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Alex pulled the sheet of paper in front of her.
“You won’t find those names in any public records,” Crew said, “because the victims were kept anonymous.”
Alex scanned the list of names. Anxiety flooded her system when she saw the name toward the bottom of the list. She looked up.
“Whose fingerprints were on the photos and the window?”
Crew reached over and pointed at the list. Alex followed his finger down the page until it stopped at a name. Jacqueline Jordan.
CHAPTER 63
Wytheville, Virginia Wednesday, May 31, 2023 9:30 p.m.
ALEX UNLOCKED THE DOOR TO HER MOTEL ROOM AND WALKED INTO room 109. It was late and she was exhausted after her meeting with Detective Crew, but still she considered driving back to DC. With her mind racing as it was, sleep would be difficult and the nighttime hours might better be spent on Highway 81 with an open road in front of her and nothing but her thoughts to keep her company as she figured out what, exactly, her next move would be. She needed to talk with Garrett, at least. Maybe the police. But what would she tell them? How could she articulately explain that ten years of searching for her family’s killer had somehow led her to Jacqueline Jordan’s doorstep—the very woman who had helped clear Alex’s name years earlier. The very woman who had played a pivotal role in her defamation case against the state of Virginia. The very woman who had employed her for the last eight years.
The sight of the bed, though, changed her mind. The adrenaline rush was fading and she felt suddenly overwhelmed with grief and uncertainty. She took a quick shower before climbing under the covers. Her mind continued to flash back to Jacqueline’s name scrawled on the list of Jerry Lolland’s victims. Could this path she’d been following for ten years really have led to this place? Was it even conceivable that Jacqueline had killed her family? The compassionate side of her brain told her no, it was not possible. But the rational side, the side that had learned to follow the evidence wherever it led, told her that her research had been impeccable and that evidence doesn’t lie.
To be sure, though, a thought came to her. A foolproof way to arrive at the truth. Every attorney in DC was required to provide fingerprints to the state bar association in order to be licensed. All Alex had to do was gain access to Jacqueline’s fingerprints—a simple task that would take no more than a few phone calls and a couple of favors. Then, she’d have Jacqueline’s prints matched against the lone print found on the bedroom window of her childhood home. Alex would enlist Donna’s help for this. Despite Donna’s exile from the McIntosh Police Department in the wake of Alex’s trial, Alex was sure Donna still had contacts there.
Settled on a plan of action, she spent an hour in bed staring at the ceiling before her thoughts quieted enough for her to drift off to sleep. Despite that it was a shallow and fitful sleep; she never heard the motel door opening.
CHAPTER 64
Wytheville, Virginia Wednesday, May 31, 2023 11:30 p.m.
JACQUELINE’S FACE MATERIALIZED IN HER DREAM. IT FADED IN AND OUT. Alex ran for the grandfather clock and squeezed behind it, but Jacqueline’s face peeked around the corner.
“Now don’t give me a hard time,” Alex heard Jacqueline say. “This will only be difficult if you make it difficult.”
Alex forced her eyes shut, put her fingers to her ears so she wouldn’t have to listen to Jacqueline’s voice. Then she felt something touch her elbow. It was Jacqueline pulling her left arm away from her ear and straightening it out. Alex opened her eyes and realized that she was no longer hiding behind the grandfather clock, but instead lying in bed. Scanning the room, she could not understand where the dream had taken her. When she felt the sharp prick on the inside of her left forearm, her eyes snapped into focus. Jacqueline was standing over her and inserting a needle into her arm. As she watched Jacqueline depress the plunger of the syringe, a thought came to Alex that perhaps this was not one of her lucid dreams.
She reached up with her right hand to touch Jacqueline’s face. Her hand nearly made it to its destination but her arm fell across her chest before getting there, as though the limb had been deflated. She tried again to lift her arm but nothing happened.
“You can fight it all you want,” she heard Jacqueline say. “You can resist until you’re exhausted, or you can accept that no matter how hard you try, you won’t be able to move a muscle. The extraocular muscles that control your eye movement will be least affected, so you’ll still be able to look at me.”
Filled with panic, Alex tried to sit up but quickly realized her efforts were useless. She tried to convince herself that she was in the midst of dream paralysis, a phenomenon where one’s mind wakes before the body, and despite a herculean effort, movement is impossible until the nervous system and the motor system decide to link up. But Alex knew this was not the case. The fictional world she was in a few minutes earlier had morphed into reality. She was not merely looking at an image of Jacqueline Jordan, she was staring at the woman herself. And Jacqueline had just injected her with a chemical that made her feel as though her veins were filled with lead.
CHAPTER 65
Wytheville, Virginia Wednesday, May 31, 2023 11:35 p.m.
THE DRUG WAS CALLED SUCCINYLCHOLINE. ADMINISTERED INTRAVENOUSLY, it brought on paralysis in seconds. Intramuscularly, it worked just as well but took slightly longer to take effect. Depending on dosing, the paralysis could last hours. Jacqueline had obtained the drug in preparation for that night’s plans. She’d found the succinylcholine in the surgical bag that her husband lugged to and from the hospital and had packed it in her things when she went to Alex’s the night before, with the impulsive thought of killing her at her condo, but then had abandoned that idea. Killing the girl in her home would bring more problems than it would solve. Jacqueline decided the best way for Alex to die was to make it look like she killed herself. It was poetic that Alex’s suicide would happen so close to Camp Montague, where Jacqueline’s quest for justice had started so many years ago with the staging of a different suicide.
“Jac . . . queline,” she heard Alex sputter.
“No talking,” Jacqueline said. “Soon your vocal cords will stop functioning anyway. I’ll talk, you listen.”
Jacqueline pulled a chair to the side of the bed and sat down.
“You’ve been looking for answers, and tonight I’m going to give them to you.”
“I already . . . know,” Alex said in a strained voice, as if speaking through a savagely sore throat. “The . . . pictures. Jerry . . . Lolland. Just like all the others. Just . . . like my parents.”
“Yeah,” Jacqueline said, nodding her head. “When I saw your board a few weeks ago, I knew it was only a matter of time before you’d figure it out. Then last night, I found you in your office. When you looked at me it was like you were looking at a ghost. I doubled back and saw your work. You pulled the files of Clément and Klein and Coleman. You went back into the archives and found your parents’ file. You saw that I was the attorney who represented them. And when I saw that you had searched the Internet looking for stories about Jerry Lolland, I knew the end had arrived.”
“Why?” Alex wheezed.
“Your parents? Because they aided and abetted Roland Glazer, a sexual predator just like Jerry Lolland. Your parents helped him hide his money, which meant they helped him perpetrate his crimes against children. After I killed Jerry Lolland all those years ago, I promised myself I’d never let another predator’s sins go unpunished.”
