Lawrence Lease
Bio
Alaska born and bred, Washington DC is my home. I'm also a freelance writer. Love politics and history.
Achievements (1)
Stories (303)
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The Third Floor Stays Warm
The thermostat in Apartment 3B had read 91 degrees for six weeks. It was not an aggressive heat. It didn’t press against the skin or suffocate the air. It existed the way a number exists on paper—quietly, insistently, without asking permission.
By Lawrence Lease13 days ago in Fiction
SWAT Raid Near Nancy Guthrie’s Home Leads to Three Detentions
Three individuals were detained late Friday night after a coordinated SWAT operation unfolded in a Tucson neighborhood just miles from the home of missing 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie, marking one of the most significant developments in the investigation since her disappearance nearly two weeks ago.
By Lawrence Lease13 days ago in Criminal
The Queue That Never Ends
The first number you are given is not yours. It belongs to the system. You learn this early, though no one explains it outright. The number arrives without ceremony. It appears on a printed card, on a digital dashboard, in the corner of your emails. It follows you across departments, across offices, across years. It outlives addresses, jobs, relationships.
By Lawrence Lease14 days ago in Humans
The Third Knock
Every year on the night they met, Mara and Julian knocked three times on a stranger’s door. They did not speak about why three. They did not remember deciding it. The number had arrived the way habits sometimes do—half joke, half dare—then calcified into something that felt older than both of them.
By Lawrence Lease15 days ago in Fiction
The Long Search: What the Evidence, the Video, and the Neighborhood Really Tell Us
If you’ve been following the Nancy Guthrie case, it can start to feel like law enforcement is circling the same ground again and again. Search teams in the same desert. Agents back in the same neighborhood. That same Ring camera footage replayed from every possible angle. From the outside, it can look repetitive, even aimless.
By Lawrence Lease15 days ago in Criminal
The Moment Before You Finally Move
The first sign wasn’t a sound. It was the way the light behaved. Mara noticed it while she stood in her kitchen with the faucet running too long, her hands held under the stream like she could rinse off a thought. The morning should have been clean and ordinary—gray Dallas daylight, thin and patient, the neighbor’s sprinkler ticking somewhere outside—but the sunlight coming through the blinds didn’t land right. It didn’t stripe the counter in neat bars. It hovered, softened, like it was deciding whether to commit.
By Lawrence Lease15 days ago in Fiction
