1. Ridley

1

RIDLEY

FIVE YEARS LATER

I leaned into the curve of the road, my restored VW Kombi van hugging the bend perfectly. Bessie and I had been together for over three years, and I knew just the speed at which she could take turns like this one. I’d spent every cent of my savings to bring her back to life and customize her insides. From the kitchen and seating area to my office in the back to the pop-up bedroom in the roof. And who could forget the cat tower for Tater.

As if she could sense my thoughts drifting to her, she stretched in her bed on the dash, leaning over to lightly nip my fingers on the wheel.

“We’re almost there. No need for tooth hugs,” I chastised.

She meowed in answer. But it sounded more like a demand. And once she got started, there was no stopping her.

But Tater’s talking only made me smile as the road curved again. The two-lane highway was blanketed by a wall of massive trees on either side, but they didn’t make me feel claustrophobic. They made me feel free.

My work brought me to cities occasionally, but I did my best to pick locations off the beaten path. Ones where I had access to my drugs of choice: mountains, forests, deserts, or bodies of water of any kind. They were the only places I found comfort now. The only places I could find peace for a fleeting moment. In nature and in my work.

As if the thought summoned him, my phone rang out with the Jaws theme song. It was a good thing my boss didn’t know this was his ringtone, because he wouldn’t have been pleased.

I tapped accept on the screen, choosing speakerphone. “Hey, Baker.”

“Where are you?” he clipped.

Never any pleasantries with my producer. Always in a rush. In his book, time was money and he wasn’t going to waste a dime. “About five minutes out from Shady Cove.”

I heard a chair squeak over the line as Baker sighed, and I could picture my boss in his office on Sunset Boulevard, looking out over Los Angeles and wondering how he ended up with such an obstinate podcaster under his umbrella. “You could keep going another few hours north and take that case of the missing mom of three.”

My stomach twisted. That mother deserved her justice too. But I needed this case in Shady Cove. This woman. This set of circumstances. “I can look into that one next.”

I’d have to give Baker a win after back-to-back passion projects. But I’d gotten used to that cadence. Two for me, one for him.

He sighed again, as if disappointed in me. “I don’t get what’s so interesting to you about this one. Bungled abduction. The girl got away.”

That itch skated over my skin again, the need to move, to roll down my window and breathe the fresh mountain air. “Which means I’ll have a victim to interview. How often do we get that?”

Baker made a humming noise in the back of his throat as he mulled that over. I knew what called to him. Any angle that would push the numbers. Subscribers, downloads, listens. The hope of going viral on TikTok. Anything that would up what he could charge advertisers.

“You could have a point.”

I went in for the kill. “They never found the perp. Maybe we get lucky and nab him.”

I’d been doing this for over four years now. I’d covered over a dozen cases. I’d made headway in almost all of them, but I’d broken three wide-open. One had left a man doing twenty to life for murdering his wife, the other had a man on trial for the abduction and assault of eight women in Wyoming, and the final one had meant a life ended in a shootout when a man opened fire on the FBI instead of being brought in for questioning in the disappearance of a college student—they’d found her body in his basement.

“I want you to start posting tonight,” Baker ordered.

I shook off the chilling memories and did a mock salute even though he couldn’t see me. “You got it.”

He hung up without a goodbye, just another waste of time for him. But I didn’t mind. Anything to get off the call quicker. And I didn’t mind the social posts either because that forward progress on a case came from getting the community on your side. Activating them to become a force of amateur sleuths.

That public involvement had its downsides for sure. False leads and people getting in my way. The occasional safety concern. But I took precautions. People didn’t know who I was, not really. I used my middle name, Sawyer, as my last on the podcast. And I never spoke about what had spurred me into the world of true crime to begin with—knowing what it was like not to have the answers you needed and feeling like no one gave a damn.

I was careful about more than the links to my past. I was cautious about the here and now too. I never posted around where I was staying. Never took photos or videos of my vehicle. Bessie was unique after all. Her teal-and-white paint job, the paddleboard fastened to her side, the cat almost always perched in the window.

Since taking care with those safety measures, I hadn’t ever had someone find where I was staying. Probably because anyone interested enough to look checked hotels or short-term rentals. But I was always staying in Bessie.

It was necessary. Because with that first breakthrough case, there’d come attention. Just over a million followers on Instagram. One and a half on TikTok. And we averaged over two million monthly downloads of the show between all platforms. It was a community. There were some kooks for sure. There were some folks who thought they were the next Sherlock Holmes. But mostly there were people who wanted justice for those who had been forgotten.

They were my people.

It might have been because they too had lost someone. Or maybe they had been victims themselves, unable to speak up in the moment or even now. Or they could simply be empathetic humans who wanted the world to be better than it was.

No matter the reason, I was grateful for them.

As the road straightened out then dipped down a bit, I caught sight of a sign in the distance. I could see the white letters spelling out Welcome to Shady Cove . The paint was chipped in places, worn by weather and time.

I quickly tapped the camera app on my phone from where it was in the charging dock and hit record. People loved the rolling-into-town footage that meant I was on a new case. As I got closer to the sign, I could see more of its details. The waves that marked the large lake the Northern Californian community sat on, the trees carved into the wood and painted a dark green for the surrounding forests. All of it aged, raw, real. And followed by Population 2,033 .

Small. Almost minuscule.

But I knew that the most horrific things could happen in the places you least expected.