akin to the holiday mementos regular people tote home from every excursion. The police don’t know if he keeps anything, but they—we—know that the Creeper sends his victims out with a memento. A tattoo, a specific one: Flower buds.
Of course, journalists have speculated. Why that one? Is he a florist? Is it symbolic? Is it about the language of flowers? There are a lot of questions, and not very many answers.
The only truth I know for sure is that he's out there. Right now, he has another victim with him or has another victim he's still watching. He has a pattern, a type, a timeline, and he's good at it.
He kills in the South. Regional. No DNA. No forensic evidence that leads to him. He’s white and in his thirties in all likelihood, based on profiling. I have read every snippet I could get—not that I am technically allowed to do so, but Henry has bent more than a few rules so I can sleep at night.
We don't know how to find him, though. I don't know if we'd even find the victims if he wasn't so eager to share.
The Carolina Creeper is good at what he does, and I am afraid. I'm not good at being afraid, so I'm going to find him. I have to. It's the only option—and it's all I can do to avoid total obsession with it.
Andrew and I spend another date reading horrible things in case files. I'm fairly sure he's using vacation time to do so. I look up at him and smile. He is oblivious, reading glasses slipping down and forehead furrowed.
"Thank you," I say, as he looks up questioningly.
"If you're going to do this, I'm here to help, too. Well, as much as I can." He gestures at the pages in front of me. "Read. I have an hour left today to do this."
The biggest anomaly in the cases is the missing heiress: Teresa Morris.
There are only two realistic choices: The Carolina Creeper has either killed her or he still has her. I can’t decide which would be a worse fate. She was one of the last girls to go missing in North Carolina, but she gets a lot of attention because of her family—especially in the last year: Her mother died about fourteen months ago, and her entire estate was left to her missing daughter.
I find Sterling Morris’ final act of faith unsettling. She died believing her daughter was alive. I never want to have another woman with a flower bud tattoo under my gloved hands, but I cannot imagine wishing for anyone to survive what he does to the women.
Years of being trapped there would be more than I’d wish on an enemy. What sort of woman would wish that fate on her daughter? Or did she just foolishly think that her daughter was elsewhere? Safe and not his victim?
I’ve made use of my connections through the police department to get files from around the state, and I’ve looked for the missing girls. Andrew has used his ties to the paper to help me as often as I’ve wanted. Henry has left files out where he knew I'd see them. It still isn’t enough. Amateur sleuthing doesn't work like it does on TV. I haven't found some magical clue that would lead to the killer's apprehension.
Instead, the Creeper is watching me. I know it. His letter proves the fears I’ve tried to ignore the last year.
The man whose victims I’ve prepared for their graves, the man whose actions make me far too often unable to sleep, knows my name. He knows where I am. He knows who I am. The sheer weight of that realization makes me shudder. Too often we imagine that killers are people we'd notice, but in reality, they often aren't. Richard Ramirez, Paul John Knowles, Charles Schmid, Paul Bernardo . . . a lot of serial killers are charming and attractive.
"Jules?" Andrew slides a paper from one of my files toward me. A missing person's file. A thin, dark-haired woman. “What about this one?”
The woman in the picture is a light skinned Latina girl of the right age.
“She’s a likely candidate.” I read her name: “Ana Mendoza.”
“A lot of women are likely candidates,” Andrew points out. This is what he does. He switches to devil’s advocate.
“He usually picks paler girls,” I admit.
“As far as we know. There could’ve been others, ones we didn’t realize were his . . .”
That’s the part that’s maddening sometimes—one of