by Vera Kurian
Andre accepted a beer from Charles with a nod—I didn’t like this. They had a buddy-buddy vibe going. “John Fiola was writing a book about the case, which Wyman never did, or any of the detectives who worked on the case. It’s pretty weird if you think about how much money a book like that would have made, coming from people directly involved with the case. He wanted a big book deal, and some of the agents were biting. So, I don’t know, maybe this is illegal, but I signed up for a Gmail address with Fiola’s name and wrote to all of them, some bullshit about me having serious family issues, but now I have time to devote to this project, could you please resend any notes you originally had. Most of them didn’t answer, but one did! She just forwarded me the last email she sent him with the attachment—the whole book.”
“Send it to us,” I said. “We can look through it right now, divide the work between us.” Andre nodded and sent the email and then all three of us began to skim. The book was unfinished—about two hundred pages of text plus a chapter outline. When I scrolled down to the original email, it was clear why the book had never been published.
We read your proposal and chapters with a great deal of interest. I imagine you have several agents who are highly motivated to get this story out there. Our concern is with the quality of the writing, which doesn’t make this book competitive for a tough market right now. Our proposal would be that you work with a ghostwriter to help tidy it up. We have several we could recommend, and the process would be easy for you. If you’re interested, please contact me at the below number and we can chat.
The ghostwriter made sense—John was an awful writer. The pages were filled with purple prose and turns of phrase that were supposed to sound profound.
I skimmed as quickly as I could. John started with CRD’s childhood and moved through to when he started killing. I hesitated. Was there any chance at all CRD wasn’t actually executed? This almost made sense—he broke out of prison, or got a last-minute pardon from a softie governor, then returned to make Wyman’s life a living hell. I did a quick search on Charles’s computer. CRD had been put to death by lethal injection in late 2006, a death that had been observed by the prosecutor of the case and members of some of the victim’s family.
“Oh my God,” Andre said suddenly.
“What?” Charles asked when Andre didn’t say anything.
“Sorry, some of this stuff is graphic,” he murmured, still reading.
I was at the part where the police had nailed CRD, linking him with DNA evidence. The case was about to go public. My eyes skipped down pages rapidly.
A squeak escaped my mouth.
“What? What?” Andre asked.
“‘Between myself, my adviser, and the detectives working the case, we knew the media storm that would erupt once they announced a break in the case. In addition to the named and unnamed victims there were three more victims: Gregory’s wife, and their twins.’” I paused for dramatic effect. Charles had his eyebrows raised and Andre comically had his mouth wide open. “‘And yet the trauma hadn’t ended with CRD behind bars. Marsha—’ that’s the wife ‘—committed suicide before the bail hearing. One thing we all agreed upon was that it was in the best interest of the girls to protect their identities.’”
“You think Emma and Megan might be the Rock Creek Killer’s kids?” Charles said. “A lot of people have twins.”
“They’re the right age to be Ripley’s kids,” I said. I was immediately on the internet, pulling up images of Gregory Ripley to see if there was a resemblance.
“How is that possible? The media would have been all over that. A couple Google searches and you’d have the wife and kids’ names,” Andre said.
Charles was still skimming the manuscript. “The police helped—they had their names changed immediately and they were sent to live with friends of Marsha’s in California.”
“Then how’d they end up back here?”
Andre popped to his feet. “It happened like this. They have this idyllic life on the beach, only they start to realize there’s something wrong with Emma. They call Dr. Wyman and he says she needs treatment.”
“Because he was so good treating the dad? Wait a minute,” Charles said slowly. “Did you guys get a signing bonus for the panel study?”
“Bonus?”
“You mean beyond tuition?”
“Twenty-thousand dollars,” Charles said. Andre and I looked at him like he was crazy. He blinked slowly. “When I went to dinner with Emma she mentioned that both she and her sister each got a twenty-thousand-dollar signing bonus.”
“What!”
“I didn’t get shit!” I shouted. “You’re just telling us this now!”
“Well, I didn’t remember! I thought we all got one—I don’t know, I couldn’t remember if I did or not.”
“How do you not know about twenty thousand dollars?!” Andre said.
“Portmonts are too busy polishing their monocles!” I yelled, and Andre cawed. He was just as mad as I was.
“Don’t you see?” Charles interrupted. “He was willing to pay a premium to get them—and not just because they were twins, but because they were Ripley’s twins.”
“Isn’t it kind of inappropriate to have test subjects you personally know?” Andre wondered.
“This is the piece we’ve been missing,” I interrupted.
Charles still looked doubtful. “Okay, maybe they’re Ripley’s kids, but I’m supposed to believe Emma’s a serial killer just because her dad was? You haven’t met her. She’s...she’s...”
“It makes sense,” Andre said. “It’s the twenty-year anniversary of when CRD started killing, which is fucked up because it’s also the year the twins were probably born. Maybe she wanted to make her own mark. Wyman knows the family, so he’s desperate, thinks he can stop her, but he’s gotten too attached to be objective. He’s having dinner with her! She’s supposed to be a patient, not a family friend!”
“Or maybe it’s Megan,” I suggested. I didn’t need the two of them watching Emma like hawks, not when I had final chess pieces to move. It was Emma. She explained the CRD connection. She attacked Trevor, who then thought it was me or Charles because he didn’t know about Emma. And she has a crush on Charles, so maybe she got mad that I hooked up with him and sent the #slut message on Instagram. What I needed was for Charles and Andre to run in circles for a few days so I could take care of one more thing. It would require getting Emma down to the Sand Filtration Site to at least put her in the same location as Will.
I didn’t exactly understand why she wanted to kill people in the program—maybe she was mad at Wyman or something—but if the murders were just Michael, Kellen, and Will, I could still make it seem like she was just targeting Adams students because they were convenient. And all male, for that matter—maybe I could work that angle.
“Megan’s the normal one,” Charles said.
“Who’s to say what’s normal?” I said. “It’s the perfect crime, really. Go around killing people, and when someone fingers you, you say, Do you really think it’s me? Are you sure it wasn’t my identical twin who’s a diagnosed psychopath?”
“Oh my God, it is perfect!” Andre shouted. “And if they found DNA, they wouldn’t be able to prove which twin it belonged to, so Emma ends up behind bars.”
I knew this wasn’t really how twin DNA worked—there was still the issue of random mutations that would be different between them, but luckily neither of them had taken advanced biology.
“We need to take action, get enough evidence to stop them,” I said. “Let’s divide the work. I’ll tail Emma. Charles, you see if you can find out where Megan lives, and Andre, you tail Trevor.” Andre looked disappointed—he had broken the CRD part of the case and clearly wanted to claim Emma for his own. I made my eyes big and detailed how Trevor had a creepy fixation on me. As Andre’s face grew softer, Charles, standing behind him, smirke
d.
“What about that Will guy?” Andre asked.
“Charles will keep an eye on him. They’re in the same frat.” Andre finally nodded in agreement—he was shockingly easygoing for a psychopath. But at this point I had already figured out that Andre’s agreeableness—unusual for one of us—was all part of his act to get people to like him. It went along with his dimples just fine and would probably work well until he started to look a little older.
Charles peered at me. He knew I was up to something, and the last thing I needed was for him to corner me. I stood up. “Everyone be on high alert.” I was in a hurry to leave, half expecting Charles to stop me to probe me further about Emma or Will.
To my surprise, he said nothing. I didn’t like the two of them hanging out without me, but now that I had finally narrowed down who the hunter was, there were a lot of things on my to-do list.
55
“Should we come up with a game plan?” Andre asked, not looking up from his phone where he was still skimming Fiola’s book. He felt out of place being alone with Charles in his fancy apartment without Chloe there as a buffer.
“Yes.” Charles sat at his piano, resting his beer bottle next to him. Andre wondered what the hell kind of college student actually had a piano. He began to play it, a disturbing, intense piece that brought to mind goblins and ghouls.
“Do you know any music that’s less horrifying?”
He laughed and stopped playing. “Not a fan of Liszt...? Can I ask you a question?” Charles said. Andre looked up. “How long have you been faking your diagnosis?” He said it almost conversationally.
Andre froze, his stomach lurching. “What?”
“Come on, you can tell me.” Charles wore the benign, friendly expression of someone about to sell you a subprime mortgage. “I’m dying of curiosity.”
“Why would you even think that?” Charles didn’t answer, just looked back at him. You could confuse him for a nice guy, couldn’t you? A guy with a sweet apartment who played the piano, who tried to be the voice of reason in their trio. It was hard to reconcile the friendly, open way he was looking at Andre with the fact of what he was. Andre’s face cycled through a few expressions—a haha, you’re too funny expression, a what the hell expression. He knew he was about to be threatened in some way, but some tiny part of him, after all this time and all he had gotten away with, felt a tiny bit of relief. Relief at finally being caught.
Charles smiled. “It’s the way you act, the way you respond to things. I first noticed it when you were disgusted by that funnel-cake cheeseburger.”
“What!”
“I don’t feel disgust,” Charles replied. “My girlfriend makes it a habit to sniff through the stuff in my fridge because I don’t interpret the smell of spoiled food as something dangerous.” Stunned, Andre struggled to think of something, maybe a joke, that would distract him. “Also, you just seemed pretty alarmed when I accused you of faking.”
“So?”
“So, you catch someone like me or Chloe in a lie and we’re lying in the next breath so well we almost believe it ourselves.”
“You seem normal. Not like Chloe.”
“I’m not,” Charles said flatly. “I’ve spent two decades curating an image of normalcy.”
Andre took a sip of beer, letting the nearly salty IPA sit in the back of his throat before swallowing. There was something exciting about the truth floating close to the surface, bumping its head up for oxygen. “If I were to say something...would you tell anyone?”
“Why would I?”
“Because you lack a conscience?”
“But my lack of conscience is exactly why I wouldn’t tell,” Charles said, his smile practically glittering. He was about to get his way and was probably sensing it. “I’m really curious, so I promise if you tell me I won’t tell, because I want to know.”
“You won’t tell anyone? Not even Chloe?”
“She’s hardly my confidante.”
Andre played with his label. “I just filled out the application as a joke, but I never thought it would actually go anywhere... And then it sort of took off on its own and started snowballing.”
“What? What did you do exactly?”
“The backstory is that when I was thirteen I got diagnosed with Conduct Disorder.”
“Oh, I got that, too. I think I was nine, though.”
Andre nodded. “I didn’t think about it at the time—I mean, I was a kid, but later I read about it and basically thought it was a bunch of bullshit. My family was just in a bad place—of course I acted out. So did my brother, and I always did what he did.”
“What do you mean bad place?” Charles leaned forward, and if you didn’t know what he really was you could mistake him for an inquisitive, empathetic person. Charles was good, Andre thought. Much better than Chloe at faking it. Was this what prompted the outpouring of words, or was it exhaustion, the weight finally being lifted off his shoulders?
“My sister died really suddenly. She was the oldest. It wasn’t even like she was sick or something. She just had an asthma attack.”
“She died of an asthma attack?”
“It happens,” Andre said, his voice clipped. “They called an ambulance and it took over forty minutes to get there.”
“DC efficiency.”
“Welcome to Northeast. Shit happened in our neighborhood—burglaries, sometimes a shooting. But this was different. It was like it broke everyone. My brother was in the same high school as her at the time. A pretty good student and really good at track. Sprinting and hurdles. Planned to go to college, but then he stopped caring. Didn’t go to class. Started hanging out with what my mom called the ‘bad elements’ in the neighborhood. I was with him sometimes. Or just cutting class.”
“So they diagnosed you with Conduct Disorder?”
Andre nodded. “I don’t think I have it, to be honest, but it ended up working in my favor. When I was fifteen, I got in serious trouble. Some friends of mine broke into a place—I wasn’t there with them, but I drove them away in someone’s car right after it happened, but then they got caught. I got put on probation and had to switch to this special school. It was like a transitional school for kids with behavior problems, and some of them were coming straight out of juvenile detention.” Andre shook his head. “Some of those guys. It hit me—I didn’t want to end up like them. It made me realize how hard my parents worked to take care of us, what I was doing to them on top of all the suffering they were already feeling. Anyhow, the school counselor told me that this program at Adams was interested in me.”
“Dr. Wyman?”
Andre nodded. “I started reading about psychopathy. Most of the people with Conduct Disorder end up getting diagnosed with Antisocial and that’s basically the same as being a psychopath... I thought, hey, maybe I could make them think I had it for real. I didn’t expect it would work, but then when it did, and my parents found out about the free financial aid, by then it was too late.”
“But how did you get past the screening interviews and all that diagnostic stuff?” Charles seemed delighted by the tale of subterfuge. Andre felt a rash of strange pride.
“I looked up stuff on the internet. Most of the diagnostic surveys are self-report. I just answered the way I knew I was supposed to, based on what I read in books.”
“What about the phone interviews?”
“I got my brother and his friend to pretend to be my parents.”
Charles gave a short laugh. “So your parents don’t know?”
Andre wagged his head uncomfortably. “Not really. I sort of told my mom it was a special academic scholarship. The next thing I know, here I am.”
Charles held up his beer, as if toasting. “Minus the deranged serial killer, it’s not a bad deal.”
“Was I that obvious?”
“I don’t know. Seems like Wyman and
Elena are fooled.”
“You promise you won’t tell Chloe?”
“Why would I? And she’s too self-absorbed to notice herself.” Andre was relieved, but then Charles smiled, leaning back on the piano with his elbows, eliciting low and high discordant notes. His smile was a little too wide. “Why would I tell anyone your secret?”
This, Andre realized, was what Charles was about. The offer to let him use his apartment wasn’t altruistic—it was some way of exerting power. This information was power. Charles didn’t personally care about the scheme—he seemed to think that bilking Wyman out of grant money was funny. But he just liked to have that little piece of control. Don’t trust these people for a second, Andre thought.
56
I knew I should be more patient like Charles, but now that I finally knew who was hunting me, I wanted to hit her head-on like a semi.
Emma was to be taken seriously; this was a girl who, either by subterfuge or physical force, had made Kellen drink buckshot, had stabbed a man and bounced out the window before Andre could even spot her, and had broken into Kristen’s house. She had followed me the night Will was killed even though I took every precaution.
I opened Instagram on my phone and went to Pinprick52’s account. I DMed, We need to talk. I stared at my phone, expecting an answer back right away. The little green bubble by her name indicated that she was active.
The longer I waited, the more enraged I became. Who was she not to answer me, when I knew she was online?? I waited ten seconds, then huffed my way to the computer lab in the basement of Albertson Hall, which was nearly deserted. Everyone knew the faster computers were in the newer lab in the library, but the Albertson lab had the added benefit of being stupid enough to allow unlimited printing. I opened my email and printed out the entire document that Andre had gotten—Fiola’s shitty book. I then hurried home, stopping briefly in the quad to fill my pockets with dirt.
