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Jared huffed, but Holly didn’t care. This was too important. If her fiancé couldn’t see that, then she shouldn’t be marrying him.
“Yes. I’ll go.” Callie flipped the card over in her hand. “I promise.”
“It’s our anniversary.” Jared held his arm out toward Holly. “Let’s go.”
Holly shot her fiancé an icy glare. “Just a second,”she barked, surprised at the bite in her voice.
Holly grabbed a napkin off the table and used a pen from her purse to write down her phone number. “If you think of anything else, call me.” She slid the napkin toward Callie. “Day or night.”
“I will.” Callie lifted the napkin before putting it into her jacket pocket.
“Is there anything else you remember about him?” Holly asked, ignoring Jared’s impatient stare.
Callie gazed into her coffee. “No.”
“Thank you,” Holly said. “For finding me. And I mean it, please call me if you think of anything else, no matter how small.”
“I will,” Callie said as Holly left a five-dollar bill on the table for their coffees.
Holly didn’t want to leave. Sitting across from Callie was the closest she’d felt to Meg since she died. But Callie had already told her what she knew. Holly hoped that the sooner she left, the sooner Callie would go see Andy. Reluctantly, Holly slid to the edge of the booth.
She started after Jared, who was already moving toward the door, when Callie’s small hand wrapped around Holly’s wrist.
“Wait,” Callie said. “There’s one more thing.”
Holly stopped and turned.
“Meg told me that before they took her baby away from her at the hospital, she asked that his adoptive parents name him Tanner.”
Chapter 6
JOHN
March 1985
John knew what his dad was doing as they walked side-by-side through the damp woods beside Star Lake. His dad had been paying more attention to the news lately; in the evenings, John had seen him lingering over articles about the Green River Killer. And now his dad wanted to sniff out the famous killer’s latest dump site.
When his dad had come into John’s room that morning, John knew better than to argue.It’s time to get your head out of those books. The weather’s getting warmer. Let’s go fishing.All John wanted to do this Saturday was finish readingTheCall of the Wild. He’d already read it once, but the raw adventure of Buck’s survival in the wild made John want to read it again.
John’s favorite part was Buck’s first kill, when he defeats Spitz, the lead dog, in a brutal fight for dominance. Buck hadn’twanted to kill Spitz, but he hadn’t had a choice. It was kill or be killed. It made John wonder what made his dad kill Sally. Some kind of instinct, like what Buck felt? Or had Sally somehow deserved it? Maybe she’d tried to hurt his father.
But she’d seemed so nice. Her crooked smile from the front seat of his dad’s car flashed in John’s mind. Then an image of her, naked, running for her life out of those woods—away from his father. John eyed his father now, tromping through the forest. Why had he done that? There had to be a good reason, he decided, although he couldn’t shake his dreaded suspicion that his father had done it for fun.
After they'd parked on a vacant lakefront lot, his dad had asked John to go for a walk with him through the adjacent woods before John had even gotten his line in the water. John hadn’t been surprised. His father wasn’t a fisherman. He was a hunter. And John had been keeping up on the news too.
His father obviously knew what he was doing, but it felt risky to come here. The latest Green River Killer victim had been discovered in these woods only three days ago. What if the police came back? John had realized his dad was using the serial killer to get away with murdering Sally, but did it bother his dad that the Green River Killer was all over the news, getting credit for killing not only his own victims, but Sally too?
John had seen the way his father looked at young women, even teenagers, when the two of them were out. He couldn’t shake the feeling that his father would do to them what he did to Sally. He just hoped he wasn’t around the next time it happened.
Then John was struck by a terrifying thought. What if his dad went down for all the Green River Killer murders and not the other way around?
John kept in stride with his father as he stepped over a fallen log.
He got the feeling his father was competing with the Green River Killer somehow, like it was all a game. John looked up at his dad, studying him as he crept through the woods. The woman the police had found a few days ago in these woods had gone missing the day after Thanksgiving, and John had been with his dad that whole day. They’d even gone to seeThe Terminatorin the theater, so his father hadn't killed her. Still, maybe the Green River Killer didn’t killallthose women the cops thought he had. Maybe his dad killed some of them.
Beside him, his father’s footsteps were barely audible, despite him being over twice John’s size. A branch snapped under John’s shoe in the quiet woods, the sound reminding him of when he went into the forest and heard Sally scream. John winced at the memory. He’d been such a coward, running back to the car, leaving Sally to die.
John lowered his eyes to the ground, not wanting to look at his dad. A cold thought slithered in his head—what if he does that to me?