We aren’t heading to Whitehorse anymore. We’re going back to Haven’s Rock.
There’s no choice here. It might turn out that the phone problem is a temporary glitch. If so, then we can turn around. But it doesn’t seem like a glitch. It seems like someone is making sure we can’t contact Haven’s Rock. Someone who knows where those phones will be and can take them.
The whole time we’re packing and driving to the airport, I’m calling those numbers. Endlessly calling. At the same time, I dig for more on Jerome Moyer. It’s an online slog. The name isn’t uncommon enough for me to easily sift through the chaff, and the fact that “our” Jerome Moyer is an online ghost means most references I find aren’t him. It doesn’t help that I’m looking for a Jerome Moyer who might be a killer and there’s an unrelated Jerome Moyer whoisa convicted killer.
At the airport, I wait with Storm as Dalton runs through his preflight checks. Émilie has already sent me a quick-and-dirty history for Jerome Moyer, proving why she has a professional investigator instead of just relying on a former police detective with a laptop.
Jerome Moyer. Forty-two years old. His father was Black, that being the Moyer side, but his dad had died in the military when Jerome was young, and he’d been raised by his white mother and her new husband, a big-game guide in Montana.
Jerome moved out before his eighteenth birthday, and his mother and stepfather never bothered reporting him gone, as if they’d all decided he was close enough to legal age. From there, he seemed to have held down a string of jobs that I’d expect to be above the reach of a guy who hadn’t finished high school, including a stint as a paramedic… despite having no paramedic training.
The “Marlon” I know is even-tempered and easy to get along with. Charming, but not so charming that it puts people like me on edge. He’s self-effacing, happy to help out. On the surface, he’s a far cry from a manipulative sociopath, but even in his Haven’s Rock persona, I see a form of manipulation, a far more clever one.
Marlon has been who we need him to be. Friendly and helpful without causing any waves. Looking at him more critically, he reminds me of Anders… or the version of Anders most people see. The popular guy everyone wants to have a beer with, wants to be paired up with on a job. The guy who always has a smile and a warm greeting and a sympathetic ear, if you need it.
Is the Marlon I know Jerome’s usual persona? Or did he come to Haven’s Rock, zero in on the most popular guy—another man of color, no less—and craft his facade to match? I think it’s a combination, given that string of seemingly impossible jobshe held down, often for years at a time. He got away with it because he seems like the last guy who’d lie to get ahead.
Along with that data comes a list of cities where he’s lived. He likes cities—easier to disappear in. And when he relocates, he doesn’t just hop in the car and drive a hundred miles. He crosses the country. Putting distance between where he was and where he wants to be next.
I use those cities as the starting point for my search. This is where Idohave the skills to search, though again, I could do better with access to databases and contacts. Still, since Jerome seems to have stayed in the US, I’d have been limited there, too.
My search for unsolved murders is nothing short of depressing. These are major cities. Of course there are unsolved murders, and narrowing it down to “female victim” and “sadism” doesn’t help.
I’m aware of time ticking by. If I’m close to any kind of breakthrough, Dalton will wait, but otherwise, we cannot afford for me to surf the internet while something may have happened in Haven’s Rock. Nor can we risk missing our takeoff window.
I need to be more specific. Search on hypothermia. How about exposure? How about—
The link doesn’t come where I expect it. I’ve searched on Jerome in connection to murders in all the places he lived and found nothing, but then I get a hit on his name and a death by… dehydration.
It’s a strange story, one I need to read twice to parse it out. The connection comes because Jerome attended high school with the girl who died. They’d been in the same class, and in one article, he’d been referenced as having helped organize the search when she disappeared.
The strange part is the girl’s death. It happened over thesummer break. She’d gone missing, and the whole town had searched for her. She’d been found five days later… in the high school, which had been closed for the season.
It seemed she’d broken in through a window to retrieve a necklace she’d accidentally left in her former locker. After she had the necklace, she went into the accessible bathroom, and the door locked behind her. The janitor had been on vacation, and no one was in the school to hear her shouting and banging on the door. This was back at a time when few kids—especially in small-town Montana—had a cell phone.
A horrific and tragic accident. One that I would have taken a helluva lot closer look at. A girl described as a “model student” breaks into the school for a necklace rather than wait until the janitor returns and ask to get it? After breaking in, she decides she really needs to use the bathroom before making her escape? She chooses the accessible bathroom… which also happens to have the water turned off for the summer, leaving her with nothing to drink and survive? And how the hell did the door lock behind her? The article says something about it being an automatic door that failed, but add that to the other oddities, and I’d be very suspicious. The local sheriff was not. The school raised money and installed emergency alarms in all the bathrooms. Problem solved. Future tragedies averted.
That sets me on a new search. Girls or women dying in bizarre and horrible accidents, particularly involving things like exposure to the elements or dehydration. Something where they were trapped and died slowly.
The next one comes quickly, because in this case, the family didn’t accept the manufactured explanation. Twenty years ago. College student in a city where Jerome lived. Her death was ruled a suicide after she apparently tied a cinder block to her leg and stepped off a dock into a small lake near the school. Herfamily argued that she wouldn’t have done that, but when it looks like suicide—especially with someone that age—the police will often ignore the family’s protests. Her parents no longer lived with her, so she could hide her college-induced depression from them.
In this case, though, it wasn’t just the parents—no one who knew the victim had seen any sign that might indicate suicide. All this wouldn’t get my attention except for one tidbit that didn’t make it into most respectable publications. The investigators believed the victim had underestimated the depth of the lake, because the cinder block hadn’t pulled her under to a relatively quick death. She’d been held under just enough to cover her mouth and nose, leaving the top of her head above the surface.
I imagine what that would be like. How she’d have been able to get snatches of air as she struggled, swallowing water when she tried to scream. How long would it take to die like that? How horrible would it be?
And what if your killer was right there, on the dock, watching? And with your eyes above water, you could see him watching.
“Casey?”
I look up to see Dalton standing there.
“Ready to go?” he says.
I nod and I go to snap the laptop shut, but then keep it open. “Can I keep working while we have a signal?”
“Of course.”
We’re in the air, ten minutes outside Dawson City, when I finally lose the last flicker of cell signal and shut my laptop.
