Page 17 of Look Deeper
He kept the post clean. Location, date, confirmed facts, documented gaps. The campground's ownership situation. The minimal details reported. Preliminary medical event ruling with no specifics. He listed the questions the available information didn't answer and stopped there.
Riley posted as Archivist shortly after, including an annotated property map and a documented timeline of the campground's activity over the past eighteen months, including suspicious activity reports and the gap in operational management.
When they finished, they sat back, exhausted. Now there was nothing to do but wait.
Riley yawned and closed her laptop. “I should head back to my place.”
“You’re welcome to crash here.”
“Thanks, but no thanks. I’m out of eye bleach.”
Patrick laughed. The last time Riley had crashed in the guest room, she’d taken an unfortunate trip to the kitchen for a glass of water at the same time as Garrett and discovered that their cousin wasn’t big on wearing pajamas.
Or underwear.
After declining his offer of a ride and promising to text the moment she got back to her place, Patrick shut down his own laptop and called it a night.
7
SOMEWHERE IT SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN
MORGAN
Morgan wason her second cup of coffee when she decided to check her phone. She’d heard the quiet vibrations of notifications several times over the course of the morning and had wanted to be sufficiently caffeinated before dealing with her mother.
Worse, it could be her supervisor, telling her they’d decided to make the temporary leave of absence permanent.
But it wasn’t her mother firing off texts, or anyone from the Medical Examiner’s Office telling her not to bother coming back. It was the true crime forum she’d joined years earlier, notifying her that someone had posted a new case thread.
Intrigued, she set her mug down and unlocked the screen.
Because clearly, dealing with crime and death every day simply wasn’t enough for her. It had to be her downtime focus too.
The new thread had been posted sometime the previous night and had accumulated responses while she slept. She started at the beginning and read through the updates in order, her interest growing as she went.
Because it was the same case she’d been thinking about since she read about it in the Ridge Courier.
DeepTrace had opened the post. She'd read DeepTrace's work before on other cases and thought highly of their work. He or she was a methodical poster, strong on pattern recognition and data sourcing, not given to speculation.
The thread was clean, and included location, date, confirmed facts, and documented gaps. It noted the absence of personal and identifying effects, along with the preliminary medical event ruling with no supporting specifics. Then, because DeepTrace was extremely organized, they’d included a list of questions the available information didn't answer. Everything was presented the way it always was: objectively and factually, without editorializing.
Morgan read it twice.
It was good work. Precise, restrained, with the right questions in the right order. She'd had the same questions herself, sitting at Frank's kitchen table. There was something quietly affirming about seeing them laid out by someone else who’d noticed that the information didn't add up.
She couldn’t help wondering how DeepTrace had picked up on the incident, however. The Ridge Courier was a local paper, covering local events. Was it possible that DeepTrace was in thearea? Or did they have some sort of crawler trolling the internet, flagging potential cases of interest?
Probably the latter, she realized with some disappointment. Pine Ridge was a small mountain town that most people had never heard of, and coverage of the discovery had been minimal at best.
Which was suspicious in itself. Did medical events resulting in death warrant front-page headlines? No. But John Does found dead in cabins during the off season deserved something more than a mere mention at the bottom of page three.
Another Thread contributor had followed DeepTrace’s original post with property maps and a detailed timeline. Again, the data was clean, thorough, and well-sourced. The map showed the full property layout—the main cabin cluster along the lake's eastern edge, the rental dock and shack near the water, public showers and restrooms. Other members of the group had weighed in with questions about financial patterns, geographic precedents in adjacent counties, and whether standard identification procedures were being actively pursued or quietly deprioritized.
She looked at the map for a long moment. The campground was on Route 9 East. She knew that road. She'd driven past the turnoff twice since arriving in Pine Ridge without registering what it was.
It wasn't far from Frank's.
She scrolled on. NorthStar—the group’s moderator and overall mentor—had posted as well: Who owned the campground before?
