Page 50 of Go Alone

The Beverly Marsh lead frustrated him more. He’d focused on the Garfields because that’s where Holt had ended up dying, and he’d completely ignored the two other people Holt had screwed over. As soon as he learned that Beverly moved away from Columbus years before the murder, he stopped thinking about her. Had he only looked, he might have found the connection to Linus Varne and saved Raymond Brannigan and Martin Cole.

"Linus didn't have a social security number or a driver's license, and he and Beverly never officially married," Kate reminded him. "We still wouldn't have realized the connection to the murders."

Kate was sitting next to him at the diner, decoding the cipher from Cole's house. Marcus was scouring everything he could find on Beverly Marsh, trying to find some thread that led to Linus.

But Kate was right. There was nothing there. Linus was off the grid. He was the perfect serial killer. No fixed address, no identification of any kind, an appearance that could easily be written off and made bland and unnoticeable with something as simple as a hat to cover his blond hair.

Kate was right, but Marcus couldn’t shake the accusation in his mind. He could have done better. He could have worked harder. He could have kept looking instead of giving up on the leads at the first sign of adversity.

His coffee cup started to bend in his hand, and before he crushed it, he got to his feet. “I’m going to take a walk,” he told Kate.

He fished for his wallet, but Kate waved him away. “I’ll get breakfast. Go. Convince yourself that it’s not your fault, because it isn’t.”

Marcus nodded and left the breakfast place. The girl behind the counter gave him a wary look that only frustrated him more, mostly because he was aware how dangerously pissed off he looked.

Walking had the desired effect. By the time he reached the city limits of Columbus proper, he was thinking clearly again.

He walked the trail in his mind. Linus Marsh was with Beverly when Deborah forced them from her home. They squatted in one of Brannigan’s vacant homes. Brannigan, likely fearing exposure of financial crime, chose to resist the adverse possession claim. They left that home, but Beverly managed to find success in the stock market again, enough to get them a nice home in Upper Arlington.

Beverly was probably just fine with her home in Upper Arlington and ready to let the past stay in the past, but Linus couldn’t let it go. He feels a need to preach about housing rights. Unlike Curtis Dalby, he didn’t really believe in advocating for people. He was just pissed off that he kept getting screwed over. Or maybe he did believe in it, but it was definitely personal for him. Marcus had been right from the beginning. Whatever the tone of the language in his ciphers, he was angry.

Enter Martin Cole. Marcus had done some research on Martin after hearing Linda Marsh’s story. He wasn’t a deadbeat the way Linus was, but he was a loser. A somewhat more sympathetic one, at least at first. He was a child of drug addict parents in South Linden. He dropped out of high school and ran away from home at eighteen. He’d spent two years on the streets, earning several arrests for prostitution, vagrancy, and drug possession before finally landing somewhat on his feet.

For thirty years, he’d managed to keep his head above water, but never more than that. A few business ventures had fallen apart and left him in debt each time. Because of his lack of education and his criminal record, he could never get a job that paid better than minimum wage. He usually had to work two or sometimes three of those to keep off the streets.

Marcus could understand why he wanted Beverly’s home. He was in his forties when he met Beverly, and he was no doubt staring down a long and increasingly painful physical decline ending with him likely dying homeless once more when he got too old to maintain his overwhelming work schedule.

What he couldn’t understand was why he would have divorced her. Even if he didn’t love her, it seemed like an acceptable trade-off to be with Beverly in exchange for comfort. Certainly Linus Varne thought so.

Either that, or Linus Varne did love her. Maybe that was why he killed Martin. Martin hadn’t coveted his neighbor’s home, per se, but he had taken the woman Linus loved, even if he hadn’t really coveted her either.

So where was he now? The trail for Linus went cold after Martin married Beverly Marsh, and then picked up again now when he returned to make a reckoning.

Marcus had no idea where to look next.

He turned left down a tree-lined path that followed a creek into an expansive park. Several other walkers, joggers, and bicyclists enjoyed the path, some waving at Marcus, most offering a curt nod or simply ignoring him.

There was one gray spot in the thread. Martin Cole, Deborah Holt, and Raymond Brannigan had each stolen Linus Varne’s home directly. Howard Greer had worked with Holt and Brannigan to take his first two homes, but there was also that doctored record of rezoning Linus Varne’s property in “outlying areas” of Columbus.

That was the only record of Linus Varne ever actually owning property himself, the only official record of him at all. How he had managed to own property without a social security number was beyond Marcus, but it was easy to see why he wouldn’t have been able to put up much of a fight when Howard decided he wanted it.

Marcus pulled his phone from his pocket and called Anita. She answered on the first ring. “Hey, Marcus.”

“Hey, Anita. Got anything?”

Anita sighed. “Well, it looks like Varne only recently started using Dalby’s name. The van he lived in was unregistered for years. Almost ten years. I talked to someone at the DMV who told me that Varne paid all ten years of fees, penalties, and judgments when he finally registered it. The number ended up over seven thousand dollars.”

“And no one thought to ask why Curtis Dalby appeared out of nowhere after all these years or why he was suddenly a white man?”

“It looks like Dalby was mostly off the grid too. He’d only popped up sporadically, and never in Ohio. They didn’t interact with him a lot and probably didn’t think to confirm his race. The ID passed muster, and that’s as far as they thought to go.”

“So how could they know his van hadn’t been registered for ten years?”

“Well, the registration is attached to the vehicle, not the owner. Varne had all the right paperwork, and he had cash to pay the bill.”

“And no one thought to ask what he was doing with seven thousand dollars in cash?”

Anita sighed again. “People don’t think to look much beyond the edge of their own nose. If I’m the DMV guy, I’m thinking the guy lives in his van and has so few records that he’s probably a sovereign or some very private person who doesn’t like the government. There are still people in the Midwest who have deep-seated mistrust of the federal government that goes back all the way to the time of the pioneers, especially away from the cities. They’re not common, but there are enough of them that it’s not a shock to see them. It’s kind of like hippies on the West Coast or Rastas in New York.”