Take any kid, throw her out there, hurt her and twist her, do the worst things possible to her. Would any kid go around shooting men point blank in the head after all that? Or did it take someone, for lack of a better word, special?
* * *
“Oh my God, Nash Steven Wilt.” The teenage girl in front of him squealed.
Nash paused in the hallway. He was back in the Martin household, hoping to get a few more character interviews with some of the cleaning ladies who worked there. He understood from Billie that a couple of them had been coming in to clean the house for more than ten years, so they would remember seeing Sibel.
“Uh, hi,” said Nash, shifting nervously on his feet. The girl was cute, he noted. She wore glasses and she had her hair in pigtails on either side of her head, and she was wearing a form fitted top over a pair of short shorts.
And then he felt sick for thinking a teenager was cute.
It was a split second sort of thing. His lizard brain did it. It was wired that way. Look for youth and beauty. Be attracted to it. Caveman say young strong woman make good mate.
Yuck. He wasn’t a bad person. He did not find children attractive. Teenagers were children, and he would never, in a million years, ever—
But he felt himself blushing. He looked down at the floor, and he scratched the side of his neck.
“I heard you were coming,” the girl continued. “I’m such a fan. Oh my God, I listen to your podcast every week.” She thrust out her hand. “I’m Zoe.”
He didn’t want to touch her. But he gingerly shook her hand. “Hi, Zoe, I’m Nash.”
“I know.” She giggled. “So, I hope you don’t mind, but I heard that you’re here about Sibel, and I think I can help. I remember her.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You do?”
“Yeah, I been cleaning this house for nearly five years now. I started back when I was in high school as an after-school job—”
“You’re not in high school?” He rubbed his forehead. “How old are you?”
Zoe drew back. “That’s kind of rude to ask, don’t you think?”
He winced. “Yeah. Sorry. It’s just, I thought—you look really young.”
“Oh, it’s the pigtails.” She gestured. “I’m twenty-three. I’m a college senior. I’m studying communications. I’m actually looking for an internship to complete my senior capstone. You’re not maybe looking for an intern, are you?”
Twenty-three. Still way too young.
But not illegal. Not a child. He was not a supremely disgusting being.
Zoe was looking at him expectantly.
“What?” he said. “Oh, no, I don’t need an intern. Uh, I’m really, really sorry. I’m just—” Don’t look at her boobs. He shifted his glance lower. Geez. Her legs. Damn, those shorts were short. He looked at the ceiling. “You, um, you…”
She laughed. Thankfully, she seemed oblivious to the fact that he’d been accidentally ogling her. “I’m the one who’s sorry. I ambushed you. People are always telling me I’m a lot to take. You probably are so annoyed with me. I bet you get people coming up to you all the time and getting super excited.”
“Actually, no.” He shook his head. “Never. I’d say your my first gushing fan.”
“I’m not gushing.” She giggled. “Okay, maybe a little. But you want to interview me, right? Right?”
“Uh…” He nodded. “Yeah, yeah, let’s do that.” He pointed. “Is there somewhere maybe we could sit down?”
“Totally,” she said. “Follow me.”
She led him down the hallway and back to the living room where they’d been before. Squinting, she brushed off the arm of the navy easy chair before sitting down.
He scrutinized the room. The couch was far away from the chair, which hadn’t been a problem when he had Billie and Adam hooked up to mics, but he wasn’t going to go through all that trouble with Zoe for a short interview that he’d probably only use a few quotes from. “Uh, I’m not sure how well my field recorder is going to reach across the room,” he said, gesturing to the couch.
“Gotcha,” she said, shaking her head. She grinned, got up, flounced across the room and sat down on the couch. She patted the spot next to her.
Great. They were going to be close. He sat down on the couch next to her, clearing his throat. He could handle this. He just needed to think professional thoughts. He busied himself with getting out his recorder.
“So, you just released a new podcast, like, yesterday,” said Zoe. “I was going to listen to it tonight. How’d you have time to finish that one while you’re doing this?”
“I work ahead,” he said. “Six months ahead if I can help it. It’s something a friend taught me to do.” Damn. Should he tell her that friend was Siobhan? No, it would be more complicated to explain than it was worth.
“Oh, cool. That’s smart,” she said. “That’s so smart. I always want to be one of those people who does everything ahead of time, but I’m a total procrastinator. I really admire your drive.”
“It’s mostly about laziness.” He turned on the recorder.
“How do you figure that?”
“Well, I don’t like doing stuff, and I tell myself that I can relax once I get far enough ahead. I spend a lot of time lying around watching television when I’ve got everything done. I can be a huge slob.”
She laughed. “Well, that we have in common.”
He gestured to the recorder. “You want to tell everyone your name and how you knew Sibel?”
“Um, sure. I’m Zoe Johnson, and I worked for the Martin family cleaning house when Sibel moved in.”
“Great,” he said. “So, what can you tell me about her? What was she like?”
“She was nice,” said Zoe.
“That’s what I hear,” he said. “Everyone I’ve talked to said she was nice.”
“I didn’t interact with her a lot,” said Zoe. “Mostly, it was just if I came into a room to clean and she was in there doing something else. She’d be like, ‘Oh, let me get out of your way,’ and I’d be like, ‘Not a problem. You can stay,’ that kind of thing.”
“So, you never saw her angry or… violent?”
“Nope,” said Zoe. “I guess you’re asking that because there’s this theory floating around that she killed Bart?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, that doesn’t make sense, because if she killed Bart, then she would have had to have killed all those other women, and they all died before she was even in the area.”
“You don’t know that,” said Nash. “Just because the murders happened before she was married to Bart doesn’t mean she wasn’t close by.”
Zoe seemed to consider this. “Okay, so I’m a crazy serial killer, merrily nabbing women and killing and burying them, but I have no connection whatsoever to Blue Lake other than the fact I stalk my victims there. So, obviously what I do is get married to some guy who has a house on the lake, because that makes utter sense.”
Nash chuckled. “I hear you. But it is true that serial killers sometimes like to flirt with the danger of being caught. They write letters to newspapers. They insert themselves into investigations. They leave cryptic messages. That sort of thing.”
“I guess,” said Zoe, tapping her chin thoughtfully.
“But you don’t think she killed anyone?”
“No,” said Zoe. “I don’t.”
* * *
That night in his hotel room, Nash set about trying to track down Siobhan Thorn. The first thing he did was search for her on Facebook.
No dice.
He kind of figured that might be the case. When he was in high school, Facebook was in its infancy, and it was only being used in colleges. He hadn’t gotten a profile until a few years after graduation, but even so, he’d started using it soon enough after high school that he was Facebook friends with practically everyone from his high school. If Siobhan had been on there, they would have been friends.
Undaunted, he googled her name.
<
br /> And the screen was filled with results from Etsy. Listing after listing of hand-made jewelry made by someone with the name Siobhan Thorn.
Was it the same Siobhan? He clicked on one of the listings.
There was no picture of the person who made the jewelry, no address listed, nothing that could tell him for sure if it was the same Siobhan.
He clicked out and tried another Google search, this time excluding any Etsy results.
He got some hits on a dentist in Ireland and someone who published a bunch of scientific journals about behavioral science. Maybe that was her. But digging into that Siobhan eventually led him to a photograph of her, and it wasn’t his Siobhan.
This could continue all night, he realized. There had to be a better way to track her down. Maybe someone from high school had kept in touch with her. He could reach out to Pike or Robin or Daisy.
He shot off quick messages on Facebook to each of them, asking if they kept in touch with Siobhan, if they new how to get in contact with her.
And then he decided to have a look into the Blue Lake Stalker.
There wasn’t a lot of information to be had, considering it was only recently that the bodies of all of the victims had been found, but it was easy to see right off that the Stalker had a type. Just looking at photographs of all the women let Nash see that they were all blondes, all young, all with long wavy hair.
Heck. Siobhan herself fit the type.
That was weird. Would a serial killer kill women that looked just like her?
He sat back, thinking about it for a moment.
The girls that had gone missing when he was in high school hadn’t looked like Siobhan. There had been no discernible type amongst them. They’d all looked different. Farrah Nelson had red hair. Ginger Carter’s hair was dark, and she was a little pudgy. Heather Mitchell had dark hair too, but it was frizzy and short, and she was much taller than the other girls.
So, if Siobhan was responsible for all of these murders, she would have had to have changed type over the years.
Maybe that made sense.
Maybe she’d been sort of practicing in high school, taking whichever girl she could get at easily and killing them.
But the bodies of those girls had never been found, so he couldn’t even be sure they actually were dead.
Of course, when both Farrah and Heather had gone missing, he’d been with Siobhan. Both of the girls had gone missing at parties at Pike’s house, and he and Siobhan had been at the parties together. But that didn’t mean she was innocent. After all, he hadn’t even seen Heather that night. Siobhan had come in alone. Maybe she’d knocked Heather out before the party, stuffed her in the trunk of her car, and then come in to say hello to him as if nothing had happened. She was late to that party.
And there was the fact that Siobhan’s house was really close to Pike’s house. That meant she might have a place close by to take her victims and kill them.
But Farrah didn’t quite fit, did she? He’d seen Farrah run off, and Siobhan hadn’t left the room. Maybe she’d gone after Farrah later, though.
He didn’t think Siobhan was capable of murder, but it could have happened. That was what he needed to establish. Possibility, not probability. He had to look at the evidence, not trust his feelings.
A notification from Facebook popped up.
It was a message back from Daisy. Haven’t talked to her since graduation. Sorry. Hey, I hear you’re doing some Internet thing about unsolved crime? That’s so cool.
He snorted. Internet thing. He was often amazed at how many people had never heard of a podcast. Apparently podcasts were geeky or something. It wasn’t a tough concept to understand. It was just a periodically released audio show that was delivered via the Internet.
He typed back a response to Daisy. Yeah, it’s pretty cool. Thanks.
But where the hell was Siobhan?
CHAPTER FOUR
An alarm went off on Nash’s phone around seven o’clock.
Oh, time to call Ariel. He brightened. He didn’t get to talk to her every day, but he was lobbying for that. Tabitha said that she wanted to ease Ariel into a routine with him, and that it was probably better if he only talked to Ariel once or twice a week for now.
He thought that maybe, if he went to court or something, he could fight all that. But there wasn’t a lot of point in that, not when his schedule was the way it was, not when he didn’t have a schedule and when he never could be sure when he was going to travel or where he was going to go. So, he didn’t push. But sometimes, he thought that he could probably work it out if he needed to. He could make sure that he was home to see Ariel. He could be there every weekend or every other week or however it was that Tabitha wanted to work it out.
But Tabitha was cautious.
He didn’t totally understand why, considering he was fairly sure her motivation in springing the whole situation on him had been because she wanted help with Ariel.
Now, though, she wouldn’t let him help.
He picked up his phone and dialed Tabitha’s number. It rang. He waited.
“Hi Nash,” said Tabitha, sounding a little out of breath. “Um, Ariel’s still in the bathtub, can we call you back in five?”
“Sure,” he said. “Am I early?” He checked the time, even though he knew he wasn’t.
“No, we’re just running late,” said Tabitha. “We’ll call you back, okay?”
“Okay,” he said.
She hung up.
He set down the phone on the bed and stared at it, waiting for it to ring.
It was quiet.
Tabitha Walker was a woman he’d met at a bar years ago. She had been in town for her brother’s wedding, but she actually lived an hour north of Nash, in a different city.
When they met, they were both drunk, which was a good thing, because Nash was shit at picking up women when he was sober. He was always nervous and he’d get sweaty and he would sometimes stumble over his words. Plus, he didn’t know what to talk about. He was really interested in unsolved crimes and he did a podcast about it, which meant that he talked about it all the time. You’d think he’d get sick of talking about it. But he didn’t. And he found that all kinds of things made him think of unsolved crimes.
Like, once, he’d been talking to this woman, and she’d mentioned that she was getting the locks changed on her house, and that reminded Nash of this guy who’d been a locksmith, and he’d kept copies of the keys to people’s houses when he put new locks on. Then he could go back in and rob them blind. Nash had shared that little story with her, which had only made her nervous.
Or another time, the conversation had turned to carving turkeys with electric carving knives, and Nash had a story about a guy who’d killed his parents and chopped them up into pieces with one of those. The pieces had gone in the freezer. They’d never found the guy. Sharing that story hadn’t endeared him to the woman he was talking to, either.
But he didn’t tell those kinds of stories when he was drunk. He felt looser, and it made it easier to talk about things he didn’t know anything about.
He wasn’t sure what he and Tabitha had talked about.
The most memorable part of meeting her hadn’t been talking anyway.
It had been the sex. She’d come back to his place, and they’d both been drunk and uninhibited, and they’d had sex on the balcony of his apartment, in the dark. The danger of discovery had made it all the hotter.
And then the next night, after the wedding she had been in town for, Tabitha had shown back up at his door, and there’d been more sex. Lots more sex.
He really liked her.
Well. He didn’t know her. He liked her naked, and he liked the way her body felt against his. But he thought he would like to know her better. After she left and went back home, he’d called her four or five times, and they’d tried to make plans to meet up again. But every single one fell through. Work got in the way, or previous plans with friends, or surprise visits from Tabitha’s parents,
or something or other.
Anyway, it didn’t happen.
One night, a few weeks after they’d hooked up for those two nights in a row, Tabitha had called him, but he’d been in a bad way that night.
See, at the time, he was not making a go of his podcast, not yet. He’d had a different podcast back then. It was a serial killer podcast, and what he did was pick a different serial killer every week and basically detail all the things the guy did. He thought it was interesting, but it was really akin to a podcast in which a guy reads a Wikipedia article.
It worked for Stuff You Should Know, but it didn’t seem to translate well to serial killers.
Anyway, that day, he’d been called into the office at the high school where he worked teaching history. The principal had received several concerned calls from parents who’d listened to the podcast. They didn’t like the idea that their children were being taught by some guy who was into serial killers, and they wanted him fired. The principal admitted that she’d never listened to the podcast, but the principal—before she was a principal—used to teach English and coach cheerleaders. She had pictures on her desk of her white toy poodle whose name was Bubbles.
The principal did not get it. She was pretty disturbed by the idea of the podcast as well.
He tried to say that it was no worse than watching CSI on TV.
“Well… that’s not real, though. These killers you’re talking about are real.”
“Yes. I’m a history teacher. This is part of history.”
She scrunched up her nose.
He sighed.
“I’m not saying you’re fired or anything,” said the principal. “It’s a long, slow process to fire a teacher. But I am saying that it might be a good idea if you stopped doing this little pod-thing of yours.”
He’d been devastated.
His serial killer podcast wasn’t popular. He sold some ad space on it, and he had some backers on Patreon, which was a way for people who liked the podcast to give him money on a subscription model, but he didn’t make near enough money on it to survive. He needed his job.
But the podcast was his passion. The job was just a thing he did for money.
The Feminine Touch Page 3
