Page 4 of Captive Audience

Then it hit me like a sledgehammer.

My Wildfire was the smartest, most observant person I knew. She’d honed her investigative skills as a journalist and now used them to solve crimes on her podcast. Just last month, she’d looked into a suicide case and exposed it for what it really was: a murder covered up by a rich kid’s parents. She didn’t just chase stories; she hunted the truth, and nothing slipped past her instincts.

Suddenly, it all made sense.

Niall had sent Asha to me, and now, I needed someone to find out who’d had him murdered.

My heart took up a frantic beat inside my rib cage.

I knew what I had to do.

“I get to choose who does the investigation?” I asked.

“Aye. Pick wisely.”

I couldn’t help the small smile that tugged at my mouth. “I have just the person in mind.”

We were going to get along famously.

2

ASHA

“It’s now forty-seven days since fifteen-year-old runaway Sierra Witkowski disappeared. No contact with friends or family and no activity on her phone or bank accounts. But people don’t just vanish. Someone did something to Sierra, and I intend to find out who.”

I paused to take a breath. The sounds of Philadelphia and my neighbors in the apartment complex were mostly muted in the closet space that doubled as my recording studio.

Fine.Studiomight be an exaggeration. My closet looked more like a preschooler’s art project, with its egg-carton-clad walls for soundproofing and cables dangling from clothes hangers, but until the podcast gained traction, I was living on a tight budget to make ends meet. The freelance articles I wrote under a pen name barely covered my rent.

I was about to wrap up the episode, but something compelled me to push for more. To reach inside my listeners’ minds and make them understand why Sierra’s disappearance was so important to me and should be to them.

The teen’s case had gotten under my skin, and I needed answers.

“Maybe some of you are wondering why you should even care about a kid whomade bad decisions and mixed with shady people. Sierra’s record isn’t clean, and if she hadn’t left home, perhaps none of this would’ve happened. But her family is stuck in limbo between grieving the loss of their daughter and clinging to the slightest hope that she’s still alive. Each day they wake to no news is torture. And if someone has murdered Sierra, that means there’s a killer in our midst. Maybe you’ve walked past them in the street or brushed shoulders with them on the El. Maybe next time their victim will be someone you love.”

I paused again, this time for dramatic effect.

“If you’re listening on YouTube, drop your thoughts in the comments. And if you have information about Sierra’s disappearance, slide into my DMs. The rest of you? Stay sharp and stay safe. Because out there in the shadows, someone could be watching.This is Inferno, signing off.”

I ended the recording and shut my laptop. When I removed my pawnshop headphones, the electrical tape holding them together caught on my hair and tore a few long red strands out from the root.

“Oww. Son of a bitch!”

Things wouldn’t be this way forever. And it wasn’t like I was flat-out broke. On a scale of filthy rich to homeless, I sat somewhere aroundsplurges on sushi but not booking a vacay to Cabo anytime soon. On the upside, my followers were steadily increasing, and once earnings from the podcast improved, I’d pimp out my studio so the quality of my shows could mix it with the big kids likeThe Kill FileandBuried Secrets.

I rose from the three-legged wooden stool, rearranged my hanging clothes so they weren’t squished to one side, and packed my microphone into a shoebox for safekeeping.

Later, I’d edit the audio and run it through an app to disguise my voice. There were three benefits to doing that.

One: There was no way I wanted the murderers and rapists I hunted to find me first. Those creeps belonged in prison, not on my doorstep.

Two: The chatter on Reddit and Discord about who Inferno was had shroudedCaptive Audiencein secrecy, and boosted listeners. People ate that mysterious shit right up.

And three: No one recognized me as the washed-up investigative journalist whose promising career at Philly’s biggest newspaper had taken a monumental fall from grace. I didn’t need my tarnished reputation tainting the podcast.

Getting fired from my dream job had been bad enough. Listening to the HR manager tell me I was lucky Greg Holbrook had decided not to press charges was probably the cherry on top of the shit sundae that had caused my mental health to collapse.

After that, no one would hire me. Not that I wanted to work in the journalism game again. It was too triggering.