“Stahl never faced justice for what he did to those women,” Schreiber went on. His voice was rough, and he looked into my eyes as if searching for something. “There wasn’t enough evidence to link him to a single one of those murders. Without you, he isn’t arrested. He doesn’t go to trial. He doesn’t spend the rest of his life behind bars. Without you, more girls die. I’ve done the work, Ms. Cunningham, but without you, there’s no ending to this story.”
“It doesn’t feel like an ending,” I said. I stared at the blinking light on the digital recorder, imagining my voice played back. Imagining the people who would hear it, hungry for narrative, the sense of story to make random violence make sense. “You want to know what I feel, hearing he’s dead? I feel numb. I feel relieved, because he won’t ever get the chance to kill me, like he promised to if he ever got out. And I feel guilty.”
“Guilty?” he repeated, surprised.
I shouldn’t have told him that. Too late now. “A man died in prison because of my testimony. It’s a lot to put on a child. I know he was a horrible person. If anyone deserved it, he did. But it happened because of me, and that’s more power than I ever wanted to have. It shouldn’t have been up to me.”
“Not just you. Cassidy was the one who first identified Stahl, while you were unconscious,” he said.
“You really have done your homework.” I folded my hands on top of my laptop. I was talking too much. I needed to get my answers and shut him down. “What did Olivia say to you?”
He considered. “Not a lot. She said that she was interested in talking to me, but there were some things that she needed to deal with first. It’s funny—she told me something similar, about the victims. That what I was doing was good, because the dead shouldn’t be forgotten.”
We owe it to her. “That’s all?”
“Pretty much,” he confirmed. “But she wanted to check in with you and Cassidy first—she preferred to have your blessing.”
Preferred. Not needed. She was going to tell, with or without us.
This is a good thing, I thought. We should come clean. With Stahl dead, the only thing keeping us silent was shame and selfishness. Liv was the only one brave enough to admit that.
“Well, then,” I said. “We’re done. Cheers.” I lifted my bottle to him.
“I’ve got more questions.”
“But I don’t,” I replied with a shrug. “Sorry.”
“One more,” he pressed. “And then I promise I’ll leave you alone.”
I sighed and swigged my beer. The hops made my nose itch. “Fine. One more.”
Schreiber gave me a considering look, his finger tapping on the table. “Stahl’s youngest known victim was sixteen. He targeted women who were alone and lured his victims into his truck under false pretenses. He transported them in his truck to the location where he assaulted and killed them.”
“I know all this. I don’t want to hear it,” I said, my skin crawling, but he didn’t stop.
“He sexually assaulted them before stabbing them to death. On four of the bodies there was evidence of restraints being used; decomposition made it impossible to tell in the other two cases.”
“What is your point?” I asked, feeling sick. I couldn’t hear about the details. I didn’t want to imagine what it had been like for those women. There was enough horror in my head already.
“You were eleven years old. You were with friends. You weren’t near the road; you were in the forest. You were stabbed, but you weren’t assaulted, and you weren’t restrained,” he said. “There was no physical evidence linking Stahl to the attack. Your testimony, and your friends’， was all that the prosecution had to go on.”
“Is there a question in all of this?” I asked, keeping my voice steely as fear flashed through me. The questions had been asked a hundred times before, of course, but they were always questions about Stahl. Why had he changed his pattern? What had he been doing in Chester?
“Here’s my question: Are you sure it was Stahl who attacked you?” he said. His voice was gentle, understanding.
“He was convicted, wasn’t he?” I shot back. He was convicted. Liv and Cass had seen him. The police were sure.
“That’s not an answer.”
I sat back, my palms braced against the table. “We’re done here.”
“I’m not accusing you of anything,” Schreiber said. “But these are questions that I need to address.”
“I don’t know what goes on in the mind of a serial killer,” I said. The recording light blinked and blinked. All of this was going to be on the record. I was past caring. “I know what it feels like to have a knife driven into my body. I know what it feels like to struggle for breath because my lung has collapsed and filled up with blood. So I know what those women felt when they were dying. I can’t tell you why Stahl changed his pattern or why he was in Chester. But I can tell you that he deserved to rot in prison, and he did, and now the story has a happy ending.”
“And yet you feel guilty.” He sat back in his seat.
Before I could reply, Cody appeared, approaching from behind Schreiber. “Is there a problem here?” Cody said.
Schreiber turned in his seat, grabbing the recorder as he did. “Just having a chat,” he said.
Cody glanced from Schreiber to me. My jaw was clenched, and I felt cold all over. “It’s okay,” I said, almost a whisper.
“Get up. And get out,” Cody growled.
“I—” Schreiber began, but Cody grabbed him by the collar and hauled him up out of his seat. Schreiber scrambled to keep his feet under him and backed away quickly, hands upraised. “I’m going. I’m going.”
Cody loomed. He shouldn’t have been able to—he was shorter than Schreiber by a good two inches, but he had more bulk, and there was something in the way he carried himself that made it clear he knew how to hold his own in a fight. The same couldn’t be said for Schreiber.
“If you change your mind about that interview—” Schreiber started.
“Out,” Cody barked, giving him a hard shove, and Schreiber retreated. I shrank down into the booth and didn’t relax until I heard the front door slam.
I shut my eyes. Alan Michael Stahl is an evil man, I thought, as I’d thought many times before, lying awake and trying not to be. I did the right thing.
All this time, I’d been waiting for it to fall apart.
Liv and Cass had been afraid that if people found out about Persephone, they wouldn’t believe us about Stahl. They would think that we were liars.
I was afraid they would find out that I was one. Because Persephone wasn’t the only secret I’d been keeping all this time. I’d lied to the police. I’d lied on the stand. I’d lied to myself, told myself I’d seen Alan Michael Stahl in those woods—and maybe there was even a time I’d believed it.
But the truth was, I hadn’t seen him that day.
I hadn’t seen anything at all.
Cody slid back into the booth, scowling. “Who the hell was that?”
“Journalist. No big deal,” I said. I went to take another drink, but my hand was shaking too much. “I shouldn’t have let him start talking. My fault.”