Page 5 of Deliver Me

Receiving a reply at all had surprised her, but if he was going to write she had expected more than one blunt question with no context.

She’d answered in the same way, unwilling to give him the satisfaction of asking for an explanation.

I’m twenty.

She sighed and chewed gently on the end of her pen as she rescanned this most recent correspondence with a frown. Most of his anger seemed centered around her age, if the liberal sprinkling of offensive language was any indication, though she didn’t understand why.

She was a grown woman, perfectly capable of handling herself in the world, despite his obvious opinion otherwise.

Little girl.

Hmph.

He seemed unreasonably determined to scare her off and this letter definitely seemed to hint that what he had done was bad enough that it might even have made the news.

Maybe …

She dropped the letter on the bed beside her, letting the paper flutter down and land on a white blanket patterned with small daisies in her favorite colors of blue and yellow, and reached for her laptop. Her jaw dropped as a simple search for the words “Gabriel Myers” brought up more than half a million results.

She scanned the top few, all of which were news stories with horrifying headlines—

“Gruesome Crime Rocks Nation”

“Shocking Violence Among America’s Elite”

“Teen Killer Gabriel Myers Faces Justice”

She placed a hand on her stomach, fighting the urge to be sick as the last headline jumped off the screen and swam dizzyingly in front of her eyes.

“A Family Demolished—How Patricide Destroyed a Legacy”

Patricide …

Her mind flashed to the only parents she could remember—the father who loved her, the mother she had lost. Gabriel Myers really was a monster. He hadn’t even bothered to try and deny it.

She slammed the laptop closed, only to reopen it seconds later and peer intently at the small thumbnail image beside the first article. The boy in the photo stared back at her without remorse.

He might have been a handsome kid if she hadn’t known what he’d done. Wavy black hair framed a long face with defined cheekbones and a prominent nose. The sharp lines and sculpted jawline would have made his appearance harsh if his lips hadn’t been so full and the ears poking out from his hair so large. She couldn’t make out the color of his eyes, but they were hard and emotionless as he stared at the camera.

Why would God have guided her letter to someone like this?

Unable to ignore her curiosity, she scrolled the results, skimming past the YouTube videos of old news reports for now, and filling her screen with articles and images. She scanned the page, taking in a series of pictures taken after his arrest. In each of them he looked young, almost childlike, but his eyes were always cold.

She bit her lip as she considered his mugshot—a boy with dark circles under his eyes and hair that was cropped too close on the sides, revealing those ears that were a touch too big. He showed no fear, none of the terror that she knew she would be experiencing if she were in his place.

His face was equally impassive in a newspaper photo of him wearing a blue juvenile detention jumpsuit as he stepped out of the back of a police car, flanked by officers with stern expressions. The handcuffs on his wrists and ankles were connected by a long chain that made his attempt to stand look awkward and emphasized the youthful lankiness of his arms and legs.

She almost laughed sadly at a court drawing of him in a black suit, an obvious but failed attempt at making him lookpresentable for the courtroom. He didn’t look old enough to attend prom, much less be on trial for murder.

Her amusement faded when she found the only picture that showed a smile on his face. A candid home photo of him as a child in front of a Christmas tree, arms wrapped around the waist of an older man with an identical grin—his father she realized with a jolt.

The man he’d killed.

She didn’t understand how anyone could do such a thing to another person, especially at such a young age. He looked so happy in that Christmas photo—his smile so enthusiastic, his hug so pure.

The shadows on her walls grew long and the sun sank below the horizon as she sat on her bed with its pretty floral blanket, searching the internet’s memory as though it might have answers to a mystery that humanity itself still hadn’t solved.

What made someone a killer?

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