“Oh, I bet she was.” And it wasn’t out of concern, either. She wanted to get the gossip straight from the horse’s mouth.
“Now, you want to be telling me why you both are magnets for trouble?”
My phone buzzed on the kitchen counter. I glanced at the face of it and groaned. Jared’s attorney. Man, he had rotten timing.
“Who’s that, then?”
“Long story. I think I’m being sued,” I said.
“Oh, well, they wouldn’t be calling you if you’re being sued,” Ted said. “They’d be serving you papers, doncha know?” Ted reached for my phone. “Mind if I…?” he asked, and I shrugged.
“Oh, hello, dere,” Ted said as he pressed the phone against his ear. “I’m Ted Anderson, Ms. Takeda’s attorney speaking.” Ted winked at me. Then he nodded. “Mm-hmm. Sure.” He nodded again. “Sounds about right,” he added. “Uh-huh. No, yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah, no. Hold on one minute, if you would.”
Ted pulled the phone from his ear and hit the Mute button. “Peter Neufeld doesn’t want to sue you. He’s thinking you might have information about the case that could help his client file a civil suit against the Chicago police department. Do you?”
I shrugged. “Everything I had I put in the podcast.”
“Well then, why don’t you give the man a listen and see if anything he says makes sense to ya. Ya don’t need to offer anything, just listen.” Ted put the phone on speaker so we could all listen. “Hey there, Peter. You hear us?”
“Yes, sir. Is Ms. Ophelia Takeda there?”
“No, yeah. She’s here. But folks around here call her—” I flashed him a warning look. “Ella,” he finished.
“Hello, Ella. Very nice to finally connect with you on the phone. I don’t know if you can help us, but there have been some developments in the case. We’re trying to prove that early on, the police ignored vital clues that could’ve led them to the real killer, which is why they owe my client compensation.”
“I’m listening,” I said staring at the phone in the center of the table.
“First of all, police found a match for the tire tread recovered from the scene of the influencer who mocked the Special Olympics.”
“The one run over in the parking lot?”
“Yeah,” the lawyer said.
This was news to me.
“Yes. The tire tread matched evidence in an unsolved murder case. But this was an old case in Lake Sanguis.”
“Lake Sanguis had a murder?” I asked, baffled. “When?”
“Olga Duncan, seven years ago, out at the abandoned campground?”
Her name did slightly ring a bell. I was at Northwestern then, though, and what information I could get came from Olivia. Oscar was tight-lipped about it. “She was a sex worker found out at some old cabin. She’d been drugged and then strangled. Policedidn’t find much evidence, but they did lift a tire tread. The FBI put it in their database, which is how the Chicago police found it.”
“Had Olga Duncan been canceled?” I asked, curious.
“No,” Peter said. “Not that we could tell. Someone simply took this woman there and killed her. Police think it was a john. Maybe rough sex gone bad.”
“But the Canceled Killer is always so righteous,” Jude protested as he stared at the phone on the table. “This murder doesn’t make sense.”
“It does if our killer isn’t actually a righteous killer at all,” I said. “But just a cold-blooded murderer.”
I glanced at Jude. He’d already made that logical leap. “But he was so careful to make a story out of all his crime scenes.”
“Only after he figured out he wanted to kill people,” Peter suggested on the phone.
I felt my blood boil. If I had hated the Canceled Killer before, I hated him even more now. He wasn’t any different from any other serial killer. It was all about bloodlust, power, and control. It had nothing to do with social justice.
“Do you know where the first murder happened?” I asked.
