Bex wasn’t sure she was breathing. She wasn’t sure her heart was still beating.
Her mouse hovered over the main menu, page titles like “Kills,” “Court,” and “Crimes” magnifying. She knew she should go straight for Forums because she was doing what Detective Schuster had said: she would find her father and trap him. The overzealous “Dangerous Serial Killer Surfaces in Beaufort” headlines would vanish, and maybe, if she was fast enough and smart enough, she could disappear back into her life as Bex Andrews, back into Michael and Denise’s family, back into her plain high school social life at Kill Devil Hills High.
A girl was murdered there after you came, that horrible voice hissed. You’ll never be normal. You’ll never disappear…
Bex didn’t even try to blink back the tears.
“You and me, Bethy girl. We’re special. There ain’t any like us. We stick together. We take care of each other. We’re special, Bethy. You and me.”
Her father’s voice was a smoke-filled whisper in her ear. The memory of her sitting on his knee, his big palm wrapped around her rib cage, was just a slice, a tiny vision.
“I’m helping Detective Schuster,” Bex said, jaws clenched.
But was he really the one who needed help?
Bex knew she should drop another bit of bait, but the page Beginnings caught her eye. She wasn’t sure she had seen it the night before. She clicked and the photo-heavy page loaded slowly. As the connection lagged, the picture came up incrementally, half-inch-thick bars creeping horizontally across the screen. She saw the top of her father’s head first, some caught-forever-on-film breeze casually lifting a few strands of hair that used to be the same color as Bex’s.
The page kept going and she was struck still, staring at a photo of her family—mother, father, daughter—that she never remembered seeing. There was another photo inset, a smaller one of her father and Gran, and finally, the same picture that had sat on the mantel every Christmas. This one had text across the front and a bold, red circle around Bex’s smiling mother with her hands protectively gripping her daughter. Someone had scrawled “Victim zero?” with three big question marks and a typed parenthetical: “(first wife).” The text along the bottom read:
Did our serial have a practice vic or “victim zero” in his own wife? He married nineteen-year old Carrboro, NC, resident Naomi Lee who he met at his job at Joe’s Tires. Lee was pregnant. The couple moved to Raleigh where daughter Beth Anne was born.
Bex’s heart began to thud. She scrolled with the text, and a black-and-white square popped up showing a picture of her parents, younger than she ever remembered, smiling while sitting on the back of a car. In it, her mother held a tiny bouquet against the slight bump at her belly. Bex had never seen the picture, had never known that her mother was nineteen or from Carrboro, or that she herself had been a bump straining against her mother’s lacy, white shift dress the day her parents married. She didn’t know any of this but a stranger with a fake name did. A complete stranger was filling in the gaps in her history, stocking it with pictures, even.
Bex felt sick. She continued to read.
Naomi “abandoned” her family when her daughter was barely six years old. Or did she? She shares a lot of the same physical traits as the Wife Collector victims.
Bex couldn’t read anymore. She slammed the lid of her laptop down, pacing. She tried to turn on the TV, but every channel was running and rerunning what seemed to be the same photo series of her father and the victims. Doe-eyed anchors looked concerned while news reporters peppered the broadcast with general serial killer “facts.” She started to play music but every song seemed to be specifically chosen to make her feel guilty, to remind her that she was no good. She couldn’t be good; she likely shared the blood of a serial killer.
The tiny ribbon of hope inside her, that inkling of thought that maybe he wasn’t guilty, was beaten to a pulp by the websites, the pictures, the reminders that she didn’t really know him at all. That should have made her feel better. It should have made her more resilient, more determined to send him to prison where he belonged. But all it did was turn her into a quivering heap lying on her bedroom floor and feeling hopeless and horrible.
She was through crying and half-asleep when Detective Schuster called.
“I guess you’ve seen the news.”
Bex nodded, then mumbled, “Hard not to.”
“Have you gotten anything from him?”
A sob lodged in her throat and burned at the edges of her eyes. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”