Caitlin was initially brought to Kennewick Hospital, but was moved that evening to Portland and kept under observation for two days. Detective Dixon told Harry that her physical issues were comparatively mild—a broken nose, a contused neck—but that she was now under psychiatric care. Harry didn’t get a chance to see her before she returned to Michigan; he’d asked, several times, if he could see her, but was always told that she wasn’t seeing any visitors.

And then he was informed she was back in Michigan with her family.

During those bizarre days after Jake Richter’s death, Alice, hounded by the throng of journalists that had arrived in Kennewick Village, had moved into a spare bedroom at her friend Chrissie Herrick’s house. Paul Roman had immediately arrived in Kennewick, found an Airbnb near the harbor, and Harry had moved in with him, bringing Lew the cat from the store. He got far more information from Chrissie than he did from Alice, who’d barely spoken since being attacked by Jake in his condominium. Harry tried to elicit more information from Detective Dixon, but he was tight-lipped because of the ongoing investigation. Harry also wondered if Dixon was somehow ashamed at not having arrested Jake earlier. According to the articles that Harry read online, Jake had been a person of interest in the investigation into the murders of Bill Ackerson and Grace McGowan, but the police were convinced that the perpetrators were Lou and Annie Callahan, neither of whom had solid alibis for either murder.

Since the events that led to his death, more had come out about Jake Richter’s past, including from a schoolteacher from Albany named Joan Johnson who claimed that Jake Richter, back when he’d been a coworker of her mother’s, had seduced her when she was just a teenager. It also turned out that Jake Richter had lived for a number of years in the Fort Lauderdale area in Florida, where he’d been fired from a job at a beach resort because of “inappropriate behavior.” A picture emerged of a lifelong sexual predator.

There was much speculation that when he’d been married to Alice Moss’s mother, he’d been sexually assaulting Alice, and that he’d most likely killed Bill Ackerson out of some form of jealousy. Alice hadn’t spoken publicly yet to dismiss any of these rumors, but Vivienne Bergeron, a longtime resident of Kennewick, sold a story to one of the tabloids in which she said she knew for a fact that Jake and Alice had been lovers. But she also said that Alice had murdered her daughter, an erroneous claim she had apparently been making for years.