And that is why I won’t pick up the phone and call her right now, no matter how much I want to.
The interviewer in me wants to exploit that vulnerability—wants to push a little harder until she breaks wide open and her secrets start spilling out—but that’s not what the rest of me wants from her. Not after I held her and fucked her and felt her fall apart all around me. I may be a single-minded bastard when it comes to my work, but even I have lines I won’t cross. There is no way in hell I’ll use our sexual connection against her.
Which means I really am totally, one hundred percent screwed.
Fuck.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
Fuck.
The word is my new mantra, and I think it about a million times as I take my drink back to my computer and pull up my files on William Vargas. There isn’t much here yet—I was counting on Veronica to help fill in some of the blanks about this one of Liam Brogan’s aliases. But if she won’t talk to me, I’m going to have to find someone else who will.
Maybe her mother? I wonder as I scroll through the pages of questions I have about this time in Brogan’s life. Melanie Romero is known to have a soft spot for the press. And a definite affection for the spotlight. She is the one who hired him, after all. Even though everything I’ve dug up points to her being a hands-off kind of parent, surely she knows quite a bit about the man she entrusted her young daughter’s safety to for nearly three years. A man who left that post rather abruptly and then, weeks later, started killing girls and young women. And not just any girls and young women—ones who all bore a striking resemblance to her daughter and whose ages all coincided with Veronica’s at the time of the murders.
Admittedly, Melanie doesn’t know any of that and neither does Veronica. No one does, outside of Mitch and me. I’m the one who discovered the Vargas alias and I’m the one who has put the pieces together since. It’s precisely because I do have those pieces that I’m unwilling to push Veronica any farther than I already have.
Not when my suspicions all point to her being Liam Brogan’s first victim.
Just the thought makes me furious, another clue that blurring the lines with sex has shot my objectivity straight to hell. I take another swallow of tequila to dull the rage, then pull up the photos of Alicia Corning, the first documented victim in Brogan’s sixteen-year-long murder spree. She was twelve when she was taken from her solid middle-class neighborhood in Mesa, Arizona. A sixth grader at a local middle school, she’d disappeared when walking home one warm November day—three weeks after Brogan lost his position as bodyguard and nanny for Veronica Romero and shed the identity of William Vargas once and for all.
She was a pretty girl, with golden blond hair and bright, blue eyes. She had clear, porcelain skin, a happy smile and a small smattering of freckles on her nose. She was also—for all intents and purposes—close enough in size and build to Veronica at that time to pass for her from behind.
I look at the pictures provided to the FBI by Alicia’s family for long seconds, then flip to a second file that contains hundreds of public photographs of Veronica through the years. Not for the first time, I pick out one from when she was eleven or twelve and place it up against one of the before pictures of Alicia Corning. The resemblance isn’t perfect but it isn’t just superficial, either, especially when you consider the rest of Vargas’s fifty-four victims.
I save Veronica’s photo to Alicia’s file, then pull up the crime scene photos of Alicia. These will never make the book considering her age when she died—and the fact that I’m not a monster and would never consider making them public even if it was legal—but they’re extremely useful in evaluating Vargas’s psyche considering she was the first kill the FBI attributes to him. He didn’t have his techniques developed yet, didn’t have the set M.O. that would later tie him to so many crimes. In fact, one of the only things that ties Alicia’s murder to the later ones is the red ribbon she was strangled with. A red ribbon that came from the dress she’d been wearing the day she was taken.
Everyone—the local police, the FBI, me—all thought that he’d used that ribbon because it was convenient. And had incorporated it into his M.O. later because of the feelings he associated with his first kill. But now, after seeing that photo in Veronica’s parents’ bedroom, I don’t think that’s the case at all. Instead, I think it was the red ribbon that originally drew his attention to Alicia.