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Cassie followed David through the living room, up a set of stairs, and to a door that led to the attic. Cassie could feel a shift in atmosphere. It wasn’t as strong as Shapiro’s entity, but a heaviness indicated McLaughlin had spent hours in the attic pouring over this case and stewing in his own anger and hurt. The subtle smell of cigarette smoke emanated from the room.
“Wow.”
David looked her over. “You feel something?”
“A lot of pain. This was personal for him.”
David nodded and led them up the last set of stairs and into the attic. Cassie was momentarily taken aback by the overwhelming influx of sensations. Not only was the back of her head tingling with the pain and strife McLaughlin had left behind in this room, but her eyes couldn’t focus for the sheer amount of sensory input in front of her.
Every wall had papers and photographs. There were two plastic folding tables fitted end-to-end that took up the entire length of the room, and stacks of papers and books were strewn across the floor. A singular chair sat in the middle of everything, like the eye of the storm.
“Jesus.” Laura’s jaw was hanging open. “How long did it take for him to do all this?”
David walked over to the table and picked up a notebook. There was nothing special about it. You could buy one at the store for less than a dollar. Most college students had at least a half dozen of them. But instead of writing equations or historical facts on the pages, McLaughlin had kept a journal of all his findings about the case.
“It’s going to take a while to go through everything, but this isn’t the only one.” David gestured to three more notebooks like the one in his hands. “He kept extremely detailed notes. From what I gather, he just liked to journal. He’d start off with an overview of what happened at work, then he’d jump into some personal thoughts, and then he’d write about his latest findings in the case. There’s at least a couple years’ worth of notebooks here.”
Laura walked across the room and picked up one of the other notebooks. “This will tell us everything we need to know. Motive. Process. Execution.”
“Why wouldn’t he just burn all of this?” Cassie still couldn’t process just how much information was in the room. “I mean, Shapiro’s dead. He carried out his mission. He might’ve gotten away with it. But now we have all this evidence. Why didn’t he try to hide it?”
Laura shrugged. “He spent a long time putting this together. And you said it had to be personal, right? Maybe burning or getting rid of the evidence was never an option. Or maybe he meant to and just never got around to it.”
“A killer who procrastinates,” Cassie quipped. “What’s next?”
Laura ignored her. “Or he didn’t care if we found it.”
“Why wouldn’t he care?” Cassie asked.
“He could be states away at this point.” David’s shoulders dropped. “He could be dead. Maybe he had a plan to disappear. It wouldn’t matter if we found this if we could never find him.”
“What I really want to know,” Cassie said, taking a step closer to one of the walls covered in photographs, “is how he figured out it was Shapiro.”
David joined her. “I haven’t had much time to go through his materials, but from what I can tell, it took a lot of research, leg work, and determination.”
“Well, we’ve already established he knew the victims, right?” Laura asked. “And he was friendly with them.”
“Exactly.” David pointed to the notebook in her hands. “There are a couple entries in that one that talk about how he’d check up on the guys who had been released. McLaughlin did a lot of volunteer work for homeless shelters and food kitchens. He’d see a lot of these guys after they got out. But not always. And sometimes they’d disappear.”
Cassie turned. “Shapiro?”
“No. McLaughlin wasn’t just looking into what Shapiro was doing. In fact, that wasn’t even where this started. In one of the earlier notebooks, he talked about having a hard time keeping tabs on the inmates who left the prison. A lot of them went back to the streets, and then he couldn’t find them again.”
“There’s a huge link between homelessness and mental illness, as well as addiction,” Laura said. “Being homeless is incredibly stressful—never knowing where you’re going to sleep or where your next meal is coming from—and that can increase anxiety and depression. Stress can lead to psychosis, and there’s evidence that it can increase the likelihood of developing disorders like schizophrenia.”
Cassie gestured to the surrounding chaos. “What made him figure out there was something else going on here? How did he realize these deaths related to the disappearances?”
David shook his head. “I still don’t have an answer for that, but a lot of the homeless people on the streets run in similar circles. They all have their own groups where they feel safe, but there’s a huge us-versus-them mentality.”
“As in the homeless people against people who aren’t homeless?”
He nodded. “And against the police. I’m thinking that’s how Shapiro got away with this for so long. He tricked these former inmates into meeting up with him, pretending to be their friend or pretending to have an opportunity for them, and then killed them. They’d disappear, and their friends on the streets had to know something. They would’ve noticed the disappearances, would’ve realized something was wrong. They would’ve been able to identify Shapiro if they’d gone to the police. But the police are the bad guys. They wouldn’t reach out to the police for help.”
“Especially since the police were doing such a good job of ignoring the case anyway.” Cassie blew hair out of her face. The heat of the attic was oppressive. “If any witnesses came forward, they would’ve throw
n their statement in the back of a drawer somewhere. Just like they did with Carl Graham.”
Laura closed the notebook in her hands and picked up another one. “What I want to know is what happened to McLaughlin.”
