get to call the shots, asshole.But of course he does. I’m on his property. And he’s holding a gun. I walk outside. I turn and flash a chipper smile. I know all I need to know.
Right before he shuts the door, I hear him mumble, “Fucking bitch.”
I resist firing something nasty back, but I got what I came for. He’s lying about not knowing Clarissa.
On the way back to my car, I’m snared in anger. Rage fills my head like the thrum of electrical wires, drowning out the tractor motor in the distance and the boisterously chirping crickets. Each footstep takes on more fury, like I might punch right through the ground.
SSS?What a jerk.
When I pass his truck, I pull out my Leatherman and squat next to his tire.
I try to calm myself, try to listen to the voice inside me saying,Do not do this. You can’t afford to do anything wrong anymore.
The air crackles with the dry heat from the ground. The sharp scent of cured rubber from Ridgeway’s new tires pierces my nose. I’m gripping my Leatherman so tightly, the knobs of my knuckles are white.
I know I’ll feel terrible later, but right now, I don’t care.
I slide the blade in, right between the treads.
It’s crude and minimal justice, but it’s more than most people get.
Chapter 3
Six Days
The thunderheads scale the peaks, billowing and rising above them like great white fuming beasts. Now they’ve spread over the valley, their undersides turning shades of deep gray and purple.
From my kitchen window, I watch the tree branches whip this way and that like they’re possessed dancers. Lightning flashes. Thunder explodes.
Within seconds, Jess calls. She’s frantic because the power has been knocked out on the east side, where she and Sam live.
I’ve been dreading this day for two weeks, since I returned from Choteau. I’ve already spoken to her several times this morning and planned on going over to check on her and Sam later this evening anyway. But now I rush over earlier, braving the storm.
It’s walloping the rest of the valley with a good dose of howling wind, rain, and hail as I race south, past window, flooring, and furniture businesses servicing the construction boon in the valley. The wind splatters pea-size hail and quarter-size raindrops against my windshield. My wipers beat feverishly against the stabbing drops to swipe it all away, watery streaks smearing across the glass and silvery pearls clustering below the blades.
I turn the radio up, way up, to drown out the vicious onslaught.
“A new sketch from the killer, now known as the Confession Artist, has come out after six and a half weeks of no new sketches,” announces the male newscaster with a honey-smooth voice against the roaringferocity. “... same demand, to confess in six days or die. The search for the person behind the killings continues to intensify ...”
A new sketch?Awful. And somewhere in the mess of this ugly thing that’s captured the nation’s interest, the killer has earned a moniker.The Confession Artist?
As if there’s some Leonardo da Vinci act of genius going on. I roll my eyes.
The newscaster is now interviewing someone who says, “Everyone has been anticipating—practically demanding—a murder since the third sketch came out, like some high-octane reality TV episode. Only it’s not TV. It’s real life. But when no one turned up dead after the six days with the third, we all wondered if maybe it had all stopped. But now we have a fourth.”
I turn the radio off. I don’t need news or hype right now. Not this day—the one-year anniversary of that dreadful night. Other than the Ridgeway case and the fact that Graham Insurance did come through and I’ve spent the past week and a half surveilling Lasserio, there’s only one other thing on my mind.
Jess.
Always Jess. And Sam. It’s not that she’s not a capable woman and mother. She is. Very. She’s even benefited greatly from the true crime craze because of her work in genetic research at Rotical.
For several years now, she’s hosted a popular podcast calledThe Search, which covers the recent rise of genetic genealogy and outlines many of the cold cases solved by it when relatives of the killer or rapist have added their genetic information to genealogy databases now mined by law enforcement. She’s not only discovered her life’s passion but turned her skills into a gold mine.
There was even talk at one point of transforming her podcast into a TV show on one of the streaming platforms, a true crime investigative series that would delineate how she’s helped detectives solve cold cases—cases shelved because no matches were found in the criminal databases set up at the time. It used to be that DNAcould solve a case only if it matched the genetic profile of someone in a criminal database or an existing suspect on record. Now a skilled genetic genealogist like Jess can often take an unknown DNA profile that has no hits in traditional searches and connect a name to it.
