I BLINKED, UNSURE OF what I had just watched. But it took only a second for a hearty laugh to slip out between my dry lips, nearly shaking the inside of the compact rental.
“Holy shit,” I yelled, slapping the wheel.
It was pure gold. I imagined this footage fitting into the storyboard that suddenly filled my mind. I imagined a snippet, Jasper lifting the hood off his head and staring up at the camera, his eyes the devil’s black. That shot would be the perfect ending to a teaser reel.
“Fucking gold!”
Still nearly out of my head with excitement, I caught sight of the time: five thirty AM. I blinked again, my eyes suddenly burning with exhaustion.
“No way,” I muttered to myself.
Ripping the USB out, I tossed the laptop onto the passenger seat. With a final look at my new treasure, I stuffed it into my front pocket. Then I drove like a madman. I had to be at the prison by nine.
I’d come directly from Jasper’s house. Sitting in the waiting area at the prison, I slapped my knee, still nursing a simmering euphoria. The footage I’d shot just kept repeating in my head.
“Fucking gold,” I muttered.
“Excuse me?” someone asked.
Startled, I looked up to see a prison official, someone I’d never met before. He was tall, with a straight back and a shock of white hair atop his head. When he spoke, his voice had the timbre of a radio announcer.
“Hello, Mr. Snyder. We’ve been expecting you.”
“Um, hi,” I said. “Is it time to go back?”
“Of course,” the man said.
I groaned as I rose to my feet. The man watched me with a thin half smile lifting a corner of his mouth.
“You look tired.”
I scoffed. “You could say that.”
“Well, Jasper is waiting to see you.”
I frowned, thinking about what the Halo Killer had told me on the phone hours earlier.
“Jasper, huh? You’re on a first-name basis, then?”
The man laughed. “I’m sorry. I’ve just recently started working here and I’ve forgotten the necessary formalities. Inmate Ross-Johnson is ready to see you now.”
When I finally got to the actual visiting area, Jasper wasn’t there waiting for me. Before I could even question the old man, he was gone too. Only a guard stood on my side of the viewing room glass, staring straight ahead.
“Does it matter which booth I take?” I asked.
“No, sir,” the guard said flatly.
I took a seat. Within a minute my camera operator, Jessica, entered, carrying her equipment.
“Sorry, my train ran a little late.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “You can set up right behind me.” I turned back to the guard. “That’s okay, right?”
“Yes, sir,” he replied.
I watched him for a second, once again remembering my call with Jasper earlier that morning.
“Hey, what time is lights-out, anyway?”
The guard looked at me then. “Here?”
“Yeah.”
“Twenty-one hundred, sir.”
“So, inmates can’t make a call at—”
The sound of chair legs scraping on the floor interrupted me midquestion. I turned and found Jasper sitting across from me, his legs tightly crossed and a cloying smile lifting his razor-thin lips.
“Scare you?” he asked in that voice of his.
“Sorry,” I said, and a yawn slipped out.
Jasper leaned forward. “Theodore, are you feeling well?”
I blinked. “Excuse me?”
“Did you find my safe?” he asked. “Did you watch the footage?”
“Of course I did,” I said. “That’s why I—”
“Did you notice the date?”
“Yes,” I snapped, but I couldn’t recall it at the moment.
“Did you?” he asked, his head tilting.
“Sure,” I said.
“Excellent,” he said, punctuating the word with one of his excited claps. “Then you noticed that it was the day before my first.”
I could only stare at him as a layer of context built around the security video I’d watched. Jasper had been practicing. Testing his process. Making sure he left no evidence behind. That nod. The smile he gave. He was ready. To start killing.
“Wait a second,” I said, my mind flipping back to what he had just said. “That can’t be right. What about Danny? He was your first, right?”
Jasper blinked. “Who have you been talking to, Theodore?”
I leaned back, taking a deep breath. I even tented my hands. “A friend of your father’s.”
“Martino?” Jasper scoffed. “He’s a fool.”
“Do you think so?” I asked. “I found him to be very heartfelt. And earnest.”
“Like Bender’s sister?”
I recoiled despite my best effort. It was Bender’s sister who’d led me down the rabbit hole. I blamed her for the scandal, 100 percent. Our affair was common knowledge, but nothing else. As far as the reports went, It had been an anonymous source that I had failed to vet. One that led me to conclude that Bender had been falsely accused. Which led to the defamation suit by the sheriff’s department in Tulsa. The Twitter exchange between me and the producer. None of that mattered, though. What hit me was that he shouldn’t have known that.
I took a breath, steadying my nerves. “Jasper, we don’t have time to go into that. All I’m saying is that you were much younger when you … for your first victim. Thirteen or fourteen. Correct?”
“Danny was no victim,” Jasper spat back at me.
“What would you call him?”
“A horrible mistake.”
“How so?” I asked.
“How so? Are you serious?”
I just nodded and waited, trying to regain my composure. Jasper’s eyes nearly cut right through mine. But I held my ground. I let him make the next move.
Jasper shook his head slowly. Then he looked past me. Maybe at the camera; I couldn’t be sure.
“It wasn’t supposed to happen. But I had read some books and looked up a number of articles. I just assumed that it would be boys. Because of my father, maybe. I just overthought it. When it happened—when I … chose … Danny—I knew it wasn’t right. It was all wrong. I felt no relief. No, the voice just got angry. It yelled at me. Like she did.
“So, Danny isn’t real. He’s not part of this, Theodore. You need to understand that, or you won’t understand anything else. She was the first one. I knew it the minute I saw her on the beach.” His head shook slowly. “And none of my preparations mattered. Not that time.”
When he mentioned seeing her on the beach, my heart thumped against my chest. I grabbed the edge of the table between us.
“Are you talking about the woman on the beach, from that first story you told me?”
“No,” Jasper said, frustrated. “Please, listen to me. I’m talking about the first one.”
My thoughts spun. “She was on the beach too. Jane Doe—or, I mean, Abbie Henshaw? The Miracle Baby’s mother?”
“Yes! Precisely. I believe that was her name. Can I continue? It happened right after I learned my father had passed.”
ACT ONE/SCENE 17
INT. DOCTOR’S OFFICE—DAY
We see an entirely new side of the Halo Killer. As Dr. Jasper Ross-Johnson, he sits behind an immaculately clean desk. Over his perfectly pressed shirt and tie, he wears the white coat of a doctor, a healer. The light from his lamp sparkles off his frighteningly smooth skin. The phone rings. It is a call from his mother.
As he sat behind his desk, waiting for his first patient of the day, Jasper had no idea it would begin later that night. He had been busy, perfecting his trade. Recording his practice. But he did not feel ready. In his studies, he still left faint traces of evidence behind, particularly on fabric surfaces. Such things would get him caught. Thrown behind bars. And Jasper knew he could never abide captivity.
In the moment, he wasn’t even thinking about it. Not directly, at least. The hunger was always there, but at work he could keep it below the surface and focus his attention on the necessary skills: Lift the corners of your mouth into a smile. Don’t forget your brows. Make eye contact for three seconds, no more. Laugh and glance out the window. Comment on the weather.
Jarringly, his phone rang. He snatched it up.
“Yes.”
“Dr. Ross-Johnson,” the nurse/receptionist said, her tone nervous. “Um, there’s a woman on the phone. She says she’s your mother?”
His eyes widened when he heard that. The movement was minute, barely perceptible. Yet his reaction made him angry, for it was unpracticed.
“Put her through, please. Thank you,” he said, with purposeful inflection.
The line clicked. He let out a silent breath before she spoke.
“Hello, Jasper.”
“Mother,” he said, looking out the window at a cardinal sitting on the branch of a pine tree.
“I’m fine,” she snapped. “Thanks so much for asking.”
“How are you?” he asked, his eyes unblinking.
She laughed. It was a bitter sound, one he had not heard in a wonderfully long time.
“Your father is dead.”
She dropped the news like the strike of a weapon. Jasper did not flinch. Nor did he respond.
“Did you hear me?”
“I did,” he said.
“The funeral is on Sunday. At the church on Rehoboth Avenue … of course.”
“Are you attending?” he asked.
“Of course not.”
“I can buy you a plane ticket.”
She laughed again. “No, thank you.”
“Okay.”
The line remained silent for a few seconds. Jasper could hear his mother’s breathing. In it, he also heard her unspoken words. BE A MAN, Jasper!
“Will you be going?” she asked, as if she could not care less.
“No,” he said.
“No? Are you serious? Whatever he was, he’s your father. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?” She left space for him to answer. When he didn’t, she continued, “I assume I can expect the same from you. I don’t really care, Jasper. You need to understand that.”
“I do, Mother.”
“I do, Mother,” she mocked. “Do you? Do you have any idea what it’s been like? Your father’s … behaviors … were bad enough. But you … Whatever! It doesn’t matter. I felt compelled to tell you. Now I have. Enjoy your life, Dr. Ross-Johnson. You pathetic little …”
Her voice trailed off, muffled by the sound of her hanging up the phone. Jasper laid his receiver gently in the cradle and continued to stare at the blood-red cardinal until it flew off. When it did, his hand seemed to move without permission. Two fingers pinched together where his eyebrows used to be.
Late that night, Jasper moved along the empty beach. The surf ran up the sand to his left, hissing to a stop a few feet from his path before retreating once again. Though he stared straight ahead, south along the coast, he felt utterly alone. As if all the people throughout the world had simply ceased to exist. There was Jasper. And there was this place. Nothing else.
Eventually, he saw the first twinkle of light coming from the windows of a dozen homes that sat atop the dune, overlooking the ocean as if they owned it. At one time, this had been his home. Jasper kept moving as names listed in his head. D’Angelo, Frantz, Cheever, the past owners of each fabulous home. Maybe they were gone, the houses sold to the nouveau riche. Maybe not. In a way, it didn’t matter to Jasper. He wasn’t walking in the present anymore. Since his mother’s phone call, he had slipped through time. Somehow trapped in a past he had no desire to revisit.
He stopped in front of his childhood home. Standing just where the dune slowly rose, he stared up at the behemoth and felt nothing but an icy finger tracing the line of his spine. Then a flash of movement in the shadowed night caught his eyes.
Jasper’s body tensed as he made out the figure of a person, wispy and frail, as it rose from the ground. His hands balled into tight fists as he watched her move. There was something off. Something wounded about her gait. His predatory instinct locked on.
A gull shrieked overhead. He did not flinch. He leaned forward. His lips parted. His mouth watered. And Jasper took that first, silent step. The base of his brain, that part that had remained unchanged throughout the evolution of his species, took control. It evened his breathing. It tensed and loosened his muscles. It drew in every stimulus through his focused senses, every sight, every sound, every smell. Even the feel of the sand under his shoes. It calculated distance. Risk. And most of all, reward.
Closer … closer.…
A part of him remained. A sliver of humanity in the frontal lobe. The truth is, however, even that part of him did not ponder morals or ethics. Love, kindness, empathy—none of that factored into the silent, almost one-sided struggle inside Jasper that night. Instead, his intelligence tried to slow the near unstoppable momentum of his instincts.
“I’m not prepared,” he whispered. “I don’t have the latex. I didn’t shower and lotion. I only shaved once today.”
But his pace did not slow. Instead, he heeded the stronger call. Jasper inched closer and closer to her.
“Patience, practice, purpose.”
Closer … closer!
That drive drowned out all the rest. Time skipped jarringly forward, and it was over. He was panting, looking down at what he had done. At the limbs bent at marionette angles as if playing among the jagged rocks. At the neon-yellow headset hovering like a halo above perfectly lifeless eyes. He was no longer Jasper Ross-Johnson. Instead, he was something else. Something entirely different. And it would be that reality, more than anything else, that he craved more and more, for a very long time. For, on that dark night, the Halo Killer was born.