Page 72 of It's One of Us
“At a press conference this afternoon, Metro detectives discussed the ongoing investigation into the disappearance of Jillian Kemp, last seen on Monday night leaving her gym in Brentwood. Metro sees no connection between Beverly Cooke and Jillian Kemp at this time, though all avenues are being pursued. This story will continue after the break.”
A commercial for a local car dealer blares three times louder than the news broadcast, but Darby doesn’t hear it. She goes to the kitchen, a little unsteady now, and pours the last bit of wine into her glass. Maybe this wasn’t the best way to deal with her fears, but it is certainly taking the edge off.
“Mom!” The word is strangled, a call of genuine fear.
Darby’s adrenaline shoots through her system. She runs back into the living room to find Scarlett sitting upright, the remote in her hand. Her face is ashen.
“Honey? What’s wrong?”
Scarlett points the remote at the television. The commercial is over; the story has continued. Her daughter’s hand is trembling.
“What is it?”
“The sketch. Mom. Oh my God.”
Darby turns to face the TV, and Scarlett hits Play.
“Metro has just released a sketch of a person of interest in the Beverly Cooke case. The suspect is using the name Griffin White, though police believe this could be an alias. If you’ve seen this man, do not approach, but call 911 immediately.”
The charcoal lines capture him perfectly. The square jaw. The beard. The only thing that’s wrong are the eyes. The eyes are dead. Cold. Cruel. Empty. A void of horror. A void she hasn’t seen in over a decade.
“Mom,” Scarlett says again. “Mom? What do we do?”
Darby is speechless. Scarlett rewinds and clicks Pause, and her son’s handsome face freezes on the screen.
30
THE MURDERER
One last hug. One last “I love you.” That’s all he wants.
He doesn’t think he’s going to get it.
The phone in his pocket rattles to life with the notification from the news app he downloaded. It’s the third burner phone of the month. He’s been so careful to leave his real phone in all the places he’s expected to be—Murfreesboro, mostly. He’s been stashing it in the wheel well of his roommate’s car, taped to the metal with only the charging port exposed. Attached to that is an extended-life solar battery pack. The wire feeds up through the trunk, and the small panel is glued just to the left of the wiper of the back windshield. It’s almost impossible to notice, and so far, has worked perfectly.
But time is running out.
He’s not stupid. He knows that if it comes down to it, if he is caught, if he says the right things, chances are he’ll go back to the hospital. But in case they want to go the trial route and try to send him to jail, he needs something, anything, that will make him look innocent. He can’t do that to his mom, can’t go to jail. It would break her. The hospital is a different story. People can forgive insanity.
Circumstantial as it is, the cell phone pinging in the proper places while women are going missing forty miles north gives him a defense. Today he needs to attach it to another car, of a former friend who is going to the mountains, and let that be his alibi.
He hates having to think like this. But he’s always been self-aware. Too much for his own good, his doctor told him once.
Time is running out, but he can forestall a little while longer.
Campus is quiet in the dark. He finds the car, gets to work. Thinking. Always thinking. He can still smell the blood on his hands. Blood, and flowers.
When Scarlett told him about the Halves, he made up a name and sent in his DNA. Matched to her, and to all the others. He is known in the program as Male Sibling 13, though he is really number one. The first of his kind, the first of his name.
Of course, putting his DNA in ended up being a mistake, but really, maybe it was for the best. This lifestyle isn’t sustainable. And it drove him to find his father, and that was how he found her. His darling Olivia.
Oh, her pain. The tears. The strength she shows. He’s known no one like her before, his blessed soul mate. It was bound to happen; he’d always known he’d find someone who understood him. That’s why he did so much introspection. He wanted to be right for her. To do things she likes, to make her happy.
He’s only curious, after all. About himself, about his mind. In the hospital, after talking to his doctors about why he was experiencing such violent thoughts and urges, he’d done copious amounts of research about the MAOA gene, the warrior gene, and its link to aggressive behavior. The sexier, and less accurate, name was the murder gene. According to one study he memorized, of nine hundred criminals in a cohort in Finland, the group had committed over eleven hundred murders. Were they destined to kill? Compelled? Was this murder gene a real thing? He didn’t know, but wow, he was fascinated by the possibility.
He’d always been convinced the urges he was feeling were organic, though he held back with the doctors on just how intense the impulses were. He was smart; they all knew he was smart, so they dug, deep, into his psyche. They tried everything to pull out the seeds that were germinating inside of him, but he was able to control what he told them, what he said. He didn’t want to spend his life in the hospital, and he knew he could control his compulsions if only he understood himself. This was a dopamine thing. A serotonin thing. A coiled snake that lived in his head, not created by his environment. He’d had a fantastic upbringing with a wonderful mother, so where did his darkness come from?
His genes.
