The First Time I Hunted

by Jo Macgregor

  “You’re not fooling me, Gwyneth!” her father said crossly. “You came up with this notion before now. You want someone residing on the property in order to snoop on me!”

  She merely laughed, and I followed her out of the hothouse, eager for a breath of fresh air.

  “I do want someone here,” Gwyneth admitted as we walked across the soggy lawn. “Someone responsible, someone I can trust to keep an eye on him.”

  Uh-oh. It was one thing being responsible and trustworthy when it came to filing and spreadsheets; it was a whole other thing if I was secretly expected to be a live-in caregiver.

  “Keep an eye on him?” I said.

  “He doesn’t look after himself properly. Too much sugar and not enough exercise. I wish I could care for him personally. I truly do. We all miss him so much. But my husband and I both have jobs in Albany, and our kids are settled in school there. We’ve asked Dad again and again to come live with us, but he flat out refuses, says he values his independence and wants to be here for his clients. I think he’s secretly afraid of becoming a burden on us.” She sighed. “Having someone live on the property is a compromise I can live with”

  She gave me a pleading look — a good daughter wanting to spend more time with her father, making plans for someone to look after him. It was admirable and even kind of inspiring. Gwyneth the Good made me want to be a better daughter.

  “I don’t want him living alone. He has heart problems,” she said.

  “The thing is, I’m not a nurse,” I warned.

  “Oh, I don’t expect any problems. I’d just feel more at ease if there was someone here. You know, just in case.”

  “And I can’t guarantee to always be here.” Mason wasn’t the only one who valued his independence.

  “Of course. Just let me know if you’re going to be out of town, okay?”

  “Sure.” That much I could commit to.

  “And maybe you could keep an eye on what he eats, encourage him to cut down on junk and eat his five-a-day?”

  Crap. I was no role model when it came to eating healthily. In fact, I was the very last person who should be put in charge of anyone’s diet. I needed to warn her that her expectations of me were entirely too high. As my father would say, an ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure.

  “Look, I don’t—” I began.

  “Over here,” she said, tugging me to the massive garage where outside stairs led up to a door on the level above. As we climbed the steps, she said, “I think he’s lonely too. He’d deny it with his last breath, of course, but he could really use some company, someone to chat with over a cup of coffee now and again, you know? I think, deep down, he’d welcome that.”

  I raised my eyebrows. Mason hadn’t struck me as the sociable type, and he didn’t appear to have taken an instant liking to me either.

  “Well, at the very least, he’ll welcome someone to spar with — a good argument always energizes him. And Ryan says you’re no shrinking violet.”

  Nosy and sassy? I wondered what else Ryan Jackson thought of me.

  – 10 –

  Thursday, April 12

  Gwyneth Fletcher was right — I did love the loft apartment above the garage. Yes, it was filled with spiderwebs and dusty boxes of old books, but within five days, I’d cleared it out, cleaned it up, and moved in. I was delighted with my setup and with Ryan, who’d gotten me the gig. He’d helped me pack and move my stuff from Boston, too, and I’d appreciated the help as much as the sight of his muscles bulging under his sweatshirt as he lugged heavy boxes down to our cars and up to the loft.

  A tiny galley kitchen ran along one side of the space, with a narrow bathroom adjacent to it. In the middle of the loft, a worn leather couch faced a table with two chairs. I placed the TV set from my apartment in Boston on one end of the table, set up my laptop on the other, and managed to cram most of my clothes into the corner closet. Once I’d added a few decorative touches — a landscape painting in muted grays, a braided rug for the floor, and a free-standing oval mirror — looted from my old bedroom at my parents’ house, it looked more homey.

  It was basic, but it was mine. Plus, it had great Wi-Fi.

  When my parents came over to inspect my new digs, they gave it their stamp of approval. My father, ever practical, brought bags of groceries and a potted plant as housewarming gifts. He took in the arrangement of furniture and insisted we swap the bed and chest of drawers around so that I didn’t wake up with sunlight shining into my eyes.

  My mother, ever mystical, brought a collection of crystals, which she set up in a grid on the kitchen countertop, and then walked around the entire space, waving a burning bundle of sage. “It’s White Californian, dear, and the smudging will clear out any negative energies.”

  The woodsy smoke made me cough, and the crystal grid took up precious surface space. But knowing she meant well and inspired by Gwyneth’s admirable example, I waited until they left before I swept the stones into a bowl along with the apples and bananas from my father’s groceries and placed the dish on top of the refrigerator. I found a home for my new plant, a small Venus flytrap that my father ought to have known better than to leave with me, on the windowsill.

  That afternoon, sprawling on the amazingly comfortable couch, with throw pillows behind my head, I sighed with pleasure and raised my glass of pinot noir in a toast to my new space and job. My father had been delighted that I now had what he called “a proper job” and told me it was high time I settled down. The words “and grow up” hovered unspoken in the air.

  My mother, who’d been hanging onto the hope that I would set up shop as a psychic private eye, was less thrilled. “It’s all very well to want to earn a living, Garnet, but for goodness sake, don’t throw the baby in the bathwater! You’ve been given a gift, and if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it. That’s how the universe works.”

  I didn’t know how to use it. That was the problem. There I was, sitting pretty in my cozy pad and drinking wine, while out there in the darkness, a monster who’d ended multiple young lives and left families destroyed by grief had literally gotten away with murder. He might even now be hunting for more prey. And what could I do about it? What had it helped to get visions of hands and buttons? Singh hadn’t replied to any of my texts — I’d already sent three — or returned either of my two calls. I reckoned he regretted ever consulting me and, not wanting his colleagues to find out about it, was determined to ignore me.

  I’d no sooner had that thought than my phone chirped with an incoming message. Finally, I thought, but it wasn’t a reply from Singh. It was a series of texts from Professor Deaver.

  Dear Garnet, I enjoyed our discussion last week very much! I’ve been keeping an eye on the news, and it seems your serial killer is targeting gay men. If you’d told me that, I could’ve shared more information with you at the time, but better late than never, not so? I thought you might be interested to know about anti-LGBTQ murders.

  I did, indeed.

  Unfortunately, there’s scant research in that area in general and for gay male victims in particular.

  Big surprise. I bet the net was full of articles, research, statistics, and theories for the murder of pretty, straight young coeds.

  But what there is supports my theory of no hard and fast rules when it comes to methods or motives. A significant number of gay individuals are targeted simply because they’re viewed as easier or more vulnerable targets. Many are targeted because their sexuality is seen as abhorrent or offensive. Murdering them could be thought of as a homicidal extreme of “gay-bashing.” And as for the perpetrators who target gay men, they might be gay, straight, bisexual, or undecided. If you’d like to pick my brain further, it would be a great pleasure to meet with you again. Warm regards, Bradley

  I sent him a thank you for the information, wondering what the news had reported about the victims. I’d been so busy with my move that I’d had no time for watching TV. I read through the details of his message again while finishi
ng my wine. Maybe my father was right. Maybe I should just settle down, date Ryan, try to be a good daughter to my aging parents, and stop chasing the darkness. Setting my empty glass down on the floor beside the couch, I closed my eyes.

  Sometime later, I woke up from my nap with a jolt, dream images still vivid in my mind. A white orchid in a hothouse had morphed into a Venus flytrap closing its teeth around a fly, squashing it to a bloody pulp. The teeth became black stitches piercing lips, and a hand, my hand, placed pretty buttons over staring eyes and onto the sewn mouth. I didn’t need my years of training in psychology to understand the message from my subconscious: if I didn’t help catch the killer, I’d feel complicit in some way.

  Struggling to shake the dream images, I went to the bathroom to splash my face with water. In the mirror, I saw that my cheek was creased with indentations from one of the cushions on the couch. Four lines imprinted by raised seams met like the crosshairs of a rifle sight at a central circle made by the button that had pushed into my skin. I touched that red circle, pressing my button.

  At seven o’clock that evening, I drove over to my parents’ house. My father had invited me for supper, telling me that he had a real treat to show me. I asked him what it was as soon as I got there, but he merely said that all good things come to those who wait and eat their vegetables.

  When we finished supper, he said, “Did you see the Stakeout special on the Gay Slayer?”

  “The who?”

  “That’s what the media is calling your killer.”

  “Oh, for goodness sake!” I said, shaking my head. “And no, I didn’t. When was it on? I wish you’d given me a heads-up to watch it.”

  “Follow me,” he said, looking pleased. “I recorded it so that we could watch it together.”

  All three of us got comfortable in the living room, and then my father hit Play on the Stakeout special, which promised both an in-depth look at New England’s worst serial killer and fascinating information about serial killers in general. It started with a summary of what had been found at the burial site in New Hampshire. Over footage of the taped-off crime scene, a female voice said that a total of eight bodies had been found, all of them belonging to men. Five of them had now been identified as young men who’d gone missing between 2011 and 2017.

  “So recently!” I said. “They thought the murders stopped after 2009.”

  A police spokesman confirmed that two sets of remains were, as yet, unidentified and one of these didn’t appear to fit the profile of the other victims either in terms of age or the date of killing. Tests to confirm the date of death had not yet been finalized, but it was thought to have occurred at least ten and possibly as many as thirty years previously. The shot cut to the anchor, a woman with gray-blond hair who wore a serious expression and an even more serious skirt suit. She said that an “anonymous source” had informed Stakeout that the remains of this body had also not been disposed of in the same way as the others.

  “Interesting,” I murmured.

  “Authorities have not confirmed that this body is in fact even related to the others,” she continued. “But what are the odds that the killer coincidentally chose a spot where an older corpse just happened to be buried?”

  “Good point,” my father said at the same time as my mother said, “There’s no such thing as coincidence. Everything is connected.”

  – 11 –

  I commandeered the remote control and turned up the volume on the TV in time to hear the anchor say, “It’s bad enough to think of seven or eight people dead at the hand of this killer, but it seems there may be many, many more. Our researchers have been digging deep, and we now have reason to believe that the bodies found in the Nash Stream Forest are only the most recent victims of a serial killer who’s been operating in New England for the last two decades. Our researchers have identified twenty-nine unsolved murders where the victims were young men between seventeen and twenty-seven and a further two hundred and two missing males in that same age range during the last twenty years.”

  My father gave a low whistle at the shockingly high number which, the anchor explained, was “probably an underestimation since some disappearances are never reported to police,” though their estimated number did include several victims whose remains were never claimed or even identified.

  “Of course, not all of the murder victims will have been killed by the Slayer,” the anchor pointed out. “And the missing persons statistic includes people who purposefully go missing, like runaways and those wanting to escape abusive or unacceptable circumstances or perhaps join a cult, as well as those who wander off due to mental illness or those who die from natural causes far from home. And since the FBI has not released a comprehensive list of murders attributed to this killer, it’s impossible to say how many of these older murders and missing person cases were young men who ran afoul of the Slayer, but one thing is certain: the number is horrifyingly large.”

  “But can’t they tell which ones are his victims by the buttons?” my mother asked.

  “The FBI will have withheld that detail so they can distinguish true from fake confessions,” my father said. “The press probably doesn’t even know about the buttons.”

  “But from our long list of possible murders, an inside source has identified several as confirmed victims of the Slayer,” the anchor said.

  “A leak? Singh’s going to be furious!” I said as my phone chimed an incoming message.

  Hoping it was from Ryan, who hadn’t been able to join us for dinner because of some problem at the station, I checked my phone. The text was from Deaver. He was just following up on our chat in Perry’s office last week, he said. Were there any new developments on the case? Did the FBI need him to help compile a profile? Could I put in a good word for him with the investigative team?

  I sent back a polite message reminding him that I wasn’t part of the FBI investigation and that they didn’t share information with me (very true), that I had a new job which would be sucking up a lot of my time (true), and that I’d be sure to let him know if there were any definite developments in the case (a rotten lie). Then I returned my attention to the TV, where the anchor was saying, “Let’s take a closer look at who these young men were.”

  I grabbed some paper and a pen from the writing desk in the corner so I could note the names and dates of disappearance as the victims were listed. A photograph of a white man with flyaway fair hair and a shy smile appeared on screen. His name was Dylan Floyd, and he’d been a librarian from Greensboro, Vermont. In 2001, his body was found dumped in a culvert near Caspian Lake.

  “Dylan’s sister still remembers him well,” the anchor said.

  The shot cut to a fair-haired woman. “Dylan was my younger brother, and I loved him. He was an introvert who would rather spend the night in bed with a good book than go out partying. He was gentle. Really good with animals.” A photograph of her brother having his face licked by two Labradors appeared. “When he died, our family just … it was terrible for a long time afterward. We’re okay now, but for a long time, it was bad. Our hearts were broken, you know?”

  The next victim highlighted — Todd Ennis from Springfield, Massachusetts — had been a twenty-year-old gymnast who’d hoped to make the US team for the 2004 Olympics in Athens. He went missing in January 2003, and his body was found three weeks later beside Route 91 outside of Northampton.

  Eric Zhang, originally from California, disappeared in 2005. He’d just finished high school and was visiting family in Rhode Island when he vanished. His remains, buried in a shallow grave near someplace called Nooseneck, were discovered by land developers only in 2012.

  “Oh, dear,” my mother said. “This is very sad.”

  “Yes, one forgets that behind the statistics are real people,” my father added.

  I was feeling much the same way, and the next victim’s story had my eyes prickling with tears. A photograph of a black man roasting a giant marshmallow over a campfire appeared. Antoine Marshall, a twen
ty-two-year-old electrician’s apprentice from Meredith, New Hampshire, disappeared in May 2006. According to his family, he’d loved to play the guitar and had dreamed of starting his own rock band.

  His mother, her face creased with lines of suffering, appeared onscreen, dabbing her eyes with a tissue. “Antoine was adopted. But we couldn’t have loved him more if he’d come from our own bodies. In the year before he went missing, he grew very curious about his biological family. He wanted to find out who they were and to meet them. So when he disappeared, a part of me always wondered if he’d gone looking for them, if he’d preferred them to me, and that’s why he never came home. Then a year later, they found his body, and I knew he hadn’t. But sometimes, I still pretend that’s where he is, living safe and sound with another family, making good music.”

  “This is heartbreaking,” I said, my voice rough in my constricted throat.

  “Yes, I think it might be a bit much for me. I’ll just go wash the dishes,” my mother said and left.

  A yearbook photo of a smiling white guy was displayed. “Sean Walton, most likely to become president,” the inscription read. The voiceover said, “Famously the hometown of crime writer Stephen King, the city of Bangor, Maine, was also home to one of the victims. Twenty-two-year-old law student Sean Walton went missing on August eighth, 2006. His body was found two days later, buried in an overgrown embankment of the Penobscot River.”

  Ewan Grady was nineteen years old when he was murdered in April 2007. He’d been a runaway who worked intermittently as a sex worker and was squatting in an old hunting cabin just outside Manchester, so no one was sure of the exact date he went missing. Based on the state of decomposition, the medical examiner estimated he’d been dead around ten days by the time he was discovered in an abandoned building site on the last day of the month.