We saw the clouds had piled in when we came out.
I noticed a blur of light bouncing off the cloud cover from the direction beyond the Slake-ur-Thirst.
Greg Itson noticed it, too. He frowned, checked his phone, then frowned more as he climbed into the cab of the requisite off-duty pickup.
As I prepared to leave, I saw him on his phone.
I pulled out and headed one direction. In my rear-view mirror, I saw Itson pull out of the Slake-ur-Thirst lot and head the opposite direction. The shortest drivable route to where I believed the Cottonwood County Sheriff’s Department was looking at bicycle tire tracks from the Shangri-La Mine Road.
It started to rain.
* * * *
“I’ve got it. I think I’ve got it. I’ve probably got it. No, I’ve got it.”
Jennifer’s outburst swamped the hellos as Diana and I arrived on the video call simultaneously. Mike was on assignment in Chicago and not reachable.
I’d pulled off the side of the road, with an accompaniment of rain on the SUV’s roof and windshield.
“I bet you do,” Diana said. “Now tell us what it is.”
“The thing down the career ladder that she’s trying to get away from. The consultant woman. Chloe.”
“You see how what you said at the beginning was big news to you, but wasn’t to us without context?” I asked. “Context is what who, what, when, where, how provide the listener. A government official has been arrested. Where? Who? Someone who governs us or halfway around the world? It’s started to rain. Has it flooded recently? Or is there a drought. Context.”
Jennifer protested, “You already know the context—”
“Not until you said it concerned Chloe.”
“And now that Elizabeth has made her educational point, please tell us what you found out, Jennifer,” Diana said.
“Yes, please,” I added meekly.
“Chloe’s old bios listed a station as the start of her career that came after Zanesville. But I found a piece about her joining that supposedly first station from a defunct weekly paper digitized by a local historical society. It said she’d been a reporter for the Zanesville station. And a quote from the news director said she’d impressed him with her tape from Zanesville.
“So I called the Zanesville station and said I was doing a report for my class at the local high school on the oral history of the station and who was the best person to talk to. Bingo. They connected me to Mary Tresser and she knew everything about everybody. For example, Chloe was Chloe Cosalini in Zanesville. The hard part was to get Mary to focus on the info I wanted.
“Boy, people complain about how much search has degraded on places like Google and Amazon — as if they ever were great — and they have. Because they shove what they want to sell at you instead of what you searched for. But trying to search a person’s memory is even harder. I never realized how good you have to be to get as much information from someone as you do, Elizabeth.”
Those words might be my favorite career accolade.
“Yes, Elizabeth is marvelous,” Diana teased. “Now, get back to what Mary Tresser said about Chloe.”
“She never was a reporter at the Zanesville station. She was a secretary. That’s what Mary said — not even an assistant or admin — a secretary.”
“But her audition tape that wowed the next news director… Was Mary sure—?”
“Absolutely. Chloe was passed over for a reporter job. Got bitter. According to Mary, she up and left a couple months later, no notice, and no one heard from her again.”
“She had to have submitted a fake audition tape. Stories that never aired,” I said. “She could have done the video herself.”
“Multimedia journalist,” Jennifer said wisely. “The station was moving to MMJs — Mary called them one-man-bands, because they do video and standup and everything — and that would be the end of Thurston, since he can’t play one instrument, much less the whole band. He left around the same time.”
“He would know Chloe’s first audition tape was fake, her first job as a journalist wasn’t as a journalist. The lie at the foundation of her career. Pull that out and it all falls apart, including the consulting now,” I said.
“She could be working with Thurston as a thank you for not giving her away.” Diana hesitated a moment, then said, “On the other hand, would any of us put it past him to hold his knowledge over her head and insist she work with him?”
“Nope. I think it’s time to talk to Chloe.”
“If you go to Denver, Audrey will—”
“That’s why we’ll try the phone first. In the meantime, I have a little story about a bike.”
I finished my account with the potential significance.
“Say the person who took the bike used it to ride out to meet Melissa. She thinks the bike-rider is going to help her fake her suicide to make Thurston sit up and take notice — based on the content of her note. Instead, he or she kills Melissa, rides the bike to the bar and leaves it there.
“Anyone who paid attention would know that’s where the owner left it. Magnus is a semi-regular customer. Itson patrols there.”
“Thurston? I can’t imagine him on a bike,” Jennifer said reluctantly. “Or in a place like Slake-ur-Thirst.”
“Not ordinarily, but he’s certainly strongly motivated by self-interest.” That cheered her up.
“What about Fawn?” Diana asked.
“Possible. It’s about a fifteen-minute drive from the Baxter ranch road.”