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Cal’s bright grin made a momentary return. “I thought Ash was going to stroke out when I told him. His blood pressure shot through the roof.” He got serious again. “My client has done a lot of bad, but when he confessed, he was under the influence of a significant number of drugs. He wasn’t in his right mind and he felt guilty for the things he had done, so he confessed to everything he was accused of, including Dr. Firestone’s murder. But he didn’t do it.”
“And he doesn’t have the birthmark of the man who attacked me,” Alexis added. “That man raped me repeatedly. He had a large birthmark on his pelvis. I’d recognize it anywhere, and Jaxon Thorne doesn’t have a mark on him.”
“Wait.” Connelly exhaled hard, feeling as if he’d just been punched in the gut, and sat back in his seat. “The man who attacked Veronica at my house? She told Ash he had a port wine stain on his stomach or hip. She saw it when Rebel bit him and ripped his shirt.”
Alexis held his gaze. “That’s exactly why we’re talking to you. We believe the Stalker is actually two men working together, one older and one younger. The younger one raped me and attacked Veronica. We think he’s also the one imitating your books. He’s impulsive, reckless, sloppy. The older man is the one who hunted me. He’s cold and calculating. He’s been getting away with this for decades, hiding behind the urban legend of The Shadow Stalker.” She nodded to Cal, who drew a handful of pictures out of his bag and spread them out on the table. They were all images of young women with long dark hair just like Veronica’s.
“These are the victims we have tied to them so far,” Cal said. “Look familiar?”
“They all look like Veronica.” The words tasted bitter on his tongue, and he poured himself a glass of water from the pitcher on the table. Taking a long, sobering sip, he leaned back in his seat, his gaze never leaving the faces of the women on the table. The resemblance was uncanny. The same expressive dark eyes, the same long waves of hair cascading down their shoulders. He could almost imagine Veronica’s face among them.
“Who are they?” he asked, glancing between Cal and Alexis.
Cal picked up one of the pictures. “This is Clara Sullivan,” he said, tapping the girl’s photo. The young woman in the picture was smiling at the camera, her face glowing with joy. “She was reported missing five years ago.”
“And this,”—Alexis picked up another picture—”is Ashley Moore. She disappeared a year before Clara. She was the youngest, only fifteen.”
Each woman had a story to tell, each one more terrible than the last. Thirty-six in total. Connelly found himself feeling sickened as he looked at their faces, each one filled with so much promise and life.
A chill ran down his spine as he picked up one of the photos. On the back was scrawled the victim’s name, Heather Garcia, her age, 17, and the date of her disappearance, April 2, 2001. The girl shared an uncanny resemblance to Veronica as a teenager.
“Jesus Christ. She could be Vee’s twin.”
Alexis picked up another picture. It showed a Native American woman, who couldn’t have been much over twenty, with a hard smile and sad eyes. “This was the first, as far as we can tell. Maria Ayunli Socktish. She was reported missing in June 1998 when she didn’t show up to court for a hearing to get her son back from foster care. We think she’s the key to figuring this out.”
Connelly looked up at them. “Have you told Ash any of this?”
“Yes.” Alexis’s lips flattened into a grim line. “And he told the FBI, but they think we’re chasing shadows, and Ash deferred to them.”
“He’s got a lot on his plate,” Cal said. “Between the widespread corruption in his department and now these murders, he’s not making the connection to what happened to Alexis. As far as he’s concerned, that’s case closed, and these others are all cold cases. God love him, but he’s a myopic bastard. He can’t see what isn’t right in front of him.”
“So, we’re going to tie it up in a nice neat bow and put it in front of him,” Alexis said. “That’s where you come in.”
“How can I help?” Connelly asked, his gaze lingering on the pictures scattered across the worn table as a hollow emptiness opened in his chest.
“You’ve studied the Shadow Stalker urban legend more than anyone,” Alexis said. “We need you to help us understand him.”
Something about their request felt like a violation. His novels were based on his own deepest fears and insecurities, twisted into horrifying narratives for public consumption. Digging into them felt akin to exposing all of his vulnerabilities. “But my Shadow Stalker is a fictional monster, not human. He’s the amalgamation of a town’s worst fears.”
“And so is ours.” Alexis set down a photo of May-Lynn Tapia in her red coat and one of Lucy Harper looking pissed off in her hospital bed. On top of those, she added what looked like a crime scene photo that she almost certainly shouldn’t have. It showed a woman—was it a woman? Had to be, but she was so badly cut up that she no longer looked human. The as-yet unidentified newest victim. “People are scared, Connelly. ”
Cal nodded. “If the younger of our killer duo is as obsessed with your book as we think, who better to get into his head than the author himself?”
He couldn’t tear his gaze away from the photo of the unidentified woman. She was no longer a woman, reduced to a grotesque sculpture, her life’s last moments frozen in a tapestry of horror that was more than familiar. This was more frenzied than in his book—Ash was right; the killer was losing control—but he’d penned this scene, given life to this monstrosity from the safety of his own imagination. She was an echo of what she had once been, a macabre caricature of life turned into something nightmarish. The lump in his throat solidified.
“I...” he began, only to lose his voice. He cleared his throat and tried again. “I’m gonna start writing romance novels.”
Alexis gave a sad smile and gathered up the photos. “I’d read them, but right now, we need that twisted imagination of yours.”
He scrubbed his hands over his face, through his hair, and locked them behind his neck, squeezing tight to combat the unease tap-dancing down his spine. He was a storyteller, not a detective. His job was to create nightmares, not solve them.
After a long moment, he exhaled the air caught in his lungs and dropped his hands back to the table. “Okay. I can do this,” he said more to himself than them. “At least I can help you understand the story, the legend.”
Alexis dug into her shoulder bag for a tablet and powered it on. “My sister Ellie started looking into the legend for me. She’s an excellent researcher, but she couldn’t seem to find much about it.”
Connelly accepted the tablet when she handed it to him and smiled a little at the nursery rhyme on the screen:
In shadows so deep, the Stalker hides.
