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Brooklyn Sloane
February 2023
Tuesday — 3:56pm
“Whatwassourgent?”
Theo had walked through the glass entrance of S&E Investigations with his gloves in one hand and a coffee carrier in the other. He only had four hot beverages instead of five. Kate was spending the day with her father to celebrate her acceptance into the FBI academy.
“There is a chance that our unsub is dead,” Brook replied as she lifted the cup with her name scrawled on the side. It was her usual large caramel macchiato, and she couldn’t wait to savor her favorite drink. “We need to regroup.”
Brook had been walking out of her office to join the others in the conference room when she’d spotted Theo. She’d texted him that he should join them if he’d finished speaking with Mr. Willow.
Fortunately, Theo hadn’t had a chance to follow through on his interview. Their meeting had been pushed to this evening due to a previous conflict in Mr. Willow’s calendar. Theo would now have a chance to be armed with more information, thus giving him new informed questions to ask the widower.
“Did you say that the unsub is dead?”
Theo followed closely behind Brook as they walked down the hallway.
“Dead.”
Brook entered the conference room first, noting that Sylvie had practically taken over her part of the table with notepads, files, papers, and her laptop. The end of her nose and her cheeks were still pink from being outside in the cold weather. Apparently, she’d driven from the hair salon to Grace Willow’s old neighborhood. She’d wanted to speak with the family of the children who had originally been suspected of having left a jack-o-lantern on Grace Willow’s front porch.
Unfortunately, the family no longer lived in the house across the street.
Bit wasn’t in his seat yet, so Brook quickly explained to Theo what she’d discovered at the nursing home. He waited to ask additional questions until she was finished recounting her day conducting interviews.
“Jack Ridgeway? I don’t remember hearing anything about deaths in a nursing home, let alone two different facilities,” Theo said after he’d handed Sylvie her Chai tea. He then removed his jacket and hung it from the back of his chair. “And you’re saying that there is a possibility that Ridgeway was the unsub in the original murder case?”
“I’m not sure yet, but I find it oddly coincidental that Agent Parker’s case came to a standstill after Jack Ridgeway took his own life.” Brook had already made herself comfortable in her chair. She had left her cell phone in her office, but she didn’t expect this meeting to take too long. They were all still conducting their parts of the investigation, and they were running out of daylight hours. “I read over Agent Parker’s notes from when he spoke with Leonard Buchert. Nowhere in those reports did it mention Jack Ridgeway, but the interviewhadtaken place weeks prior to Ridgeway’s subsequent suicide. The moment that the police zeroed in on him after the previous investigation at the first nursing home, Ridgeway’s body was discovered in his apartment. Agent Parker wouldn’t have been notified of such news.”
“Nothing about that situation fits your profile.” Theo took his seat before reaching for the cup carrier. He removed both beverages. “Are we dealing with two unsubs?”
“We won’t know the answer to that until Sylvie fills us in on Ridgeway’s background.”
Brook didn’t have to explain that even after they were given the pertinent information, they would still be theorizing on what could have possibly happened three years ago for the stalkings, abductions, and surmised murders to suddenly stop.
“I’m here,” Bit exclaimed as he came through the doorway. He had an electronic tablet in his hand, and he was already swiping up on the screen so that whatever he’d found of interest was displayed on the monitor behind Brook. “And I come bearing news that possibly vindicates Ridgeway. I’m also running a program to see if he had connections to anyone in relation to the case.”
Bit walked behind Sylvie and then Theo, who was holding up one of the cups. Brook caught the way Bit grimaced at the offering, but it just as quickly disappeared when Theo mouthed that it was hot chocolate. There would come a time when Bit would fess up to Sylvie that he couldn’t stand the taste of tea, but it was clear that today wasn’t going to be that day.
“I still don’t know how Agent Parker missed this,” Bit said as he took a seat.
After setting his tablet down on the table, he pulled out a bag of Skittles from the front pocket of his sweatshirt. It was Brook’s turn to grimace at the thought of mixing that kind of sugar with hot chocolate.
“The two incidents could be completely unrelated,” Brook pointed out as she observed Bit remove the white lid from his cup. He then tore the end of the bag open and poured a few Skittles into his hot chocolate. “Bit, what are you doing?”
“Adding flavor,” Bit replied with a wide smile. “Little T, what deets do you have for us?”
No wonder Bit was Sylvie’s person. His quirks and positive attitude were refreshing in the face of what they dealt with on a daily basis.
“Okay.” Sylvie had practically sighed the word, though in an accomplished manner that alerted everyone to her success. “Jack Ridgeway. Caucasian male and thirty-one years of age when he took his own life by swallowing a bottle of pills that he’d procured from the nursing facility. He grew up in Virginia with his ailing mother, although he moved to a suburb of D.C. after she’d passed away from ovarian cancer. Shortly thereafter, Ridgeway attended nursing school. Upon graduation, he worked at a local hospital. He was let go after a wing of the hospital caught fire. Overstaffing was the written reason, but I’ll place a call to make sure that was the case. Ridgeway then proceeded to apply for a position at some private practices, but he ultimately chose a nursing home. The administrator—Camille Stewart—became suspicious when two elderly patients died within the span of one month. While one autopsy was inconclusive, the other one was determined to be from an overdose of sleeping medication. She eventually brought her suspicions to the police. A full investigation was launched, but there wasn’t enough proof to make an arrest. Following Ridgeway’s suspension, he waited a month before quietly applying for a nursing position where the family members of Debbie Horton and Felicia Rhimes were patients.”
“How does that even happen?” Theo asked in disgust. “Did the facility not check the man’s references? He shouldn’t have been hired until his name was cleared from the investigation. That was a lot of liability to take on given the circumstances.”
“From what I’ve gathered, I believe Ridgeway used a different social security number. Had the nursing home done their due diligence, the misinformation would have been flagged from the start. By the time that Jim Risner placed the calls, a patient under the facility’s care had already died under suspicious circumstances.” Sylvie finally sat back in her chair, giving the monitor behind Brook a good stare. “You all know what happened after that.”
“This could all be a coincidence,” Theo tossed out, though his tone didn’t indicate that he believed that theory. “Your profile stated that the unsub forced his victims to leave their bloody handprint in the same place that they were last seen to give their families some sort of closure. That denotes that the unsub felt something for those families. Do the police suspect that Ridgeway believed he was taking away the pain of his patients?”
