Page 92 of Everything She Feared

“Magda didn’t answer,” Sandra continued. “Then after about a minute, she looks up at us, and says: ‘You have no idea what I can do. One day you’ll all be in awe of me.’”

“Wow.”

“Then Magda got up, walked away, vanished in the dark. To this day, it still freaks me out.”

Ryan pulled a file folder of Julie’s typed interviews with people who knew Magda. After she graduated from high school, she fought with her parents, left home, moved to Billings and into an apartment with two older women. Julie had tracked down one of the women and wrote this note:

PENNY WOMACK

Roommate in Billings

We lived together for a time. Magda answered our ad for a roommate. My friend Kit Lee and I thought she was young, but we took her in to save on rent. Magda was smart and had a thing about numbers. Her room was full of calendars. She read weird books about mystics and the cosmos. She was quiet, a loner. She had a job at a poultry processing plant. Kit and I were office girls. One night we were all watching TV when Magda started talking about her job.

Lord, she went into such detail, how the birds, as she called them, are shackled upside down on a moving conveyor line, then electrically stunned before moving on to where their jugular veins were automatically severed. Magda said it was her job to ensure this stage ran smoothly, that the process was quick, effective and humane. But she was grinning, and her eyes were gleaming when she told us: “I just love watching them bleed.”

Ryan pulled out another of Julie’s notes:

JANINA RIMKUS

Poultry plant coworker

Magda was good at her job. She enjoyed it. She kept to herself until she met Herman Vryker, a trucker from Idaho, who moved shipments in and out of the plant and drove all over the country.

Herman was good-looking with intense eyes. But he was an outcast, or so the story went. He was a prepper who followed wild conspiracies and got kicked out of a doomsday cult. But Magda seemed to fall for him. She would suit him up and sneak him into the plant to watch the process. Magda told me that Herman thought it was “poetic,” that was his word,poetic, the way the blood flowed. Those two were made for each other. No one was surprised when they got married and moved into a double-wide at the edge of town.

Paper-clipped to the Rimkus note was another.

CAMILA DIAS

Poultry plant coworker

Magda and Herman didn’t get many visitors. I don’t think it bothered them. They didn’t care much for people. When word got around that Magda had a baby, a couple of us visited to fawn over her little daughter. They named her Hayley, a play on the name of Halley’s Comet, Magda told us. She was a beautiful baby. While we cooed over her, Magda said odd things, like “Hayley’s birthdate was an important sign for us to make use of her.” None of us knew what the heck she was talking about. “Make use of her?” We thought, who says things like that about their child? At one point Janina nodded to all the calendars, charts and numbers on the wall. It was strange. We’d heard the rumors about Magda’s borderline obsession with some sort of cosmic relationship with dates and events and numbers, I’m not sure, maybe like some sort of occult, numerology thing? But being there, hearing her and seeing her home, well, we left there a little shaken. I’m still uneasy talking about it because, well, of what they were planning.

Leaning back in his chair, Ryan exhaled, rubbed his eyes, then reached for the folder of information that had drawn him to Seattle, flipping through it for the millionth time.

Am I really getting closer to finding Magda?

He typed a few notes into his phone.

He had more work to do.

41

Seattle, Washington

Tanner Bishop lookedat the handcuffs around his wrists.

“You’re still under the Miranda warning,” Pierce said.

Nodding, Tanner turned to his father’s stern, sober face, then to that of Whitney Bowen, the $400-an-hour attorney he’d hired.

A few hours earlier, Pierce and Benton had located Tanner near his home, eating at a McDonald’s, where they arrested him. They brought him downtown to the King County Sheriff’s Office headquarters.

Tanner was photographed, fingerprinted and permitted to make calls. He’d summoned his dad, who’d hurried to headquarters with Bowen. The detectives allowed them to consult privately with Tanner in a holding cell for nearly forty minutes.

Now all five were gathered at the table in a large meeting room. Pierce tapped commands on her tablet, then turned it so Tanner, his father and his lawyer could view the screen.

Clear video recorded by the security cameras at True Ocean Auto Dealers in Lake City played. It showed Tanner getting into the white Chevrolet Silverado pickup belonging to John James Smith and driving away.

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