Page 30 of By the Time You Read This (Raisa Susanto #3)

Emily Logan: Can you tell me your name and a little about yourself?

Roan Carmichael: Uh, Roan. Roan Carmichael. And, uh, I don’t know what I should say? I work in the tech industry in Seattle. My brother was murdered ten years ago. That’s ... that’s it.

Logan: That’s great, that’s all great. Now, from what I understand, you were a large part of the unsolved mysteries community online.

Carmichael: I was, yeah. No one knew who killed my brother, and it drove my mom to, well, give up. On herself for years, really. She shut down, couldn’t hold a job to save her life. I was paying her rent, I was getting her groceries delivered. She just ... she wanted to know, you know. What happened to Mitch. I think if she’d just known she would have been okay to move on.

Logan: But you couldn’t solve your brother’s murder so you tried to solve others ...

Carmichael: Yeah, that’s a good way to put it ... yeah. Tried being the key word there. I didn’t solve any. We all just talked, mostly. Bickered. There were power struggles. It felt like a community with a goal that we didn’t really work toward at all. That sounds harsh, but I mean it in a good way. It was kind of just an online place for all of us to hang out and make friends. It was nice, especially for people not into sports or video games.

Logan: So you never contacted investigators or did your own digging?

Carmichael: No.

Logan: Oh. Okay. So you said you were involved, does that mean you aren’t anymore?

Carmichael: About two years into being an active participant with the group, someone in the forum somehow found my mother’s cell phone and landline. They called her incessantly, and then when she couldn’t answer their questions to their satisfaction, they said terrible, nasty things to her. Blaming her for Mitch’s death, stuff like that. And she had just started to get better, too. I had thought maybe she’d turned a corner.

Logan: Having to talk about the crime reopened her wounds?

Carmichael: You could say that. She took a bottle of sleeping pills on top of a fifth of vodka a week later. She never woke up.

Logan: Oh. Oh. I’m so sorry.