‘Wait. You think this Miller guy has been living out here in the woods for twenty years?’
He shrugged. ‘Weirder things have happened.’
‘If Everett Miller was guilty, would he really hide out here? Surely he’d have hot-footed it to Canada or somewhere.’ We were only a thirty-minute drive from the border.
David grunted and turned his attention to Connie, who had arrived at his side while we were talking. He nodded towards the couple she’d been speaking to. ‘Who was that?’
‘They’re fans,’ she said. ‘They even asked for my autograph. Said they’d come here after hearing about it on my podcast. Hey, Tom.’
‘Hi.’ I was impressed. She had fans?
‘So, are you ready?’ she asked David.
‘As I’ll ever be.’ He stood. ‘You want to come, Tom?’
‘Where are you going?’
He grinned. ‘We’re going to take a look at where it happened.’
Chapter 5
We pushed our way through the trees, stepping over rocks and treading through tall grass. I wasn’t sure exactly how David knew which way to go – as far as I could see all the trees on the path that led north looked the same – but he was like a sniffer dog who’d picked up a scent. We paused frequently so Connie could keep up, before ducking beneath some low-hanging branches.
‘This is it,’ David said, a little breathlessly, like an explorer who’d just found some long-lost burial chamber. He took a few steps forward and looked around, not speaking. He seemed in awe. Reverential.
There, at the centre of the clearing, just as he’d described, was a large, flat rock, about two and a half metres across. We approached it and David reached out a hand to touch its smooth surface.
‘I can feel them,’ he said after a short while.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Them. The victims. Can’t you feel it? The energy.’
I couldn’t. It was a beautiful day, the sun flickering through the trees. The bloody symbols on the rock had been washed away long ago and it was hard to imagine anything horrific happening here. David and Connie had obviously spent a lot of time immersed in the minutiae of this case, and Connie had, I guessed, described the crime scene in great detail to her podcast listeners. But for me, it was just a rock in a clearing.
‘Eric and Sally weren’t the only victims,’ Connie said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Jake Robineaux.’
‘The boy who found them?’
‘Yeah. He killed himself a couple of years after his book came out.’ Connie leaned on her stick and looked down at the rock. ‘You can tell by reading his book that he was deeply wounded by what he saw. He loved Sally Fredericks. She was his favourite teacher. Imagine finding her like that. Naked, her face turned blue from where she’d been strangled, her lover beside her with his brains leaking out of his skull.’
I was beginning to see why her podcast was so popular. She had a way with the ghoulish details.
‘It must have really messed him up,’ said David.
‘You’re not kidding.’ I paused. Despite my insistence that I wasn’t interested in true crime, I could feel myself being drawn in. The picture the Butlers had painted, last night and now. I was starting to see it. ‘What do you know about Everett Miller? What was he like, apart from being a death-metal fan?’
Connie answered. ‘Everyone said he was a pussycat. A pacifist. He had no record of violence. Kids he went to school with said how shocked they were, because Everett had always been bullied but never fought back.’
‘Exactly the kind of person who’s most likely to snap,’ said David.
I could see that, even if it seemed like pop psychology. I wondered how many murderers had no record of violence in their past, though. I could understand it of domestic abuse victims who killed to escape. Or someone who committed a so-called crime of passion. But a murder like this? Surely there would have to have been some propensity towards violence. Wouldn’t they need to build up to it? Could he really have been influenced by the music he listened to and videos he watched?
Maybe, as David suggested, he’d got sick of being ostracised and bullied and had snapped.
‘Did he have a history of being into the occult?’ I asked.
‘Kinda,’ said David. ‘There was the music he was into, of course. They found tarot cards and a Ouija board in his room too. A big collection of horror videos.’
‘That doesn’t mean he believed in pagan gods, though, does it?’