“TOO EARLY,” I said.
The man hissed at me again, but I ignored him. That had to be it. The police had arrived too early. Her plan, at least how I imagined it, had failed. But, as I should have known, nothing could stop someone like Miracle Jones, someone who had already danced with the devil and survived, seemingly unmarked. Her hunt had never ended, only paused, while the Halo Killer was in prison.
How’d she find him?
The question lodged in my head, suffocating everything else. Could Miracle Jones have done what no one else could? Lure him out of hiding? I closed my eyes and pictured the woman sitting on the counter in my empty kitchen. I saw her dark, intense eyes. The strength somehow hidden behind her wiry, short frame. Was it enough? Maybe … Maybe not.
Once again, I dove, switching from the small screen of my phone to one of the desktops. The library around me disappeared. I entered my research as if floating through the internet. I gave my fingers freedom as they guided my way, driving the search until it focused on Cassandra. The daughter of a prominent filmmaker. A prominent director in her own right. She had been on this story before me—allegedly. She would have come across that name, Miracle Jones. Coincidence? It surely could be.
But to turn on me? Investigate me?
That was emotional. Illogical. Sure, she had the bigger name. She could act with impunity. That fact, however, made her involvement in all this even more suspect. Why would she waste her time doing a story on me? The Bender story had very short legs. The Basement was huge, a household name. I, however, was not. Who would watch a movie about me?
No one. Though it hurt, thinking that, my ego could not cloud the truth. Not any longer. Maybe that was why I hadn’t seen it before. In that moment, it seemed utterly clear.
It took me less than two seconds to find the next clue. One look at IMDb and the connection hit me like a stone to the face. Cassandra had a movie in development. It was the story of a well-known crime blogger. Her work had led to the arrest of a man who had killed forty-three young men in San Francisco. But that wasn’t what grabbed me. It was how the blogger had done it. She’d convinced local authorities to submit unidentified DNA from the crime scene to a local ancestry company. The sample identified a fifty-four-year-old woman from Los Angles as a sibling. It took the police less than a week to identify her only brother and obtain a DNA sample from his home. It was a match, and the story of the crime blogger’s part in solving the crime hit national media.
At first blush, the project read like any other. One that I might have been interested in myself, for that matter. When I saw it, though, the connection was made. I knew for certain that I was being played.
Since meeting Miracle that first day, something had gnawed at me. I couldn’t imagine her using a DNA test and tracking down her mother, then somehow identifying her as the Jane Doe. She didn’t have that kind of experience. But Cassandra did. She had used it to solve the unsolvable case. Miracle alone could not have found Jasper. But Cassandra had already proven she could. She had been the anonymous tip. Miracle had shared her DNA results with Cassandra. And I would wager that they had approached Bunny Henshaw together. Cassandra was a pro. She could have convinced the police to run Miracle’s DNA results against their database. And that sample had led to Miracle’s truth. Her connection to the Halo Killer.