I am on Facebook and see a post by Noelle: “My best friend will never get justice and they may never be held responsible for her but one day after their long miserable lives they will answer to someone!” I pause. I reread. The only person I have ever heard Noelle refer to as her best friend is Sarah. I comment with a question mark. She responds: “I’ll call u.”
She calls a long fifteen minutes later. “There is a rumor going around that Sarah might have been given a hot shot.”
“A hot shot?” I ask.
“It’s an intentional overdose.”
“I don’t understand,” I say blankly.
“Well, that man I told you about, who was with Sarah on the day she died. He is involved in some heavy shit.” This man—his name is Ray—had admitted to Noelle that he had picked Sarah up that final morning and taken her to get heroin. He said he dropped her off at Jack’s house while he ran an errand, and when he returned, she didn’t answer the door.
“What kinds of things is he involved in?” I ask.
“It’s not just what he is involved in. It’s what Sarah got into too.” Noelle sighs and goes quiet.
“What did she do?” Noelle doesn’t answer right away, and my voice cracks as adrenaline floods my system. “What did she do?”
Reluctantly she tells me what little she knows: Sarah gave or sold a shotgun to some drug friends. Two people were murdered in a robbery gone wrong. Two weeks later someone else was killed, and Ray was involved.
“I still don’t know how this has anything to do with Sarah, other than the gun …” I trail off. Is this who Sarah had become, someone who provided a gun used to kill people? I realize I should be taking notes or keeping track of what Noelle is saying.
“Someone told me that Ray and Dale started to freak out about getting caught, so they were trying to tie up loose ends.”
“And?”
“Sarah was a loose end.”
As soon as I hang up with Noelle, I’m online, in research mode, looking up every name she gave me until I find the news articles. I print everything out and sit down to highlight, circle, and annotate. The story comes into focus.
There are three main people involved: Raymond Douglas, Dale Brady, and Leland Miller.
I don’t recognize Ray, but his picture frightens me. He is short but muscular with dirty blonde hair and a strong chin. When I look at him, I feel queasy. He has been arrested, accused of killing a man, Leland Miller, and then dismembering his body.
I recognize Dale Brady immediately: he is covered in tattoos, a white power symbol inked on his forearm. He is at the center of this case. He is accused of killing a couple at a trailer park during a robbery gone wrong. He has been charged, alongside Douglas, in the death of Leland Miller, who was reportedly present for that initial robbery and double homicide. Brady was worried that Miller would talk to the police. He was a liability.
It occurs to me that there is a fourth person involved: Sarah. The gun used to kill the couple belonged to Sarah’s boyfriend, Jack. She had given it to Brady right before the homicides took place. Or sold it. Maybe she sold it for drugs. Maybe she knew what the gun would be used for. Or she figured out afterward that her good friend Dale had murdered two people with the weapon she had handed to him.
Jack was angry when he figured out the gun was missing; it had belonged to his grandfather. He confronted Sarah about it, and she confessed to him that Brady had it. Jack called Brady and told him to return the gun, or he would go to the police and tell them that Brady was in possession of a stolen firearm. At the time, Jack had no idea that the gun had been used in a double murder; he just wanted it back. It was returned to him, sawed off, and he tucked it away where even Sarah wouldn’t be able to find it. Since all this has come to light, he has given it to the police.
This is what Jack says to me on the phone. He is hard to get ahold of, and reluctant to tell me anything. He is no longer in California, having fled to a different state because he has heard through friends that, because of his connection to this gun and Sarah, he could be the next person killed. He tells me that the house was ransacked the day he found her body. He tells me that Douglas has put a hit on him, and I try not to laugh. It sounds ridiculous to me, like a shitty Law & Order episode that can’t seem to wrap up by the end of the hour. But the fear in Jack’s voice, the newspaper articles, this terrible Tattooed Man who called Sarah his sister, the fact that Ray was the last person to see her alive—it’s all starting to paint a very different picture of what happened in the early morning of November 19, 2013.