“Well, when someone who you went to the same college as turns out to be a crazed psycho, yeah, you take notice. You think Harlow was one of Slater’s first victims, then?” Catherine moved away from the door. “Oh, I’m sorry. Won’t you come in?”
“You’d be willing to chat with me about this, then?” said Dawson.
“I would, absolutely,” said Catherine. “What happened to Harlow has always haunted me. I’d love for someone to get to the bottom of it.”
“Thank you.” Dawson stepped inside.
Catherine led her through an immaculately decorated living room and dining room to a little nook in the kitchen with a table tucked against a bay window. Outside, there was a view of the yard and a fence that blocked the neighbor’s yard.
“Would you like some tea?” said Catherine.
“Only if you’re having some,” said Dawson.
Catherine motioned for Dawson to sit down, and Dawson did. Then Catherine put on a kettle and got down two cups from a cupboard. “Harlow and I were friends in my freshman year, which was how we’d become roommates, but that year—our sophomore year—we had drifted apart.”
“So, you weren’t friends anymore?”
“There wasn’t any conflict or anything like that.” Catherine came over to sit with Dawson. “I had a boyfriend, and she was still single. I spent a lot of time with him. She had another group of friends.”
“Did you ever see her with Phineas Slater?”
“Oh, I never met the man,” said Catherine.
“Never?” Dawson was disappointed.
“No,” said Catherine. “I saw pictures. He looked vaguely familiar. I think I may have seen him going to and from classes on occasion. I understand he stayed in that dorm that burned down, Renwick Hall? That was on the other side of campus from me.”
“Right,” said Dawson. “So, what you’re saying is that you don’t really know who Harlow was associating with before she disappeared.”
“Well, I know a little,” said Catherine. The kettle was already starting to steam. She held up two boxes of tea. “Herbal or Earl Grey?”
“Earl Grey,” said Dawson. “What do you know?”
“She told me about some friends she was making. She was getting involved in some sort of, um, oh, I don’t know what to call it. It sounded almost New Age to me. I don’t even know if they call things that anymore? Sisterhood, Gaia, herbs and chants, and pretending-we’re-all-Neve-Campbell-from-The-Craft.”
“Witchcraft?” said Dawson.
“No, they didn’t call it that,” said Catherine, pouring the water into the cups over the tea bags. “These should steep.” She came back to the table and sat down. “I don’t think they thought there was really magic, you know. It was about focusing one’s spirit and becoming one with the trees or something.” She chuckled. “I think it was harmless.”
“Did you mention this when she disappeared all those years ago? That she was involved in witchcraft?”
“You’re the one using those words,” said Catherine, eyebrows raised. “And I honestly wish I hadn’t said anything, because I see you’ve already jumped to evil rituals and virgin sacrifices.”
“I haven’t.” Dawson laughed. She quieted. “Was Harlow a virgin?”
“Hardly,” said Catherine with a snort.
“Oh, all right, then,” said Dawson. “Honestly, I don’t suppose it matters. It doesn’t seem like Slater’s style.”
“No,” said Catherine. “But I think Harlow went to a party that night. I don’t think they called it a party. There was a bonfire and I think they were going to do some sacred chakra alignment or something. Don’t quote me on that.” She turned. “Tea’s probably ready. Cream? Sugar?”
“Please,” said Dawson.
Catherine bustled about and then brought over the tea cups. “Maybe Slater crashed the party.”
“Maybe,” said Dawson.
“I did tell the police that she was going to that party,” said Catherine. “I think they interviewed everyone there.”
“Okay,” said Dawson. “Maybe I should do the same.”
“Well, the problem is that I don’t know who was at the party,” said Catherine. “I can’t even remember the name of her little group.”
“The witch group.”
“Stop calling them witches.” Catherine chuckled.
Dawson took a sip of her tea. “Sorry. The tea is quite good. Thank you.”
“Of course,” said Catherine. “But maybe I could find out the name, if I looked through some of my things from school. I don’t know. I sporadically kept a journal back then, and it also had snippets of very overwrought poetry.”
Dawson looked away, embarrassed. “Yes, that’s a prerequisite for being eighteen, isn’t it?”
Catherine laughed. “Yes, it is. Anyway, I can go through it, but it’s all packed away. Maybe you could leave me a number. I’ll call you if I find anything.”
“I would appreciate that,” said Dawson. “So, the party is the last time that anyone saw Harlow?”
“As far as I know,” said Catherine, sipping her tea. “I will say this about it all. Harlow was different toward the end. Whatever she was doing with that group of hers, it was changing her. She was very, very taken with one of the girls, sort of the ringleader of the group. Her name was Lola, I think.”
“Lola,” repeated Dawson. “Do you remember a last name?”
“Gem?” said Catherine. “No, that can’t be right. It’s what leaped to my mind, but it sounds strange. Lola Gem?”
Dawson furrowed her brow. That sounded familiar to her. Why did that sound familiar?
“That means something to you?”
“I don’t know,” said Dawson. “Let’s leave that for now. How was it changing her?”
Catherine considered, a thoughtful expression on her face. “It’s hard to explain, but she seemed… I don’t know… you know how when your best friend gets into a relationship with a new boy, she’s taken with him and never wants to spend time with you anymore and when she does, he’s all she talks about?”
“You were just saying that you were in a new relationship,” said Dawson.
“Yeah.” Catherine nodded slowly. “It was new love for both of us. But I don’t think it was a romantic relationship between her and Lola. I think she maybe had a… what do they sometimes call it? A girl crush?”
Dawson nodded. “I think I know what you mean. Did you ever meet Lola?”
“Once or twice,” said Catherine.
“And she also went to Branwen College?”
“Yes,” said Catherine. “Maybe you can find her.”
“Maybe I can,” said Dawson. On the other hand, as intriguing as all this was, she was afraid it was leading her in exactly the direction she didn’t need to go. Away from Phineas Slater.
* * *
“Sorry,” Dawson was saying into her phone. She had just gotten back to the office and was going through her voicemail and returning calls. “I would have taken your call earlier, but I was on the road. Is this a good time to talk, or would you like me to call you back?”
“I can talk now,” said the voice of Detective Marsha Crane. “I work at the Springfield Police Department in Missouri. I wanted to call to talk to you about Annie Gibbons. I understand that she shot at you and was killed while she was being subdued?”
“That’s right,” said Dawson. This had happened over a month ago. After receiving a coded message in Bosom Friends, they had gone to an abandoned warehouse, where they’d found a bouquet of arms and legs. They’d identified one of the arms as belonging to one of Slater’s victims, but they didn’t know who the others belonged to. Annie Gibbons had been in the warehouse. She had been armed and had tried to shoot them. “You work for the department who investigated when she went missing?”
“Exactly,” said Crane.
“Thank you so much for reaching out,” said Dawson. “We certainly don’t have any idea how Ms. Gibbons is related to our current case. I
don’t know if you’ll be able to shed any light—”
“I don’t think so,” said Crane. “I can’t tell you much about Ms. Gibbons, because we obviously didn’t find her. I will say it was a very strange case, and that I started to think that she hadn’t been abducted at all, but that she’d gone into hiding.”
“That is very strange,” said Dawson. “What do you mean by that?”
“Well, before she went to that convention—they call it MadCad? I assume you’re familiar with it?”
“Yes,” said Dawson. MadCad was the abbreviation fans used to talk about the pairing of Maddox and Cade, the werewolf and vampire from Dusk. There was an entire subculture built around this, and fans went to conventions and patronized fanart, amongst other things.
“Before she went to the convention, she had withdrawn from her friends and family. People had expressed some concern that she was being pulled into her obsession with an online community devoted to MadCad.”
“Really?” said Dawson.
“Yes, she’d quit her job and had been flaking out on appointments and plans with friends and family. After her disappearance, I went looking into that, and I traced some of her online presence. I found out that she’d been a member of an online forum called Seasons of Success. It seemed to have some ties to MadCad, but it was primarily a… I don’t know what to call it? Part self-help, part New Age?”
“Did you say New Age?” said Dawson. What a funny coincidence.
“I don’t know what you’d really call it, I suppose. A hodgepodge of mystical ideas and advice on acquiring wealth, sort of in the vein of The Secret and that ilk.”
“Oh, all right,” said Dawson. “How could that have ties to MadCad?”
“Apparently some of the founders of the forum also wrote MadCad fanfiction and they actively recruited people from the fanfic forums to their forum. Most of the posts on there were unintelligible claptrap, but I was able to read between the lines and trace the semblance of a business plan. I’m speculating a bit, but I think it involved leveraging the MadCad fandom to make money through various schemes, one of which was the forum, I think. I think they were selling an online course that promised to teach someone how to be successful and wealthy and manifest one’s will on the world. There was a lot of talk of sacrifice and something called the all-seeing eye.”
Dawson swallowed. “Annie Gibbons said that to us. Before she died. She shot herself, you know. But right before, she said that she would become one with the all-seeing eye. I think she said something about sacrifice as well.”
“Well, she was deeply indoctrinated into this forum before she disappeared,” said Crane. “I think, and I could never find any evidence to support this, mind you, that she could not afford to buy the online course, and so she went to volunteer her services to the group instead. I think perhaps she was told that if she devoted her life to them, that she would reach enlightenment or something of that nature.”
Dawson shook her head. “What does this have to do with Phineas Slater?”
“I couldn’t tell you,” said Crane.
“I wondered if it was a coincidence, if she wasn’t just a random crazy woman in the warehouse when Slater arrived? Maybe he armed her on a whim, simply because he thought it might be fun.”
“Could be,” said Crane. “I don’t see a link there.”
“Except for the fact that Slater was at the convention that she went missing from, because he was selling his MadCad fanart there.”
“So, that’s the connection,” said Crane. “Hmm.”
“I’d like to look at that online forum, if you don’t mind giving me the website.”
“Well,” said Crane, “odd, that. It’s gone. I went looking the other day when I found out that Annie Gibbons had been found, and the forum has been scrubbed from the internet. It was password-protected, so I don’t think it’s possible to access with something like the Wayback Machine. I couldn’t find it, at any rate.”
“What about the users on the fanfiction forums who were recruiting people to the forum?”
“I can give you some handles,” said Crane. “Maybe you can make some headway trying to figure out who they were.”
“Were any of them called GilbertBlight?” That was the name that Slater was publishing under.
“No, doesn’t ring a bell,” said Crane.
On the other hand, she suddenly remembered that Slater had written This Love, and he’d published it under another name.
LolaRose.
“Thank you for all this, Detective Crane,” said Dawson. “But I actually have to go. If I think of anything else, can I contact you?”
“Absolutely,” said Crane. “And I’ll also get in touch if I remember anything pertinent.”
“Thank you,” said Dawson. She ended the call.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Yeah, LolaRose is the name of the author of This Love,” Ricky Hernandez was saying. He was sitting in a conference room in the Cape Christopher police station along with Dawson. Hernandez was a consultant on Slater’s case. He was their resident expert on all things fandom. He’d done some graduate work studying it, written a thesis about vampire literature and rabid fans. Dawson hadn’t read it, but it was down to Hernandez that they’d even known about Bosom Friends, which had provided important clues in tracking Slater down thus far. She respected his opinion and expertise.
“But she wasn’t a separate person, right? She was one of Slater’s sock puppets,” said Dawson.
“We can’t be sure about any of that,” said Hernandez. “But that’s what we think, mostly from analyzing the writing style. However, it’s important to note that there’s considerable disagreement in the fan community about whether GilbertBlight wrote This Love, even though he claimed to have done it.”
“GilbertBlight is obviously Slater,” said Dawson. “The way he plays with people online, the way he uses sock puppets to rile people up, it’s got to be him. It’s obvious that Slater’s getting off on that power, and we already know he’s the type to enjoy that. He started with that, and when that got boring, he ended up turning to rape and murder. He can’t be satisfied unless he’s controlling other people.”
“I agree,” said Hernandez. “Here’s the interesting thing about the name you gave me, Lola Gem. There’s another writer, another sock puppet, supposedly a friend of LolaRose, named MiaGem.”
“What?” said Dawson, confused.
“Let me back up,” said Hernandez. “To understand how this works, you have to think of there being various layers to the stories that Slater was posting online. So, the top layer is the fictional layer of the story itself, which was about Maddox and Cade and Aurora. But then, you can think of there being another layer, that being another fictional world which pertained to the characters he’d created who were the ‘authors’ of the work. It’s almost like a frame narrative, like what you might find in Frankenstein or Wuthering Heights—”
“I think you’re making me more confused and not less confused,” Dawson interrupted.
“LolaRose would type these notes at the beginning of her chapters, in which she would talk about her life,” said Hernandez. “She had a best friend named MiaGem, who also posted fanfic on the site—but the style makes it obvious that MiaGem is actually the same person, that it’s just one person operating all of these different sock puppet accounts.”
“How did he have time to do all this?” Dawson shook her head.
“I have no idea,” said Hernandez, shrugging. “Okay, so LolaRose and MiaGem were supposedly co-writing This Love, but then they had a falling out over some boy at their school.”
“But none of that happened? Because they’re not real people?”
“Slater was just making this up. This was another story underneath the fanfic story. He even has LolaRose kill MiaGem—”
“Wait, what?”
“It’s actually kind of hilarious,” said Hernandez, snickering a little bit. “Slater was making fun of a certain kind of Dusk fan
, a young teenage girl who took the entire fandom far too seriously, someone who might be adversarial towards say Cade fans instead of Maddox fans or vice versa.”
“Except Slater was actually killing women.”
“Well, not yet,” said Hernandez. “This fic was posted in 2003, and he didn’t start killing until 2004 with Destiny Worth, right?”
Dawson sighed. “Okay, well, you know what? None of this really matters, because what matters is the fact that a possible victim of Slater’s was last seen at a party being given by a group of New Age not-witches who were led by a woman named Lola Gem.”
“Not-witches?”
“Never mind that,” said Dawson. “It’s connected to Slater somehow. It’s got to be.”
“Yeah,” agreed Hernandez.
“But how?” said Dawson. She got up from the table and started to pace. “Catherine Wilson met Lola Gem, so she was a real person.”
“Or a person using a name that Slater had given her,” said Hernandez.
“Right,” said Dawson. She continued to pace. “Right. So, we know that Slater has this… nearly otherworldly ability to get people to do his bidding, right?”
“Otherworldly? That’s a stretch.”
“I said nearly,” said Dawson. “So, maybe he got this Lola person to help him lure in his victims.”
“But why would he need someone to lure in his victims?” said Hernandez. “Liam says that he picked up girls and brought them back to his dorm to rape on at least three occasions. He had no problem attracting them or drugging them.”
“He didn’t need to,” said Dawson, “but it’s like the fanfic. The more people under his control, the more exciting it is. He wanted to.”
Hernandez nodded slowly. “Okay, I can see that.”
Dawson stopped pacing and leaned over the table. “We have to find this Lola person. You don’t think that could really be her real name, do you?”
“Highly unlikely,” said Hernandez.
“Do you think she was really helping him post the fanfic, or helping him with the sock puppet accounts? It seems like a lot for someone to be operating all on his own.”
“I don’t know, maybe,” said Hernandez.
The Temptation of Silence Page 4