Page 117 of Wrong Mail

The police had DNA. They’d recovered it from the assaults, enough from different scenes to know that one man was responsible. But there had never been a match in the system. No name.

I’d learned about it months earlier from a source close to the Oregon investigation. Eventually, that source gave me something I was never supposed to have. A copy of the DNA data the genealogy team had been working from. No names attached. Nothing that pointed to anyone. Just data.

The genealogy work had gotten them closer. Relatives. Branches of a family tree. Still no confirmed name.

I had found Henry another way.

Through the houses.

I’d followed what happened to them after the bodies were gone. Listings. Sales. Agencies that disappeared and came back under different names. Money moving through companies until one name kept surfacing at the edges.

Henry Westburn.

It wasn’t proof. So I followed him. For weeks. Chasing a possibility I couldn’t let go.

And that led me to the bar.

Me sitting across from him, laughing when I didn’t mean it, letting him think he was the one studying me. Waiting until he left his glass behind.

I took that glass to someone I trusted who worked in genetics. Not the source who’d given me the profile. Someone else. I didn’t tell them where the DNA data had come from, and I didn’t tell them whose glass I’d brought them. I couldn’t risk destroying an innocent man’s reputation if I was wrong. And I still didn’t know that I wasn’t.

I asked only one question.

Were they the same man?

The answer came that night, while I was sitting out there looking for him.

A voice message.

They were.

It was Westburn.

After that, there was no almost, no maybe, no story I could tell myself where I’d forced the pieces to fit because I needed them to.

It was him.

And suddenly his empty car in that neighborhood meant something else.

I tried to call.

One bar. Then nothing.

I pulled away, looking for a signal, one hand on the wheel and one on a phone that wouldn’t catch, trying to reach anyone who could stop whatever was happening before it was too late.

Then she came out of the dark.

The road. The white of her in the headlights, arms up, mouth open. Soaked through, almost lost in the storm before I ever reached her.

For two years, I have carried her as the worst thing that ever happened to me, a stranger who stepped into my lane, a death I could not undo and could never explain to myself.

But the truth was, she was running from him.

"Kelsi Taylor," Henry says. “She was a pretty little thing."

A sound comes out of me. I don't know what it is.

"She was the one person alive who could have put me in that house," he says. "The only one. And you took her off that road before she said a word to anyone." He turns his head and looks at me. His face is soft, and open, and I have never seen anything worse. "You saved me, Mallory. You didn't know you were doing it. But you did. You came closer than anyone ever came, and then you saved me, and then you forgot me. All in one night."