“I’m not going public with my identity.”
She heard the detective sigh into the phone and her resolve started to crumble. She needed to go public for Darla. For all the other girls. For her father, if he really was… She wouldn’t let herself complete the thought. But going public meant going back to her old life, to staring at her shoes and pretending she didn’t hear the whispers.
“Is there any other way?”
“Well, we can create a profile for you on the websites. We’ll be monitoring you the whole time, of course, but we could do all the work and all you’d have to do—”
Is wait, Bex finished in her mind. Like prey.
“I don’t know why he would even visit one of those sites, let alone want to make contact or comment on it or whatever.” Bex couldn’t keep the shudder out of her voice. “They’re heinous.”
“Do you know what a narcissist is?”
“I do.”
“Well”—it sounded like the detective was shrugging his shoulders, talking with his hands—“most serial killers are narcissists. To varying extents, of course. They’re intelligent and they often like to see people admiring their handiwork.”
But my father isn’t a narcissist, Bex wanted to scream. He was good and kind, and he would do anything for her and Gran, anything at all.
“Sometimes you’ll see them taunting the police or the victims’ families. They like to believe they’re smarter than everyone else.”
She had heard the stories of legendary killers who sent coded letters to the police working their cases, joining search parties, walking shoulder to shoulder with their victims’ parents and friends while they had the missing person tucked away in some horrible lair or shallow grave. Her father wasn’t like that.
Was he?
“These people are depraved, Bex. These men and women are sick.”
Women?
That struck the black part deep within Bex’s soul that didn’t question whether or not her father was guilty. It scratched like a clawed hand, fingernails dragging through wood, piercing the back of her neck, whispering with hot, moist breath. It’s him. It’s you. His depravity, his sickness, his narcissism, his need to do this runs in your own veins…
She had seen a movie about a female serial killer once, watching it huddled under the covers while her gran slept in her chair. But it was just a movie, and the killer was a big Hollywood star who had gained a couple of pounds and wore fake teeth to look evil and ugly. She said her lines like a Hollywood starlet would, and they used computer-generated images to show a couple of murder scenes. Two weeks later, that actress was on every television station in fabulous dresses and diamond-dripping chandelier earrings because it had only been a story. The thrum of death that coursed through Bex’s veins couldn’t be shed like the teeth and a couple of extra pounds. Bex’s ugly was in her blood.
But if Schuster was wrong…
If Schuster was wrong and her father was innocent—the word stung more than it should have, an aching reminder of what she did—then he wouldn’t be on the sites at all, would he? Bex tried to quell her guilt, tried to remind herself that she was just a child and couldn’t have known that they’d take what she said and use it against her dad.
And then the anger walloped her and the sound of Schuster’s coaxing voice enraged her. He should have known better. He’d manipulated her, and here he was, doing it again. But no one else had ever talked to her. She was a pariah without Schuster. The emotions wheeled through her—dizzying, frustrating, lonely, painful—when all she ever wanted was to be normal.
“Bex?” Michael knocked on the door frame before slightly nudging open the door. “Ready to take a break from homework? I made lasagna. Well, not so much made as thoroughly heated up.” He grinned at her, a floppy, cockeyed Dad-laughing-at-his-own-joke grin, and Bex knew that the only way to get to normal was to wade through this mess with her real father.
She pressed her fingers over the mouthpiece of her phone and smiled back at Michael. “I’ll be right there.”
? ? ?
“No. No, I couldn’t. I would just die.” Chelsea was shaking her head, her ponytail bobbing against her cheekbones. “I can’t believe you stayed in that house knowing that someone had broken in.”
Bex took a miniscule sip of her coffee and avoided Chelsea’s eyes. “It wasn’t really that big a deal. The cops said it was probably just kids.”
Laney smacked her palms on the table, and both Chelsea and Bex jumped. “Do you hear yourself? The cops are just brushing it off, but our friend was murdered. Shouldn’t they have put up surveillance or put you in protective police custody or something?”