Detective Schuster followed Bex as she rode her bike the three blocks to Kill Devil Coffee. He had offered to drive her, even insisted, but she refused to get in his car, intent on making a quick getaway if the need arose. As she rode, her mind was trilling, dropping pieces into place in her memory—the first time she saw Detective Schuster, how he looked at her father’s arraignment. She trusted him, just not enough to get in the car and ride with him.
Bex rode into Kill Devil Coffee following behind the detective’s car. She locked up her bike and steadied herself with a deep breath before pulling open the coffeehouse door. Her heart started to tick again when she saw the detective at the counter. What am I getting myself into?
“Did you want something, ah—”
Bex could tell he was trying to figure out what to call her. She had no inclination to help him. “I’m good, thanks.”
She sat down and Schuster came over with a steaming cup of black coffee. Bex watched him stir in a handful of sugar packs, her tension and anxiety throbbing until it was all she could think about.
“What do you want me to do?” she said again.
Schuster sucked on the stir stick and raised his eyebrows as if the subject of their conversation hadn’t been gnawing at the back of Bex’s mind every minute of the last ten years. He leaned closer to her, wriggled a manila file folder from his messenger bag, and dropped it on the table, covering it with his hands.
“We’re not entirely sure of the exact date your father appeared back in North Carolina.”
Bex felt herself gape. “Good tracking work.”
Schuster bobbed his head apologetically. “Believe me, I had the same reaction. But, again, he did reappear.”
“You have reason to believe he has reappeared.” Her voice was snide.
“It’s been ten years, Beth Anne.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Sorry. Bex. It’s not that easy to find someone who doesn’t want to be found.”
“I didn’t want to be found.”
Schuster didn’t make eye contact while he raked a hand through his hair.
“Okay, fine,” Bex said, shaking her head. “What does any of this have to do with me?”
“Nothing, we hope,” Schuster said, taking a sip of his coffee. “But there is the chance that he’ll contact you. I’m thinking that might be why he came back into town.”
A shudder went through Bex—something between hope and disgust. Did her dad know that her gran had died, that she would be all alone? Did he want to help her—or hurt her?
“We’re thinking maybe you could be the one to draw him out.”
Bex’s gut lurched. It wasn’t a sinking feeling; it wasn’t fear; it wasn’t anxiety—it was something else entirely.
Would he want to see me?
A tiny spark of hope flickered but was just as quickly stamped out by guilt.
He murdered six women…
Or didn’t he?
“Bex?” Schuster touched her hand. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m sorry.”
“We’re not sure what he’s going to do—if he wants to disappear again, if he wants to make contact with you, if he wants to…” He wouldn’t look at Bex.
“If he wants to kill again,” she supplied.
Schuster nodded and Darla’s crumpled image washed over her again. Had he killed again already?
“Has anyone tried to contact you?”
“You know, Darla wasn’t his typical”—Bex choked on the word—“victim. Maybe it’s not him, just a—”
“Copycat? Believe me, we’ve considered all the possibilities.”
“And?”
“Has anyone tried to contact you?” Schuster asked again.
Bex picked up a napkin, rolling the fibers between her fingers. “Other than you, no.”
“Anything strange, out of the ordinary happening around here?”
Bex thought about the postcard with its glaring, overly cheerful “Greetings from the Research Triangle” moniker.
“No, nothing like that at all.” She didn’t know why, but the words were out of her mouth before she could consider them.
Detective Schuster held her gaze and Bex felt as though he were looking right through her, reading her mind to know she was lying. She cleared her throat, looked at the napkin, and kept rolling it between her fingers.
“A body was found on the beach not too far from here?”
“Stop! What is that?”
Headlights glaring over the dunes.
A single foot, big toe buried in the sand.
“Yeah. I know. We’re not certain it’s him, of course, but the timing and the victimology do line up.”
Victim. Darla was a teenager, a high school cheerleader who sat at the popular table and threw tremendous house parties, and now she was a victim. She wasn’t a person anymore. She was a type, a specimen to be dissected and catalogued and discussed as though all that mattered about her were the things that mattered to her killer: blond hair, big blue eyes, sixteen to twenty-two years old, missing ring finger.
Bex sucked in a sharp breath. “Was her ring finger missing?”
“What’s that?” the detective asked, setting his coffee down.
She pulled at the manila file folder and began pawing through it, suddenly desperate.
“Bex, you don’t want to look at that.”
Her gaze was steel. “Didn’t you bring them for me?”
“Let me just—”
But it was already too late. The numbness started at Bex’s fingertips and deadened everything inside her. A picture of Darla, nude, with an enormous, jagged-looking Y cut on her chest, her lips lightly parted and a haunting, deep purple was at the left. To the right, a four-by-six glossy photograph of what could have been Bex’s father, dressed in a slim-fitting flannel shirt, his hair unkempt and shaggy, brushing his shoulders. He was getting into a big rig, one booted foot balanced on the sideboard, the other still on the ground. The details of his face weren’t clear, except for the eyes. The eyes that had once been so warm and full of security and love were cold and black and vacant as he stared into the camera and out at Bex.
“That was taken three months ago,” Detective Schuster clarified, trying to close the folder. “Somewhere around Beaufort.”
“South Carolina.”
She snatched the picture and held it closer, squinting, trying to take in every detail. He was heavier than she remembered, with square, blocky shoulders and a stomach that was just starting to slide over his waistband. He looked much older too, with lips that seemed incapable of any expression other than the slight, disgusted frown he showed in the shot. Behind him, the truck-stop gas station had nothing to mark its character or give Bex a sense of anything but disconnection from the photo and its subject.
She took a long, slow breath, hoping that would be enough to process ten years of absence and longing and guilt. Ten years of abandonment, of hiding from the whispers and shadows and memories of what her father might have done. Finally, she shook her head.
“Look, as far as I know my father hasn’t tried to contact me in ten years.”
Saying that out loud hit Bex squarely in the chest. She cleared her throat, hoping to keep the wobble out of her voice.
“I don’t think anything would change just because he’s…” It was hard for Bex to say the word. “Here” meant that he was alive and out of hiding. He was living among his “targets”—potential victims and his accusers. And he didn’t care about the daughter he had left behind. Unease rolled through Bex.
“I don’t…I don’t even know how I would go about finding him or”—she made air quotes—“‘drawing him out’ like you said. I don’t really know that much about him.”
It pained her to admit that she knew little about her father beyond the few memories she had of him. Anything personal—anything more than the old truck, the Black Bear Diner, and that he always called her “Bethy”—had been forgotten or blotted out by newspaper headlines and what the attorneys and reporters called “cold, hard facts” about him. He was as charming as he was ruthless. He was a pathological liar. He had an inability to feel. He hunted his prey before making a move.
“Besides, if he’s trying to keep out of jail, he’s probably not going to be sending up rescue flares. Even if he does know where I am, he probably won’t come knocking on my door, right?” Another torrent of emotions surged through Bex. Would he come to her door? Would he want to see her at all?
Detective Schuster seemed undeterred, but there was a careful edge to his voice. “How aware are you of your father’s crimes, Bex?”
She gaped, rage overtaking her. “I know what my father is accused of, Detective Schuster. I don’t need a needlepoint to hang over my bed.”
He didn’t look at her, and for that, Bex was glad. She didn’t want him to hang on the word “accused.” She didn’t want to have to defend her father, especially when she wasn’t really certain how she felt.
“I’m sorry, Bex. I didn’t mean anything by that.” Detective Schuster paused and raked a hand through his brushed-back hair. “Your dad probably won’t have an email address or a website, but there are lots of websites about him. Did you know that?”
Bex dug her thumbnail into the layers of veneer on the table. “I knew that.”
The truth was that Bex—Beth Anne—had had a debilitating need to know exactly what her father was accused of. Once the files became available on the Internet, she had nearly lost an entire summer poring through the documents—the testimony, the crime-scene photos, the autopsy reports. Somewhere in her mind she thought that maybe the clue was there, something that the police had missed that would vindicate her father, that would vindicate her for attempting to send him to prison. The clue to absolution wasn’t there. A preponderance of evidence linked her father to the sadistic, horrifying murders of young women all over the county—including the one who Bex remembered getting into her father’s car and another who tucked her number into his hand.
She had run across the other websites accidentally, but then her curiosity drew her in. The sites were horrible. One showed a grinning photo of Bex’s father—she remembered the shot and had herself been cropped out. The webmaster had made red flames flash across the picture with the words “The Wife Collector Should Burn in Hell.” Another site rooted for her father with photographs and court documents and was populated by sickos who thought the Wife Collector was “the greatest,” listing his body count and even some of their “favorite kills.” Bex wasn’t sure which site was worse.
“People who run these sites have followers, and while we’re not one hundred percent sure, there’s a really good chance that your father could be one of those followers.”
The sites were bad enough. The idea that perhaps her father visited or even followed the sites made Bex’s stomach turn.
“Okay…” she said slowly.
“There are forums where”—Schuster grimaced—“fans can get together and talk, like chat rooms. We think your father might frequent one or more of the chat rooms under an alias.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
“I think that if you post to one of the sites, your father might respond.”
She crossed her arms in front of her chest, doing her best to smother her nerves with anger. “You think he might respond? You want me to cyber hang out with a bunch of serial-killer groupies in case my dad decides to drop in? No”—she shook her head—“I’m not going to do that.”
“You wouldn’t be ‘hanging out’ with them per se.”
“Well, whatever you call it, the answer is still no. How am I supposed to do that anyway? Why would he talk to me? Let me guess… You want me to use the screen name ‘Hey, Dad, it’s me?’”
Detective Schuster stared at Bex, his lips pressed together in a hard, thin line. “I think you should go public with your identity.”