Chapter 174: What Winston Knows

Chapter 174: What Winston Knows
Winston had been nursing the same beer for forty minutes when the documentary started.
He'd been half reading something on his phone and half watching a cooking show when the channel switched over to a news program and the title card came up.
The Vanishing Four: Inside the Investigation.
He set his phone down.
The documentary was the kind that news channels put together when a story had been running long enough to justify a retrospective but hadn't resolved yet—forty minutes of footage stitched around interviews with people adjacent to the case and b-roll of empty offices and police stations.
It opened with Pixel Ledger. Winston watched his own place of work on television and felt strange about it. The building on a gray day, employees going in and out with the self-conscious awareness of people who knew they were being filmed.
The documentary moved through the four missing people in sequence.
Wyatt first. They used his company headshot, the same one that had been on every news segment since the beginning, and an interview with someone from the board who spoke carefully about his leadership and his vision and didn't say anything that sounded like it came from actually knowing him.
Then Liza. A photo of her at some company event — smiling, the way Liza always smiled. A colleague said she was driven, professional, and a good person to have in your corner.
Winston had liked Liza. He looked at the photo on the screen and thought about her empty desk and looked at his beer.
Then Del. The narrator described her as a college student with no prior connection to Pixel Ledger before her involvement with Oliver Clarke. The documentary used a photo Winston didn't recognize, and she was looking slightly away from the camera with the expression she always had in photos, like she hadn't entirely consented to it.
Then Oliver.
The narrator's tone changed. Winston noticed it before the visuals shifted. The documentary used the same headshot as the others, but then it brought up a second photo, one Winston hadn't seen before, slightly blurry, taken at an angle. Oliver was at what looked like a public event of some kind, younger, and not looking at the camera.
The narrator said, "While the disappearance of Wyatt Parson and Delilah Teller initially led investigators to treat all four as potential victims, the investigation has taken a significant turn. Oliver Clarke has emerged not only as a person of interest but also as the central focus of what authorities now believe may be a much larger and more complex case."
Winston sat forward.
The documentary walked through it carefully. Not everything — there were things Reyes had told him that weren't in here, details that were clearly still being held back. The aliases were described carefully without specifying all of them. The inconsistencies in Oliver's background. A former FBI profiler said something about organized behavior and long-term planning.
A graphic came up on screen. A map. Several states, several pins, lines connecting them.
Winston looked at it. His beer had gone warm. He set it on the coffee table and sat with his elbows on his knees and watched the rest of it without moving.
When it finished, he sat in the quiet for a minute.
Then his phone rang.
Reyes sounded the same at ten-thirty at night as she did at eight in the morning, which Winston was starting to think was less a professional quality and more just how she was built.
"Can you come in?" she said.
"Now?"
"If you can."
"What happened?"
"I'd rather go through it in person. It's significant."
He was in the car eleven minutes later.
The station at night had a different quality from the station during the day. Reyes met him at the front and walked him back without stopping at the desk.
They went to the same room as always. Reyes had a folder and a coffee, and the expression of someone who had received a lot of information in a short amount of time and had organized it but not yet processed it.
"Sit down," she said.
Winston sat.
"Earlier today, investigators executed a search of a property in Taunton." She opened the folder. "A private residence, listed as abandoned, about an hour outside the city. The property was flagged based on financial records connected to one of the aliases."
"Which one?" Winston said.
"The name is Rupert Green." She slid a document across. "The property was purchased four years ago under that name. It's been maintained minimally — utilities kept on, taxes paid, nothing else. No one reported living there. Neighbors described it as a house that was used sometimes and empty the rest of the time."
Winston looked at the document.
"Investigators entered the property this afternoon," Reyes said. "They found evidence of recent occupation. And they found remains."
Winston looked up at her.
"Four sets," she said. "Confirmed within the last several hours." She held his gaze. "Wyatt Parson. Liza McNamara. And two others, male, consistent with the descriptions of individuals connected to Parson."
Winston sat very still.
He thought about Liza's smile in the documentary, the company event photo, and that particular warmth she'd always carried into a room.
He pressed both hands flat on the table.
"She's really gone," he said.
"Yes," Reyes said it quietly.
Winston looked at the document without reading it. He thought about the last time he'd seen Liza, before all of this, and how that was the last version of her he was going to have.
"And Wyatt," he said.
"Confirmed."
"The two others."
"We believe they were with Parson that night, based on what we know of the timeline," Reyes paused. "The property is consistent with what we've been building. It connects directly to the alias and through that to Clarke."
"Rupert Green," Winston said. "How many names does he have?"
"We've confirmed four with reasonable certainty," Reyes said. "There may be others."
Winston sat back. He looked at the ceiling. "He did it there. At that house."
"The evidence suggests that's where the incident occurred, yes."
"Del was there."
"We believe so."
"And he brought her out of there." Winston looked at Reyes. "He took her out of a house where four people were dead and put her in a car and drove to Texas."
"That's the current reconstruction, yes."
Winston thought about the surveillance footage. Del in the gas station, light hair, standing close to Oliver.
"Has this changed anything for the search?" he said.
"It confirms the timeline and the geography," Reyes said. "Texas is the right direction. Presidio is still our best estimate for the crossing point." She looked at him. "We have people positioned. We're monitoring."
Then her phone rang. She picked it up and listened, then asked. "How many?” She paused, then set the phone down and looked at Winston. "They’ve just found two bodies inside a house in a property in rural Texas."
Winston felt his chest tighten. "He killed two more people.”
"It appears so."