Boris stepped out into the dry desert heat, closed his car door, and entered his small tract house. The retired probation officer then did what he had done nearly every day since Janelle Stone escaped 25 years ago in the year 2000 from the gas station just one lousy hour away from the jail and prison complex where she should have been serving a sentence of no less than 12–15 years.
Ironically, they were not only the same age but also shared the same birthday. He had just turned 66, and therefore, so had Stone—if she was alive. Most people believed she was dead since there were virtually no reported sightings of her, and any idiot knew she couldn’t stay out of trouble for long or survive without her medication. But if she was dead, where was her body?
Her story had been featured many times on various crime shows in the hopes that somebody, somewhere, would help solve the case.
As obsessed with her as ever, so much so that she was the inspiration for him joining the FBI, he had been hunting her down online every chance he got, in case she was alive somewhere. If she was, she was going to do her time, and he’d see to it if it was the last thing he ever did.
He had been running her picture through facial recognition ever since the technology became available. As dumb as Stone was, he was surprised he hadn’t gotten a hit years ago. But that day, facial recognition finally got a match. The image came from a guy’s Facebook page. The young man sat at an outdoor table by some kind of eatery, smiling into the camera. Just behind him and off to the side sat a heavyset older woman with a large round face. Boris could see most of the woman, who sat cross-legged with a neutral expression and droopy jowls. She held a cigarette in one hand—Stone had been known to smoke, too. The background was a bit grainy, so he couldn’t make out much detail. She appeared to have light brown hair pulled back and wore a sleeveless top with shorts. He could see most of one shoe: a tan or light brown closed-toe shoe with a strap across the bridge of the foot.
Excitement rose in his chest, and his heart rate began to speed up. It was her. It just had to be.
The Facebook profile of the young man in the picture indicated he was in his 20s and from the UK. “Lunch in Budva,” said the caption above the photo.
Budva, Boris thought to himself. How convenient, you sick little bitch. Budva was in Montenegro and didn’t have an extradition treaty with the U.S.
Law enforcement showed the picture to Janelle’s ex-husband and sister since her parents were now dead. Neither could swear to it, but both agreed it was likely her.
Using the power of social media, they shared the picture online and asked if anyone knew anything. The man featured in the photo was contacted, but he didn’t remember anything, as he hadn’t been paying attention, according to him. The American authorities also contacted the Montenegrin authorities and asked them to question the workers at the diner to see if they remembered anything, but they didn’t. Other attempts to confirm Janelle’s existence and exact location proved fruitless. Boris believed, however, that if it was Janelle in the photo, she would become more lax and dumber with time. Most fugitives did.
He regularly read comments on articles about Janelle Stone, just in case someone else slipped up for her. No one did, but he found the comments interesting nonetheless. Almost all agreed Janelle needed to be tried and convicted. A few, however, said the same things Janelle herself might have said: she’d already gotten an overly harsh sentence for past offenses, his friend had gotten in her face first, and she hadn’t intended or likely even known she’d killed him. Some pointed out that dozens more people might have been killed had Janelle not reached out to her probation officer and alerted authorities to her whereabouts.
One comment, in particular, stood out:8Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡA9dW4pNmhR
"I worked at the hospital where Janelle Stone was brought a quarter-century ago, and I can say for sure that Janelle was a gullible, naive idiot. The police knew this and took advantage of her. People need to keep in mind that she was and still is a criminal if she’s out there somewhere. She once killed an unborn child and caused a host of other problems. When her ex’s niece awoke from the coma Janelle put her in, she named Janelle as her attacker even though the law couldn’t legally charge Janelle for lack of evidence other than the word of a woman who’d sustained a serious brain injury. No one could prove anything, but I’d bet she was also responsible for killing this woman’s mother. Then there’s the fact that, no matter how much she denied it, it was obvious she had absconded or was trying to when she was kidnapped. It’s horrible what happened to her friend at the time, but that person also had a record, and Janelle wasn’t supposed to associate with anyone like that.
"So after all these lies and crimes—and God knows what else she may have done that no one knew about—a man was still killed. Yes, he approached her first, but it was bullying and taunting, not an attempt to kill her. Janelle may not have intended to kill him or even been aware of it, but she still did, and that in itself should require consequences.
"The only thing I can say in her favor, if you can call it that, is that her probation officer was truly obsessed with her. It wasn’t love or attraction, given Janelle’s horrid appearance, but I think it was something personal. It came out that the guy she killed was his buddy, but the obsession existed before that. Reports say she tried to change probation officers unsuccessfully at one point. So the guy definitely had it in for her. He was at the hospital more than anyone else, insisting he wanted his face to be the first she saw when she woke from her coma. It was like he wanted to torture her with his presence. Even the staff was sometimes annoyed by him. Maybe, like most people, he hated her for being a racist, for killing an unborn child, and for being a suspect in other attacks and deaths.
"Whatever it was, the gullible little idiot caught on in the end. Something must have triggered her escape."
Another year passed of checking facial recognition and plugging various keywords into search engines, and then one day Boris hit paydirt on a website for writers. Some wrote about their lives, others wrote stories, a few under their real names, but most under various usernames. Janelle didn’t state her exact location, but she basically told the story of how she escaped.
Everyone had always wondered—if she was dead, where was her body, and how did she die? If she was alive, where was she, and how was she surviving? He had pages and pages to read through, but it answered all his questions, telling the story of a very brazen escape and a deranged but brilliant doctor.
Janelle used everyone’s real first names except for her own, her ex, and her family. She wrote under the name Kathy Freely. How nice, thought Boris bitterly. Kathy was pretty generic, and Freely was very fitting, wasn’t it?
Too curious and excited to waste time contacting anyone about the blog, he grabbed a cold beer from his refrigerator and sat down to read. “Kathy Freely’s” first entry was written just over a year ago. He began at the beginning and read well into the night.
The first handful of entries were about her stay in the hospital. She was careful not to mention why she had ended up there. She did say that she was given immunity for something in exchange for her testimony and how she had wanted to believe and trust in the justice system but continued to have doubts nagging at her, suggesting she was being bullshitted.
Then she described some of the discussions she'd had with him and others at the hospital, including shoving him off the ward. She recounted most of what he remembered being said during the ride in the police van.
Finally, he got to the part he was dying to read:
“Something was very off, and I knew it. The way they were acting, the things they were saying, their mannerisms, facial expressions... everything. There was absolutely no empathy or compassion whatsoever. There was no way I could deny the lack of professionalism.
I had just been through a tragic ordeal and was still traumatized, yet despite their assurance, I felt like I was in custody and not on my way to a safe place where I could be protected until it was time to provide my share of the testimony. When we made what was supposed to be the second-to-last stop, I could no longer ignore, deny, or shake the feeling.
No matter how hard I tried to tell myself I was just being paranoid due to being lied to in the past by pigs and lawyers, I knew I was bullshitting myself. I knew I could walk into the same damn traps I’d walked into before or set myself free. I just didn’t know I had walloped someone a little harder than I thought at the time—or his connection to Boris. But that’s for later on, though.”
Boris felt his anger growing. That person she'd “walloped” and killed had been his friend, after all.
ns216.73.216.154da2
