Love in the Time of Serial Killers(33)

He turned to rinse off his plate, placing it in the sink and then wiping his hands on a dish towel. “So let’s go.”

“I’m not even finished,” I said around a mouthful of pie.

“Bring it with you,” he said.

“If anything in there makes me lose my appetite, I’m going to be really pissed,” I said, but followed him through the living room, past the piano. Now that the WE’LL MISS YOU, BARBARA sign was gone, I noticed there were some family photos hung up, showing Sam with a truly mind-boggling number of people. Did he belong to one of those families that had a group chat and wore matching shirts to family reunions? Because that wouldn’t help my ability to trust him at all. I didn’t have time to look any closer at the pictures, though, before we were at the garage door.

He’d stopped so suddenly I almost ran into him. He turned back, his hand on the doorknob. “Normally I make people sign an NDA first.”

“The Corporate Killer,” I said. “He buries them under paperwork. The Dateline episode writes itself.”

He flung open the door and flicked on the light. Of course, at first glance everything looked normal. Disappointingly normal. There was a washer and dryer in one corner, a metal rack holding various toolboxes and old paint cans and other garage-y things. On the walls, I could see where he’d affixed several large panels of covered material, and I assumed those had something to do with the soundproofing he’d mentioned.

There was also a drum set, resting on top of old carpet remnants, and a guitar leaning against one wall. The guitar looked like it had seen better days, the paint faded, covered in stickers that were peeling off.

Toward the front of the garage, there was another guitar in pieces, laid out on some wooden boards balanced over a couple sawhorses. The boards had been covered in plastic dropcloth, which I guess explained at least one thing I’d seen. But there had been some liquid on his hands, too. I hadn’t imagined that.

I looked at the concrete floor, trying to see any remnant of a suspicious stain. Sam stayed near the door, his hands shoved in his pockets, while I walked around the space as though conducting a forensic analysis.

“The other night,” I said finally, not able to help myself, “I thought I heard a crash?”

I could’ve named the exact date and time, since I’d written it down in my notebook. But it was probably better if I didn’t cross over from endearingly neurotic to obsessively weird (too late?).

“Hmm,” he said. “Another mystery.”

“I thought you were cooperating with the investigation.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Is that what this is? It hardly seems fair, me giving up all my secrets and you giving up none.”

I set my empty plate down on the top of the washer for now. I couldn’t help but notice that I’d been right about the laundry detergent—mountain fresh.

“Okay,” I said, my pulse quickening. “What do you want to know?”

He studied me, as though he were really considering his question. I hoped it was something easy, like Why Batman Forever?, at which point I could riff about how with villains named things like Penguin and Two-Face, it was better when adaptations of the comic leaned into the camp.

I hoped it wasn’t anything about my dad.

“What are you writing your dissertation on?” he asked finally.

I wondered how he even knew I was working on that, until I remembered that I’d told him about talking to my dissertation advisor the other day. “True crime,” I said, pulling a face like I understood how on-the-nose that sounded at this point.

“Probably should’ve guessed,” he said dryly. “What about it, specifically?”

I had quick, pithy answers for this inevitable question, since people’s eyes tended to glaze over once I started saying rhetoric and genre theory instead of just talking about The Ted Bundy Tapes on Netflix like they really wanted to. But for some reason I wanted to explain it to Sam, wanted him to understand what I’d been doing with my life these last five years. Why that was important to me, I didn’t care to analyze too hard.

“True crime is especially interesting,” I said, “because it tends to reflect and shape our cultural attitudes toward crime in general. You look at how the genre has morphed in the last sixty years, even, from the way Truman Capote made it more literary in In Cold Blood to the more sensationalistic, hard-boiled accounts written in the eighties and nineties, to how personal and nuanced Michelle McNamara gets in I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. And then it’s like, who’s writing these books? What relationship do they have to the subject going in, or what relationship do they form as they go down this dark rabbit hole? How do they choose to present the information, and how does that affect the way a reader might feel about it? Does that change how ‘true’ the books are, really? Or does—”

I cut myself off, realizing I was a little out of breath. “Sorry,” I said. “I could keep going for about, oh, a hundred and eighty pages or so. But I’ll stop.”

“Give me an example,” Sam said. “Like when you said something might change how ‘true’ the book is.”

“Okay, well,” I said, warming to my subject. This actually happened to be a major point of analysis in the chapter I should be at home writing at this very moment. Maybe I could even count this conversation as “brainstorming” time and not feel guilty that I was blowing off my work. “Have you read In Cold Blood?”