She was taking a hell of a lot on her mother’s word. Then again, following her own instincts would’ve meant that Andy would be at the funeral home right now sobbing on Gordon’s shoulder while he worked out burial arrangements for her mother.
Andy’s fingers returned to the keyboard. She looked over her shoulder. The librarians had disappeared, probably to log in the returned books or practice shushing people.
Andy clicked on PREFERENCES under the Google tab. She set the browser to Incognito Mode to mask her browsing history. She probably should’ve done this first thing. Or maybe it was overkill. Or maybe she should stop berating herself for acting paranoid and just accept the fact that she was paranoid for a very damn good reason.
The first site she went to was the Belle Isle Review.
The front page was devoted to Laura Oliver, local speech pathologist and killing machine. They didn’t actually call her a killing machine, but they’d quoted Alice Blaedel in the first paragraph, which was the same as.
Andy scanned the article. There was no mention of a man in a hoodie found with a frying-pan-shaped indentation in his head. There wasn’t even a stolen vehicle report on the black truck. She clicked through the other stories and gave them a quick read.
Nothing.
She sat back in her chair, perplexed.
Behind her, the door opened. An old man shuffled in, heading straight for the coffee as he launched into a political tirade.
Andy didn’t know who the tirade was for, but she tuned out the rant and pulled up CNN.com. The site led with the Killing Machine quote in the headline. Gordon was right about a lot of things, but Andy knew her father would not be pleased to be proven correct about the focus of the news stories. The patheticness of Jonah Lee Helsinger’s life was highlighted in the second paragraph:
Six months ago, Helsinger’s sheriff father, a war veteran and local hero, was tragically killed in a stand-off with a gunman, around the same time police believe young Helsinger’s thoughts turned to murder.
Andy checked FoxNews.com, the Savannah Reporter, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
All of the stories were focused on Laura Oliver and what she had done at the Rise-n-Dine. There was no mention of Samuel Godfrey Beckett, or even an unidentified murder victim in a hoodie.
Had Laura managed to move the body? That didn’t seem possible. Andy supposed her mother could’ve refused the police entry into the house, but the 911 text sent from Laura’s phone was probable cause for entry. Even if Laura managed to turn away the Belle Isle cops, the person in that unmarked black Suburban would not have taken no for an answer.
Andy tapped her finger on the mouse as she tried to think it through.
Someone with a lot of connections was keeping a tight lid on the story.
They?
The same people who had sent Hoodie? The same people Laura was terrified would track down Andy?
She felt her heart bang against the base of her throat. Half the police force would have been outside Laura’s bungalow. Probably Palazzolo, maybe even the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. That would mean they had some kind of pull with the governor, maybe even the feds.
Andy checked behind her.
The old man was leaning on the checkin desk, trying to engage one of the librarians in a political discussion.
Andy looked at the time on the computer again, watched the seconds turn into minutes.
The unit number is your birthday. One-twenty.
Andy put down the coffee. She typed in January 20, 1987.
January 20, 1987, was a Tuesday. People born on this day are Aquarius. Ronald Reagan was president. “Walk Like an Egyptian” by the Bangles was on the radio. Critical Condition starring Richard Pryor topped the box office. Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising was #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.
Andy counted back nine months in her head and entered April 1986 news into the search. Instead of a month-specific timeline, she got a general overview of the year:
US bombs Libya. Iran–Contra. Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Perestroika. Halley’s Comet. Challenger explosion. Swedish Prime Minister murdered. Oslo G-FAB assassination. Pan-Am 73 hijacked. Explosion on TWA jet over Greece. Mercantile bombing. FBI Miami bank shoot-out. Oprah Winfrey Show debuts. 38,401 cases of AIDS worldwide.
Andy stared at the words, only some of which seemed familiar. She could spend all day backtracking the events, but the fact was, you couldn’t find something if you didn’t know what you were looking for.
Paula Koontz.
The name had been edging around Andy’s thoughts for the last few hours. She had never, ever heard her mother mention a woman named Paula. As far as Andy knew, all of Laura’s friends were in Belle Isle. She never talked to anyone else on the phone. She wasn’t even on Facebook because she claimed there was no one back in Rhode Island she wanted to keep in touch with.
I could talk to Paula Koontz.
I hear she’s in Seattle.
Austin. But good try.
Laura had tried to fake out Hoodie. Or maybe she was testing him? But testing him for what?
Andy searched for Paula Koontz Austin TX.
Nothing Austin-specific came back, but apparently, Paula Koontz was a popular name for real estate agents in the northeast.
“Koontz,” Andy whispered the word aloud. It didn’t sound right to her ears. She had been thinking more like Dean Koontz when Hoodie had said it more like “koontz-ah.”
She tried koontze, koontzee, khoontzah . . .
Google asked: do you mean koontah?
Andy clicked the suggested search. Nothing, but Google offered khoontey as an alternative. She kept clicking through the do you means. Several iterations later brought up a faculty directory for the University of Texas at Austin.
Paula Kunde was currently teaching Introduction to Irish Women’s Poetry and Feminist Thought on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. She was head of the women’s studies department. Her book, The Madonna and Madonna: Like a Virgin from Jesus Christ to Ronald Reagan, was available in paperback from IndieBound.
Andy enlarged the woman’s photo, which had been taken in an unflattering side profile. Black and white, but that didn’t help matters. It was hard to tell how old Paula was because she’d obviously spent way too much time in the sun. Her face was worn and craggly. She was at least Laura’s age, but she did not look like any of her mother’s usual friends, who wore Eileen Fisher and sunscreen every time they left the house.
Paula Kunde was basically a washed-out old hippie. Her hair was a mixture of blonde and gray with an unnatural-looking dark streak in the bangs. Her shirt, or dress, or whatever she was wearing, had a Native American pattern.
The sunken look to her cheeks reminded Andy of Laura during chemo.
Andy scrolled through Kunde’s credentials. Publications in Feminist Theory and Exposition, several keynote speaker slots at feminist conferences. Kunde had earned her undergrad at the University of California, Berkeley, and her master’s at Stanford, which explained the hippie vibe. Her doctorate came from a state college in western Connecticut, which seemed weird because Bryn Mawr or Vassar would’ve better suited her field of study, especially with a Stanford master’s, which was to Andy’s unfinished technical theater arts degree as diamonds were to dog shit.
More importantly, there was nothing in Paula Kunde’s résumé that indicated she would ever cross paths with Laura. Feminist theory did not overlap with speech therapy in any way that Andy could think of. Laura was more likely to ridicule an old hippie than befriend one. So why had her mother recognized this woman’s name smack in the middle of being tortured?
“Hey, hon.” The librarian smiled down at Andy. “Sorry, but we’re gonna have to ask you not to drink coffee around the computers.” She nodded toward the old guy, who was glaring at Andy over his own steaming cup of coffee. “Rules have to apply to everybody.”
“I’m sorry,” Andy said, because it was her nature to apologize for everything in her orbit. “I was leaving anyway.”
“Oh, you don’t have to—” the woman tried, but Andy was already getting up.