“He was staying with me.”
“Here?”
“Yes.”
“When did he leave?”
“You saw Peter’s social media profiles?”
“Some of them,” Wilde said.
“He left three days before his last Instagram post.”
“The one with the cliff?”
“Yes.”
“How did that happen?”
“What do you mean?”
“You said he was staying with you.”
“Yes.”
“What precipitated him leaving? What did he tell you?”
Again her eyes welled up. “On the surface, Peter seemed to be getting better. There was that post about not being so quick to believe what you hear. Did you see that one?”
Wilde nodded.
“So I thought maybe Peter was turning a corner, but looking back on it, I see it was all kinds of forced. Like he was psyching himself up for a battle he knew he couldn’t win.” She headed toward a computer on a desk in the corner. “Did you read the comments under any of his posts?”
“I did,” Wilde said.
“Vile, right?”
“Yes.”
“The last few days he was here, Peter read them all. Every single one of them. I don’t know why. I told him not to. They made him spiral. So on that last day, that’s what he was doing. He read the comments. Then he went through hundreds of DMs.”
“DMs?”
“Direct Messages. Think of it like the messaging service in your DNA website. Followers on Instagram can write to you directly. Most remain unread. I tried to keep up during the height of Peter’s popularity—that was important to him, to be kind to his fans—but there were so many it was impossible. Anyway, he got a particularly awful one. And that, I don’t know, that seemed like the last straw.”
“When did he get this message?”
“A day or two before he left. Some toxic creep had been trolling him, but this particular message—it was the first time I saw a flash of anger from him. For the most part, Peter was just confused and baffled by all this, not angry. It was like the world punched him in the face, and he was just trying to get his bearings and figure out why. But with this message, he wanted to go after the guy.”
“The guy who sent the toxic message?”
“Yes.”
“What did the message say?”
“I don’t know. Peter wouldn’t let me see it. A few days later, he packed up and left.”
“Did he tell you he was leaving or where he was going?”
Vicky shook her head. “I came home from work and he was gone.”
“I assume you reached out to him?”
“Yes. But he didn’t reply. I called Jenn. She said they hadn’t spoken in weeks. I called some other friends. Nothing. After three days passed, I went to the police.”
“What did the police say?”
“What could they say?” Vicky replied with a shrug. “Peter was a grown man. They took my statement and sent me on my way.”
“Can you show me the message?” Wilde asked. “The one you said upset him.”
“Why?” Vicky shook her head. “There’s so much hate out there. After a while, it’s hard to stomach.”
“I’d like to see it, if that’s okay.”
Vicky hesitated, but not for very long. She brought up Instagram on her app and moved to her brother’s profile. There was that cliff again and that caption:
I just want peace.
She shifted the cursor so that the post before it came up. Wilde again read the words in the photograph:
Don’t be so quick to believe
what you hear,
because lies spread quicker
than the truth.
“So this one creep with the profile name DogLufegnev commented a lot,” Vicky said. “Always saying something awful like ‘You’ll pay’ or ‘I know the truth about you,’ ‘I have proof,’ ‘You should die,’ that kind of stuff. But here is what he wrote under this post.”
She scrolled down to a comment made by DogLufegnev. DogLufegnev’s profile picture was a big red button saying GUILTY. His comment read:
Check your DMs.
Vicky said, “Maybe DogLufegnev is a dog lover or something.”
“No,” Wilde said.
“No?”
“DogLufegnev,” Wilde said, “is Vengeful God backward.”
She shook her head. “Lunatic. A goddamn lunatic.”
“Can we see his message to your brother?”