I lay awake for a long time that night, staring at the ceiling in the dark and listening to the rumbling of my landlord’s washing machine. Saira prowled around the house at night, sometimes vacuuming or mopping or scrubbing the walls until two or three in the morning. Wilson, the tenant in the room next to mine, was half my size but snored like a foghorn, and I caught every blast through the paper-thin drywall. Finally, I gave up pretending to sleep and reached for my computer.

There were two messages I needed to send. The first was to the mysterious X, and I typed the email address Todd had given me into a new message. Hi, I’m Deirdre Crawley, I wrote. I’m Caroline Thraxton’s sister. I know she sent you a message to read after she died, and I want to talk to you about it. Can you message me back? Or call? Thanks. I added my phone number and pressed send.

One down. The next one would be harder to write.

I turned on the light and reached for the photos my sister had given me. Flipping through them, I found the one of Caro and the man I didn’t know. With Ben, at the Clarkson/Northcutt house in High Falls, New York. I studied his face. He was handsome in a bland way—clean-cut hair, well-tanned white skin, chiseled features, perfect teeth—and I found myself squinting at his image, trying to picture him in black shades like the man who’d been watching Caro’s funeral from afar at Green-Wood. It could’ve been him, but that was just a guess.

There was a lot about Ben Northcutt online. He was the definition of Intrepid Reporter, having been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He’d written three books on politics, drugs, and terrorism in South America, focusing on the years he spent living in Colombia and Argentina. His website linked to articles he wrote for Esquire and GQ and the New York Times and the Guardian, and I devoured one after another. There were plenty about political corruption and the drug trade, but the ones that stayed with me were haunting, especially a series about human trafficking for slave labor in the mines of Venezuela and Colombia. Others were about the rehabilitation of child soldiers who still struggled with PTSD, gangs in Bogotá who used zombifying drugs on their victims, and the excavation of a World War II–era Nazi hideout in the middle of Argentina.

The bottom line was that Ben seemed like a badass. Even his author photo—unsmiling and serious, next to a pile of human skulls—was kind of thrilling. I took a deep breath and tapped out the world’s dullest email—Hey Ben, this is Deirdre, Caroline Crawley’s sister, I really need to talk to you—and gave him my phone number. There was nothing I could do but wait.