POV: CASSIE
Demi calls back at 7:23 p.m. Cassie is still at her desk. She has not been stirred, but only to replenish her coffee twice, to nail three more things on the reference wall, which are printed copies of the anonymous messages, in chronological order, the oldest on the right to the latest on the left, the way to arrange the evidence when you are making out the shape of something that is yet unnamed. She picks up on the first ring. "Talk to me," she says. "All right." Demi is trying to sing this song, and the tone she has is the one she has after a day of work, without its social accent, the voice of a person who has laid everything aside and is telling you the information. This is a voice that Cassie has heard a lot of times. It is her favorite incarnation of Demi. Seven out of eleven have been verified by me. The remaining four I have another hour on - two of them are in counties where the records are slower to access and one of the databases of my use is performing poorly to-night. "Tell me about the seven."
"Tell me about the seven."
"All deceased. All within a window of two weeks to three months after the submission date in your spreadsheet. Manners of death — " the sound of paper, or a trackpad, Cassie cannot tell — "two ruled accidental, one ruled suicide, three classified as suspicious and currently open with no active leads, one initially ruled natural causes and then contested by a family member." A pause. "The contested one is interesting. The family member who contested it — a daughter — she filed a formal complaint with the county medical examiner's office eight months ago. The complaint is still pending."
What was the identified cause of death?
"Cardiac event." "Age of the deceased?"
"Forty-one."
Cassie jots this down. "Are the seven related in any way? Socially, geographically, and professionally?
"That's the part that took me longest," Demi remarks. "And the solution is not clear. They are dispersed throughout four counties. On the surface, there are differences in age groups, occupations, and demographics. However—" Another pause. longer. When someone has discovered something and is deciding how to present it, they pause. "A thread is present. Previous reports had been filed against all seven of them. domestic occurrences. One restraining order was filed, but it was later revoked. Three calls to the local police department resulted in no charges. One unsuccessful complaint to an employer
"All seven," Cassie says while remaining motionless. "All seven," Demi replies. Because the reports are dispersed throughout various jurisdictions and record systems, it took me some time to locate it. Because no one was looking at all seven at once, no one was making the connection. "Nobody except whoever sent you those messages."
Cassie examines the wall of reference. On the yellow legal pad, at the eleven circles. She looked at the spreadsheet on her screen, which had eleven rows, neat columns, and two words in the last row's final column.
Not just yet.
"Keep going on the other four," she advises. "Tonight if you can."
"Already am," declares Demi. "Cassie—" she halts, "What."
"These men. I've verified the seven. Whatever happened to them—" Demi's voice makes a tiny, cautious sound that isn't quite a hesitation. "They're not precisely—I mean, the records on them are—"
"I know," Cassie replies.
"Okay," Demi responds after a pause. Then, since Demi has been her researcher for four years, she can tell the difference between what something means professionally and what it means morally without being told: "I'll have the other four by midnight."
Cassie doesn't hold out until midnight.
She starts cross-referencing after pulling up every news archive she has access to, which is significant because six years of journalism contacts results in a level of database access that would surprise people who believe podcasting is not a real profession.
She excels at this type of work. Not the recorded voice, not the interview rooms, not the calm professionalism that others observe and mistake for bravery. This includes the cross-referencing, the archive, and the methodical assembling of disparate facts to form a more comprehensive truth. She resides here. If she is being honest with herself in a way that she seldom is, this is the part of the process that feels almost joyful.
Tonight, she is not feeling anything approaching happiness.
She is experiencing something that resides in the same area of her brain as joy but is a mirror image of it: absorption, concentration, and the hours passing by without any resistance, but beneath it all is a chilly and increasing certainty that she is putting together something she did not want to discover.
When she reclines in her chair and examines what she has constructed, the wall clock reads 9:14.
Compared to three hours ago, the reference wall is significantly more crowded. Eleven chronological printed messages. There was a printed news article next to each one, but it wasn't everything she could find because some of the cases were so quiet that there wasn't much coverage. Because she ran out of string and the marker was closer, she hand-drawn eleven red lines between submission and outcome on the wall itself. The need to see the connections outweighed the need for the wall to look tidy afterward.
It appears to be a map of something from where she is seated. a framework. For three years and two months, an architecture of decision-making and action has been operating invisibly, silently, and consistently inside the inbox she checks each week.
She created the inbox especially to make herself accessible to those who needed to be heard.
In at least four interviews, she has shared this tale—the tale of the anonymous inbox. It is one of her greatest accomplishments, according to her. The door is open. The room for the inexpressible.
Her gaze is fixed on the wall.
She considers what entered through the open door.
She discovers the detail that alters everything's weight at 10:07 p.m.
Working backwards through the messages, she has been cross-referencing not only the results but also the timing, particularly the connection between each submission and the release date of the closest Final Words episode. It begins as a method of organising the timeline, a structural check, and the kind of scaffolding work she automatically performs when creating an evidence map.
However, the pattern she discovers is not structural. It's behavioural.
All eleven anonymous messages were sent within seventy-two hours of the release of a new episode.
Not in a week. not weakly connected. in seventy-two hours. Every single time. Without fail.
She examines it three times because this is the type of discovery that needs to be examined three times, either because it is the most important item on the wall or because it is the result of a brain that has been staring at a pattern for four hours and has begun to perceive random shapes in the same way that a weary eye perceives faces in ceiling plaster.
She does a fourth tick.
It endures.
Within 72 hours following a new episode, each message was sent. Two years and nine months ago, 48 hours after the season two premiere, the first message was sent. Nineteen hours after the release of the most recent episode, the eleventh message was sent five days ago.
She ponders this for a while.
This is what she believes it to mean, subject to confirmation and the discipline she applies to all beliefs before allowing them to become conclusions.
The sender of these messages isn't just using her email as a confessional. They are reacting to her. They're talking to her. Every episode sets off something, such as a choice, a confirmation, or a readiness, and then the message appears in the window, much like a response follows a letter.
For three years, she has been in contact with a murderer.
She was writing the letters without realising it.
11:52 p.m. A message is sent by Demi.
Each of the four attested. The same pattern. I discovered something else as well. Give me a call.
"The something else," Cassie calls, and then Demi says, "The manner of death across all eleven." "I've been examining the medical examiner records that I have access to, and two issues keep coming up. First, every time a comprehensive toxicology was performed, the results were negative. Nothing was introduced or administered. It wasn't poison, whatever happened to these men."A pause. "Second, the findings describe a very clean scene in the four cases that are detailed enough to include forensic notes. methodical. In three of the four, there were no overt indications of difficulty. The fourth showed some signs, but nothing definitive.
Cassie examines the wall of reference.
"Someone who knows exactly what evidence looks like and exactly how to not leave it," Demi says. "Someone with forensic knowledge," she adds.
At nine in the morning, Cassie imagines Damian Cross leaning across a table. He muttered the name. the office. the three specifics. The pattern of behavior—she is aware of how evidence functions. Depending on where people choose to look, it may or may not be found.
She considers the document. The detail is either load-bearing or meaningless.
It has some significance.
This has been known to her since the forecourt. Every hour that has gone by since then has given her a deeper understanding of it. She has been waiting to find out everything, which is different—there's a difference between feeling something in your hands and suspecting its weight.
She's currently picking it up.
"Demi," she responds. "The name I gave you this morning. the search for footprints.
"Still running," declares Demi. "I'll have something by morning."
"Move it up," Cassie says. "Tonight." "That'll cost you." "I know."
"I mean it'll cost you a favour, not money."
"I know that too," Cassie responds. "Tonight, Demi."
She doesn't get any sleep.
She has no intention of sleeping. She can see an object's outline, approximate dimensions, and the negative space it occupies in the evidence she has gathered, but its center is still dark, and she doesn't sleep when something's center is dark. Sleep is for the hours that follow the discovery of an object's shape.
She makes her third cup of coffee of the evening at 1:15 a.m., stands at the reference wall with the mug in both hands, and examines it as you would a proof you are almost finished with.
Eleven messages. Eleven people died. Eleven men whose names were sent to her in the wee hours of the morning by someone who listened to her show, went out and did what the show is about, which she has spent six years documenting, contextualising, and researching, and then returned to tell her about it.
She considers the line that shows up in each message. the signature.
Since you are concerned about accountability, I felt that you ought to be aware.
Since she was nine years old, when a boy in her neighbourhood mistreated her friend and nothing happened to him, she has been concerned about accountability. Since she witnessed a man receive an eighteen-month sentence for a six-year-old crime while sitting in a courtroom at the age of twenty-two. Because she recognised early on that the formal mechanisms of accountability are slow, flawed, and only accessible to certain individuals.
Her entire career has been based on her concern for accountability.
Her gaze is fixed on the wall.
Someone has been closely observing me, she muses.
Someone has been listening to every word, she muses.
At last, she thinks about what she hasn't been thinking about for the past seven hours: the thought she has been carefully putting to one side, much like you put a heavy object to one side when you don't yet have the surface to put it down properly.
And I gave them the open door, she muses.
She grabs her recorder.
"It's 1:23 a.m.," she reports. "October 14 through October 15. I've spent twelve hours at my desk. Her gaze is fixed on the wall. "Eleven of my cases are confirmed. submissions made anonymously. All within seventy-two hours of the release of a Final Words episode. All of them came before the deaths of men who had previously reported domestic incidents. All written by what I believe to be the same person, pending Demi's forensic analysis, in the same syntactic structure."
"I have been calling this folder crank mail for three years," she says after pausing.
It's a very quiet room. The eleven red lines on the reference wall are a stark, hand-drawn map of something she built without realising it. "I was wrong," she admits.
She switches the recorder off.
She looks back at the wall.
In the quiet of 1:23 a.m., she starts to construct the next segment of her knowledge.
"