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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Vertigo
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
'Dazzlingly twisted and dark' S. A. Cosby 'Difficult to put down'New York Times A PODCASTER SEEKING ANSWERS. A KILLER LYING IN WAIT ______ VICTIMS Twenty years ago, the Countdown Killer went on a deadly killer spree. Each victim was a year younger than the last. VIGILANTE True-crime podcaster Elle Castillo has long been hellbent on finding him and serving historic justice. VENGEANCE Now, he's back. Elle must stop the countdown before the killer can claim his next victim. ______ PROPULSIVE AND TWISTY, GIRL, 11 IS AN EXPLOSIVE PAGE-TURNER WITH A FRESH TWIST, PERFECT FOR FANS OF KARIN SLAUGHTER, LISA JEWELL, MY FAVOURITE MURDER AND I'LL BE GONE IN THE DARK 'The very definition of a page-turner' Katie Lowe 'A masterful, heart-pounding suspense' Samantha M. Bailey 'Clarke knows how to get a reader's heart hammering' Candice Fox
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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girl, 11
“Twisty and tense! Girl, 11 is a stirring and stunning tale of secrets, saviors and serial killers. This story stays with you long after you’ve reached the last page!”
Rachel Howzell Hall, author of They All Fall Down
“A chilling, expertly-constructed thriller”
Layne Fargo, author of They Never Learn
“An exceptional debut… A great hero in Elle Castillo”
R.W.R McDonald, award-winning author of The Nancys
“Girl, 11 dives into the world of true-crime podcasts, and also plays with structure and form. It’s the kind of book you start reading on a lazy afternoon and then can’t stop until it’s done. A smart and fast thriller”
Kate Mildenhall, author of Skylarking
“A confident and riveting debut perfect for fans of Karin Slaughter and Meg Gardiner”
Amy Gentry, author of Last Woman Standing
“A dazzlingly twisted and dark thriller with complex characters, a neo-Gothic atmosphere and a killer that ranks with some of the most disturbing in the genre”
SA Cosby, author of Blacktop Wasteland
“Current, twisty, and utterly irresistible!”
Wendy Walker, author of Don’t Look for Me
“With brilliant twists and turns and a genius mix of propulsive action and psychological tension, Girl, 11 is a masterful, heart-pounding suspense that ushers in an astonishing new voice in crime fiction”
Samantha M. Bailey, author of Woman on the Edge
girl, 11
Amy Suiter Clarke
To my mom, who read thousands of my words before a sentence was published; and to my dad, who encouraged me to tell the truth even in fiction.
I need to see his face. He loses his power when we know his face.
— michellemcnamara
Contents
Part I
THE COUNTDOWN
1
Justice Delayed podcast
December 5, 2019
Transcript: Season 5, Episode 1
ELLE VOICE-OVER:
Minnesota is known for the cold. Frigid winters and stoic Nordic sensibilities. On this bright November morning, as I drive southwest in the land of ten thousand lakes, drifts of snow gust over the highway, aloft and swirling like phantoms. One minute I’m winding my way through flat expanses of prairie and farmland, the next I’ve arrived in the city — all concrete and lights and neat, modest lawns. Like many Midwest American states, there’s a separation that runs along the invisible but impenetrable borders between rural and urban. Just a few miles is all it takes for demographics, ideologies, cultures, and customs to change.
But every now and then, something happens that shakes a whole state. Its impact is felt by everyone, uniting people in grief and a common purpose.
Just under twenty-four years ago, in the lively college student community of Dinkytown, a young woman named Beverly Anderson disappeared.
[THEME MUSIC] 4
ELLE INTRO:
The cases have gone cold. The perpetrators think they’re safe. But with your help, I’ll make sure that even though justice has been delayed, it will no longer be denied. I’m Elle Castillo, and this is Justice Delayed.
[SOUND BREAK: Snow crunching underfoot; the echoes of “I’ll Make Love to You” by Boyz II Men playing in the distance; the laughter of young adults.]
ELLE VOICE-OVER:
In February 1996, twenty-year-old Beverly left a party she was at with her boyfriend and several other fellow juniors from the University of Minnesota. When the group walked out of the party, Beverly’s boyfriend tried to convince her to come with them up to Annie’s Parlour for late-night burgers and milkshakes. But Beverly had to get up early the next morning, so she insisted on going home. She was three months away from finishing her psychology degree and had already started an internship with a local clinic. They had an argument about it — nothing serious, just a spat like college lovers do. Eventually, he gave up and followed his friends alone. It was only five blocks to her apartment — a short walk she had made alone a hundred times before. Beverly zipped up her black wool coat, dipped her chin into her scarf, and waved goodbye to her friends.
It was the last time any of them saw her alive.
When she didn’t show up for her internship the next day, Beverly’s supervisor phoned her apartment. Her roommate, Samantha Williams, answered.
SAMANTHA:
I don’t know how to explain it. As soon as I got the call, I had a feeling that something was wrong. I went up to her room to check, just to make sure, and yeah. Her bed wasn’t slept in. None of her stuff was there, like her bag and keys and everything. I could tell she had never come home. 5
ELLE VOICE-OVER:
I’m sitting with Samantha Williams, now Carlsson, in her kitchen. She lives about an hour outside Minneapolis with her husband and two beagles, who sounded the warning before I even made it up to her front door.
SAMANTHA:
[Over the sound of two dogs barking.] Hush! Go to your crate. I said crate. Good girls. You see, they’re well trained when they want to be.
ELLE:
So, what happened when you realized Beverly hadn’t come home?
SAMANTHA:
Well, I told her supervisor, and he said we should call the police, so that’s what I did. At first, they didn’t want to investigate — you know, it hadn’t been long enough or whatever. But once her boyfriend and me told them she was seen walking home alone, and that she was a dedicated student who had just started an internship, they started getting more worried. I know they interviewed [redaction tone], but his friends gave him a solid alibi. Other than that two or three minutes when they argued about her coming up to the restaurant with him, he was with them the whole rest of the night. The police came and talked to me that day, I think in the afternoon. You could find out in their report, if you have it.
ELLE VOICE-OVER:
I do. According to Detective Harold Sykes, Samantha was interviewed on February 5, 1996, at 3:42 p.m. — approximately seventeen hours after Beverly was last seen.
ELLE:
And from what you remember, what happened next?
SAMANTHA:
Nothing, really. All her close friends had been with her that night, 6and they were at Annie’s Parlour for at least two hours after she left. Her family lived hours away, in Pelican Rapids. They figured there was no way the boyfriend did it, because he was only out of their friends’ sight for a couple minutes. She just … vanished. Everyone thought she might have gotten lost or disoriented, maybe she was drunker than her friends thought and fell into the Mississippi River and drowned. It’s happened before. But they searched the banks and snowdrifts for days, and there was no sign of her. Not until a week later.
ELLE VOICE-OVER:
Seven days after Beverly went missing, the manager of Annie’s Parlour was locking up for the night when he noticed someone huddled up against the outside wall. He thought it was a homeless person and bent over to offer to take them to a shelter. When they didn’t respond, the manager pulled the scarf away from their head and discovered the lifeless face of Beverly Anderson.
SAMANTHA:
[Through tears.] All anyone could focus on then was Beverly. Everyone was horrified, you know. This sweet, innocent, smart girl — dead. I couldn’t believe it. I barely left our apartment for weeks after that, I was so afraid. Turns out, I had good reason to be.
ELLE:
Do you remember when you found out about the other victims?
SAMANTHA:
They didn’t say anything on the news until they realized that second girl, Jillian Thompson, died the same way Beverly had. And she was missing for the same length of time — seven days. I think they found something on Jillian’s body that linked her to Beverly, some DNA or something.
ELLE VOICE-OVER:
It was skin cells on her jacket. The police figured Jillian must 7have offered it to Beverly when she got cold, wherever they were kept together. Jillian Thompson disappeared from a parking lot at Bethel University three days after Beverly did. Her family thought she had run off with a boyfriend they disapproved of. He was the primary suspect until the cases were finally connected.
[SOUND BREAK: A chair squeaking; a man clearing his throat.]
ELLE:
Can I ask you to introduce yourself for new listeners?
MARTÍN:
Uh, yes, I’m Dr. Martín Castillo, and I’m a medical examiner, an ME, for Hennepin County.
ELLE:
And?
MARTÍN:
And, full disclosure, I’m Elle’s husband.
ELLE:
Regular listeners might remember Martín from seasons one and three, where he provided expert insight about the autopsies of Grace Cunningham and Jair Brown, respectively. His identification of an oddly shaped lividity mark on Jair’s back helped us make a connection to a sofa in his uncle’s house, which was key to helping the Minneapolis Crimes Against Children Division solve that case. I’ve brought him back into the studio to discuss the other way the cases of these murdered girls were connected, before the DNA test from Jillian’s body even came back.
MARTÍN:
The simplest answer is that they were killed in the same way. The same, unusual way. 8
ELLE:
Explain that.
MARTÍN:
While Beverly Anderson showed signs of trauma on the right side of her head, her autopsy revealed that she had been struck several days before she died — likely on the day she was kidnapped. She passed away after suffering gastrointestinal distress, dehydration, and multiple organ failures. Those symptoms are consistent with a huge variety of poisons, and the pathologist might never have narrowed it down if it weren’t for her stomach contents. It took a few weeks, but eventually tests determined she had eaten castor beans — likely several. Ricin poison takes days to work, and often people survive ingesting it, but it was clear the killer fed the toxin to her multiple times. She had also been whipped on her back shortly before death. Twenty-one lashes.
ELLE:
How could you tell it was shortly before death?
MARTÍN:
The way the scabs formed indicated that her blood stopped flowing soon after the wounds were inflicted. Her heartbeat was probably already slowing when she was beaten — meaning she was already dying, which led the ME to determine that the whipping was part of a ritual, not an attempt to kill her faster. This was confirmed when they found Jillian’s body and she had been killed in exactly the same way. Organ failure due to castor bean poisoning, and exactly twentyone lashes across the back, made with a switch.
ELLE:
What do you mean by “switch”?
MARTÍN:
A stick or branch of some kind — thin but sturdy. There was evidence both bodies had been in the woods or the country somewhere. 9Leaf particles in their clothing, dirt under their nails. They figure the killer found a branch wherever he took them and completed the ritual then.
ELLE VOICE-OVER:
Jillian’s body was also found seven days after she was taken, but not in the same place she’d disappeared from like Beverly. That would have been too easy. Instead, she was left on the lawn of Northwestern College — now called the University of Northwestern–St. Paul — a rival to her own Christian university, Bethel. However, despite the fact that both young women were college students, held for the same length of time, killed in the same manner, and left in a public space, their deaths were not immediately connected. Two different homicide squads worked on the cases, and while there were centralized police databases for things like DNA and fingerprint collection, there was no modus operandi database — nothing that collected the way victims were killed and analyzed whether cases might be connected based on the method of killing.
Police investigated for months, even arrested Jillian’s boyfriend, but the charges were eventually dropped and both cases went cold. There were no similar murders, no new leads. Not until the following year.
[SOUND BREAK: A waterfall roaring.]
ELLE VOICE-OVER:
This is Minnehaha Falls, fifty-three feet of limestone and cascading water rushing on its way from Lake Minnetonka to the Mississippi River. The famous Song of Hiawatha poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow solidified its name, Minnehaha, which Longfellow interpreted as “laughing water.” The Dakota name would be better translated as “curling water” or simply “waterfall,” both of which are more apt. The intense, almost violent noise of charging water belies the idea of laughter. It was here, beneath the controversial bronze Hiawatha and Minnehaha statue, that the body of eighteen-year-old Isabelle Kemp was found.
10The recording you heard was taken last spring, when the falls were swollen with melted snow. But when Isabelle was found, the water was frozen — a thick, rough mass of ice stuck in the act of falling, as if enchanted. She almost wasn’t seen; a fresh blanket of snow was halfway finished covering her body before a tourist couple who came to view the falls noticed her red jacket peeking through the powder.
[SOUND BREAK: Background noise from a diner.]
ELLE:
When Isabelle Kemp’s body was found in January 1997, police quickly connected her murder with the cases in 1996. She had been missing for seven days and was whipped shortly before death. That’s also when you came up with the killer’s moniker, isn’t it?
DETECTIVE HAROLD SYKES:
Yes, although indirectly. It certainly wasn’t my intent.
ELLE VOICE-OVER:
That’s the lead detective on the case, Detective Harold Sykes. I met up with him at his favorite diner in Minneapolis.
ELLE:
But you noticed something that no one else had picked up on. Tell me about that.
SYKES:
Yes, well, we had already noticed that the killer seemed obsessed with certain numbers. He kidnapped the first two women three days apart, he kept them for seven days, and he whipped them twenty-one times. So, we figured those numbers meant something to him. The pattern was consistent. Which meant my team immediately scoured the missing persons records, looking for someone who might have been kidnapped three days after Isabelle was. But then when I was going through the cases, I noticed another pattern. Beverly Anderson 11was twenty years old. Jillian Thompson was nineteen. And Isabelle was eighteen.
ELLE:
They were each a year younger than the last.
SYKES:
Yes. It was just a hunch at that time, but I thought there was a good chance his next victim would be seventeen. It also fit with his number obsession. If the ages weren’t a coincidence, I knew that was bad news. It meant he probably had a plan. And that’s what I told them, when the reporters interviewed me. I regretted it at the time, but I suppose it doesn’t matter now. Someone would have thought of it eventually. I just told them: I think this guy has started some kind of twisted countdown.
ELLE VOICE-OVER:
It was a simple observation, but it stuck in the minds of Minnesotans across the state, filling everyone with a sense of impending doom. The killer was far from finished. Every girl knew she couldn’t let her guard down — as much as any girl ever does. A catchy name is all it takes to turn a local case into a national sensation.
Within hours, all the channels were calling him the same thing: the Countdown Killer.
2
Elle
January 9, 2020
Elle pulled her car up outside Ms. Turner’s house and paused the podcast on her stereo. It was one of her favorite true crime pods, more focused on the psychology of convicted criminals rather than investigating cold cases like hers. They were just getting to the good stuff, behavioral analysis of a legendary serial rapist in the Pacific Northwest, but it wasn’t exactly child-appropriate, and her best friend’s daughter was already making the half run between Ms. Turner’s front door and the warmth of Elle’s car.
The passenger door swung open, letting in a gust of frigid, dry air tinged with the smell of snow. Natalie jumped in and slammed the door, letting out a dramatic “Brr!”
Cranking up the heat, Elle asked, “How were piano lessons, kiddo?”
“Good.” Natalie buckled her seat belt and tugged her scarf away from her neck. Even in the dim late-afternoon light, her usually pale face was ruddy from the slap of winter air. “I mean, I’m still just doing scales all the time. I don’t think Ms. Turner knows how to teach more than that.”
Elle chuckled as she pulled back onto the road. “You’ve only been taking lessons for four months.” 13
“Yeah, I know, but it’s boring. I can do it in my sleep.”
“Be patient. Scales are the foundation. You have to learn to do the basic stuff well before you can tackle a whole composition.” Elle smiled at how quickly she could snap into mom mode, teaching life wisdom and doing piano lesson pickup like Natalie was her own kid.
“I guess she did teach me the happy birthday song today, too.”
“Oh, really? How come?”
Natalie laughed. “Aunt Elle, you know why.”
At a stoplight, Elle looked at her and gave an exaggerated shrug. “What do you mean?”
The girl giggled and rolled her eyes. “Because it’s my birthday, nerd.”
“Nerd!” Elle put her hand to her chest, as if mortally wounded. “You only ever call Martín that.”
“That’s ’cause he’s usually the only one being a nerd.”
“All right, all right, no more games. Happy birthday, sweetheart.” She couldn’t quite believe that Natalie was ten. So close to the age of the youngest victim in the TCK case, which had been absorbing every minute of her life since she started doing interviews for the latest season of Justice Delayed six months ago. She could barely close her eyes without seeing the faces of those girls, the ones that lined the wall in her recording studio. Natalie was the closest thing Elle had to a daughter — imagining her in the place of TCK’s youngest victim caused a surge of rage that made Elle dizzy. If it wasn’t for Natalie, Elle probably wouldn’t have started the podcast. If she hadn’t known what it was like to love a child enough to kill, she might never have started hunting the monsters who hurt them.
Elle leaned across the console and gave Natalie a loud kiss on the forehead just as the light turned green. “Did you do anything fun for your birthday?”
“I got sung to in class, and they let me bring in cookies for everyone,” Natalie said, fiddling with one of her dark blond braids. “And I came in third in freestyle.”
“You couldn’t pay me to put on a bathing suit in this weather.”
“If we stopped swimming when it got cold, we’d only swim three 14 months out of the year,” Natalie said as they pulled up to Elle’s house. “Besides, it’s, like, eighty degrees in there.”
“I’ll stick to lakes in the summer, but I’m proud of you for doing so well,” Elle said. The wind bit into her skin as she got out of the car and checked to make sure Natalie was walking carefully on their slick driveway. She made a mental note to ask Martín to put more salt down later.
“Yum!” Natalie said as soon as they walked through the front door. Elle’s mouth watered in agreement, taking in the warm, spicy fragrance. They followed their noses to the kitchen, where Martín was wearing his favorite floral apron and twisting a salt grinder over a pot simmering on the stove. He was making his take on spaghetti and meatballs: the meat a blend of beef and minced chorizo, with a dash of chili pepper in the sauce. It was Natalie’s favorite.
“Hey, birthday girl!” Martín dropped the spoon into the pot and reached his arms out to catch Natalie, who ran into them and squealed when he lifted her up into his signature bear hug. They spun around once, and he set her down on the counter, pulling the spoon out of the pot and blowing on it before he offered it to her. “For your inspection, señorita?”
Natalie gave it a taste, and her eyes lit up. “I believe that’s your best work, señor.”
When Martín set her back on her feet, he pointed at the silverware drawer. “I know it’s your birthday, but would you mind setting the table? Your mom should be here soon.” As soon as the girl gathered the cutlery and left, Martín turned to Elle with a smile. His wavy black hair stuck out in a few random angles; he was always running his hands through it when it wasn’t covered by his surgical cap at work. Still stirring the pot, he leaned away from the stove and gave her a warm kiss.
“Smells delicious.” Elle turned to pour herself a glass of red wine.
“Thanks. How are you, mi vida?” Martín asked.
Elle remembered the first time he called her that in front of Natalie after she started Spanish classes last year. Elle hadn’t learned any until high school, and Martín spoke fluent English by the time they met, but she’d dug out her old college Spanish textbook the day after 15their first date anyway. She didn’t want to miss out on conversations when she met his family in Monterrey, and with Minnesota’s high population of Mexican and Central American immigrants, it had come in handy on the job too. But the fancy prep school Natalie attended let kids start from third grade, so she knew what it meant when he called Elle mi vida.
“Why do you call her your life?” Natalie had asked. “Is it because you can’t live without her?”
Elle had expected him to tell her it was a common term of endearment where he was from in Mexico, particularly between men and their wives, but instead he looked at Elle while he answered: “No, it’s because when I met Elle, she reminded me I spend too much time around death. She helps me remember to enjoy my life.”
He was being extra romantic that day, and Martín gave most men a run for their money in the romance department.
“Elle?” His voice brought her back to the present.
“I’m fine,” she said, knowing that her forced smile wouldn’t fool him. “I can’t believe Natalie is ten. Seems like just yesterday she was that skinny four-year-old knocking on my door out of the blue.” Elle blinked away tears and took a drink of wine.
Martín set the spoon down and pulled her into his arms. “This investigation is getting to you, isn’t it?” he asked, rubbing circles on her back.
Elle tensed. “I’m fine,” she said again.
He pulled away, meeting her gaze. “I know you are.” He looked like he wanted to say something else, but instead, he just nodded and turned back to the stove.
The doorbell rang as Natalie returned to the kitchen for plates. “I’ve got it,” Elle said.
“Geez, it’s cold,” Sash said, shivering as Elle shut the door behind her. Sash stamped her boots on the entryway rug and slipped them off, careful to avoid the melting slush on the carpet with her stockinged feet.
“My dad used to call this tongue-gluing weather,” Elle said, surprised by the sudden recollection. She hadn’t thought about her dad in ages. “You know, because of all the dumb kids who used to dare 16each other to lick something metal in the winter and then got their tongues stuck.”
Sash’s big bangle earrings caught the light when she laughed, her head tilted back. After unwinding her scarf, she pulled the purple knit cap off her head and set them both on the bench by the door. She’d shaved her hair off again sometime in the last couple days, leaving only a short fuzz that highlighted her elfin features. It was an odd look for a corporate lawyer and often led people to underestimate her, which made it all the more delicious when she decimated them in court.
“That’s great. I’m using that one.”
Elle led the way to the dining room, past the hallway mirror that reminded her she hadn’t showered or done anything with her hair today. She’d been locked away in her studio right up until she had to go pick up Natalie.
“Any new leads on TCK?” Sash whispered.
Elle paused. Aside from investigation, she didn’t get out of the house much, and most of the family members and witnesses she’d interviewed never said his name. It was unsettling to hear someone say the initials that had been running through her head for months, like a fading echo becoming loud again.
“Nothing new,” she said, glancing back at her friend. “It’s a little early yet.”
Sash smiled. “A couple of the associates were talking about the case in my meeting today. This is going to be your biggest season yet, for sure.”
Nodding, Elle tried to keep her expression neutral. She had felt pressure to solve the cold cases she investigated in earlier seasons on the podcast, but nothing compared to this. It had only been a few weeks since she launched episode one, but she already knew this case was going to be different. Her inbox was full of comments, theories, and criticism — not just from listeners in the Midwest, but Australia, Indonesia, England, the Netherlands. It felt like the whole world was watching her.
But she could do this. All the cases she’d worked before, the troubled children in CPS and the previous four seasons of the podcast, 17they had been the foundation — the scales she practiced as she built toward something more complex. TCK was her magnum opus.
“You look pale.” Sash took her arm gently, stopping her before they could enter the dining room. “Shit, I’m sorry, Elle. You’re probably already nervous enough without me telling you how big this case is.”
“No, it’s okay. I mean, I’ve always known it was going to put a huge spotlight on the podcast. I just didn’t anticipate how much.” Elle met her best friend’s gaze as she pressed her fingernails into her own palm. “My producer and I are seeing lots of chatter online, ideas floated on our social media, but nothing concrete yet. I know it’s only been a few weeks, but I feel like I’m failing them.”
“The girls on the wall,” Sash said. Besides Martín, Sash was the only one Elle ever allowed into her studio upstairs. “You’re not failing them, Elle. You’re honoring them. You’re telling their stories and trying to get justice. You’re too hard on yourself.”
Before Elle could respond, the door to the dining room swung open and Natalie peeked her head out. “You guys going to come in or what? I’m starving.”
Sash smiled at Elle, gave her arm one more squeeze, and then they followed Natalie into the room where Martín was dishing up.
“How’s your birthday been, sweet?” Sash asked, giving her daughter a hug.
“Good. Thanks for leaving work early,” Natalie said.
“Of course! You think I’d miss this?” If Elle didn’t know Sash better, she might have missed the shadow that crossed her best friend’s face. It was a sore subject between her and Natalie, how late Sash worked some nights. But she always made it to the events that counted, and now that Elle worked from home full-time, she was able to help fill in the gaps. Swim meets, piano lesson pickups, even the occasional field trip chaperone gig. At this point, she was somewhere between a very involved aunt and a glorified babysitter, although Sash insisted she was more like a second parent Natalie had adopted herself. Either way, she loved it.
Pulling out the chair next to Natalie, Sash lifted her hands like 18an MC announcing the next act. “Ladies, gentleman, and genderambivalent: ten years ago today, a remarkable event happened.” The sleeves of her draped blouse swept the top of the table, narrowly avoiding the spaghetti sauce. “My daughter, the one and only Natalie Hunter, came into this world the size of a Chipotle burrito and squawking like a crow.”
Natalie giggled and covered her face with her hands.
“I know things weren’t always easy, the first few years of your life, when we moved around so much. But I’m glad we’re here now, and I’m glad you get to celebrate turning ten with your family.” Sash looked in Elle’s direction, but it was hard to see her expression through the sudden blur of tears. It still got her whenever Sash referred to Elle as family. Besides Martín and her in-laws, Sash and Natalie were the only family Elle had.
Natalie leaned forward, looking at the plate of cooling food in front of her. “C’mon, Mom, I’m hungry.”
They all laughed, and Sash raised her glass. “All right, all right. Sue a mom for giving a speech on her daughter’s tenth birthday. To Natalie!”
“To Natalie,” Martín and Elle echoed, raising their wineglasses. They clinked with Natalie’s glass of cola and then they all dug in.
“How was your day, Sash?” Elle asked as she twirled pasta onto her fork.
Sash took a sip of wine. “Not bad. This merger I’ve been working on is soul-destroying, though. The CEOs both insist on pretending everything’s rosy at their board meetings, but I can’t even get them to sit at the same table to negotiate anymore. One guy said something about the other guy’s golf swing, and suddenly a multimillion dollar deal is on the line. And they say women are emotional.”
Martín snorted around a mouthful of pasta.
“How about you, Martín? How’s life with the stiffs?” Sash asked. She pronounced his name correctly, Mar-teen, rather than the anglicized way their lazier acquaintances tried to get away with.
He held up his fork with a speared cherry tomato. “Oh, you know, pretty busy. This time of year I can’t clear the bodies fast enough.”
“Martín!” Elle said. 19
He held up his hands, palms out in the classic I’m-innocent stance. “Sorry! It’s not like they don’t know what I do.”
“Yeah, Elle, it’s not like I don’t know what he does.” Natalie took a sip of her water and grinned. “I want to be a medical examiner someday.”
Elle shook her head and cut her eyes at her best friend. Sash confided in her a few weeks ago that Natalie had developed an innocent crush on Martín, although by that time it had been obvious. She’d abruptly stopped calling Martín “tío” about a month ago, insisted on using his first name, and clung to every word he had to say. Sash blamed it on puberty. It had been a few years since Elle did her master’s in child psychology, but developmentally speaking, a ten-year-old girl falling in love with the only close adult man in her life was pretty standard stuff.
Even though he must have known they were watching in amusement, Martín ignored Sash and Elle and made eager conversation with Natalie about how to pursue a career in forensic pathology.
“I think you’d make a great medical examiner,” he said. “You’re going to have to improve your knife skills, though. I’m still scarred from the last time you helped me chop peppers for fajitas.” He held up his thumb, showing her the small pink crescent that marred his medium-brown skin.
She shoved him on the arm, her face turning red. “That was two years ago, and I apologized like a thousand times. You’re such a baby.”
Martín cradled his hand to his chest, his mouth dropping open in fake offense. “Cómo te atreves. But I suppose you’re right. In my line of work, no one risks bleeding to death if your blade misses the mark now and then. I’m sure you’ll be fine.”
Elle laughed, but there was a layer of sadness underneath as she watched her husband interact with Natalie. It was hard not to wonder what kind of father Martín would have been. Sash and Elle met during the time that Elle and Martín were trying hardest to get pregnant, when they had moved into the new house across the street to make space for what they were sure would be at least a couple children. All the dewy, fertile girls Elle went to high school with seemed 20 to get pregnant just by thinking about it, so it was a relief when Sash was so transparent about her own experience with IVF. She’d never been interested in sex or romance, but she always wanted to be a parent, so she had gone the test tubes and injections route. When Elle told her about her own fertility treatments, they commiserated about the anxious nightmare of trying to get pregnant through science (although Sash liked to joke that the idea of getting pregnant the other way was much more anxiety-inducing for her).
After years of trying, though, Elle couldn’t keep putting her body through the stress and hormones anymore. She and Martín finally agreed they weren’t meant to be parents, but by that time, they were so close to Natalie that it eased the ache of that decision — at least a little.
“You know you’re going to have to do a lot of science to be a medical examiner, right, sweet?” Sash said. “And you might need to get over your fear of needles.”
Natalie lifted her chin. “I can do that.”
Elle took a bite of food to hide her smile. Natalie was the kind of kid who was always getting excited about something new. Six months ago, she was into animal rights — she found a video on You-Tube and swore off eating meat for the rest of her life. Not a day went by that she wasn’t talking about cages or cattle prods. And then one day, Elle went over to her house and she was eating a hamburger and ranting about climate change. Most of the time, she moved on after a few months or so, but one of the things she’d stuck with was religion. Natalie’s school friend gave her a Bible a couple years ago, and since then the girls had been going to church together almost every Sunday. To Sash’s credit, she never tried to convince Natalie to stay home, even though she had no interest in religion herself.
Elle loved the girl’s passion. She knew better than anyone: the thing that pisses you off the most in life can make a pretty good career. Natalie was still too young to settle on one thing yet, but she would. Elle had been only a year older than Natalie when her life was set on fire, blazing an unmistakable path in front of her.
That thought reminded her of the faces on her studio wall upstairs, all those young futures that had been snuffed out, and suddenly 21 Elle sat back in her chair, blinking hard against the images branded on her mind. Taking a sip of wine, she glanced around the table. Sash and Natalie didn’t seem to have noticed, but Martín was watching her, one eyebrow raised in a silent question. She nodded once and picked up her fork again.
When they finished eating, Sash stood and started to pick up the empty plates.
“Oh, Sash, you don’t have to do that.” Martín got up too, trying to take the dishes from her.
“Relax, Martín, I’m not going to wash them or anything. Natalie can do that — consider it payment for the gas money you spend carting her around everywhere while I’m at work.”
“Hey, the pleasure of my company is payment enough,” Natalie said as she tossed a braid over her shoulder.
Martín burst out laughing, and Sash hollered her daughter’s name from the kitchen. Pushing aside the pictures in her head, Elle chuckled too.
As she stood to help Sash clean up, her phone buzzed in her pocket. Elle stepped into the hall and looked at the screen. There were dozens of email notifications from her show account. She ignored the alerts on her social media; she’d deal with those later. Most of the subject lines were the standard fare, but one jumped out like a typo on a billboard:
I know who he is.
3
Justice Delayed podcast
December 5, 2019
Transcript: Season 5, Episode 1
ELLE:
What happened after the press went wild with the TCK moniker?
SYKES:
We had almost nothing to go on, no physical evidence. You didn’t have shows like CSI or Law & Order: SVU back then, so the awareness of what could be done with DNA wasn’t there for most people. Yet somehow, this guy avoided leaving any trace of himself behind. Which led us to think he might have some sort of science or medical training.
ELLE:
Or that he was a cop.
SYKES:
That was also an option, yes. Either way, we weren’t able to find anything that could help us stop the inevitable from happening. Within hours of connecting Isabelle’s murder to the 1996 killings, we figured out who his next victim likely was: a seventeen-year-old girl, Vanessa Childs, who’d gone missing three days prior while taking out the 23trash at her fast food job. When we told her parents our suspicions, they were understandably distraught.
ELLE VOICE-OVER:
There is a special kind of helplessness, waiting for someone to turn up dead. Vanessa’s family hoped police were wrong about the connection, but the timing was so precise. And then, late in the afternoon on the day Isabelle’s body was found, another girl went missing. Sixteen-year-old Tamera Smith, a promising basketball player and straight-A student, vanished on the short walk between her school and the gym.
Detectives continued to search for suspects. Lab results were rushed, but no male DNA was found on Isabelle’s body. They had nothing to go on. The story was all over the news by then, and sales of mace and handguns shot up. Everyone was waiting for the next girl to disappear; everyone was determined not to be that girl. The mayor of Minneapolis reportedly considered instating a curfew, but was told it would send the wrong message that the women were to blame.
Vanessa’s family organized searches in the parks and wooded areas around the suburb of Roseville, where she was last seen, but it was fruitless. Three days later, a week after she had been taken, her body was found in some shrubs on the shore of Bde Maka Ska. There was barely time for the city to breathe before Tamera’s parents went to the media, convinced their daughter would be next and the police weren’t doing enough to stop it.
[SOUND BREAK: A phone ringing three times.]
ANONYMOUS:
Hello?
ELLE:
Hello, is this [redaction tone]?
ANONYMOUS:
Who’s calling? 24
ELLE:
Hi, my name is Elle Castillo, and I’m an investigator looking into the Countdown Killer case. I was hoping I could talk to you about —
ANONYMOUS:
Are you a detective?
ELLE:
No.
ANONYMOUS:
I don’t talk to you journalists.
ELLE:
Well, I’m not really a journalist either.
ANONYMOUS:
Then who the hell are you?
ELLE:
I’m an independent investigator specializing in cold cases of crimes against children. I share my work on a podcast.
ANONYMOUS:
A what?
ELLE VOICE-OVER:
It took some time to explain the concept of a podcast, especially an investigative podcast, but eventually I got her to come around. I’m keeping her anonymous, because it was clear she didn’t want to be associated with this case. For the purposes of clarity, I asked if I could call her Susan, and she agreed.
ELLE:
So, can you tell me how you came to be involved with the Countdown Killer case? 25
SUSAN:
I came to be involved by sticking my nose where it didn’t belong, and I have regretted that decision for about twenty years.
ELLE:
Can you explain what you mean by that?
SUSAN:
It was in 1997, after the second girl turned up dead. For days, I’d noticed my husband acting strangely: coming home disheveled and skittish hours after I expected him. At first, I thought it was an affair, but that didn’t explain the dirt.
ELLE:
Dirt?
SUSAN:
Yes, his pants were filthy, like he’d been kneeling in a garden or something, only it was the dead of winter. It took me two washes to get his jeans clean. Then one night we were watching TV together, and they were talking about this serial killer on the news, how they thought he had killed two girls the year before, and now it seemed like he was back. And Jimmy, he’d been half asleep, but as soon as that segment came on, he sat up like he’d just been shocked by a bad outlet. He didn’t say anything, just stared at the TV until they moved on. It made my hair stand on end.
So that night, I started thinking and looking at my old calendar, and I realized that Jimmy had told me he was on a work trip a year before. Right at the same time those poor girls got killed. I just couldn’t shake the feeling it could be him.
ELLE:
What did you do?
SUSAN:
If you can believe it, at first I considered not saying anything. I mean, 26 I was only twenty-three. My husband was twenty-seven. We were young, and I was in love. I didn’t think he could do something like that, but the timing was just … uncanny. So eventually, I put all my notes together and visited the detective who was running the case.
ELLE VOICE-OVER:
Detective Sykes was in that blurry stage of having too many leads and not enough time, so when Susan walked in with all the reasons why the killer had to be her husband, he initially brushed her off. She was halfway to her car by the time he scanned her notes and ran after her into the parking lot. Susan’s husband, Jimmy, became the first major suspect Detective Sykes had — a solid lead, after all this time.
SYKES:
You know in Greek mythology when they talk about the sirens, those beautiful women that lure sailors to the rocks and kill them? Well, [redaction tone] was a nice girl, but deep down, I think she had some siren in her. Of course, it’s mostly my fault. By the time Tamera went missing, I was so desperate to have something to tell these girls’ parents that I wanted to listen to her. And she wasn’t wrong — the timeframe of the murders did line up with her husband’s unexplained absences. But that was it. So, I got together a detail to follow this guy 24/7 for the next two days, to see if he would lead us to wherever the girl was being kept. We figured TCK visited his victims during the seven days he held them. He may even have kept them in his home — there was evidence on Isabelle’s and Vanessa’s bodies that they had been forced to do some domestic labor while they were held captive.
ELLE VOICE-OVER:
This was an escalation. Beverly and Isabelle showed no physical signs of abuse other than the effects of poison and lashes on their backs, but TCK’s triad of victims in 1997 was different. Their hands were dried and cracking, and harsh cleaning chemicals were found on their skin. Their knees were bruised and their palms blistered. In addition to the lashings, TCK had clearly forced them to clean, probably 27for hours on end, but it was impossible to know what or where. Or, more importantly, why.
Also, while I think Detective Sykes is entitled to his view of her as a siren, nothing about my interview with Susan led me to believe she was being intentionally manipulative or distracting when she accused her husband. Even though she later divorced him, she clearly loved him at the time and agonized over the decision to come forward. And she wasn’t completely off base. The tail Detective Sykes put on Jimmy turned up a reasonable explanation for his odd behavior — although not an innocent one.
ELLE:
Tell me about what you found out after surveilling Jimmy.
SYKES:
She was right about one thing: he was committing a crime. Jimmy worked as a county commissioner, and he’d been accepting cash bribes in exchange for granting government contracts to certain businesses. He’d been burying money on a property out in the country that he’d bought with cash, without telling her. He thought once he had enough saved up, he could surprise her with their dream house and tell her he won the lottery or something.
ELLE:
What about the way he reacted to the news story about the murdered girls? [redaction tone] said he sat up like he’d been shocked and couldn’t stop staring at the screen.
