When Bryce had ignored three days’ worth of Thea’s texts and calls, Thea could do nothing but make the decision for herself. Mikey was behind her all the way, as hell-bent as she was to figure out if the killer really was Sara Shaw, and the two gathered in the basement that Tuesday as they had every previous week.
It was strange without Bryce there. Empty.
Thea couldn’t help but let her eyes flicker back to Bryce’s usual chair, tucked neatly under the table. Her spiral-bound notebook with the rose-gold cover still sat out, brimming with tattered pages stained with her curly handwriting.
A lump began to swell in Thea’s throat if she thought too much about it. About Bryce. She didn’t know if any of this was fixable. She only knew that she needed Bryce to be okay, and that couldn’t happen if Thea’s hunch about Shaw was correct.
Shehadto do this. Even if Bryce never forgave her for it, she had to besure.
“All right, I have our list of subscribers here.” Mikey stretched in his chair after a final click of the computer mouse. “All one thousand and eighty-nine of them. We’ve really taken off since…”
He didn’t finish that sentence. He didn’t need to. Thea had never wanted to profit off of the deaths, but somehow, it had happened anyway. All she could do now was use that to prevent more.
She peered over Mikey’s shoulder at the list, watching him scroll through unfamiliar names and faces. They stopped on profiles without pictures to see if their location was listed, but it seemed a lot of their listeners weren’t from Washington at all.
Jace’s chiselled, pierced face appeared about halfway down, but they’d expected as much. There had been no further news about his charges yet, and Thea still wasn’t convinced he’d had anything to do with it.
“If itwasJace, and heistaking inspiration from the podcast,” Thea wondered aloud, “do you really think he’d come right out andsayhow much he loves it like he did? It seems a little clumsy, and this killer is anything but clumsy. Unless he was taunting us. I don’t know. None of it makes sense.”
“You’re right,” Mikey agreed, scratching his stubbled chin tiredly. “It’s too easy. I don’t buy it yet.”
They continued on, stumbling across Thea’s mom, who’d never listened to a podcast in her life but had insisted that Thea teach her how to “scribey thingy” when they’d first began recording theirs. Dina from the diner was there, too, but Thea doubted she had time in her busy day to murder people in between running the most popular joint in town.
When she found Heidi Godfrey’s profile, her stomach barely fluttered, though itdidlurch when she saw the profile beneath it.
“Hold on.” She halted Mikey’s scrolling to point to the familiar face. In his profile picture, Peter Keane’s shaggy haircut hung low over his eyes, making him almost unrecognizable, but Thea would know that sheepish grin anywhere. It was often directed at Bryce, and it made Thea feel sick, not just because Thea dreaded Bryce ever warming up to him, but because there was something…offabout someone so relentlessly oblivious. His persistence despite Bryce’s rejections, maybe. “That’s Peter from the arcade.”
“The one who likes Bryce?”
“Oh my God.” Memories of the shed, of those candid photographs of Bryce taken all over town, flashed through Thea’s mind. “Itcouldbe him.”
Mikey’s thick brows drew together. “Him?”
“He’s obsessed with Bryce.”
“So are you. It doesn’t make you a murderer.”
Thea shot him a glare and slapped him across the back of the head lightly. “There were pictures of Bryce in the shed. That can’t be a coincidence.”
“Okay, so what about Roger Morris?” His hazel eyes remained quizzical, unconvinced, and frustration began to rise in Thea’s throat. Whatever avenue they went down, nothing added up about that damn shed and the victims the killer had taken. “Why would he care abouthimif he’s doing this because of Bryce?”
She had no real answer for that, and Mikey took it as his cue to keep scrolling.
“Don’t get distracted now. Sara Shaw is the one with the most connections to this…” he trailed off for a moment and then gestured to the center of the screen. “And there she is.”
Indeed, Shaw’s name and photograph was wedged between the other subscribers. She listened to the podcast. Any doubts Thea had had dissipated instantly. There were too many coincidences, too much evidence.
“Then let’s do this.” Thea sat in front of her microphone and slipped her headphones around her neck, pausing only when Mikey swivelled around warily.
“Are you sure you want to do this? If Bryce finds out…”
“I’mdoingit forher.”It was a mantra she’d repeated to herself over and over again the previous couple of days. She couldn’t lose Bryce. She couldn’t risk it. “We have to try.”
In agreement, Mikey slipped on his own headphones, closing the list of subscribers to make way for the recording software.
“All right. On the count of three.” His voice shook, and his fingers, too, as they hovered over the mouse. “Three, two, one…”
The recording began with a click, and Thea sucked in a ragged breath before glancing down at her script. “Hello, you sick and twisted bunch, and welcome to another episode ofPerfect Crimes.”
She paused as usual, for Bryce to chime in with her own introduction, before remembering the vacant seat across from her. Chest straining with both anxiety and heartache, Thea continued on alone, fuelled by Mikey’s reassuring thumbs up every now and again as she told the story of the Railway Murders. They’d taken place in a New England town not a decade ago, carried out by Joe Marlow, an old train conductor who’d hidden the remains of his victims beneath station platforms and across railway lines so the trains would destroy the evidence for him. In fact, the last of the flattened, mangled, fractured bones weren’t found until five years later.
No trains passed through Stone Grange anymore, but an old railway line severed the westernmost town limits from Newhalem Creek, a dense and endless cluster of forests and valleys that few dared venture into alone, for fear of getting lost or caught in the strong river currents. It was as good a location as any to find their killer if she chose to turn up.
Though it had been her idea, Thea found herself hoping she was wrong as she continued talking about remains and bones, death and murder. She hoped for the first time that Jace reallywasthe killer, and all of this should already have been put to bed.
But it didn’t feel that way, so she finished the podcast as steadily as she could and tried not to wonder what trouble she might’ve just unleashed.