Twisted by Hannah Jayne(32)

“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.