Four

Immediately after hanging up, I began putting together a list of people to call. If John were taken rather than killed, there should be some clue in the chatter on the streets. Maybe not the exact details, but at least rumors. I might need to burn some of the favors I'd stored up, but I'd use anything I could to find him. It might be a coincidence that I'd gotten John's email at almost the same time he turned up missing, and I couldn’t imagine why a murderer would kidnap John rather than kill him outright, but I had to consider the possibility, I had to explore every possibility, and quickly, because if John were alive now, I was pretty sure he wouldn't be for long. Finding out why he was taken should lead me to the kidnapper.

I hated the necessity, but my first move had to be getting some serious research out of the way. I was so wound up I wanted to do something active, but I needed a trail to follow and only information would provide me with one. I had the info John sent me, but his sources weren't mine. I'd have to build my own file. I decided to start with a list of the nine people John believed had been killed. I found out everything I could about them from the internet, and when pictures were available, I printed those. It was hard for me to believe a killer organized enough to keep such a low profile and evade John's pursuit would kill people at random. There had to be some sort of pattern. I felt sure the people were connected in some way, at least connected in the killer's mind. I set up a huge whiteboard in my study, put up the pictures I'd been able to find, and under each one, I listed what information I had about the person. For those with no picture, I used a white sheet of paper with their names in large print in place of a picture and attached all the available information I could find about them. I added a large city map and put red markers at the location of each murder. The only pattern I could see was that the first body had been found in Phoenix, but all the rest had occurred in different suburbs surrounding the downtown. I refused to believe the killer had no better reason for the deaths than committing one in each area of town.

Next, I added the list I'd made of my contacts who might be able to provide useful information, but before making the calls, I went back to studying the victims. They lived in different sections of town, and they ranged from complete derelicts living on the street to wealthy businessmen. Three were women and one was a child. A waitress and dishwasher of a restaurant were among those who’d been killed. Otherwise, those old enough to have jobs didn't work in related fields. The victims appeared to have nothing in common, but I had to be overlooking something.

I knew that almost no one living in Phoenix was from Phoenix. The population had grown quickly because people moved here for the weather and the jobs, so I checked to see if the victims had all come from the same place. No such luck. Two of them were even natives. On the ones I could, I listed the last four places they had lived from oldest to newest. Finally, I discovered a common denominator: all of them had lived in the same area of town at the time the woman in the restaurant had died. Several had lived in the same subdivision and the others were close by, but all of them had moved to outlying areas by February of the following year. It wasn't much to go on, but it was the only clue I could find. If this were the connection I was looking for, then something must have happened during that time involving all the victims. The newspaper archives would tell me what had occurred during those months.

Before I began hunting, I called some of my contacts. The sooner I got the word out that I was looking for information, the sooner I might get some answers. My sources could be trying to find out what I needed at the same time I was searching the archives of Phoenix's main newspaper, The Arizona Republic.

As I waited for the phone to ring and people to pick up, I was thinking about how my past had given me some unique tools for the life I lived. I'd grown up at a time when technology was bursting at the seams with new wonders. Between bouts of abuse, I'd spent most of my time alone, since Clive and Alice spent the majority of their time out getting drunk or high with a group of like-minded friends. I was never a big fan of television, so the internet was responsible for a large portion of my upbringing. A little knowledge learned from the kids at school and hours of exploration taught me all I needed to know. I often think this outlet was the only thing that kept me sane.

By age eleven, I was a whiz at World of Warcraft. Many of my current contacts were made back then, and with no parental censorship, I met everything from perverts to saints and learned a lot from all of them. The hackers who accepted me and helped me learn were of special benefit, while surfing provided knowledge about a world I hadn’t yet been allowed to experience. Any information I wanted or needed was at my fingertips. I learned how to pull off several simple scams, so that by the time I went out on my own, I had a small savings to keep me from starving. I also learned how to exact a fitting revenge before I escaped my tormentors.

When I finished my calls, it was only natural that I turned to my friendly computer and began finding the best way to access the news for the months in question. It was easy getting into the newspaper archives. I didn't know what I was looking for, but I hoped I would recognize it when I found it, so I began with all the papers for the month of October 2012. There was a shooting as part of a bar fight, a hit and run, four robberies, and a bunch of miscellaneous minor stuff. There was also a ton of automobile accidents, but I was ignoring those for the moment. There were so many drug busts, I put those aside to consider separately if nothing turned up anywhere else. The only thing that looked promising was the hit-and-run. I chased that story through the following editions of the paper, only to discover they had arrested the woman responsible a week after the accident.

From there I moved to November of the same year. Here I found more robberies, two murders, a choking death in a restaurant, and several fatal car accidents. I hoped the murders would lead somewhere, but one was a domestic shooting and the other a drive-by. Neither seemed like what I was looking for, although the drive-by might be a possibility. Since it seemed drug-related, I set it aside for the moment. December was more of the same, but nothing stood out that would have caused a man to murder nine people.

I went back to the beginning and started over, still sure there had to be something there. I took each incident, no matter how small, and looked for any follow-up information. When I got to the choking incident from November, I caught a break. The original article had only told me that a twenty-one-year-old woman named Judy Cantwell had choked on a piece of chicken in the Coffeehouse Café and died before the paramedics arrived. When I searched for more information about the incident, I found one more article. The reporter said that after a police investigation, her death had been ruled an accident. He had also found one person who had been present when the girl died. The reporter had interviewed the man, who was a priest. During the reporter’s conversation with the priest, he named several other people that had been present that day. I almost missed the clue I was looking for, but just before moving on, it dawned on me that the people he mentioned were all on John’s victim list. I didn't know how this related to John's serial killer, but it had to be the catalyst. It was no coincidence that so many of the victims had been in the restaurant when the woman had died.