“Aubrey Gravino,” he says. “And now Lacey Deckler.”
I feel my heartbeat start to rise in my chest. My eyes dart around the room, though the café is practically empty. I lower my voice to a whisper.
“Why would you think I have anything to say about those girls?”
“Because their deaths … I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I think they have something to do with your father. And I think you can help me figure out what that is.”
I shake my head, squeezing my hands tightly around my mug to keep them from shaking.
“Look, you’re reaching here. I know you think this makes for a good story, but as I’m sure you know—given your beat, and everything—this kind of thing happens all the time.”
Aaron smiles, impressed.
“You’ve researched me,” he says.
“Well, you know everything about me.”
“That’s fair,” he says. “But look, Chloe. There are similarities. Similarities you can’t deny.”
I think back to the conversation with my mother just this morning. The creeping déjà vu I had just admitted to, the unsettling familiarity of it all. But this isn’t the first time I’ve felt this way, the first time I’ve re-created my father’s crimes in my mind. This has happened once before, and last time, I was wrong. Very, very wrong.
“You’re right, there are similarities,” I say. “A teenage girl got murdered by some creep roaming the streets. It’s unfortunate, but like I said, it happens all the time.”
“The twenty-year anniversary is coming up, Chloe. Abductions happen all the time, but serial killers do not. There’s a reason this is happening right here, right now. You know there is.”
“Whoa, who said anything about a serial killer? You are jumping so far into that conclusion. We have one body. One. For all we know, Lacey ran away.”
Aaron looks at me, a flicker of disappointment in his eyes. Now he’s the one who lowers his voice.
“You and I both know that Lacey didn’t run away.”
I sigh, glance over Aaron’s shoulder and through the window outside. The breeze is picking up, the Spanish moss swaying in the wind. I notice the sky is quickly morphing from robin’s-egg blue to a bloated storm gray; even inside, I can feel the heaviness of impending rain. Lacey is staring at me from her MISSING poster; her eyes followed me here, to this very table. I can’t bring myself to meet them.
“So what is it that you think is going on, exactly?” I ask, still staring outside at the trees in the distance. “My father is in prison. He’s a monster, I’m not denying that, but he’s not the boogeyman. He can’t hurt anyone anymore.”
“I know that,” he says. “I know it’s not him, obviously. But I think it’s someone trying to be him.”
I glance back at Aaron, gnaw at the inside of my lip.
“I think we’re dealing with a copycat here. And I’m willing to bet that before the week is over, someone else will be dead.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Every serial killer has their signature. Like a name scrawled in the corner of a painting or an Easter egg planted in the scenes of a film, artists want their work to be recognized, immortalized. Remembered beyond their years.
It’s not always as grisly as they portray in the movies—encrypted monikers scratched across the skin, detached body parts showing up around town. Sometimes it’s as simple as the cleanliness of the crime scene or the way in which the bodies are placed on the floor. Stalking patterns strung together by unsuspecting witnesses or ritualistic procedures that occur over and over and over again until eventually, a pattern emerges. A pattern that isn’t too dissimilar to the way ordinary people go through their routines in a methodical rhythm each morning, as if there were no other way to make a bed, to clean a dish. Human beings are habitual creatures, I’ve learned, and the act of taking a life can reveal a lot about a person. Each kill is unique, like a fingerprint. But my father left behind no bodies upon which he could leave his mark, no crime scenes to preserve his autograph, no fingerprints to lift or analyze. Which left the town wondering: How do you leave a signature without a canvas?
The answer is, you can’t.
The Breaux Bridge Police Department spent the summer of ’99 scouring Louisiana for a single clue to his identity. They listened for whispers of evidence that pointed in the direction of one viable suspect, a hidden signature at a crime scene that seemed not to exist. But of course, they found nothing. Six girls dead and not a single witness could pinpoint a man lurking near the county pool or a car inching down the street at night, stalking its prey. In the end, I was the one who’d found the answer. A twelve-year-old girl playing dress-up with her mother’s makeup, rummaging through the back of a closet in search of scarves to tie in her hair. And it was then, holding that little wooden box, when I saw it—the thing nobody else had been able to see.