As she did, Robin noticed something on the ground that had either been underneath the ashtray or beside it—a piece of lined paper, folded into eighths.
Robin picked it up and unfolded it—a clean, dry, pristine sheet that clearly hadn’t been outside long enough to survive a rain. And it had come from one of Robin’s father’s notebooks.
When it came to his patients, Mitchell Bloom was an old-school Freudian notetaker, scribbling on a pad while they poured out their souls on his couch, not a laptop or a voice recorder in sight. He’d been using the same type of classy stenographer’s pad for years—leather-bound, the pages a pale aqua. He bought them in bulk from an office supply chain, and in his home office, he kept the used-up ones in a locked cabinet, each notebook labeled with a patient’s name. More than once at her parents’ home, Robin had seen Mitchell opening the cabinet when on the phone with a patient, thumbing through one of these books as he listened.
Robin had expected to find a page filled with her father’s illegible doctor’s scrawl. But when she opened it, she saw a phone number with a 213 area code. She recognized it from the caller ID at her office, three days earlier. Knew it without having to double-check. Quentin Garrison’s number.
Below it, her father had written three names in careful capitalletters, with arrows drawn from one to the next, from the bottom up. And though she wasn’t quite sure what it all meant, it gave her the most overwhelming feeling, as though each name were a wave sweeping over her, knocking her down.
QUENTIN GARRISON
KATE SHARKEY
APRIL
ROBIN SAT BOLTupright in bed, the remnants of a nightmare running through her head—a spray of bullets, a wash of blood. She couldn’t remember any more of it than that. Light streamed into the room. She was alone in bed, Eric long gone. The house silent. She checked her phone. 9:00A.M.
She rubbed her eyes, confused, but only for a few seconds—only until she saw the folded-up piece of lined, pale aqua paper on her nightstand, and then it all came crashing back.
Last night, she’d jogged back to her car and sped all the way home, heart racing, eyes bolted open.
Once she got back to her house, she’d taken out her laptop and looked up everything she could regarding the Cooper/LeRoy murders. Wikipedia entries about each of the twelve victims—among them a teenage couple on prom night, a property master for TV shows who volunteered for children’s charities in his spare time. A young police officer. An elderly man and his paid caregiver. A four-year-old girl...
Each killing more senseless than the previous, the couple’s motives a complete mystery. Robin had looked online forThe Inland Empire Killers: ’Til Death Do Us Part, but had only been able to find one three-minute clip: Gabriel LeRoy—the TV actor version of him—shooting a bound and gagged middle-aged man who lay prone at his feet. A slick of bright red blood on the floor. The TVactress version of April Cooper squealing with delight. “Get him, baby.”
She’d watched the clip again and again, to the point of where it worked its way into her dreams. You’d think it was pure Hollywood hackery—Natural Born Killersstrapped onto an after-school special. But to Robin, it seemed like it may have been an accurate portrayal. She had read eyewitness accounts describing the gleam in April Cooper’s eyes, the serene smile as she watched the bodies fall. Some speculated Stockholm syndrome, but every article, every police report she could get her hands on, every credible account of the killings described the girl—a fifteen-year-old high school freshman—as not only a willing accomplice but an enthusiastic one. April’s former classmates and teachers spoke of someone who was almost disturbingly standoffish, a middling-to-poor student frequently caught daydreaming in class, a girl who rarely spoke, even when spoken to. A dead-eyed girl whose feelings remained a mystery.
Had she always been that way, or was the antisocial behavior the result of the untimely death of her mother, Grace, killed in a car accident just one year earlier? Hard to say, but according to one article, when April met Gabriel LeRoy—in the parking lot of a McDonald’s that was walking distance from both their high schools in Santa Rosa, California—the evil within her blossomed.
The more her stepfather, Peter Cooper, objected to their budding relationship, the more April and Gabriel drew closer to each other. The same article described them like this:two dry sticks rubbing together, insistently enough to create a lethal flame.
Throughout her search, Robin had only been able to find one photo of the couple—that same faded prom picture she’d seen days ago, April’s and Gabriel’s pale features ravaged by years of exposure, barely distinguishable on the screen. For the longest time, Robin had stared into the unsmiling face of that young girl as Eric laysleeping beside her, enlarging it until it looked like a mess of pixels. She didn’t like the thoughts that kept running through her head. She refused to put a name to them.
Robin plucked the piece of paper from her nightstand, unfolded it, stared at the number. Her father’s handwriting.April.No last name. Quentin Garrison’s name and phone number, another name: Kate Sharkey. And then April. Simply April. All written on a fresh piece of paper, untouched by the elements, most likely the same day Garrison had called Robin. The day of Dad’s death.
And Garrison was still here. She’d seen him in the cemetery parking lot, just after the funeral. Standing next to his silver Chevy Cruz. Talking to CoCo.
Robin didn’t know a lot about this investigation. When it came to discussing details with her, the cops all seemed squeamish about it, even Morasco.The investigation is still active, they would say, which may indeed have been part of the reason. But Robin still sensed that there was something else going on. A great big elephant in the room that threatened to crush her memories to a pulp, to subvert and destroy everything she thought she’d understood about her family. And even a bunch of cops didn’t seem to want to be part of that just yet. They had time, after all. Mom wasn’t going anywhere.
Mom.
One of the doctors in the ICU had told her. She wasn’t sure which one. Everything was such a blur these days, lack of sleep and grief and wine and pills muddying the line between dreaming and waking, between nightmares and reality to the point of where she felt like she had to grab hold of events and stare at them, just to make sure they were real. But this doctor, whichever one, had told her that Dad had been shot through the lung, shoulder, leg, and abdomen, while Mom had been shot just once, in the abdomen. Just once. Robin hadn’t thought much about it then. She’d figuredthe shooter, the murderer, had gotten scared and run. But that was before she learned that the gun had been registered to her mother. And it was before she’d learned that no one had broken into the house. It was also before she’d found Quentin Garrison’s phone number, written in her father’s handwriting, along with those other two names...
She grabbed her laptop from her nightstand. GoogledKate Sharkey. ThenKathryn Sharkey. ThenKathleen. She found a lot of them. She added Quentin Garrison’s name andCaliforniaand that’s when she found the obituary: Kathleen Sharkey Garrison, dead at the age of fifty-seven at the Mountain View Sober Living Facility in San Bernardino, California. Her gaze settled on her survivors: Kate’s father, Reginald, and her son, Quentin.
She recalled the one conversation she’d had with Quentin Garrison. The podcast title,Closure. How he’d explained it:I have a relative who was one of their victims, hence the title. She googledInland Empire Killers+Names of Victims+Sharkey. And then she stared at the screen. “My God,” she whispered. “The four-year-old girl.”
Had Quentin Garrison and Dad discussed Mom’s connection with the Cooper/LeRoy murders? Had he told him what had happened to his mother’s little sister? Had he confronted Mom with that information and had she...No. She wouldn’t.
Still, she couldn’t tell the police about this. Not until she knew more.
Robin grabbed her phone from the charger and tapped in the number. The 213 area code.
“Hello?” The voice on the other end of the line was quiet.
“Quentin.”
“Yes?”