Today only confirmed that.
I linger near the phone, waiting for a callback, but it doesn’t come. I finally head toward the office. I stop along the way and pop my head into Connor’s room; he’s reading, which is exactly what I expected, and I don’t bother him. It’s hardly a surprise to find that Lanny is texting, and she barely glances up when I knock on her open door.
“Hey,” she says, “who was it calling?”
“Someone who wanted advice,” I say.
Her fingers stumble and pause, and she transfers her attention to me. My daughter’s pretty, but more than that, there is character in her face, and strength. A fair bit of sharp stubbornness too. Can’t imagine where she gets it. “What did she want?”
“Honestly? I’m really not even sure. She doesn’t seem to be in too much trouble, though. Not in fear of her life, at least not enough to really accept help.”
“K.” She goes back to her glowing screen, thumbs working with furious precision. I love the way she attacks things, with all the intensity of a life-and-death situation. My beautiful Atlanta, never moving at less than full speed. “I hate this, you know.” She’s talking about the danger, the restrictions, the way her life keeps drawing inward.
“I know,” I tell her. “We’ll try to make it better.”
When I get to the office, I find an open bottle of wine, and a full glass on my desk. Sam’s got one of his own. He’s got his cell phone cradled between his neck and shoulder as he searches in a drawer for paperwork. I take the glass and mouth Thank you as I slip into my own chair. I check my email box.
It’s a damn disaster. I suppose I should have expected that, in the wake of the Howie Hamlin debacle, but I hadn’t, and seeing the huge increase in abusive, anonymous emails makes me regret having dinner first. I ignore those for now; most are repetitive anyway, like they passed around a script. Kill yourself, you ugly bitch. Do everybody a favor and join your husband in hell. Start a barbecue and crawl inside. That kind of thing.
Once I clear those out and into a FOR EVALUATION folder, I get rid of the flood of reporters wanting me to comment on the upcoming documentary. Someone’s helpfully signed me up for a Lost Angels newsletter. How nice.
Apart from those, there are four more messages, each containing automated web searches that I’ve programmed to archive monthly to my in-box. I’ve slacked off the Sicko Patrol for too long. Obviously. At first I was recovering, and then . . . then I convinced myself that with Melvin gone, Absalom gone, things would just . . . get better. That I didn’t need to worry as much anymore.
I was an idiot. And I’m paying for that brief, stupid burst of overconfidence.
I start as far back as I can find and open the report. It’s just an archived list of links mentioning either Gwen Proctor, Gina Royal, or any of the other briefly used false names I’d hidden out under. The date is soon after the events at Killman Creek.
Seems normal enough. If you can call mutilation, rape, and death threats normal. And of course, there are a lot of them. Hundreds.
What’s more ominous is that when I open each of the reports, I can see the cancerous growth, charted out in ever-proliferating links to videos, discussion boards, new Facebook groups dedicated to stalking me, Twitter hashtags. And that’s just on the public side. The dark web is mostly inaccessible to me now; I have a Tor browser that grants me anonymity, but the dark web is a who-do-you-know network, full of shadowy contacts and hidden agendas. I used to rely on the hacker collective known as Absalom to navigate that world, but back then I didn’t know who—what—Absalom really was, and really wanted. Without that easy access, the searches I can run in the deeper levels of the internet are very limited.
But I can see the surface, and the growing monster: day after day of commenters feeding off one another’s fear, paranoia, hate, and easy judgment. There’s a link to the Lost Angels website, finally. I click it, but I can only get to the public home page of the site, the one with all the photo montages for each of Melvin’s victims. It’s difficult for me to come here at all, looking at the calm, smiling, hopeful faces of young women just starting their lives. The innocent babies and children they once were before my ex got his hands on them. I keep scrolling. There’s usually a news section at the bottom beneath all this heartbreak where members of the Lost Angels community—families, mostly, though some close friends too—will put updates they feel are important.
This time it isn’t just a post recalling a birthday, or a graduation; it’s a full press release, dated only a couple of weeks ago.
It announces that filming on a Lost Angels documentary is underway. Not just about the victims, but about the killings themselves. About Melvin Royal.
Most especially, about the woman who might have gotten away with murder: Gina Royal.
I feel sick. I understand their pain, their rage, their need for some kind of relief, and I’ve never hated them for despising me. The one thing I can be grateful for is that at least so far, there’s no mention of Sam in connection to the making of this film.
A significant number of people got on board for this project. Almost ten thousand of them, pledging hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s matched by the nonprofit that Miranda Tidewell started for her murdered child. I feel even sicker, staring at the announcements. And the promise of more to come soon.
They’re really doing this.
They’re really coming for me.
Sam finishes his conversation, and I hear him call my name, but I don’t immediately respond. I can’t. In an effort to get my mind off the Lost Angels, I’ve clicked another link. Now I’m staring at the message on my screen that says, OPEN SEASON ON MURDERERS, and it’s a surveillance picture of me, Lanny, and Connor laughing together in front of our cabin, unafraid. There’s a target drawn over us, and painstakingly photoshopped bullet holes in our bodies.
Sam comes around the desk, and I quickly minimize the picture to the desktop—but not soon enough. He leans over and commandeers the mouse. Brings it up again. Studies the image. I know that silence. Sam’s currents run deep, fast, and sometimes dangerous.
“What are you thinking?” I ask him.
“I’m thinking this gets printed out and taken straight to the police,” he says. “And to the FBI.” We have friends in both places, thankfully. “And I’m thinking that whoever took this was right here, watching you. And I want to know who the hell that is.”
“The original photo could have been taken by a journalist,” I tell him. “They’ve been after us from the day Melvin went down.” Since I never gave much in the way of interviews, they shot a lot of pictures, usually grainy long-lens shots like this. “It doesn’t mean this photoshop hero who changed it has been, or is, anywhere close to us.”
“It doesn’t mean he isn’t either,” Sam says. “Sorry. I take this seriously.”
“You think I don’t? This isn’t even the worst of it.”
He doesn’t quite look at me. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
I’m going to have to let him in on all this. I’ve hesitated, because there are some particularly awful things in my Sicko Patrol file. Things that feel, even now, too intimate to share. But he needs to know. “Okay,” I say. “You want to sit down and look at the rest of what I’ve got?”