Every case except one.
I look to Rhys for help. His mouth flattens into a line, eyebrows drawn. His steel-gray eyes say: she said it’s your team.
Thanks.
Despite my reservations, I take hold of her weathered hands. “We’re going to try our hardest,” I promise her.
Her eyes sheen with unshed tears and hope.
Hope.
After a year of searching for the truth, of seeking justice for her daughter, hope has become Bethany’s curse. Even when you try to sever every last thread of it, hope’s gauzy web latches on to the remaining pieces of your heart. It’s a painful thing to witness, when a family member cannot let go, move on.
“Thank you.” She squeezes my hand before she releases me. Then the tears come. Rivulets streak her dry cheeks, like rain down a desert canyon.
The sound of the door closing echos through the narrow hallway. I walk faster toward the elevator.
I sense Rhys’s towering presence behind me. “You did good back there,” he says. “Closure is all we can promise. Even then, it’s usually not enough. We can’t bring their loved ones back from the dead.”
“I know.” And I do. Grieving parents have a checklist. They stay stuck on step punish killer for a long time, and sometimes, when it’s time to move forward to the healing bullet point, they can’t.
“Bethany is the purest grieving mother I’ve met,” I say. “I hope I do her justice.”
I believe to be a true crime writer, you have to respect the victim.
There’s a distinct difference between the creation of a character, the process of conjuring a person out of nothing—giving them living, breathing personality—and depicting a true person on the pages.
If I kill off a fictional character, the reader may suffer, on a topical level. Until they pick up the next book.
But when making a study of people—real people—in order to recount their story, immersing myself in their lives, I have a responsibility to them—the victims—as well as the mourning family members and friends left behind, to share their cruel experience with the utmost respect. To be compassionate, humane.
If for no other reason than to differentiate yourself from the very real killer you’re also depicting.
You need that clear line between good and evil.
I need it.
The voice of the victim, as well as the voice of those closest to the victim, are the ones who direct my narrative.
Rhys and I are silent as we descend to the ground level. When the doors open, we’re in a new frame of mind.
The next bullet point on our checklist: the crime scene.
7
Book of Drew
Lakin: Then
I saw him the first day of my Abnormal Psychology class. I was seated in the second row. He introduced himself as Drew. Not Prof. Abbot. Or even Prof. Andrew Abbot. Just Drew. He was the young teacher. The cool teacher. The one who involuntarily winked while you were talking and made you feel special.
He was giving his introductory lecture on the definition of abnormal.
“We hear that word, and instinctually, subconsciously, we place it in the negative box. Something that is abnormal is not normal, therefor it’s wrong.” Drew glanced around the room, making eye contact with various students. I was one of them. “I want you to free your preconceived notions. Just let them go. Abnormal doesn’t denote wrong. Instead, think of abnormal psychology in terms of the level of interference your patient may suffer in their quality of life due to their disorder.”
He was brilliant. And beautiful. A lethal combination that consumed the air around him. He drew everyone in; the gravitational pull of a black hole, but you felt light, and warmth, from his sun.
A girl in the front row raised her hand. “What about maladaptive behaviors, Drew? What’s the difference between that and a mental disorder?”
I wanted to roll my eyes. This girl—the one who’d stolen his attention, with her pert, bouncy tits and pert, bouncy beach waves—should know the difference if she was registered in AP. Maybe she was in the wrong class. Stumbled in thinking it was her poetry elective.
Blondes with bouncy tits always took a poetry elective.
I mocked her, yet I envied her right from the start. The way she stood out, asked dumb questions to gain his attention. And it worked.
As she peered around the class, my heart lurched, my pulse slammed through my veins. She was stunning. Her beauty was a gut punch to every girl in the class. I felt it ripple the air; a collective domino effect.
Drew knelt in front of her desk, wrist braced on the edge. “Excellent question, uh…?”
“Chelsea.”
“Mental disorders are the root. Maladaptive behaviors are unhealthy ways of coping with the disorder. Most of the time, reinforcing the illness.”
As everyone here learned in Psych 101.
The uncomfortable feeling dispelled as quickly as it came. I couldn’t be envious of someone as vapid as Chelsea. Still, I kept sneaking glimpses at her. Curious.
Later, when Drew chose me, when he picked me out of a sea of vapid girls all angling to be with “the hot professor”, I had no more reason to fear Chelsea.
But, as Drew would denote, obsessing over a fear is a maladaptive behavior in its own right.
Drew stood and turned his attention to the class. “A patient can have any number of coping mechanisms to deal with their symptoms.” He paced the front of the room, and I loved the way he moved in his jeans. “For instance, I once treated a patient who depended on dream interpretation in order to make choices through their day. They couldn’t leave the house, pay a bill, or even take a shower until I’d analyzed their dream.”
Another student raised their hand. “So, you essentially had control over their choices, their life. Isn’t that dangerous?”
This piqued my curiosity. I leaned in, needing to know.
“Yes. Freudian techniques can be dangerous in the wrong hands,” he said. “The challenge in this particular case was to use psychoanalysis in order to get the patient to interpret their own dreams, in essence letting them guide their own life. By delving into their subconscious, we discovered the patient was, in fact, revealing repressed memories through dreams.” He walked to the whiteboard and jotted a note about recovered memories.
“Think of a computer. The mind is a fascinating, intricate web. Our memories race along the spun webbing, the network, connecting to folders of cached data. But here’s the difference: we don’t recall our memories in perfect clarity or detail. Our minds alter those moments. Every time we look at them, they change in little ways.”
He spouted psychobabble like poetry. He made you feel like he was talking directly to you, intimate. Personable.
I knew I’d fall in love with him that first day.
And I knew—somewhere in the racing neurons of my brain—that love would destroy me.
8
Open Ending
Lakin: Now
As with an author of fiction, every true crime writer has their own style, their own voice, along with their own story to tell. We strive in our research on the case, the killer, the victims. We endeavor to reveal, essentially, our path to the truth.