“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 the 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.
Chapter Five
Madison stared at her phone on the floor like it was alive and would continue the conversation on its own if she picked it up. This was no longer theoretical. “Anonymous” was connected to Twitter. And she hadn’t been tweeting about anything else. If he wasn’t connected to the Gaslamp mystery, he at least followed Madison on Twitter and knew where she lived—and thought that she was investigating him. What else did he know about her? Had he been following her?
Her best guess was that he was connected to the missing women and thought Madison’s tweets had gotten too close to discovering him.
She went back to the whiteboard and stared at it. Her arms were shaking. She took a deep breath and tried to calm down. She wouldn’t respond to Anonymous on Twitter. She’d sent the tweet to draw him out; hell, she’d sent it on a whim and hadn’t thought he’d even respond. Now that he had, she wasn’t going to get anywhere playing cat and mouse on Twitter. She needed to do a real investigation. And that meant doing the usual things, being meticulous and organized. And she needed to keep moving. What next?
Under Suspects, she put Elissa’s boyfriend. He came across as really shady to Madison, not that it would explain the death of Samantha two years before. But she had to follow every string until it led either to the answer or to a dead end. No one knew for sure if the two disappearances were connected, and she would pursue every avenue that presented itself. How many avenues would that be? She had a stalker who was threatening to kill her. She didn’t trust anyone else, even the police, to take this as seriously as she did. She wasn’t going to sit and do nothing about it. She had to figure out who this guy was. Madison’s head was spinning and she was still shaky from the adrenaline rush.