17

“They think it’s the work of a serial killer.” Steven sighed, his breath clipped with static as it filtered down the phone line.

“They?”

“Just gossip right now. The police are refusing to confirm it, but that’s two murders.”

“But the young girl was just murdered,” Abi reminded him. “Did he rush off and kill someone else straight away? Did he do it? Maybe it was like a murder-suicide thing.”

“That’s one of the rumors. But the word on the street is that he was killed first.”

“The word on the street?”

“Okay, you got me, I mean Facebook. I just wanted to sound like less of a boomer.” Abi could practically hear Steven smiling through the phone, and the image brought a smile to her own face. “He was found by a neighbor this morning. Could have been killed a day or two earlier.”

“Jesus,” Abi said. “But it could still be a coincidence.”

“Massive coincidence for a small town.”

“But a coincidence just the same. This is a crappy town full of crappy people.”

“Weren’t you born and raised here?”

Abi laughed. “Maybe I’m the exception.”

“Fair enough,” Steven said. “The simple fact is, and I don’t mean to make you paranoid here, but you could be living next to Ted Bundy.”

“Nah,” Abi said, dismissively. “Robert’s not attractive or charming enough to be Ted Bundy.”

“Controversial statement, but I see where you’re coming from. In any case, you should keep an eye out for him.”

“You think I should phone the police?” Abi wondered. “I just—I don’t think they’ll listen, not after last time.”

“I don’t think so either. You don’t really have anything to go off. There is a tip line and you could probably give his name, but so what? A friend of mine used to work in law enforcement. He told me that whenever a case gets lots of media attention, everyone and their dog calls to offer their support and none of them have anything helpful to say.” He paused, seemingly deep in thought. “I have a better idea.”

“What’s that?”

“I think we should go out for lunch and talk it over. Do some sleuthing. Preferably over a coffee and a slice of cake.”

Abi smiled. Despite everything that had happened over the last few days, despite fearing that her conversation last night had been overhead by her next-door neighbor, she had slept well for the first time in weeks. She went to bed with a smile on her face and awoke in great spirits. Steven had sent her a message to tell her how great the night had been, how much fun he’d had, and how he wanted to see her again. As soon as she confirmed, he phoned her. His voice had done more to lift her mood than her morning dose of caffeine.

“It’s a deal.”

Martha was waiting for her when she hung up the phone, a stern look in her aging eyes, her arms folded across her chest.

“Who are you talking to?”

“A friend,” Abi said, taken aback by her grandmother’s quizzical stare. “What’s the problem?”

“Did you bring him here last night?”

Abi nodded, suddenly realizing what the issue was and predicting exactly what was to come.

“And why didn’t you introduce us?” Martha unfolded her arms, pulled out a chair at the breakfast table, and sat down, her eyes fixed on the granddaughter. “I would have liked to meet him. Size him up. See if he’s good enough for you; if he’s funny, charming, handsome. If he has a nice ass.”

“That’s why,” Abi said. “Because I don’t want you grabbing my boyfriend’s ass.”

Martha’s jaw dropped open; Abi immediately realized her mistake.

“Your boyfriend?” Martha had an unmistakable glint in her eye. “Well, that’s unexpected. This relationship’s moving faster than my bowels after a curry. Let’s hope it’s not—”

“—Just as messy,” Abi finished. “Yes, let’s not. And what did I tell you about scat imagery at the breakfast table?” She shook her head. “Firstly, you were asleep. Secondly, I only met the guy yesterday. I didn’t want you scaring him away with your suggestive questions and talk of penises, asses, and bowels.”

“You only met him yesterday and already he’s your boyfriend?” Martha wondered, eyebrows raised. “And he came around to the house? Where did you meet him and where can I sign up?”

Abi refused to answer her gran’s questions. She got out of the chair, planted a kiss on her forehead, and made for the bathroom. “I have to leave. I’m meeting … someone for coffee and I need to get ready.”

“Someone? It’s him, right? Is it him? Where are you going—is it a sex thing? Can I come?”

“Gran!”

“Sorry.”

Abi’s morning improved with every passing moment. After checking her messages, she discovered she had been paid and didn’t have a lot of work. As a freelancer, a lack of work was usually a bad sign, but she was welcome for the break and knew the work would come when she needed it. She also felt bright and refreshed, despite waking with a mild hangover.

The night had ended with a kiss and a hug from Steven, followed by her gushing over how much fun she’d had and how she wanted to do it again. Initially, it felt like she’d ruined the night and had been too clingy and too forward, but those feelings disappeared when he reciprocated and expressed even more delight and willingness.

The shower invigorated her and there was a song on her lips as she changed into a fresh set of clothes, kissed her grandmother, and then left the house. She was in her own world, her bright smile a facade that hid a feeling of pure ecstasy, a feeling she wasn’t accustomed to. She was in such a good mood, so blinded by her happiness, that she didn’t check the peephole before she left the house. If she had, she would have seen Robert standing at the end of her driveway, waiting expectantly for her.

Abi’s bright morning quickly darkened.

“Oh, hello Abi,” Robert said. A smile slithered onto his face; it looked fake, ominous, evil. He was standing just a few feet in front of her. “Fancy seeing you here. We should stop meeting like this!” he snorted and then fell silent, seemingly embarrassed by the outburst.

Abi offered a meek smile in reply, her hands on her phone, ready to be used as a weapon or a warning. She briefly thought about pretending that it had rung and pressing it to her ear, but she doubted she could pull it off and her fear kept her rigid and unable to think on her feet.

“I’ve been hoping to run into you, actually,” Robert said. His face hardened, the fake smile faded. The veil was ripped away. “I think we need to have a chat.”

Abi’s heart was racing. Her body didn’t feel like her own; her ears rang. She was on the brink of a panic attack. “Re-really?”

He nodded, looked down at his feet and then slowly brought his attention back to her. “I know what you’re doing.”

Abi instinctively looked at her phone and quickly opened the phone book before turning back to Robert. She visualized the app, dialed 999 without looking, and then waited, her thumb hovering over the call button. “Wh-what do you mean?”

Robert seemed confused initially, his gaze locked on hers. Then he looked away again and began twiddling his thumbs like a scolded schoolboy. “I know you’re avoiding me,” he explained. “I know you’re not really interested.”

The words didn’t filter through initially. Abi was a split second from hitting the call button when she realized what he was saying.

“And I’m okay with that, I really am.” His eyes met hers again. Abi realized that what she had assumed to be a fake deceptive smile was actually anxiety. He was just as scared, just as anxious as she was. “I mean, I like you. I thought we had a good time. I know it wasn’t the best first date and I’m okay with that. But … you don’t have to avoid me.”

“I wasn’t—”

“It’s okay,” he said. “I would have probably done the same. It’s fine, honestly. But maybe we can be friends?”

She didn’t answer him straight away because she still didn’t believe him, didn’t trust everything that he said. He had spied on her and had possibly taken pictures of her. He wasn’t the innocent, harmless gentleman he portrayed. But at that moment, she felt like there was a chance she had made a mistake, that he was just a helpful, hopeless guy who felt embarrassed by their awkward first date.

“Of course.” She wore her best smile and slipped her phone into her pocket. “I’d like that.”

“Great.” He seemed genuinely pleased.

She peeled back her sleeve and gave a cursory glance at the bangles on her arm, hoping he wouldn’t notice she wasn’t wearing a watch. “But I really have to be somewhere.”

“Of course, no problem. Another time maybe.”

They exchanged a muted smile before Robert headed back toward his house. Abi moved slowly, waiting until he was well out of reach before setting off in the opposite direction.

“Oh!” Robert called to her when he was halfway down his driveway. “You should check me out on Instagram. I love it—I’m kinda addicted. I spend way more time on there than I should, trying to be the next viral sensation like every other mug out there! You know how it is.”

—

“He said what!?” Steven was shocked, just as shocked as Abi had been and for the same reason.

Abi nodded. “Check me out on Instagram,” she mimicked. “I mean, in any other circumstance, it’s harmless. But he never mentioned it to me on the date and he brings it up after everything that happened with that young girl, after he knows I think he’s the killer? That’s messed up.”

“He definitely knows you think that?”

Abi wrapped her hand tightly around her coffee cup, sighing as the heat burned through the thin cardboard exterior and seared her hand. “He has to.” Her voice trembled. “That window wasn’t open initially. He was spying on us, and he opened it so he could hear us better.”

“Scary, isn’t it?” Steven said somberly, taking a long and slow drink of his coffee as he stared out of the window.

For the briefest moments, Abi considered that she may have been overreacting and that Robert wasn’t the person she suspected him to be. But that comment, and the smug, knowing expression on his face when he said it, instantly confirmed her suspicions.

She had arranged to meet Steven in a small café, away from the main street where camera crews still gathered and locals tried their best to get their faces on TV. Steven had been waiting for her with a comforting embrace and a hot cup of coffee—again, he ordered for her, and again, she didn’t mind.

A young man was on his own behind the counter, a gaunt and solemn expression on his face as he watched a TV fixed to a bracket in the corner of the room and aimlessly wiped the counter with a dry rag. The TV was tuned into a local news program where an equally solemn-faced reporter calmly retraced the steps of the young girl who had been butchered only a couple days earlier.

The reporter reviewed the steps that the young girl had taken on the night of her death. The piece had been filmed at night and was overlaid with voyeuristic imagery to give the viewers the impression that the cameraman was stalking her. His lens fixed on her bare legs as she walked, the sounds of her footsteps amplified. At one point she turned to look over her shoulder and the camera focused on her face and froze while the reporter narrated her own dramatized doom: “If only she knew that the man following her, the seemingly innocuous man who probably looked just like everyone else she had seen on that day, would be her killer.”

The local news networks and websites had been running around-the-clock coverage of the murder, uncovering every detail and doing all they could to prolong the report and squeeze as much news out of it as possible. They had spoken with family members and friends, had interviewed employers; they had even tracked down some of the people who followed her on social media, one of which gladly gave an hour-long interview, even though he had never met her and lived a hundred miles away.

Once they had covered everything there was to cover, they began dramatizing it, adding their own spin, reaching their own conclusions, and treating law enforcement’s ambiguity as a license to bullshit.

As the makeshift-victim returned home and opened the door, the cameraman caught up with her. The camera was thrust in her face, capturing her in close-up as her mouth opened wide to scream. The image froze again, and the local reporter playing the role of the victim spoke: “She posted an update to her followers and then began her night of terror. She was mocked, tortured, terrorized, and eventually died in the apparent safety of her own home.”

Two teen girls watched the news piece closely, absolute horror in their eyes. They struggled to even break a smile and their red, puffy eyes indicated they had spent the better part of the morning in tears. They clearly knew or knew of her, but in a small town like this, and with the media going crazy, everyone would be claiming to have some connection to the girl or the all-but-forgotten man—the newly discovered murder victim—who wasn’t attractive, young, or newsworthy enough to warrant as much attention.

The town hadn’t experienced anything worse than occasional antisocial behavior and idle gossip, but it was now in the grip of what the media were convinced was a serial killer.

Abi swallowed thickly at the thought, pulling her attention away from the two girls, whose eyes were still fixed to the screen, and back to the TV. As if to confirm her thoughts, the focus had now switched to the other murder. The reporter was standing outside a dilapidated apartment on the edge of town, an area popular with drug addicts.

Abi watched intently as the reporter spoke. “A haven for addicts and criminals. Home to the hopeless, the helpless, and the most depraved.” The ground floor flat behind her had been sealed with police tape. The doors and windows had been sealed up.

The reporter continued to layer the drama on thick. The area was indeed one of the worst in town, but it was a victim of extreme poverty and bad luck and wasn’t the portal to hell that she made it out to be. It wasn’t an unruly ghetto in the middle of war-torn Somalia. At best, it was PG-13 depravity, a far cry from the worst neighborhoods in the biggest cities; it was home to graffiti, antisocial behavior, and underage drinking, not shootings, drug running, and gang rape.

“Crazy, isn’t it?” Steven said, his eyes also on the TV. “This used to be a quiet town.”

“It still is,” Abi said. “Just because we have a crazy bastard on the loose doesn’t change that.”

Steven cleared his throat and fell silent. When Abi turned to him, she saw that his eyebrows were raised and there was a shocked expression on his face.

“What?”

“Did you just swear, Abi Ansell?”

“Did I? It must have slipped out.”

“Well, I mean—I don’t know what to think. I thought I was spending time with a sweet, wholesome, innocent young woman and now … my mother was right, you don’t know who you’re meeting on these online dating sites.”

Abi sniggered. “Sorry.”

He waved his hand dismissively, grinning. “Don’t worry, I think I actually like this side of you. And if what you’ve said about your grandmother is true, it only makes sense. It has to rub off on you.”

“I suppose.”

“And if you one day turn into an old, bitter, angry lady who swears a lot and has a catalog of catchphrases, I won’t mind. In fact, it kinda turns me on.”

“The idea of me turning into my grandmother turns you on?”

“Yes … I see how that might have sounded.”

They both laughed. For a moment, their eyes locked, but Abi quickly pulled her gaze away, feeling an unexpected twinge of embarrassment. “So, your mother doesn’t like online dating sites?” she said.

“God no.”

“Is she still alive, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“No,” Steven replied. “She was murdered by a guy she met on Plenty of Fish.”

Abi’s jaw dropped open, but Steven quickly jumped in—

“Only joking. It was cancer. Much less funny, and not much of a punchline.”

It was his time to break eye contact. He turned his attention to the window as an elderly couple walked by, arm in arm, each supported by a cane, stuttering methodically as one.

“Way to lower the tone,” Abi said eventually.

The comment seemed to bring Steven back into the conversation, he offered a short, sharp laugh, shrugged, and then focused his attention back on her, his elbows resting on the table, his right hand supporting his head. “So, tell me, what do you think about this serial killer business? If it is Robert, what’s his game?”

Abi shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, killing the girl makes sense. I mean, it’s not normal, and it’s definitely not justified. Unless she was a bitch—” She laughed and then stopped herself. “I’m sorry, that was in bad taste.”

Steven’s eyebrows raised again, a look of surprise, shock, and one that he expressed often. It was an expression that Abi liked—it animated his entire face, adding wrinkles to his forehead, life to his eyes.

“Forget I said that,” Abi said, eliciting a smile from Steven. “What I mean is, men like Robert, assuming he is the killer, target women like that all the time, right?”

“Of course.”

“I’m no expert, but I’m a writer, and I think we’re all secretly a little obsessed with serial killers.”

“Not just writers. I’ve gone down many Wikipedia serial killer rabbit holes. I don’t mean to sound creepy, but a couple years ago, I discovered a page that listed all historic serial killers by their victim counts and notoriety, with individual pages on each. That was like the holy grail for me and pretty much kept me occupied for weeks.”

“Really?”

Steven nodded. “And don’t look so surprised, you started it.”

“Yes, but I’m a mild-mannered, innately anxious woman. You’re a charming, handsome, thirtysomething man. Throw some childhood abuse into the mix and you’re the prime candidate.”

“Little harsh, but you called me handsome and charming, so I’m going to let that one slide.” He grinned from ear to ear and Abi found herself admiring his expression once more, from the way his smile exposed his gleaming white teeth, to his unblinking, trusting stare.

“So, the girl makes sense, right?” Abi said. “I mean, they didn’t say anything about sexual assault, but even if that didn’t happen, he still humiliated her. He recorded her murder, posted it to everyone, and no doubt rejoiced in watching as her once-gleaming reputation was steadily ruined and her legacy went from a drop-dead gorgeous supermodel to … well, to a corpse.”

“Shit, when you put it like that.”

“The man—the other victim—doesn’t make sense.”

“Maybe he’s bisexual, gets a kick out of humiliating both sexes.”

“I saw images of the guy. I read the stories on news sites. They weren’t as sympathetic to him as they have been to this girl. Trust me, if it was only a sexual thing then he has zero taste and was scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

Steven shrugged, his attention back on the window as a couple of teenagers rode by on bicycles, their laughter cutting through the relative silence of the café. “You don’t think it is a serial killer, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“They both lived alone. They both died in their own homes. It’s a very small town. Apparently, the methods were a little different, but it has to be, right?”

Abi shrugged, not wanting or willing to face the truth.

“From what you told me about Robert,” Steven continued. “He sounds a little awkward. Weird. Maybe … maybe …” He seemed to temporarily disappear in thought, staring absently into the middle distance. “Maybe he’s humiliating people who humiliated him. Maybe it has nothing to do with sex or pleasure, maybe he’s not a sexual sadist and just wants to hurt those who hurt him.”

“That’s a lot of maybes.”

Steven nodded but looked very serious, very concerned. “You know what that means if it’s true, right?”

Abi mirrored his concerned. “I humiliated him by rejecting him and now he wants to kill me?”

“Pretty much.”

“If you’re trying to make me feel better, you’ve failed.”