Aaron is standing on the sidewalk, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. He looks uncomfortable, and I don’t blame him. I try to smile in an attempt to lighten the mood, to draw attention away from the fact that we’re meeting each other in a nondescript motel room on the outskirts of Baton Rouge. I haven’t told him why he’s here, what we’re really doing. I haven’t told him why I can’t sleep in my own home tonight when we’re within an hour’s drive of my neighborhood. All I said when I called him on Monday was that I had a lead he wouldn’t want to ignore—a lead I needed his help to follow.
“Hey,” I say, leaning against the door. It groans under my body weight, so I straighten back up, crossing my arms instead. “Thanks for coming. Let me just grab my purse.”
I motion for him to come inside, and he does, stepping self-consciously across the threshold of the door. He looks around, unimpressed with my new digs. We’ve barely spoken since I asked him to look into Bert Rhodes last weekend, and that seems like a lifetime ago. He has no idea about the confrontation I had with Bert, my trip to the police station, and the subsequent threat from Detective Thomas to stay out of the investigation—the exact opposite of what I am doing right now. He also has no idea that my suspicions have shifted from Bert Rhodes to my own fiancé, and that I am enlisting his help to prove my theory right.
“How’s the story coming?” I ask, genuinely curious if he’s been able to uncover anything more than me.
“My editor is giving me until the end of next week to dig something up,” he says, sitting on the edge of the mattress with a creak. “Otherwise it’s time to pack it up and head home.”
“Empty-handed?”
“That’s right.”
“But you came all this way. What about your theory? The copycat?”
Aaron shrugs.
“I still believe it,” he says, his fingernail picking at the seam of the comforter. “But honestly, I’m getting nowhere.”
“Well, I may be able to help.”
I walk over to the bed and sit down next to him, the slouch of the mattress bringing our bodies closer together.
“And how is that? Does it have to do with this mysterious lead of yours?”
I look down at my hands. I need to word my response carefully, giving away only the information that Aaron needs to know.
“We’re going to speak with a woman named Dianne,” I say. “Her daughter went missing around the time of my father’s murders—another young, attractive teenager—and just like his victims, her body was never found.”
“Okay, but your dad never confessed to her murder, right? Only the six?”
“No, he didn’t,” I say. “And there was no jewelry of hers, either. She doesn’t really fit the pattern … but since her abductor was never found, I think it’s worth looking into. I was thinking that maybe he could be the copycat, you know? Whoever he is. That maybe he started mimicking my father’s crimes way earlier than we thought—maybe even while they were still happening. He went dark for a while, and maybe now, for the twentieth anniversary, he’s popping back up again.”
Aaron looks at me, and I half expect him to stand up and walk back outside, insulted that I brought him all the way out here for such a half-assed clue. But instead, he slaps his hands on his legs, exhaling loudly before standing up from the sunken bed.
“Well, okay,” he says, offering his hand to help me up. I can’t tell if he’s actually sold on my story, if he’s desperate enough for a lead that he’s willing to follow me blindly, or if he’s just going along with it to make me happy. Either way, I’m grateful. “Let’s go talk to Dianne.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Aaron drives as I navigate the directions on my phone, taking us deeper into a part of town that slowly morphs from middle-class modular homes into a dilapidated corner of Baton Rouge, barely recognizable. It happens so gradually I hardly realize it; one minute, I’m looking out the window at a toddler splashing in an inflatable pool—his mother soaking her feet, distracted on her phone with a lemonade in hand—and the next, I’m staring at a skeleton of a woman pushing a shopping cart full of trash bags and beer. The houses are falling apart now—bars on windows, paint peeling—and we turn in to a long, gravel roadway. Finally, I see a two-story with the number 375 bolted to the vinyl siding and motion for him to pull over.
“We’re here,” I say, unbuckling my seat belt. I steal another look at myself in the rearview mirror, the thick reading glasses I had put on before we left the motel partially obscuring my face. It feels cartoonish, putting on a pair of glasses as a disguise. Something out of a bad movie. I don’t think Dianne has ever seen a picture of me, but I can’t know for certain. For that reason, I want to make myself look different—and I want Aaron to do most of the talking.