Nice Girls(22)

The news cut to a commercial.

My mouth was open from shock. When I looked at Dad, he only shook his head and went back to his food.

“Scary stuff,” he said. “At least it’s not Olivia.”



Other people seemed to feel the same way.

When I looked up an online article about DeMaria Jackson, thirty-four people had already left comments. Most of them didn’t mention her:

Loading my shotgun tonight. Keep your kids safe, folks.





Thoughts and prayers for Olivia Willand!!! She might be ok!!





LL police better be doing their goddamn jobs and keep the community safe





Hope the killer didn’t get Olivia Willand





Olivia was still possibly alive. The forearm from the beach had belonged to someone else. There was no proof that Olivia had been kidnapped or killed.

But DeMaria Jackson’s death was worrying. It was too much of a coincidence—two young women who disappeared from the same midwestern town in the span of a few months. Within a week of one going missing, the other had been found dead.

Only one comment seemed suspicious about it:

Two missing women in LL is NOT NORMAL—serial killer at play?





I felt a chill run through me.

Serial killer. The concept had always been there. It flickered in the news, in films, in books. A serial killer was as exotic as a suicide bomber—they lurked in other places, bringing pain to other people. But not us. Here in Liberty Lake, we were too boring, too quiet to attract any attention. We were immune to danger.

But now the concept had taken flesh, a faceless being who slinked around the city. A real serial killer. There was somebody in Liberty Lake who had taken DeMaria Jackson. They’d hacked her apart and tossed her into a lake. They might have done worse to her. And Olivia was out there, possibly suffering the same fate.

I refreshed the article again. No updates. I was looking at the same photo of DeMaria. She looked like she could’ve been one of my freshmen residents at school—pretty and young enough to be dumb, reckless, free. She was young enough to do anything, really.

Now she was dead, her body mutilated. People couldn’t even spare a few seconds to think about her, not even on her own news report. Her death seemed to matter to very few. There was something unbearably sad about it.

I skimmed through the article again. DeMaria had gone missing back in July. She was declared a runaway. Yet online, there was no previous mention of her anywhere. No news articles, no press releases. The police had kept her disappearance to themselves. I couldn’t even find any of her social media accounts. She’d kept herself private online.

My eyes were straining in the dark. I closed them for a second, rubbing them gently. When I blinked the sparks from my eyes, I suddenly saw DeMaria’s name at the bottom of my search results—someone had made a public Facebook post about her.

It was a short post written by a woman named Leticia Jackson. She claimed to be DeMaria’s mother:

Liberty Lake police is full of shit!! My daughter did not run away, she was kidnapped and I’m tired of the news pulling this BS on my child. Police did not take action when I reported her missing this summer. Said she was a runaway, told me to wait. Now my daughter was butchered like some ANIMAL. And LL police has the nerve to slander her in death. There is no justice. DeMaria, I love you! You deserved better than this earth.



At the bottom of the post, Leticia Jackson had already received several replies. More comments appeared in quick succession:

Now don’t blame the police, they’re doing all they can





I’m sorry for your loss





i’m sorry, ma’am, but maybe this would have been avoided had your daughter not run away. If LL police say she ran away, then she probably did. Don’t blame the people who try to help you





Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.





I closed my laptop.

There was something unsettling about all of it: the hacked body of DeMaria Jackson, her mother’s claims about the police force, the response from the city. Now some people assumed that she’d brought her death on herself: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

But DeMaria was important. There was more to her story. Perhaps she wasn’t a runaway. If Leticia Jackson was right, then her daughter had vanished in town just like Olivia had. And DeMaria had washed up a week after Olivia went missing.

Two disappearances, one town, a few months. There was a connection between the two of them—I could feel it. The coincidence was too great.

And to help Olivia, you needed to investigate DeMaria.

Leticia Jackson said that the police had failed to act for her daughter, but perhaps things had changed. With a confirmed death, there was more pressure. The police had to be moving in the right direction, and if they weren’t, then they needed to be pushed.

And I only knew one person in the Liberty Lake police force.

Kevin Obermueller.





12




I was bleary-eyed at work on Monday. I kept glancing at the clocks on the walls, counting down the hours, then the minutes until lunch. At my cash register, I had a stream of customers who moved even slower.