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CHAPTER ONE

CHARLOTTE

“ W as Scott Hensner’s death set up by the CIA?”

The middle-aged man asking this stupid-ass question goes by the name of AlphaWinner69 online, and he has filmed approximately 58,038 videos on this general theme. In every single one of them, he’s sitting in his car.

Always with these guys. Always with the car.

“Here’s the thing,” he says, leaning so close to the camera that his forehead gets huge. I suck boba up through my straw, watching him on the very minuscule chance that he’ll have something new. Something I haven’t heard yet. “The three vets on the campsite. Why were they there? I know the ‘official story’ — ” He makes quote marks with his fingers— “is that Hensner hired those men from Ironshield Security Solutions. But why? He was meeting his wife.”

“Ex-wife,” I mutter to the phone, then suck down another mouthful of boba and milk tea. It makes my skin crawl, how everyone—from the true crime podcasters to the social media stars to the nerds on the CrimeSolvers forum where I’ve been doing most of my research—keep calling my best friend Edie his “wife.”

I realize it’s not their fault. They don’t know that Scott tried to kill her and that was why she was in Virginia in the first place. But I hate it. I hate that this is how people are remembering her.

As Scott Hensner’s fucking wife.

“—so obviously it indicates CIA involvement,” AlphaWinner69 is saying. “He didn’t hire those men. They were there to assassinate him. But the CIA had to clear out the evidence, right? So?—”

I swipe away from the video, rolling my eyes. I should have known better than to expect anything from someone named after a disproven theory about lupine social structures.

Defeated once again by short-form true crime videos, I toss my phone face down on my patio table and lean back in my chair, looking out at the swimming pool in the center of my apartment building’s courtyard. They still have the Christmas decorations up even though New Year’s was three days ago. Big silver-and-red bows in the palm trees. A couple of strategically-placed Santa Clauses.

Edie went missing on Halloween, the same night Scott Hensner and the three armed security personnel he hired met their apparently extremely gruesome ends—not that I give a shit about that. Just Edie.

It’s been three months.

Nothing.

I try to suck down more boba tea, but I’ve exhausted my supply. Frustrated, I toss the cup aside, watch it roll across the balcony and bounce up against the pot of bougainvillea that I’ve managed to keep alive.

Unlike my best friend.

No , I tell myself. It’s the same thing I’ve been telling myself since I got the phone call two days after Halloween from the Altarida sheriff’s department. You don’t know she’s dead .

Because unlike Scott and his soldier boys, who left four mangled bodies behind, the Altarida sheriff hardly found a trace of Edie anywhere on the old campgrounds. They certainly didn’t find her mutilated corpse. Just some blood splatter, fibers from her sweater, footprints in the snow. And all her stuff—her clothes, her car keys, all of it—in the cabin where she’d been staying. Including her cell phone, which was why they called me, since when they charged it they found my messages.

Except she had told me, a few days before Halloween, that she wasn’t staying at the cabin. That she had been with a friend in Roanoke.

So why did Edie, my best friend in the whole world, lie to me?

I stand up, scraping my chair across the concrete balcony. It’s starting to get chilly out here, and my oversized sweater isn’t doing much to keep me warm. Although that might not have anything to do with the weather.

I always get cold, thinking about Edie. Cold and sick to my stomach.

Because when she fled Virginia to escape Scott, I promised to protect her. And I didn’t do shit.

I grab my phone, shove open the sliding glass door, and go back into my cramped little apartment. Half-finished paintings are sprawled all over my living room, commissions for an art gallery that are going to be late in about two weeks. Since Edie’s disappearance, my mind hasn’t exactly been on art.

It’s been on trying to find out what the hell happened to her.

That’s why I watch videos by people like AlphaWinner69. It’s why I spend the better part of my days reading through CrimeSolvers, this website where, ostensibly, people try to solve crimes. In reality, it’s a lot of bloviating and bullshitting and no small amount of harassing victims’ families.

Normally, I wouldn’t want anything to do with a site like that, except Scott Hensner’s death has been huge on there. It’s not surprising given he’s sort of famous among the kind of douchey techbros who think they’re smarter than everyone else. The consensus on CrimeSolvers isn’t that Scott was killed by the CIA—because that’s dumb as fuck—but that he was murdered by a copycat emulating the infamous spree killer Sawyer Caldwell.

With whom Edie has a… history.

I plop down on my couch, flip open my laptop, and head over to CrimeSolvers. My breath gets all tight in my chest, the way it always does when I log on there. I know it’s probably not healthy for me to read every idiotic word posted on this site, but I can’t help myself. I grew up in one of those weirdo churches where suffering and aestheticism are supposed to purify you, and I think that’s what I’m doing here. Purifying myself for letting Edie go back to that camp.

There’s a megathread about the “Scott Hensner Case,” as CrimeSolvers calls it, but nothing new has been posted. I still doomscroll through the old comments, though. It’s a compulsion at this point, and one that I find almost possible to break.

EyesOnSasquatch: Scott Hensner was married to EDIE ASTOR? The survivor in the Fat Camp Killings? Why the fuck was she back at the camp? I thought they closed it down.

modell87: They did but someone opened up one of the cabins as an Air B&B a few years ago. Me and my girlfriend stayed there.

EyesOnSasquatch: Fucking weird. And with a copycat around? Do you think she was the copycat?

redlipsticklove: Don’t be a moron. The killer got her, too, just dragged her off. Sawyer Caldwell kept his victim’s bones ? —

The word “bones” is highlighted with an annoyingly helpful link to Sawyer Caldwell’s Wikipedia page

—so the copycat probably did that with her. Took her back to wherever he’s hiding.

EyesOnSasquatch: Moron? Really? Why so aggressive?

redlipsticklove: Edie Astor is a victim and you’re accusing her of killing her husband. She’s likely dead. It’s a copycat. I’d stay the fuck away from that AirB&B until they catch him.

repruler420: There’s no evidence of a copycat.

redlipsticklove: No evidence? Are you insane? Read what happened to Sawyer Caldwell’s victims. Now read what happened to Hensner and his hired soldiers. It’s the same fucking shit. At the same fucking location. AND Caldwell’s lone survivor was involved.

repruler420: But, like EyesOnSasquatch said, why was Edie Astor even there? Who goes back to the tourist version of the place where they were almost murdered? If you’ve seen pictures of her, it’s bizarre Scott Hensner would even be married to someone like her. Have you seen a picture of her? Like, a recent picture? She let herself go.

My theory is he wanted a divorce and she wasn’t having it, so she lured him out there to kill him and collect the life insurance money. She made it look like Sawyer Caldwell for the obvious reason ? —

I click away from the thread in disgust. I’ve read that particular exchange dozens of times, and it always makes my skin crawl. Because it was the other way around. She wanted the divorce, and he wasn’t having it. He tried to kill her .

And she didn’t “let herself go.” She went into recovery for fucking anorexia.

I don’t know how Scott wound up dead. I won’t say I’m sad about it. But there’s no way Edie did it. Absolutely no way.

Even if she did tell you she was in Roanoke ?—

My face feels hot. My heart rate’s up, pounding in my throat. I’ve got the beginnings of a migraine, something that used to happen when I was younger and only started again after Scott tried to kill Edie. After I swore to myself I was going to fucking protect her.

And here’s the truth of things, what no one on the CrimeSolvers site is willing to admit: No one knows anything about what happened. Scott is rich enough and important enough that the cops are throwing their backs into it—big surprise—but they don’t care about finding Edie. They care about finding Scott’s murderer.

And currently, they have no leads.

I scroll through some of the other threads, massaging my temple. I don’t know why I do this, why I think I might find some kind of connection between Edie’s disappearance and Scott’s death and the dozens of other strange, unsolved murders popping up across the country. But I keep looking. I keep reading.

I read about the disappearance of a couple of hikers up in the Rocky Mountains, vanished without a trace.

I read about three college students who went missing down in Texas on the way back from a spring break along the Mexican border.

I read about a man who was found beheaded behind a fast food dumpster.

Thread after thread of death and misery and terror. And I wonder if that’s what Edie’s feeling right now, if she’s chained up in some maniac’s basement. Or if she’s already dead.

Either way, I’m determined to find her.

I click on a new thread, one that was just posted an hour ago. It catches my eye because of the title: Am I crazy for seeing a connection here? Because that’s what I want to find. A connection.

It’s not about Scott Hensner’s death at all. It’s about a recent murder in Beaumont, Texas. Some drug dealer and his mistress slashed in their beds.

RamblinMan1988: So my cousin works for the Jefferson County sheriff’s department in east Texas. He’s cool with me, he knows I’m interested in this stuff, and he’ll share case details with me that don’t always get released to the public. He’d KILL me if I knew I was posting this on here, but we’re behind a password and it’s too good not to share. I have GOT to know what y’all think about this.

So there was a gangland-style murder a few weeks ago outside Beaumont. The Dennis Randall murder, for those of you who know about it. Open and shut case, right? He pissed off the wrong people and they came for him? That’s what it looks like.

Except my cousin showed me a picture from the crime scene. There were markings left on both bodies—carved into Randall’s skin and left in Kayley Burton’s blood. My cousin said he didn’t know what they could mean, but I recognized them IMMEDIATELY. From the Pellerin case . We had a whole thread about it here.

I don’t click on the link right away, just skim the rest of the post and jump down to the comments. Which are wild.

emd89039 : Holy shit, those are the exact same. It has to be connected.

FlapsyMcGee: Did you tell your cousin? What’s the Jefferson County sheriff’s department doing about this? They’re investigating it, right? Please tell me they’re investigating it.

WombatCombatSlombat: This is occult shit. Those are Satanic symbols. Probably MS-13-related or something.

My curiosity gets the better of me. I’m as susceptible as anyone, I suppose. I scroll back up and click on the link to the Pellerin case.

It’s not a text post, like I’m expecting. It’s a set of three blurred pictures, a trigger warning for graphic content. I click through without thinking.

A body.

A man’s body, naked, spread out crucifixion style in a field of soft, silvery grass. His eyes have been replaced with sunflowers. His mouth is stuffed with morning glory vines. Animal bones are arranged around him in an ornate, intricate design, almost like sound waves rippling away from him. Antlers are attached to his head somehow, the points decorated with more flowers.

And then I see it. Something’s painted on his chest in careful, neat lines of black paint.

A symbol.

A symbol I’ve seen before.

For a moment, I just stare down at my laptop screen, my breath squeezing tight in my chest. I can hear my blood rushing through my ears like the ocean. The entire room seems to buzz.

The last time I spoke to Edie, I saw that symbol. We were on a video chat and she told me it was street art in Roanoke. I’d taken a screenshot of it because it reminded me a little of the series I was doing for the Moonrise Gallery, kind of primal and eerie.

She said it was fucking street art. And I believed her.

But if she was lying about being in Roanoke, what else could she have lied to me about?

I fumble for my phone. It’s hard to breathe. It’s hard to think . But somehow I scroll back through my phone’s camera reel until I find it. Black paint, a white wall. A smudge of Edie’s dark hair in the corner.

It’s the exact same symbol.

Adrenaline surges through me, and I scan through the information about the pictures, hardly registering the words. The body was found in southwest Louisiana, down in the marshes there. The victim was a fisherman in the area. Well-liked. No criminal record. Police are baffled.

I click back to the first post, about the gang killing. My thoughts fill with static as I read through the responses. No one knows anything. The Jefferson County sheriff’s department is looking into it.

I shove my laptop away and stare at the half-finished paintings leaning up against the far wall. The picture is still up on my phone, the sigil almost glowing. Almost buzzing, like it’s pulsing with electricity.

I know what I should do is call the cops. But I don’t trust them to actually give a shit about Edie. There’s pressure to solve Scott Hensner’s murder, not find his ex-wife. And she was estranged from her parents, more or less, so they haven’t shown a ton of interest in finding her, either.

Which means I have to do it.

Which means?—

I decide to do what I’m going to do in a span of seconds. I know I shouldn’t. I know it’s stupid and expensive and very likely dangerous. I’m doing it anyway. For Edie.

I’m going to Louisiana.