For Askens, it’s clearly the recruiting scandal. I jot that down in his column. It’s clear to me that Askens was not the lead in the recruitment process—the head coach was—but still, I decide to call the school in the morning.
For SMCC, Loman’s school, I find two vague references to a scandal, professors who maintained personal web pages that condoned teenage sex and military violence on one of the college’s servers for game-authoring courses. But most of the information comes from blogs, so it’s difficult to tell if any of it is legitimate. No official complaints have been filed with authorities.
I pull up the third sketch again and resume my search of Carssen sales reps on LinkedIn. I keep at it until my eyes are gritty with fatigue. I rub them and think about going to bed, but first, I plug in the titleJeremy Fisher jotted down for me and up pops the link:Crimes Without Leads in Jurisdictional Minefields.
The summary reads: “On Montana’s Crow, Blackfeet, and Flathead reservations, families of missing and murdered Native women ask, ‘Where’s the attention for our young women?’”
I click the link, and my fatigue fades rapidly. Jeremy’s prose dances, keeps me flowing paragraph to paragraph. The research is impressive. He’s not only spoken extensively to parents and grandparents of those who’ve gone missing, but he’s interviewed the US Attorney for Montana, Justice Department officials in DC, local sheriff’s departments that share jurisdiction of the Blackfeet, Crow, and Flathead reservations. He’s interviewed Native American sociologists from Stanford and Harvard, tribal police, tribal councils, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, the FBI, and more. He adds specifics that show he’s paid careful attention to their culture, noting that the drummers sometimes use fishing rods instead of reeds on their drums because the touch is better, that dropping a feather from one’s headdress brings bad luck.
Most importantly, he discusses the effects of such tragedies on the families and the tribes, on a people who feel unseen, unheard, and powerless within the US. He discusses how the tribes’ lack of access to technology continues to keep them under the thumb of the US government and even US businesses who track everything they do and purchase, and the crimes they commit.
About two-thirds of the way down the article, he quotes Palmer Edmonds, an elder, as saying, “Until our tribes acquire our own technology to track our own crimes and our own missing persons, we’ll never be able to solve our own problems.” Edmonds is the very man Paxton Rhoads told me I should speak to because Edmonds had breakfast with his sister, Clarissa, the morning of the day she drowned. But when I contacted him, he blew me off, saying he was too busy. And Paxton can’t get me in front of him either because Paxton dated his daughter, and they were slated to get married, but Paxton ended up cheating on her and broke her heart. The weddingwas called off, but Edmonds has never forgiven Paxton even though Edmonds remained friendly with Paxton’s sister, Clarissa, until the day she died.
But Paxton has told me that Clarissa mentioned to him that Edmonds told her to stay out of the Ridgeways’ affairs, that they were bad people, that he’d gotten sideways with them in the past and they’d made his life miserable. Several years before, when he’d led a protest against drilling that the Ridgeways backed on sacred land butting up against their private acreage, one of their henchmen roughed him up badly. They told him if he ever got involved in their affairs again, the beating wouldn’t stop until he was dead. I suspect it’s also part of the reason Edmonds doesn’t want to speak to me, and not just that he has a bone to pick with Paxton. He doesn’t want to get involved, knowing it relates to the wealthy, powerful Ridgeways, and wants to avoid getting roughed up again.
Selfishly, I wonder if Jeremy might be able to help me more than I initially thought since he’s obviously trusted by the Montana tribes, including the Blackfeet Tribe. And by Palmer Edmonds.
When I finish reading, I shut down my computer, feeling raw. Jeremy wanted me to read this to show me that I’d be in good hands with him. And he has achieved that. I am impressed. At the bottom of the article, it mentions that he’s won several awards for the piece, which doesn’t surprise me. But what he doesn’t know, couldn’t know, is that he has also pinged a bruised chord inside me by discussing sexual assault against these women.
In the article, he points out what I already comprehend from my law enforcement work: that Native women are three times more likely to experience sexual violence compared to white women, that homicide is the fourth leading cause of death for those under twenty, and that those numbers are surely skewed by the fact that it’s estimated that the causes of untold numbers of those deaths have always been misclassified as suicide, overdose, or exposure to the elements.
I place my forehead against the butts of my palms, squeeze my eyes tightly shut, and press for all I’m worth, trying to squash away all this madness. Here are all these literally lost women, including Clarissa, who receive no attention, and here I am, popping up on people’s screens across the nation because I’m a white woman whomighthappen to play into a sensational, viral-ready string of crimes.
And Jess, a white woman raped by a white man, was afraid to press charges, scared to prosecute because bringing something like acquaintance rape to trial rarely works in the victim’s favor. Yes, she had a better chance of getting something done than most of the women Jeremy writes about, but still, she refused because it’s so difficult and uncertain.
I shake my head like a dog to clear my thoughts. I must think about the now and protect my own world, so it doesn’t fall to pieces.
I look at my thumb. It’s red and mangled by my own self-induced damage. Worn down as I am, I wonder if maybe I should let Jeremy interview me, not to disclose what happened with Sophie or Mark Coleman, but to share something, anything, to appease the killer.
A Confession
Facebook: Philip Inglewood—I’m a general surgeon in a small OK town where we don’t even have an OBGYN and have a slightly crooked eye. I’m confessing that I waited too long to administer care for a woman needing a DNC. She miscarried, had trouble clearing the fetus, and was sick but I couldn’t tell if her life was in danger for certain. She needed a DNC, a very common procedure but now under scrutiny in many anti-abortion states, especially OK. The medical staff were nervous to assist. They didn’t want to be held legally responsible for helping without clearly knowing whether the mother’s life was at stake, whether her body might fight off the infection. We waited eighteen+ hours before operating. Too long. She was septic and her organs were shutting down. I blame the state for this, but I blame myself, too. I shouldn’t have been so scared to be held liable. I should have helped immediately. She did not need to die. Now, her two other children don’t have a mom.
Chapter 33
Two Days
I wake up early. Pale light has erased the first layer of darkness, leaving my yard still and dusky, the mountains in the distance barely discernible.
I brush my teeth with haste, dress, gather my waves into a bun, barely toast an English muffin for breakfast, and get to work.
I hop back onto LinkedIn, scouring profiles for faces that resemble the third sketch. I can hardly believe it, but within ten minutes, two-thirds of the way down the long list of Carssen Pharmaceutical employees, I get lucky. The hair and eyes are strikingly similar. The face in the photo is broader, the cheeks in particular fuller, like the guy was heavier when the photo was taken, but everything else fits—the slant of the left eye, the texture of his hair, the shape of his jaw.
Plus, the man is from Spokane, where Alderson said the potential, would-be third target contacted the police.
Timothy Mooney. His profile says he is an appliance salesman for a small company in Spokane, but he used to be a sales rep for Carssen, which is why it came up under my search for Carssen staffers. I get his email off the appliance company’s website and a phone number to the sales department he works in. I call it and get a recorded message, so I leave a voicemail for him to call me back.
As the world begins to wake up, my phone pings steadily. I ignore it until I can’t. I have shrapnel notifications from every app. There’s a textfrom Wallace, too, screaming at me in all caps:Keep Me Updated.I guess he didn’t hear a word of what I said about needing some space. Suspicion shoots through me, but I tell myself this situation is making me crazy.
I have another voicemail from my stepdad and, worryingly, one from Linda Holbrook from Graham Insurance, the company that hired me to check out Aaron Lasserio’s claim. I call the agency back since it’ll only take a minute.
“I’m glad you called, Linda. I can have Aaron’s report by the end of the day.”
“Listen, that’s not why I’m calling.” She clears her throat like she’s nervous.
“Oh?” I sense bad news, but I’m hoping she wants me to start on another workers’ comp case.
She says, “We don’t think we’ll be in need of your services anymore.”
