Chapter 5

One of the forum members found Kimberly's body. She was in the ravine, looking for clues as to the identity of Anna Leigh's killer, something that the police might have missed, when she stumbled across the corpse.

"I didn't even know it was a body at first until I saw her painted fingernails," she wrote.

No one was looking for Kimberly because she was never reported missing. Kimberly had an on-again, off-again boyfriend who was in the "off" position during the time of her disappearance. He didn't know she was gone until the police showed up at his door.

Kimberly worked at a gas station, which meant that lots of people knew her and none of them noticed her absence. She was never beautiful, not even when she was young, which lent her a particular type of sweetness. She called everyone "honey" and remembered which brand of cigarettes they liked best. When the neighborhood children came in, she gave them lollipops that she paid for out of her own pocket.

The gas station was down the street from newly erected condos designed for young professionals. Everything inside was minimalist, rooted in glass and granite. The gas station had been on the street long before the condos and would likely be standing long after, its fluorescent lights a beacon. Though she'd worked at the gas station for over a decade, Kimberly couldn't afford to live in its vicinity and drove an hour to work each day, leaving little time for any kind of life.

William Thompson, a successful lawyer, lived in one of the condos. He walked to the gas station when he needed junk food as a pick-me-up, as he liked to keep only healthy food in his apartment. The police picked up footage of William on the security cameras days before Kimberly's disappearance, but there was nothing to differentiate him from the other men that stopped to pick up a bag of Peanut MM's. They all wore the same brands, got their hair cut the same way, and made polite conversation the way that their mothers taught them to. Surely, a true killer would never stop to say thank you.

On the day that Kimberly was found, I was seated in my boss's office nervously twirling my hair in my fingers.

"I need to speak with you," she said when I arrived that morning. I thought guiltily of the hours that I'd spent on the forum and wondered if she was able to track my internet usage.

She'd been my boss for only six months. The nonprofit had hired her from another nonprofit. They called her a "fixer," someone who was willing to tinker with everything until it was working the way that it was supposed to. I was grateful to be working underneath a woman, as all of my previous supervisors had been men. I thought that maybe she would understand the additional pressures that women face in the workplace, pressures that weren't relieved by working in the nonprofit sector.

"I'm sure you're aware that Karli is leaving the country and we're looking for someone to fill the associate director position," my boss began.

A glimmer of hope. I had my eye on a one-bedroom apartment that allowed dogs, and a promotion might put it within reach.

"I thought I should inform you that we're going with an outside hire," my boss continued.

I stared at her. She had a corporate background, which was evident by her dress. Carole told me once that she heard she came from money and started working at nonprofits as a type of altruism. Her earrings sparkled beneath the fluorescent office lights.

"Okay," I said numbly. "Thank you for letting me know."

I stood up and paused.

"Please let me know if any other opportunities for advancement become available."

She smiled at me.

"Of course, Hannah," she said.

The self-loathing started to set in before I even arrived back at my desk. I couldn't believe that I had thanked my boss for denying me a promotion and, worse, that upon reflection I could think of nothing better to say, no witty comebacks or delightful gotchas, only an endless pit of begging for table scraps.

Kimberly's predicament was a reminder that there were worse places to be, like dead at the bottom of a ravine.

I looked at her face. It'd been difficult to find a picture of her, as her Facebook profile picture was a stock photo of kittens. Finally, someone managed to contact a woman who was friends with her and she sent along an old picture to help us with our investigation. Even in that photo, wearing a pink dress and her face made-up, Kimberly still didn't look beautiful. Her lips were lined with wrinkles from years of smoking and the heavy liner made her eyes look small and beady.

Kimberly, to her credit, had stopped smoking five years prior, having finally reached an age where her fear of mortality outweighed the joy of going out back to smoke during her breaks. It made me sad to think about. If only someone had told her to smoke and smoke and smoke in order to squeeze out as many small, euphoric moments within her life as possible before she was murdered.

Though Kimberly had always shown up to work on time and had never missed a shift—except for the two days when she had food poisoning so bad that she was unable to leave the toilet—the general manager of the gas station assumed that she was a no-show and called her cell phone to tell her that she was fired. What the general manager hadn't realized was that Kimberly's phone was dead inside her purse, which she had left inside of her car, which was parked near the ravine. The car was later labeled as abandoned and towed to a lot. Through all of it, Kimberly continued to rot and rot until the forum user came across her body.

Kimberly's name didn't trend and the media coverage was scant, describing her as "the woman found near Anna Leigh." Oh, to be remembered that way, a body found near the presence of another. No one seemed to think their deaths were related. I knew from years of idly watching Criminal Minds as a teenager that most repeat killers had a type. Ted Bundy, for instance, was infamous for preferring women with long brown hair, though he strayed from this during his more manic murders. It seemed unlikely that someone would go from murdering Anna Leigh, who was young and beautiful, to murdering Kimberly, who was old and poor. Women died all the time. Who was to say that there weren't two separate killers who decided to throw bodies into the same ravine? Weirder things had happened.

"Did you see the news?" I asked Carole.

She looked up from her computer screen, took a sip of her herbal tea that smelled of grass and dread, and looked at me quizzically.

"They found another body where Anna Leigh was found."

"Oh my gosh. Those poor women."

I noticed how I didn't need to specify that the body was a woman. Bodies were almost always read that way.

"Do they know who did it?" she asked.

"No, they're still trying to figure out if they're connected."

The members of the forum got to work immediately. We never talked about our day jobs, or lack thereof. I got the impression that many people were stay-at-home mothers investigating murder when their children's heads were turned away.

I made an infographic that said "#FindTheRavineKiller" over Anna Leigh's and Kimberly's faces and posted it on Instagram.

"If you cared about Anna Leigh, you need to care about Kimberly too," I wrote in the comments. "Women are dying, and the police are doing nothing."

Within minutes, the post had been shared hundreds of times.

Another user pulled up a list of sex offenders in the vicinity of the ravine and combed through it for possible suspects. There was no evidence that either Anna Leigh or Kimberly had been sexually assaulted, but the murder of women, especially someone as beautiful as Anna Leigh, always felt linked to sex.

Someone else said that she would contact her acquaintance who worked at a nearby police department in Georgia to see if there was any information he could give.

I almost forgot about the conversation with my boss. The work I was doing was gratifying, if entirely unrelated to my salaried role. I knew that she would call it "time theft," a term she'd used in meetings before, and I didn't care. Did my boss know what it was like to live life always feeling guilty about the smallest indulgences? To feel so unappreciated that I'd begun to forget that I was good at anything at all? On her desk there was a framed picture of her, her husband, and their two children at the beach. I couldn't remember the last time that I'd seen the ocean. Investigating murders was nothing like the beach and the ravine not a sea and yet, I found a certain freedom within its mysterious depths.