Page 17 of Find Me

“He’s trying to appeal his conviction or something? Get the fuck out. He pleaded guilty on a mountain of evidence.”

There was an era in Wichita, Kansas, when children lived in the midst of a real-life bogeyman. Someone who appeared inside homes to kill women and children. He didn’t simply kill them, either. He controlled them. Positioned, posed, and staged them. He took his time with them. They were his entertainment as long as he could drag it out until the final moment when he ended their lives.

Children her age, in that place, were taught to check the phone lines intermittently to be sure no one had cut them. They knew how to turn the series of multiple locks installed on all entries to the house, including from the basement. Eventually, when the killings stopped, the College Hill Strangler became more regional folklore than a constant fear. But for Ellie, his shadow lingered.

The basement that used to be the space where she and her brother, Jess, could play Ping-Pong or produce their own impromptu talent shows became her father’s makeshift office away from the precinct. Long after the task force shut down, he continued to work the case, adding bigger whiteboards for his ever-expanding list of theories. Detective Jerry Hatcher was determined to find the killer who had eluded him for nearly a decade.

“No, it’s an attorney here in the city. A friend of hers hasn’t been heard from in more than a week. They found some blood spatter in the house where she was last seen, and it matched to one of the samples from the case.”

She waited a moment for him to digest the information that she had already processed. “Okay, but the bad guy confessed and is locked up for life. The rest of it’s noise.”

With almost anyone else, Ellie would have shut down the conversation. But maybe more than anyone—besides Jess—Rogan understood the balance she had tried to strike between putting up a good fight for her father’s legacy and forcing herself to accept the hard truth.

“Unless it isn’t,” she said.

“Nothing I say is gonna convince you to move on without knowing more about that DNA hit. Sound about right?”

“I’m meeting her as soon as this report gets filed.”

13

Monday, June 21, 11:15 a.m.

“Are you sure you don’t want to order something else, Ellie?”

The name sounded overly familiar to Lindsay’s ear, but Detective Hatcher had insisted on first names, making clear that she was here in a personal capacity, not as a cop. When Ellie suggested meeting at the Bluebell Café, Lindsay had assumed they were eating lunch and ordered accordingly, but then the detective asked only for a cup of coffee. Now she felt weird, fumbling with this stupid avocado toast while talking about serial murder.

She had already laid out everything she knew about the blood sample from the Stansfields’ house and its connection to trace evidence found at the home of Janice Beale. “The police in East Hampton, at least, are chalking it up to coincidence.”

“I worked an interstate case once with an older detective from the LAPD. He said there was no such thing as coincidence. The longer I’ve been on the job, the more I agree. You’re a lawyer: What’s your gut?”

“That it’s connected. I might be willing to say otherwise, except Hope is missing. One possibility is that it’s a person from her past—someone who’s been looking for her this entire time and finally foundher. Another possibility is that it has nothing to do with her or her amnesia, but it’s connected with this College Hill Strangler case. But the odds that it’s a completely random coincidence that has nothing to do with either Hope’s disappearance or your father’s case?”

Ellie shook her head. “Would be weird.”

“William Summer could have had an accomplice,” Lindsay said. “Maybe when Summer went inactive, the accomplice left the region. Who knows how many places he has lived since then, and how many women he could have killed.”

“It’s an interesting theory.”

Lindsay waited for the detective to say more, but Ellie simply took another sip of her coffee. Lindsay was familiar with the tactic. Say nothing and force the other person to fill the silence. She could play the game as well as any police officer, but in this situation, she was the one who needed the detective’s help.

Fine.

“In some ways,” Lindsay said, “the modus operandi itself suggests the possibility. The amount of control. The time spent with the victims. It all seems slow and methodical. That could mean more than one person.”

Ellie nodded. At least it was some kind of feedback. But instead of working the angle with Lindsay, the detective abruptly changed the subject. “Tell me more about your friend.”

Still my turn, Lindsay thought. This woman didn’t share in the sandbox.

“Well, we certainly met in the strangest way.” The detective listened as Lindsay chronicled the history of finding Hope after the car accident and the years Hope had spent building a new life. “She wanted to start over again where no one knew her history. She’d only been in East Hampton about a month.”

Lindsay pulled up a photograph on her phone. It was a selfie of her and Hope, an ocean view barely visible in the background of theclose-up shot. “That’s the last picture I have of her—from when we visited East Hampton together, in fact.”

“She’s pretty.”

Lindsay felt her throat tighten as she glanced down at her screen. “I always joke that I want to do a Freaky Friday switch with her for one day—just to know what it feels like to be that beautiful.”

Lindsay knew that she was also attractive, to an extent. With shiny dark hair, pale skin, and bright blue eyes, she had a look that matched her Irish last name. She might be described as cute or pretty or—what had Scott’s mother called her?Delightful.But she wasn’t the kind of gorgeous that turned men stupid. Focusing on the woman across the table, she realized that Detective Ellie Hatcher probably knew what it was like to attract that kind of attention. On closer inspection, she concluded that the detective intentionally frumped herself up for the job. She knew from the profile she’d read that Ellie had put herself through college with prize money from midwestern beauty pageants.

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