Disturbance by Jan Burke

small apartment in an old building not far from downtown. Had a job as a cook at a nearby restaurant, had applied for college.
    Morrissey didn’t answer a knock on his apartment door, and his landlady said she hadn’t seen him for a while; neighbors said the same. They tried calling him—it was a cell phone number and went to voice mail. When police checked at the restaurant where he worked, the manager—happy to do some venting—said that Cade hadn’t shown up for work for several weeks, so he was fired. But if they found him, the manager said, his last paycheck was waiting for him.
    At that point, it didn’t take much to get a warrant.
    What they discovered, on entering the premises, was that someone had been searching before them. No sign of Cade Morrissey himself, but his toothbrush, razor, and other personalitems, including a supply of insulin in the refrigerator, were still in the apartment. An empty suitcase was in the closet. A desk, however, that had once held a laptop computer and a router now held just a router. The drawers of the desk had been pulled out, their contents strewn on the floor.
    The cell phone company cooperated with the police, and with GPS tracking, they followed its signal to the same industrial area where Marilyn Foster had been found. In an abandoned cannery, they came across an odd sight: a pristine white home freezer unit sitting unplugged in the center of the concrete floor of a large room, surrounded by rusting machinery. The freezer was padlocked.
    Vince called the cell phone again.
    They heard muted ringing from within the freezer and hurriedly broke the lock off.
    Cade Morrissey’s moth-decorated body had already thawed.

SIXTEEN
    I tried to console myself with the thought that if I hadn’t talked to Reed, Cade Morrissey might have remained missing, left in an unplugged freezer to rot. I told myself that the investigation had been aided by my work. It didn’t make me feel any better.
    I sold two freelance stories about him, telling myself that I was helping to bring him some justice. By writing about his life, I was letting others know who he was, showing that he was more than a decorated corpse in a sensational murder—he had been an individual, there were people who loved him. And I still felt that the checks for those stories were forty pieces of silver marked up for inflation.
    The backlog in the crime lab’s DNA section—they were hard-pressed to have tests done in time for trials—meant that it would be weeks if not longer before we knew if there was indeed a biological connection between Nick Parrish and Cade Morrissey (in this situation, I could not bring myself to use the words “father-son relationship”). The director of the lab pointed out that Parrish, in prison, could not have killed Cade Morrissey, so looking for a connection was not evidence from his killer, it was more a matter of curiosity—they might get around to it at some point.
    The police investigation seemed focused in three areas—trying to learn more about the bloggers who called themselves “the Moths,” tracking down people who knew Cade, and trying to identify the woman who had been found in the trunk of Marilyn Foster’s car.
    I sold another piece freelance—to a magazine that specializes in municipal government issues, on the changes already being felt in Las Piernas’s city hall now that the paper wasn’t around to keep an eye on it.
    At that point, I was back to wondering if I should face facts and give up on being a reporter. I was rescued from dismal reflections about what other work I might be suited for when I got a job offer: a low-paying gig at a local radio station. The person who made the offer was Ethan.
    To my surprise, Ethan had talked the town’s struggling public radio station, KCLP, into letting him run an experiment. He had done his homework, discovered the weakest show in the station’s lineup, and then shown up in the manager’s office, underwriters in hand, with