Chapter 4

Anna Leigh's body was found in the ravine near her office nine days after she was reported missing. I hated that word, "ravine." It sounded like a word that was invented to describe a place where bodies were found. Her face was decomposed beyond recognition and her long blond hair cut off. They had to identify her by dental records, of which there were plenty, because Anna Leigh never missed an appointment. She'd been strangled and stabbed, the police said, in a manner that indicated that the murder was personal.

I was having a bad day at work for unrelated reasons. I'd learned that a project that I'd spent months working on was getting scrapped at the last minute because funding fell through. No one seemed to care about the ways in which my time had been wasted and only repeated that it was due to "situations out of our control."

What is within your control?I wanted to ask, but I'd been reprimanded for my attitude at a meeting the previous month and kept quiet.

At first, the discovery of Anna Leigh's body felt like yet another failure. All our work, all our posts and pleas for information, had been for naught. For a week and a half, I'd been a passionate advocate for all the missing women in the world and I hadn't managed to change a thing. What a disappointment it all was. Then I logged on to the forum where they took Anna Leigh's death as the opportunity to solve a homicide.

"Do you want to go to lunch?" Carole asked me.

I looked up at her. She wore a flowered caftan.

"I can't," I said. "We have to figure out who killed Anna Leigh."

"Who's Anna Leigh?" she asked.

I squinted at her. Clearly, we were inside of different universes.

"She's a victim of misogyny," I said.

Most of the forum still believed that Tripp was somehow guilty. Someone had managed to run a background check and discovered that he'd gotten a misdemeanor for public intoxication when he was an undergraduate in addition to being a member of a fraternity that had numerous infractions over the years, including claims of women being roofied at their parties. None of those things pointed to murder, but they did indicate some sort of moral corruption that could lead to it.

I spent the rest of the day alternating between refreshing the forum and wandering into the break room under the guise of refilling my water bottle in hopes that there would be someone new that I could tell about Anna Leigh's death.

"I was really involved in trying to find her," I told a coworker. "I made a post that had over ten thousand shares."

"Wow," he said.

When Carole returned from lunch, I walked her through the whole case, starting with Anna Leigh's disappearance, Tripp's alibi, and the information that the police had released about the body.

"It's so dark how everyone is obsessed with killers these days," she said, but listened intently.

"I'm not obsessed with killers," I told her. "I'm obsessed with justice."

As much as I insisted that was true, I already wasn't sure of my place on the dividing line.

I was making a post on Instagram in honor of Anna Leigh's life when I saw Max's post. Max didn't post personal things online, or that's what he told me after I posted a picture of us together and he said that he preferred that I take it down.

"I don't like the surveillance state," he said.

Most of his posts were advertising shows at which his band was playing that got three or so likes at best. The surveillance state was fine, apparently, if it meant they were surveilling the shows that his band played at. It surprised me to see an actual picture, one of Max with his arm around Reese, the girl that he'd been with the last time I saw him.

"My best girl," the caption said.

The post had been liked by forty people.

It was then that the true sadness hit me, an emotion so intertwined with anger that I didn't know how to separate the two. I wanted there to be something that I could do to help Anna Leigh's grieving friends and family, to bring justice to their case, to make myself the person that Max liked enough to post on his Instagram. I felt impotent in ways that were both large and small, unable to change the world or my life.

In some ways, it was easier to face Anna Leigh's corpse than it was to grapple with my own personal failings. My tiny income and even smaller apartment. My novel draft that refused to grow no matter how long I kept the document open. The boys that fucked me and left me like I was nothing at all. I didn't know how to make meaning out of my life, so I found meaning within the body of a dead girl.

I started by raiding the bag of chocolates that I kept stashed in my desk for emergencies that arose at increasingly frequent intervals. Had a bad meeting? Chocolate. Too many emails in the inbox? Chocolate. Trying to heal from a broken heart? Chocolate. Need to solve a murder many states away? Chocolate.

As the candy melted over my tongue. I vowed to find Anna Leigh's killer. I wanted it for her, for her loved ones, but more than that, I needed it for me, to know that I was capable of accomplishing something.