Joe Victim: A Thriller

The woman nods slowly, a sad look on her face, then holds out her hand. “My name is Fiona Hayward,” she says.

“Stella,” Melissa says, simply because it’s the name she decided to use on the way over here. She takes the woman’s hand. It’s warm. “Your husband—is he why you’re here?”

“He was murdered nearly a month ago,” Fiona says, and her voice catches a little and her tears well up a little. “At home. Some madman followed him home and stabbed him.”

“I’m sorry,” Melissa says.

“Everybody is,” Fiona says. “At least they got the guy. And you?”

“My sister,” she says. “She was murdered.”

“I’m sorry,” Fiona says.

“Everybody is,” Melissa says, then smiles at the woman who smiles back and nods. “It was a long time ago,” Melissa adds, remembering her sister, the funeral, the toll it took on her family.

“This is my first time here,” Fiona says. “I don’t know anybody, and I feel somewhat nervous about being here. I had plenty of friends and family offer to come with me, but, well, I wanted to come alone. I can’t explain why that is, really. Truth is I didn’t even think I would come along, but, well,” she says, then gives a small nervous laugh, “here I am.”

“My first time too,” Melissa says, trying to think of a way to free herself from this conversation. She thinks about the gun in her pregnancy suit. She draws comfort from it.

“Do you mind if . . . if I sit with you?”

Yep. She thinks about taking that gun out. “That would be nice,” she says.

People are starting to fill the seats. Some are carrying coffee. Some drag their seats a little closer together. When everybody is seated a man in his mid to late fifties goes around picking up the empty chairs and moving them beyond the circle, others dragging their seats forward to close the gaps. He has a few days’ worth of stubble and a pair of designer glasses and expensive shoes. Attractive, with good taste, gray hair—but only in the temples, the rest of it dark brown. Everybody keeps chatting among themselves until Designer Glasses takes a seat then everybody goes quiet. Melissa can’t take her eyes off him.

“Thank you again for coming along,” he says, his voice is deep and, in other circumstances, probably seductive. Melissa likes him. “I see there are a few new faces in the crowd,” he says, “and I hope the rest of us can offer you some support and companionship, and some hope too. We’re all here out of tragedy. We’re all here because we faced an incredible ugliness. For those who don’t know me, my name is Raphael.” He smiles. “My mother was an art scholar,” he adds, “hence the name,” as if Melissa should care, “and my daughter was a murder victim,” he says, “hence why I’m here.”

He delivers the line with the casualness of somebody who’s said it a hundred times.

“This support group,” he says, “was created from loss. My daughter’s name was Angela, and she was killed last year by Joe Middleton,” he says. “He took away a daughter, he took away a wife, and he took away a mother. A few of you are here because of him, and others are here because of similar men to Joe, or similar women,” he says, and there’s a moment where Melissa thinks everybody in the room is going to turn toward her, but of course that doesn’t happen. “I’m a full-time grief counselor,” he adds. “I’ve been helping people for nearly thirty years, and yet when I lost my daughter I could do nothing to help myself until I realized I needed to be with others like me. So we’re all here to help each other,” he says, smiling as he looks from face to face, spending an extra second on Melissa because there’s more of her to take in. “We’re not here to make the pain go away, because nothing can do that. We’re here to share it, to understand it. We’re here because we need to be.”

Melissa has to suppress a yawn as she looks around the room at the faces. She didn’t have time for a nap and the best she can hope for is that this won’t take long. She’s so tired she could sleep for the next twenty-four hours. Out of all these people, though, somebody will help her. She just has to invest an hour. Or however long it is these meetings go. Talking about your pain doesn’t make it go away. When her sister was killed she had to talk to a shrink every week for a year and it didn’t help an iota. All the shrink kept doing was looking at her legs.

Everybody is staring at Raphael. Lots of warm bodies for her to choose from, and she doesn’t doubt one of them has to be angry enough at Joe to shoot him.

The trick is to figure out who.





Chapter Fifteen