Chapter One
Miami, Florida
Monday, February 11, 2019
7:45 p.m. EST
I’m nursing a scotch at the sleek, backlit mother-of-pearl bar at the Setai hotel in Miami Beach when I first hear whispers of a body being found. I’m always listening for whispers like that. My ears are trained to home in on words likebodyandcrime. You never know where a scoop is hiding. It’s why while most people sleep with a sound machine by their bed, I sleep with a police scanner.
I motion for the bartender, who doesn’t look old enough to be in a bar, much less serving me Macallan in one. She tops off my glass as I glance down the bar at two cocktail waitresses with their heads together whispering.
“What’s going on?”
“Another body found,” she says. “This city and its gangs.”
It’s every city, though, every town. And it’s not just gangs. No place escapes death. That’s why I have a job.
I want more details, but I need to stay on task here. One body at a time. And the one I’m focused on is the one whose skull was dug out from a wall at an abandoned boarding school, hidden deep in the thick pines of the Kisatchie National Forest. A place surrounded by swampsand poisonous snakes, deterrents for girls who thought they could run away. I should know. I was one of those girls.
But now it looks like one girl we thought had run away has been found.
At least according to the article sent to me yesterday by a woman I don’t know named Laura Sanders. A source who wants to talk in person and who got my attention with the words I built my career on:Rita Meade, I know you are someone I can trust.
Trust.
That’s a tricky, slippery slope at the moment. I pick up my glass of Macallan and take a sip.
The article was from a local paper in a small quaint town with cobblestone streets and a river that moves as slowly as the people who live there. A town where a plaque hangs in the visitors’ bureau, welcoming you to the oldest settlement in Louisiana while also explaining how to pronounce its name: Nack-a-tish.
The two whispering waitresses move on to a long table in the far corner, where a group of young, beautiful, and expensively dressed men and women laugh and toast.
The Setai Miami Beach is not the usual hotel I stay in when meeting up with a source. But it’s the hotel I booked on my dime. A decision served up by my guilt over not telling my boss at National Crime Network, Dom Drake, the whole story. Or rather, my connection to the story.
I’d seen the Asian-inspired art deco hotel tagged on Laura Sanders’s husband’s social media. Laura Sanders has no social media. When I’d googled Laura, all I discovered was she was a mom of a little girl and the wife of a man who makes enough money to afford a Global plane, a gated home on Star Island, and a vacation ranch in Aspen. But unlike other women in her position, Laura did not post pictures of her fabulous life. I’d found one obscure picture of her with her husband at a fundraiser for Futures Without Violence, but that was it. Seems Marshall Sanders is much more face forward. I’m used to that with politicians. Their wives usually shutdown their socials once the hubby is elected to office. I wonder if maybe Marshall has political aspirations.
After another sip of my scotch, I open my phone again to my last text thread with Laura Sanders and add another to it.
I’m already in town. I can meet any time tomorrow.
Yesterday was a one-two punch kind of day. My well-timed and painfully orchestrated premiere for the docuseries I helped produce in record time,Broken Bayou: Serial Killer in a Small Town, following on the heels of my interview with my friend and fellow survivor, Dr. Willa Watters. Dom said it was a coup. I’m allowed to call him Dom now. Mr. Drake is reserved for the reporters who aren’t on the verge of winning him an Emmy. Little does he know we all call him Doom behind his back. That’s what we sell at NCN, after all.
That’s not all Dom doesn’t know, though. He doesn’t know that the lead I told him about is one that is personal to me.
I squeeze my hand into a fist.
I’ve never kept information from Dom before. Not sharing my connection to a potential story is a problem. A big problem. But so is digging around in the past.
I built my career on trust, and if this lead turns out to be legitimate, that trust is going to be questioned. But I can handle it. He asked what the story was, and I told him it had to do with an old case near my hometown in Louisiana. Not a complete lie.
Of all the stories I’ve chased, this is the one I packed away over a decade ago. A story I protected because Poison Wood Therapeutic Academy for Girls is one story I never wanted to tell. Now a woman named Laura Sanders may not give me a choice.
I told myself on the flight from Dallas earlier today that I was going to fill Dom in as soon as I knew more about this source. A source whose last communication with me wasBe careful, Rita.
I’ve heard that phrase many times from many different people over the years: my dad; my boss; Carl Frost, my camera guy for the last eight years. But hearing them from a stranger in relation to a school that had to close its doors because so many bad things had happened there has my full attention.
I finish off my drink and press into my temples to try to stop the pounding that started two days ago.
Despite that, the timing on this lead could be good. The thought of going to my house in Dallas and sitting around in the quiet instead of chasing a story was not appealing. A quiet space would mean reflecting. Reflecting is for people who teach yoga, not for those who run toward trauma.
