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“Penelope?” I ask, feeling thrown. It’s been years since I’ve spoken to her. We met only once, at Luke’s and her wedding, though even that was quick, a passing nice-to-meet-you.
“Have you seen him?” she asks, clearly upset, and I don’t know what to say because I don’t want to make her more upset than she already is. I don’t want to get him in trouble. He did me a favor by coming to meet me tonight, but I think she will be angry if she knows he was with me.
But then I think of how very pregnant Penelope is, and I start to wonder if she’s gone into labor or if there is something wrong with the baby.
“Yes,” I say, being honest. “I just saw him, maybe twenty or thirty minutes ago. He’s on his way home now. He should be there any minute,” I say, wondering why Luke isn’t home yet, but telling myself he might have stopped for ice cream or flowers on the way as a peace offering. “I’m sorry. Please don’t be upset with him. It’s my fault. I asked him to meet so we could talk about something that happened at work.”
Penelope is quiet at first, and then she says, “I don’t think so. I don’t think he’s coming home.”
Her words take my breath away. “Is everything okay, Penelope?” I ask softly, worried, wondering if their fight was much worse than Luke suggested. “Are you and the baby okay? Is there anything I can do?”
She doesn’t say. Instead she says, “The police were just here, at our apartment,” and I shift gears, I go into a flat spin because that means that after I saw them at the hospital, they came looking for me. They must have gone to my apartment before going to Luke’s. It must have been sometime after I left to meet him. I think of Sienna home alone, of her answering the intercom and letting them in. What would they have said to her? What would she have told them?
“Are you there?” Penelope asks.
“Yes,” I breathe. “I’m sorry. I’m here. What did they want? Did they say?”
“They wanted to talk to Luke.”
I nod, feeling sick. Of course they did. The police want to talk to Luke, to ask him questions about me. It’s part of their investigation and I wish in vain that I could talk to him before he gets home, to appeal to him not to lie—because Luke wasn’t there in Caitlin’s hospital room that day, he didn’t see anything—but to defend me, to say Meghan would never intentionally hurt a patient, that it’s simply not possible, that Meghan doesn’t have it in her to hurt someone at all.
“They had a warrant for his arrest.”
My throat goes dry. The color drains from my skin. “What?” I ask, completely caught off guard and trying to make sense of it. “I don’t understand. I don’t—”
“His DNA, Meghan,” she says, cutting in. “They found it under that last woman’s fingernails. It was a match. I saw the scratch on his neck the other day, but he said he’d nicked it shaving and I believed him.”
“What woman, Penelope? I don’t understand. What are you saying?”
“All these women who have been being attacked, Meghan. It was Luke. Luke’s the one who has been hurting them.”
I start shaking. I lose my hold on my wineglass and it falls, toppling over, spilling onto my lap. I feel the cold moisture on the thigh of my jeans. This can’t be right. She must be mistaken. Not Luke. Luke couldn’t have hurt those women. It’s impossible.
But then I think back to college, where I took a criminal justice class and learned about serial killers and sexual predators. I learned how they come across as relatively normal, meaning you wouldn’t know it to look at them and that there probably isn’t anything in their everyday life that suggests they’re predators. Usually they have normal jobs, families, wives and kids, a mortgage, a 401k.
I think back to what Luke told me about his past, how he was raised by mostly absentee parents, an abusive father and how his own teenage years were marked by delinquency, a stint in juvie before supposedly turning his life around.
But what if he didn’t? What if he just got better at hiding his crimes? What if, over time, he only became more violent?
The first time Penelope called, thirty minutes ago, Luke took a passing glance at the number on the display. Not two minutes after she called, he left.
“Meghan? Are you still there?”
“Yes.”
“There’s more, Meghan. That’s why I’m calling you.” She takes a deep breath. “After the police left, I searched through his things. There was a shoebox in our closet.” Penelope speaks haltingly, having a hard time getting the words out. “It was just a shoebox in a stack of shoeboxes. I never thought there was anything off about it. But there were things inside, Meghan.”
“What things?”
“Online newspaper articles he printed and kept, a heart-shaped locket—” she pauses, choking on the words “—a woman’s thong.”
“Mementos,” I breathe, my hand rising to my mouth as my stomach roils at the thought of Luke walking away from someone’s apartment with a pair of women’s underwear in his pocket—a souvenir, something to remember her by—leaving her alone and crying, scared for her life.
“Yes. There was a picture in the box too. Taken from outside a three flat, from across the street.”
“A picture of who?”
“It was of you, Meghan.” She takes a breath, loath to say, “And your daughter. He took it, I think, without you knowing.”
