Gramps, though. He’s got quite the current record. But they are all senior moment things. And there are plenty of people on the Fort Collins Chat Board who think Gramps is a cool, local oddity who should be celebrated. Vinn, Vonn, and Vann have nothing but tattoo stuff. And Belinda has zero—I’m talking zero—results. Not even a picture of her with Vann. And there are lots of pics of Vann.
So what the hell? Right? Why was that lady so furious? And why does this town hate this family so much?
Oh. I forgot Veronica. She’s so mom-ly, so I’m not expecting much, but holy fucking shit. Her name is the actual pot of gold. Not Veronica Shrike. She’s as bright and shiny as the rest of her family. Veronica Vaughn, though…
I make a cup of coffee. Because there are at least a hundred news articles associated with her name. Not just her, either. Rook is… wow. There is only one word for the hate that pops up on the internet for the name Rook Flynn. The smiling, good-natured woman with the bright blue eyes and two little girls named after birds is… infamous.
She leads me down a rabbit hole that turns into a murder investigation where Spencer, Ronin, and Ford got off. On a technicality. But that’s not all. Rook’s maiden name—Walsh—is tied to some federal human trafficking trial whereby the entire FBI field office in Fort Collins is implicated in a long string of abuse, and secrecy, and some strange goings-on with the Federal Witness Protection Program, and eventually agents are put on trial or end up dead.
I pause to blink a few times. What the actual fuck am I looking at here?
I have no clue, but I keep going.
Then, about three hours into this deep dive, I find the name Sasha Cherlin.
Not Sasha Barlow, which is her name now. Not Sasha Aston, which should be her maiden name, since Ashleigh and Ford adopted her.
Sasha Cherlin.
I make another cup of coffee and keep reading. I can’t stop. I click every link. I end up on some conspiracy theory image board called the Chans where they have entire threads dedicated to this Sasha Cherlin name. The words ‘secret shadow government’ pop up, along with a list of assassinations and a fire that took place at a Santa Barbara mansion and killed hundreds of people over a decade ago.
I have to read those words again.
Hundreds of people.
Then these conspiracy nerds tie Sasha Cherlin to some incident out in Kansas where Sasha Aston killed a global drug trafficker her first time out as a newly minted FBI agent.
Could they be the same person, this nerd asks?
There are no pictures of Sasha Cherlin, but there is some fuzzy security footage from that Santa Barbara incident of a small girl—just a shadow really—pointing a gun at another shadow.
That’s all they have in the way of evidence so I’m pretty sure it’s bullshit.
I mean, child assassins? Stupid.
But the longer I look at that footage, and the more I squint my eyes and move back a little, the more I can see Sasha Barlow in that profile.
I close my laptop and sigh. Then go find Vivi and make us lunch.
“Are you even listening to me?”
“What?” I say. Because I wasn’t. At all.
Vivi crosses her arms and makes a face at me. “I’m not going to say it again. You’re not paying attention.”
“I’m sorry, Viv. It’s just… things are happening and I don’t know what to do about them.”
She cocks her head at me, narrowing her eyes. “That’s what I was trying to tell you. You need to call Jeeves.”
“Who?”
“Jeeves. The man who took us up to the donkey place that day I was with Vicious.”
“Wait. What donkey place? You went somewhere else that day besides the AA meeting and the swap meet?”
“Yep.” She pushes some wild blonde hair out of her eyes. “We went to the donkey reunion.”
This makes no sense. “Donkeys have a reunion?”
“No. The people. The people!”
She’s getting frustrated with me and I know I shouldn’t find it cute, but I do. “Calm down, Vivian. I’m not familiar with the donkey people.”
“The family reunion at the campground. Jeeves took us up there and Vicious did tattoos on all the people, I ate a jackalope hotdog, and rode a donkey, and then Jeeves told me the story about the killer jackalopes. But.” She holds up a finger, telling me to hold my commentary. “But the jackalope is really the code word.”
Code word? I just spent the last five hours diving down an internet rabbit hole of crazy about people I went swimming with yesterday and now my six-year-old daughter is telling me about code words? “What the actual freaking hell are you talking about?”
“Yep. Code. You call him and then—Oh!” Her eyes go big. “I almost forgot.”