“What do you think is going on?” Lisa asks.
“I have no idea,” Aimee says as she pulls into a strip mall with a laundromat and a Korean grocer. This is the address of Jon Block’s office, but she doesn’t see anything that looks promising. Aimee takes Lisa off speaker, cuts the engine, and holds the phone to her ear as she gets out. “I have to go, Lisa.”
“Wait, I still want to talk to you about last night,” Lisa says. “I hope you know what Gwen was saying wasn’t true. Sleep with Anton? I mean, you know I would never, ever do anything like that. I’m not that kind of person. You know me, Aimee. I just wouldn’t do that.”
“Of course, right.” But Aimee isn’t paying attention to what Lisa is saying as she walks past the laundromat. She stops in front of a nondescript office. There’s no sign, and when she peers in the darkened window, it looks like an empty waiting room. But this is the right address. “Gotta go. I’ll call later.”
Aimee hangs up and pulls open the glass door, a little bell attached to the top tinkling as she does. The small room is empty except for two plastic chairs and a table with aPeoplemagazine on it from 2019 featuring a celebrity she doesn’t recognize.HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE MYSELF, the headline reads. She’s not sure if she should sit and wait or approach the only other door in the room. She looks at her phone. Eleven minutes until Block said he was leaving. She knocks on the door.
“Come in,” someone calls. The door opens into another small room, only this one is crowded with furniture. Block sits behind a desk crowded with piles of paper and two monitors. Several beige metal filing cabinets line the wall, and stacks of bankers’ boxes fill the room.
He looks at his watch. “You have ten minutes.”
“Eleven,” Aimee says. “You have to help me. You have to tell me what’s going on. Why Scott hired you.”
Block scowls. He leans back in his chair, grabbing a neon-pink stress ball and squeezing it over his head. “What did he tell you?”
“He told me that he hired you to help him because he had been scammed. For a lot of money.” She takes a deep breath. “One hundred thousand dollars. At first he told me that it was a business expense, but then he admitted that wasn’t the truth. He was going to come clean last night and explain everything, but he never came home. I’m worried that this is all connected. And now the police are asking me about Anton’s death.”
“Anton?” He frowns.
“Anton Khoury. My neighbor. He was killed last Friday night. Just tell me, is Scott involved in some shady business scheme?”
“No. Not exactly.” His words are deliberate and slow.
Aimee tightens and releases her jaw. She’s dealt with difficult men before. Suppliers who want to stiff her, a crew member who was caught stealing from a job. “My husband’s life may be in danger. And if something happens to him, I’m going to hold you responsible. Now I’m going to ask again, why did Scott hire you?”
Block smirks at her, his nostrils flaring. She can tell he doesn’t like her tone. Aimee holds up her phone. “I’ve got a detective on speed dial. Detective Salazar? I’d rather hear from you what’s going on, but if the only way to get you to tell me is to call the cops, I’ll do it.”
“Fine,” Block says in a tone that tells her things aren’t fine at all. He shoots the pink stress ball toward a small plastic hoop on the wall and misses. “Your husband hired me to find out who was blackmailing him.”
28
THIS PAST SPRING
AUTHORITIESSEARCH FORMISSINGSTUDENTATHLETES.
Lisa couldn’t shake the headline from her thoughts over the next few days. When she had time, she searched for more information about Michael Finch and Dexter Kohl but came up with nothing.
What she did discover was that Humboldt County was so infamous for its high number of missing persons, it had acquired the nickname The Black Hole. It held the dubious distinction of having the highest per-capita missing-persons rate in California.
About a week later, on a Monday, she dropped Kai off at school after a dentist appointment and returned home, where instead of doing admin work for her coaching business, she fell down a rabbit hole of online research. She learned that growers had been cultivating marijuana in Humboldt since the 1960s, and growing was considered a way of life, woven into the culture and texture of the community. Before pot was legalized, the region attracted so many growers because it was remote and inaccessible to law enforcement.
“I believe that everyone living here is either directly or indirectly related to the marijuana industry,” one local told a reporter.
But even though pot was legal now, the area still struggled with high crime rates and boasted one of the highest homicide rates in California.
Lisa got out of her chair, energized by the news. She had spent hours online, and Kai was almost home. She was so revved up that she went downstairs to make him a snack plate.
Her intuition told her that the disappearance of these two guys—Michael Finch and Dexter Kohl—was somehow related to drugs. And that Scott’s being in the area at the same time was no coincidence. After all, they were high school baseball players just like him. Maybe he had been involved with drugs, but had closed that chapter of his life and didn’t want to look back, so he pretended he had never been in California. Maybe they were his friends, and their disappearance had traumatized him, and that’s why he wouldn’t talk about California.
But over the next few days, the more Lisa mulled over the few facts she did know—these two baseball players missing, Scott’s social security number being used in the area at the same time—the more convinced she became that something nefarious was going on.
It was a rainy spring morning when, on a whim, she put in a call to the high school both boys had attended. She wasn’t optimistic; it seemed like a long shot. When her call went to voicemail, she improvised, leaving a garbled message about being a podcaster who covered missing persons cases.
After a few days, she all but abandoned hope anyone might call her back, but to her surprise, a return call came at the end of the week. It was a typical Friday in late May. The suburbs of D.C. were in full bloom, and the neighborhood was filled with flowering white-and-pink dogwoods and the last of the azaleas. Kai had spring fever and was counting the days until school ended and summer began. Lisa was with the whole gang, having the first barbecue of the season in Gwen’s backyard, when her phone rang. Normally she would let unknown callers go to voicemail, but this time she took it.
“This is Arlette Fagin, secretary at Mad River Regional High School,” a woman said. “Sorry it took a few days to call back. Things are busy here with graduation.”