The Podcast

Chapter 10

Wednesday Afternoon

She's poised in front of him, the room small and dark, her expression unreadable. She's her thumbnail extruded, the likeness unerring. Doesn't everyone in LA never quite look like their photos? But here she is exactly as Lucas had seen her online: haunting gray-blue eyes, wide pastel pink lips set in a straight line, impossibly clear alabaster skin, her dark hair pulled back away from her face. She was beautiful, like something made of porcelain. She could stand perfectly still to be admired, or shatter dangerously into shards.

Before Sumner can open her mouth to respond, her agent, Akari Zimmerman, wedges her comically petite 5'1" frame into the small entry space of the recording room. Akari looks dwarfed next to Lucas, her botoxed face immune to the disgruntled frown lines she's feeling as she tries to position herself between Lucas and Sumner.

"Excuse me for the tenth time, if you want to talk to Sumner, you can follow our talent contact protocol, work with legal, as I was trying to explain a moment ago, and coordinate an interview through me." Akari's voice takes on her no nonsense icy tone. Lucas' expression turns impossibly darker as his gaze shifts between Akari and Sumner.

"Wait, no bullshit, is this a stunt?" Everyone whips their heads in Benny's direction as his voice bellows out in the hallway. "Are we recording some new TikTok trend, getting questioned by the police? Because I swear to God, Sumner, you're a marketing genius—"

"Stop talking." Lucas turns his head slightly, holding up a large muscular hand, interrupting Benny into unprecedented silence.

Lucas spent yesterday evening and the early hours of dawn painstakingly listening to and rewinding Sumner's hypnotic voice, resenting the seduction she brought to the medium. It wasn't in-your-face sex, but something more subtle, more powerful in the way it built and crescendoed throughout the episode. The pleasurable pull of her voice. It struck Lucas how calculated it all felt, the intentional cliffhangers studded with sixty second ads that bookmarked the actual deaths of real people. Two UCLA students to be exact. Exactly 25 years to the day before Carolyn Vinson and George Schiff were found dead. A near one-for-one replica. Anything but a coincidence.

Lucas smoked four cigarettes while listening to the thirty-two minute episode twice, back-to-back. He'd felt the jittery thrill of too much nicotine, knowing he'd make himself sick with it that night. An all-or-nothing kind of guy. The buzz only intensified as it mixed with the high of being onto something.

He arrived home after his drive, a modest two-bedroom bungalow just minutes from the Santa Clara River. Anything nicer would make him uncomfortable after years of sharing barracks with twelve other soldiers. His all-black German Shepherd greeted him excitedly, sniffing the fresh cigarette smoke on his clothes with the voracity of his drug detection days. Two retired military bachelors.

As Lucas toed off his black leather combat boots and put on a fresh pot of coffee, he played the episode again. With Sumner's voice flowing through his phone's speaker, Lucas pulled his whiskey leather Chesterfield sofa away from the living room wall. He created a space of about four feet. Index cards in hand, using his thigh as a writing surface, he quickly jotted down the most critical details mapping the recent UCLA murders to the 1997 case, a pushpin between his front teeth as he made quick work of decorating the wall.

Both sets of murders are double homicides near UCLA's campus involving a female victim (a junior Pi Beta Phi sorority sister) and a male victim (female victim's boyfriend, also a junior).

Both sets of murders occurred on February 6th, one in 1997 and the other in 2022.

Both sets of murders involve the female victim being found dead inside her car, no obvious cause of death apparent, and the male victim being found dead inside his apartment, by a blunt force blow to the back of the head.