Abbey didn’t want to call Tom Blomberg at the Washington Sentinel until she had a real story. Conspiracy theories from a girl named Iris weren’t enough to place an article in a national newspaper. But she’d been digging into the murder of Deborah Mueller for days, and she hadn’t made much progress getting past the official explanation. With every search she ran, she bumped into an internet wall, which made her suspect that Iris was right. Somehow, the facts of the Mueller case were being suppressed online.
Why?
The lights in Abbey’s studio apartment were off, so the bright glow of the screen strained her eyes. It was already well past midnight, but she did her best work during the nights. Sometimes she stayed home and wrote; sometimes she found an all-night bar and nursed a beer while she worked. She was a morning sleeper, typically not going to bed until three or four o’clock.
With a sigh of frustration, she put the laptop on the sofa next to her, then got up and poured a cup of coffee from the pot in her efficiency kitchen. No single-cup coffee makers for her. She drank cheap Folgers in staggering quantity. She took her coffee mug to the fifth-floor window and stared down at the small park below her. It was dark except for a single streetlight near the alley that ran behind the building. Her red hair was dirty; she could feel the grease as she pushed the bangs out of her eyes. She hadn’t showered in two days as she pounded on the keyboard, but she’d finally switched clothes and underwear to freshen up. When she was close to a story, she couldn’t think about anything else.
Focus! What are you missing?
Abbey went back to the sofa. She’d already filled up half a dozen yellow pads with notes, and so she went back to the beginning and reviewed all the research she’d gathered for the past week.
She started with the video. Iris had shown her the interview with the homeless woman in West Potomac Park, who claimed to have seen three killers converging on Deborah Mueller. Abbey had the video on her phone now, and she watched it again just to confirm that it was real. But other than that, the video didn’t seem to exist anymore. She couldn’t find it online, not on YouTube, not on Twitter, not on Facebook. Searches came back empty. And yet it had been there, because Iris had done screen captures of the video in multiple locations. When Abbey checked, all of those links now came back dead.
But it wasn’t just the video that had disappeared. So had the woman in the park.
Abbey had gone to West Potomac Park to locate the witness. Everyone knew her. Her name was Retha, and she’d spent most of her days and nights in the park for as long as anyone could remember. But shortly after the murder of Deborah Mueller, Retha had suddenly stopped showing up. Nobody knew where she’d gone. Abbey had checked other homeless encampments nearby—plus local hospitals—but Retha was a missing person.
A coincidence?
She didn’t think so.
Then Abbey began to dig into the story of the killer. Again, things didn’t add up. According to the DC police, a homeless addict by the name of Leon had stabbed Deborah Mueller multiple times in the chest, probably while under the influence of heroin. He’d died of an overdose in the park, with Deborah’s purse in his hand. Open and shut. But when Abbey talked to the people who knew Leon, they’d all been shocked that he would have committed a crime like that. He’d never had a history of violence. His nickname in the park was the Gentle Giant.
None of which, Abbey knew, proved anything at all.
When she’d brought her suspicions to a friend on the DC police, he’d laughed at her. She couldn’t entirely blame him. She had no evidence to prove that the murder of Deborah Mueller was anything other than what the police said it was.
So for the last two days in her apartment, Abbey had been investigating the next piece of the puzzle, which was Deborah Mueller herself. The victim. That was when things got even stranger, because as Abbey researched Deborah Mueller, she found herself unable to confirm anything about her.
She called up the picture of Deborah on her laptop, which was the passport photo everyone knew from news reports: the twenty-eight-year-old German woman with the long, narrow face, intense dark eyes, and oh-so-severe expression on her mouth. A very German-looking girl. Abbey could recite everything she knew about Deborah, because she’d seen the same facts on every news website: Deborah Mueller had lived in an apartment in a small town outside Berlin. She’d worked as an IT analyst for a software company. She was single, her parents were dead, she had no siblings. She’d talked for months about taking a vacation to America, only to become the latest victim of the country’s urban violence.
That was the portrait of Deborah Mueller that had appeared over and over on U.S. news programs and online.
It was very specific, until you realized it was completely vague.
A small town outside Berlin. Which town? Abbey couldn’t find a reference anywhere to the actual place where Deborah had lived.
IT analyst for a software company. Which company? What industry? Abbey didn’t know. No one knew.
She’d searched for the name Deborah Mueller in Germany and found more than two hundred women with the same name. But none of the profiles on social media matched the passport photograph of Deborah Mueller, and she’d found no accounts where anyone had posted their regrets about the woman’s death. It was as if she’d been murdered, but no one in her life had even noticed.
Neither had the German press. In Abbey’s mind, a German tourist stabbed to death in Washington, DC, should have been front-page news. But the only articles she’d found in Berlin newspapers were translations of wire stories that had been taken from Reuters International. No one in the German media had bothered to take a deeper dive into the life and death of Deborah Mueller.
Why?
When Abbey reviewed online news reports about the crime, she noticed something else that was curious. The so-called facts about the life of Deborah Mueller all seemed to come from the same two German women. Interviews with those women had been rebroadcast and reposted by multiple news outlets. Ursula Hopf said she’d worked at the same software company with Deborah for two years; she called her colleague smart and serious, a good worker. Trudy Weiss said she’d lived in the same apartment building with Deborah for nearly five years, and it was such a shock to think that her good friend was dead.
Ursula Hopf. Trudy Weiss.
Two real German women who claimed to know Deborah Mueller.
But Abbey had spent an entire day tracking them online, and she couldn’t find any evidence of who they were or where they lived. Deborah was a ghost, and so were Ursula and Trudy.
Insane!
“Who are you?” Abbey said to the photograph on her screen, but the somber picture of Deborah Mueller didn’t reply.
She got up with her coffee and went to the window again. With her phone in her hand, she rewatched the banned video of the woman known as Retha. The more she watched it, the less she thought the woman was mentally ill. She was scared, yes, but not crazy. There were three men. Three! Two of them wore creepy masks, and the third, he just took a knife and killed her!
Abbey let that idea sink into her head.
What if it was true?
What if the woman in the park hadn’t been killed by a homeless man? What if she’d been assassinated? Targeted by three killers. A professional hit. That was the only explanation for the scenario Retha described.
A mystery woman killed by mystery men.
As Abbey stood by the apartment window, her phone began ringing. She was surprised; usually, she was the only one who worked crazy hours. She went to the sofa and grabbed the phone and noticed that the caller ID reflected an unknown number. Probably spam. But Abbey answered it anyway.
“Abbey Laurent.”
“Abbey, it’s Mike Parisi with ICE.”
She recognized his voice, but she was surprised, because Mike was already in her contact folder. He should have showed up as the caller. The fact that he didn’t meant he was reaching out to her from a different phone, and that told her he didn’t want a record of the call showing up anywhere.
“Did you get that information I was looking for?” Abbey asked.
The customs agent hesitated. “Yes and no.”
“What does that mean?”
“Yes, I was able to access the manifests on incoming flights to DC from Germany from the night you mentioned.”
“And?”
“And there’s no Deborah Mueller.”
Abbey loaded the passport photo on her laptop. Then she played the video Iris had given her of the taxi line at Reagan National. There was no mistaking that it was the same woman’s face.
“Mike, I’ve got footage of her at the airport that night. She was killed a couple of hours later.”
“I know that.”
“So what the fuck?” Abbey asked.
“All I can tell you is that no one named Deborah Mueller came into the U.S. from Germany on a flight that night. And I’m not just talking about DC. There’s no match on any inbound flights. I checked on the off chance she’d cleared customs somewhere else.”
“What if she was using a different name? Were you able to match her photo to someone else?”
“I looked,” Mike replied. “Her passport photo doesn’t show up anywhere.”
“How is that possible?”
She heard a long pause before he answered. Mike was a serious man, and she’d used him as a source for years, but for the first time in their relationship, he sounded nervous about talking to her. “Well, if she did fly in from overseas that night, then the computer data was altered. Somebody removed her record from the system. To do that, you’d have to have access at a pretty high level.”
“As in?”
“As in CIA. State. NSA. This is the kind of thing that gets done for operatives under cover.”
“You think Deborah Mueller was some kind of spy?” Abbey asked.
“I have no idea what she was,” Mike told her. “As far as I can tell, Deborah Mueller doesn’t exist at all.”