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  He continued: “You have to promise to let me handle this, though, okay, Maddie? Don’t start some investigation of your own.”

  “Have you met me?” She laughed. “I can’t promise that.”

  He stared at her mouth while she laughed. He was about six feet two inches tall; she had to tilt her head back slightly to look at him. Her laugh faded to a smile. He looked at her forehead, then her mouth again, and then into her eyes. “I’ll let you know what I find,” he said, and turned and walked out.

  Chapter Four

  Madison watched Tom walk out the door, wondering if she’d just made a huge mistake. Should she be bringing him back into her life so soon? Or at all? Well, it was done now.

  She turned on the podcast again as she stared at the copy of the note she’d made before giving it to Tom. The note was just so plain and ordinary that she didn’t see how it could be traced to anything. Now that she thought about it, she doubted the person had allowed fingerprints. With all of the crime TV shows, it seemed unlikely anyone would do something nefarious without wearing gloves these days.

  But who had so much animosity against her? Madison knew that sticks and stones could break her bones but words would never hurt her, but tell that to someone staring at a threat of death. To Madison, it felt like the words hurt. She looked again at the note, peering at it from different angles. There was nothing unusual about the words used. The No police was sort of a cliché, but they also probably meant it. Could she decide that the person was for sure an English speaker, as in English as their first language? Not enough to go on. The sentence was simple enough that even someone who spoke English as a second language could have written it.

  It couldn’t be someone playing a joke. She didn’t know that many people, and the people she did know would have known she wouldn’t think this was funny. Plus, it wasn’t funny. It had to be exactly what it appeared: someone thought she was investigating them and wanted her to stop.

  She suddenly remembered a private investigator that she had royally pissed off one time and he had sworn to get even with her. Could he be behind this note? She’d made friends with his partner at the time, Ted, and so she decided to give him a call. She paused the podcast and dialed Ted’s number while looking out the window at her view of the ocean. During the summer it was always cloudy in the mornings at the beach, but by the afternoon the sun came out, as it had now. She looked at a blue ocean and cloudless blue sky that blended together so you couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. It felt timeless.

  “Hey, Ted,” she said when he answered. “Long time no talk.”

  “I got a new phone and you’re not in it. Who’s speaking?”

  “Oh, sorry. It’s Madison Kelly. You remember, I helped you with surveillance on a truck driver who said he was injured but was playing soccer on the weekends? We ended up tailing him all the way to Nevada?”

  There was a pause. And then a huge barrel laugh. “Oh shit, Madison, how ya doin’? Did you ever get the sand out of your ears after crawling through the desert with your video camera?”

  Madison laughed in return. “I did finally, yes. Listen. A weird thing happened.”

  She explained about the note and the fact that she had no current investigations ongoing.

  “So I was just wondering if that guy you worked with … what was his name? Would he be behind this?”

  Madison had replaced the investigator after the company fired him. He was furious and thought Madison had done something to get him fired, and there had been a confrontation. She had done nothing to deserve his wrath except do a good job on the case.

  “You’re not working right now? Must be nice to live a life of leisure,” he said. “But no, I don’t think that guy would be after you. His name was John something. I think that was a momentary lapse of judgment on his part. But I could call him and feel it out if you wanted me to?”

  “That would be great,” Madison said. “Get back to me on this number?”

  “Will do.”

  Ted was a good enough investigator, Madison knew, that she didn’t have to tell him not to mention her phone call to the other PI. Ted would bring the conversation around to her name and see how the guy reacted.

  It was nice to be able to call Ted. Investigators tended to be loners: sitting in darkened cars, working from home, alone except for witnesses and subjects. On the rare occasion when a “two-man” investigation was called for, it was nice to feel like she had a compatriot.

  She turned the podcast back up.

  “It seems like we’ll never figure out whether this was a coincidence or a serial killer,” Tim was saying. “Unless, and no one wants to hope for this, their bodies are found.”

  Madison went to the dresser in her bedroom and threw on some yoga pants, then got on the floor and started doing three hundred crunches.

  As she crunched, she tried to put herself in the place of the girls leaving the Gaslamp when the bars closed: You’ve been drinking, maybe you’re even drunk. How do you end up missing? What could have happened? Madison didn’t want to be on the PR team for the Gaslamp District: “Come out for a night of fun … maybe you’ll make it home, maybe you won’t!”

  And anyway, Gaslamp was a bit of a misnomer: while the area was built in the Victorian area, it had never had gas lamps. When Alonzo Horton began development in the 1860s, it was actually called New Town to distinguish it from Old Town, the original Spanish colonial settlement of San Diego, built in the 1700s and still in existence. Horton wanted a more centralized San Diego closer to the water, and he had succeeded: the Gaslamp District was now part of downtown San Diego, mere blocks from city hall and the courthouses—and the water. The area had fallen into a long period of decay but was renewed in the 1980s and became what it was today: a vibrant area of nightlife and shopping frequented by locals and tourists alike. During the renewal period the locals had begun calling it the Gaslamp District, and the name stuck. Madison thought the official name was the Gaslamp Quarter, but once locals got a name lodged in their heads, it was hard to change it. You could park near the sixteen-block radius of red-brick buildings and walk from restaurant to bar to shop. Better yet, take a rideshare service, walk around all night, and then get home safely. Well, getting home safely was how it was supposed to work.

  The first victim, Samantha Erickson, had last been seen four years before, on security video at Hank’s Dive, at 1:30 AM; the camera was positioned over the bar, mostly to watch the cash register and make sure the bartender wasn’t stealing money. In the video, which Madison had watched online when she first heard about the case, the bartender could be seen cutting Samantha off because she was so drunk. He even used the universal hand-across-the-throat sign. Samantha stumbled backward, right into the side of another guy, spilling his drink on his shirt. He could be seen exclaiming and yelling at her, and she stumbled out of the frame while he was gesturing wildly at her. She was never seen again. Her VW Jetta was found the next day parked a few blocks away; it was locked and appeared undisturbed.

  Madison turned over and began a two-minute plank.

  There was no video outside the bar or on the streets nearby. Hank’s used to have security video outside, but after a Hank’s bouncer assaulted a guy ten years earlier and their own security video helped to convict him—and get the victim a multimillion- dollar settlement from Hank’s—their security video “wasn’t working” anytime video was sought, which was quite often, considering the number of assaults that occurred at Hank’s. The bar specialized in huge drinks, beer guzzlers and shots, and generally consuming as much liquor as possible and still staying upright. The waiters and bar staff all practiced that form of serving entertainment where they were intentionally rude to the customers and everyone was supposed to laugh. Madison had gone in one time and was out within ten minutes. She considered it a frat-boy bar, and she saw a fight start even in the short time she was there. Excess alcohol being served at Hank’s meant bar brawls there on a nightly basis.
r />   Two years later Elissa Alvarez didn’t make it home after a night at Bourbon Baby in the Gaslamp District. Her friends said she’d gotten into a fight on the phone with her boyfriend and was upset and wanted to go home. She wasn’t that drunk; she was more distraught, or else they wouldn’t have let her drive. She walked out of the bar to go home and was never seen again. The next day her car was found a few blocks away in a parking lot, undisturbed.

  The similarities between the two incidents were striking. Was there someone driving around downtown San Diego at night looking for women walking alone? Madison kept thinking of a rideshare driver preying on drunken women who decided as they walked to their cars that they were too drunk to drive. She had read about a more recent case where a woman alleged she was picked up by a rideshare and driven from New York into New Jersey, raped by several men, and then driven home and dropped off. It was so traumatic she blocked it out. When she saw the next morning—after waking in inexplicably horrible pain—that the cost of the ride the night before was over a hundred dollars for what should have been a fifteen-minute ride home from the bar, she looked at the map of her ride and couldn’t understand how she’d been taken to another state. She sent a screenshot of the map to her friend and texted WTF? This was my ride last night. It was only in discussing it with a friend the next day that the memories came flooding back, and she started sobbing and went to police. The woman was now suing the rideshare for their response to her alleged attack, and for the culture that allowed a driver like that onto their workforce. Madison thought it was interesting that the victim in the case was not suing for money. She was suing for, as the woman put it, “a seat at the table”—to work on global changes so that this horrible crime didn’t happen to another woman.

  There were plenty of other crimes alleged against rideshare companies, and Madison couldn’t help but wonder if the Gaslamp mystery would turn out to be the case of a criminal rideshare driver, or even a fake rideshare driver—someone pretending to work for a rideshare company who really wasn’t—preying on women out at night alone. Madison felt like the apparent safety of the now ubiquitous rideshare was just that—an apparency. In fact, Madison felt it was more like a predator’s dream, like taking candy from a baby: drunk women stumbling around getting into a car with a strange man—and not just willingly. They paid to get into the car with a strange man.

  Every time Madison had another thought regarding what might have happened to the girls in the Gaslamp, like the rideshare angle, she would tweet about it. Sometimes another Twitter user responded, and once in a while one of the podcast’s hosts, Tim or Lance, tweeted back. Twitter had created a nice community of armchair detectives and real detectives, who normally worked alone, and allowed them to share ideas and enthusiasm that kept cold cases alive. She just used the hashtag #GaslampMystery, and all the other sleuths saw it and joined the conversation.

  On the one hand, Madison felt like she should probably work on finding friends in real life instead of engaging with strangers on the internet. But on the other hand, strangers on the internet could be turned off with a switch; you had to talk to real people even when you didn’t feel like it.

  She sat on the ground to stretch out her hamstrings.

  “Even though we can’t respond to everyone, we do appreciate all of your tweets with suggestions and clues and ideas,” Tim said on the podcast. “We definitely forward anything that might be important to law enforcement. Not to mention that your idea might give someone else an idea that leads to a resolution. And who knows, maybe the person or persons responsible is paying attention and realizes we’re getting closer. That could cause them to make a mistake.”

  “A slipup that gets them caught,” Lance added. “You never know. That’s why we bring as much attention to these cases as we can. So keep those tweets coming! And now on to the case of Maura Murray, University of Massachusetts student missing since February 9, 2004.”

  “I probably tweet you more than you’d like,” Madison said aloud. And then she froze as an idea struck her. She jumped up, grabbed her phone, and pulled up the Twitter app. She looked at her recent tweets.

  From yesterday: @Tim: What about rideshare drivers? #GaslampMystery

  From the day before: #GaslampMystery do you guys know if we ever found out if the same bouncers were working the nights the girls disappeared?

  From the week before: @Lance: What does Elissa’s boyfriend say? What if these are coincidences, not the work of a serial killer, and he killed Elissa? And maybe even Samantha before her? #GaslampMystery

  There were other tweets, going back months. Every time she’d had an idea, she’d tweeted it. Because Madison had a lot of downtime, she’d been listening to this podcast and using her investigative skills to try to solve this San Diego mystery casually, just as a hobby—an armchair detective like everyone else listening to true-crime podcasts. The difference was that her Twitter profile said she was a licensed private investigator. What if the killer or killers were following social media on the case and were seeing her tweets? What if she’d been getting too close?

  Was this what her anonymous note person had meant when they said Stop investigating me? Was this the investigation she’d been doing without realizing it? But how would they have figured out where she lived? Well, her Twitter handle was her name, Madison Kelly, which took away some of the mystery. And being a PI, she knew how easy it was to find someone if you put your mind to it.

  She opened up a new tweet and typed #GaslampMystery and then I DON’T SCARE THAT EASILY.

  She hit Tweet.

  “That oughta do it,” Madison said.

  Her adrenaline was pumping from the exercise and her epiphany. She needed to do something. She needed action. She went to the closet in the living room and pulled out the large whiteboard on wheels she kept there for big investigations. She wanted to write down each tweet she’d sent and organize her thoughts on the board. She’d spent the last three months doing nothing, and it wasn’t like her. She felt best when she had a problem to work on. Well, a mystery to work on.

  She didn’t know if the stalker was threatening her because of her tweets or had anything to do with the Gaslamp disappearances, but it made the most sense at the moment. She didn’t want to sit and wait for someone else, like Tom, to figure it all out. She was the hero in her own story and always would be. If this was all indeed connected and if she figured out who the stalker was, she might solve the disappearance of these two girls.

  She needed a heading for the whiteboard. What should she call this investigation? She wrote ANONYMOUS, and then stepped back to look at it. Good. She returned to the board, made a column, and labeled it Suspects. Under that she put Creepy P.I. John. Until she heard back from Ted, she would keep that guy on the suspect list.

  On the first day, everyone is a suspect; the only person I know for sure didn’t do it is me was Madison’s motto. She started to get that excitement in the pit of her stomach that she felt at the beginning of a new case.

  Next she wrote a column labeled Clues. She started to write down all the tweets she had sent out about the case, but then just abbreviated them down to the things that would’ve caused “Anonymous” to react: rideshare driver, Elissa’s boyfriend, club bouncers, local transients, visiting sailors who are part of San Diego’s huge military contingent, where are the girls’ phones?, and finally, serial killer stalking the Gaslamp. This last didn’t seem specific enough to get somebody riled up enough to leave a note on her door, but who knew how the mind of a kidnapper/killer worked. It could be that the person just thought that she, a licensed PI, was working on the case, and that was enough for them to strike out at her.

  Next, she wrote out leads she could follow: family members of the victims and staff at the bars. That would be where she would start. She wondered if Tom would know anything about these disappearances and if so, would he talk to her about them?

  Her adrenaline rush had calmed down, and she stopped for a minute to think. She walked to th
e window over the front garden. There was a hummingbird hovering near the eaves above her; he was tapping his beak near the edge, looking for a hummingbird feeder that had long ago fallen in a storm.

  How far was she willing to take this investigation? What was she getting herself into? She was licensed to investigate anyone or anything—but did she want to get into interviewing witnesses and family members in the disappearance of two women? How would that fit into the life path she’d been on recently? She wasn’t even sure her note leaver had anything to do with Twitter; it was just an assumption at this point. This would be a huge investigation to undertake, one that the police had been working on for years. What could she even contribute?

  In favor of doing it herself was the fact that no matter how seriously the police took the threatening note, it would not be as important to them as it was to her. Sure, it might be connected to two missing girls—but it also might not be. If she called the detective investigating the cases, he would probably file her idea alongside that of a psychic who’d called to say they’d had a vision of where the bodies were buried. Even if he took it slightly more seriously, he certainly wouldn’t jump all over finding Madison’s stalker on the off chance it was connected to his case. And even if he did—no police, the note had said. A haphazard police investigation would get her no results, except for perhaps a quicker escalation of aggressive behavior. Sometimes the old adage was true: if you want something done, do it yourself—especially if you’re licensed to do so. So the only question was: Did she want to?

  Her phone pinged and she reached over to grab it. A Twitter mention. It was a reply to the tweet she’d just sent where she said I don’t scare that easily. The reply was from an account called MaddieKelly12. It said: We’ll see what it takes to scare you. The note was just the start.

  Madison felt an electric jolt in her arm and the phone dropped to the floor.