Page 18 of She Didn’t See It Coming
Lizzie puts the sleeping Clara down on her living room sofa and covers her with a blanket.
It’s after nine o’clock. She was asleep when Lizzie picked her up from Angela’s.
She doesn’t yet know her mother has been found.
Lizzie’s two cats, Pip and Squeak, swirl around her legs as she feeds them.
She gets her parents set up in the spare room.
They’d barely touched the sandwiches she’d made them at the condo while they waited for the results of the search.
They are like her patients at the hospital—weak and uncomplaining, doing as they are told.
They are in shock. She kisses them good night, and hopes they can sleep, because tomorrow will be a terrible day.
And so will every day after that. She makes a phone call and reserves a hotel suite for the night at the Marriott.
Then she checks on Clara, tucking the blanket up around her chin, and retreats into her own bedroom and closes the door.
Lizzie takes several deep breaths, sitting on the edge of the bed.
She finds it helps, in times of crisis, to be alone and practice deep breathing.
It’s how she gets through her most difficult times at the hospital, when a patient dies, or a child is diagnosed with a terminal illness. This feels worse than that. Closer.
She needs to pack her overnight bag but instead gets up and turns on her computer.
She has a desk in her bedroom with a desktop computer and a large monitor.
She also has a laptop that she uses for most other things.
Nobody knows about her hobby. The people she knows online only know her by her other persona.
She doesn’t want her online life to spill into her work life or her family life or her meager social life. People might think it’s weird.
She’s not a gamer. She’s never found computer games interesting.
She finds people interesting; she finds real life interesting.
She finds real crimes most interesting of all.
She belongs to numerous True Crime Facebook groups, is fascinated by real-life cases.
Madeleine McCann. Elisa Lam. Recently, she has even joined some groups that try to solve actual crimes the police have failed to solve—it’s an odd community of online amateur sleuths.
One Facebook group she is a member of is called True Crimes in Albany NY.
It’s a public group, with sixty-six members.
It’s a community of sorts, and she feels like part of something, like she belongs.
Perhaps she is online too much because she is lonely.
She knows it’s an obsession, and that obsessions are dangerous.
But she can’t help herself. She can’t resist the allure of the group and what they do.
She’s aware that some people might find it strange, or unpalatable.
That they wouldn’t understand. Perhaps even more so now, now that her own sister has been murdered.
She doesn’t want anyone in her real life to learn about what she does.
Especially her parents. And the detectives.
The police are dismissive of online sleuths, of what they do.
They don’t like it when they succeed where the police have failed.
It all started when she watched that show on Netflix— Don’t F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer.
It was a documentary about a group of people online who connected through a public Facebook group because they were outraged by the anonymous posts of some deranged person on YouTube showing cats being tortured.
The group was called Find the Kitten Vacuumer…
for Great Justice. They wanted to find out who was hurting these cats, because if there’s anything that people on the internet love, it’s cats.
Lizzie loves cats herself—especially Pip and Squeak.
And everyone knows that lots of serial killers start out by torturing and killing animals before they move on to people—it’s a huge red flag.
But the police weren’t much help with the online cat torturer.
So the online sleuths, building on what one another learned, eventually discovered who the creep was—someone called Luka Magnotta, a Canadian.
And they also figured out that he was responsible for the grisly murder of a man in Montreal.
They did the police’s job for them, solving the murder and tracking Magnotta down so that he could be arrested, ultimately, in Berlin.
Once she saw that documentary, Lizzie, already an avid reader of true crime, was hooked. She ventured into that world, gently at first. She became obsessed with other cases, just as gripping.
Now, she logs on to the Facebook group True Crimes in Albany NY.
She uses her fake profile on here. She suspects some others do too.
She calls herself Emma Porter. She logs on to see what people are saying about her sister’s disappearance.
She goes back to her own first post, that she’d made yesterday evening on her phone from the condo, the one that started it all.
She’d posted a picture of the front of Bryden’s condominium building, a photo that was already on her phone, that she’d taken when Bryden and Sam had moved in, with the address prominently displayed. And then she’d written:
A woman has just gone missing from a condominium at 100 Constitution Drive. Police are on the scene. Stay tuned for updates!
She skims the recent posts of people speculating about what might have happened to Bryden; there is considerable interest. Well, it is an interesting case.
Perfectly happy woman goes missing from her condo in the middle of the day.
Lizzie reviews her own posts, the ones she’d made furtively the day before on her cell phone from the condo, with Sam sitting nearby, oblivious.
Still no sign of her, and it’s been hours. Apparently, she didn’t pick up her kid at day care.
Michelle Gautier
Oh no, she has a kid?
They’ve searched the building. I’m on the ground here, outside, and there’s police and reporters everywhere.
Tessa Workman
Post more pics!
She’d ignored that. She couldn’t post more pics because she’d been inside the apartment, and she certainly couldn’t post any pics from there, unfortunately.
It’s a pretty safe neighborhood, and a nice building—hard to believe it happened here.
Michelle Gautier
Nowhere is safe for women.
Tessa Workman
It can happen anywhere. Probably domestic violence. It usually is.
From the sound of it, it looks as if she just stepped out for a minute. Maybe she’ll turn up, safe and sound. Fingers crossed!
But Bryden hadn’t turned up, safe and sound. Lizzie hasn’t posted anything today yet. And now things are about to get a lot more interesting.
Lizzie takes a deep breath and begins to type.