Page 54 of Secrets Along the Shore (Beach Read Thrillers #1)

CHAPTER

ONE

There’s something terrifying about staring into the eyes of a serial killer.

In any other person, when your gaze meets theirs, you find something—warmth, anger, fear, light—something telling you a soul resides inside. A testament to the being within.

I’ve heard it said that sharks have dead eyes—cold, soulless orbs serving as lasers to zero in on prey. I never fully comprehended the description, never having seen a shark up close myself.

At least not before this case.

Now I understand exactly what it means.

As I stare into the eyes of defendant Kurt Fogerty from my seat in the courtroom gallery, I see nothing alive.

Nothing human.

Fogerty unabashedly holds my gaze in return, the corner of his mouth rising in a twisted delight I can’t fathom, and don’t want to.

It’s been like this through the whole trial.

I’m not sure why I, out of everyone in here, seem to have caught his eye.

I’m nothing special. Thirty-five, brown eyes, long brown hair—usually with a fair number of knots and thrown into a twist or ponytail—and coming in at a whopping five foot three.

Nothing here to justify the Nicholson-worthy grin that only gets creepier the longer it lasts.

Not caring whether he wins this visual game of chicken, I look away. As the primary investigator on this case, I’ve had enough of him to last a lifetime.

I sit here today, in the first row behind the prosecution table, after almost two years of trying to put this man away.

Though my hours on this investigation would suggest otherwise, I’m not employed as a full-time investigator with the Mitchell County Sheriff’s Department or Mitchell County D.A.

I’m a private investigator who the sheriff brings in on contract when the small county’s needs go beyond the single investigator he can afford to keep on the payroll full-time.

Most often that happens in long-term, all-consuming cases, like say, a string of serial murders.

The D.A.’s minuscule state budget leaves his office with no investigator at all, so it’s not unusual for him to hire me for his big cases when he needs a little extra punch.

This was one of those times.

That’s how, on an otherwise beautiful spring Friday in north Alabama, I—Sophie Walsh, P.I.

—have landed in a cherry-paneled courtroom packed to overflowing.

Journalists from all over the state, and one national network, have come to hear for themselves whether the jury believes Kurt Fogerty and The Perfect Princess Killer are one and the same.

The nickname callously assigned by media from the outset stirs a reflexive nausea I have to fight back.

I should be numb to it by now. I’ve heard it thousands of times in meetings with the D.A.

, sheriff, on the news, online, out of the mouths of people in my community…

but it still churns my stomach. I’ve had to look at pictures, read the coroner’s reports, endure the gut-wrenching tears of parents—and somehow put it all in an emotional lock-box, so I could remain professionally detached.

All of it but that name.

Call me crazy, but evil shouldn’t have a catchphrase.

The week-long trial ended an hour ago, when the jury retired to deliberate.

I was down the street at Benny’s BBQ, just about to dive into my sauce-slathered pork sandwich and curly fries—the first food I’ve almost had all day as my growling stomach reminds me—when I got word the verdict was in.

Now everyone’s back, waiting under the fluorescent lights hanging from cork ceiling squares streaked with Jackson Pollock–esque water stains.

A nervous electricity buzzes through the room that ironically matches the faint hum coming from a flickering fluorescent bulb, apparently on its last legs.

I catch the eye of a man strikingly similar to Fogerty—his brother, Harlan.

His stare isn’t so much evil as just plain mean.

During the investigation, I spoke to many members of what I suspect is Kurt Fogerty’s unnaturally straight family tree.

Nearly all of them live in the middle of nowhere in western Mitchell County, Alabama.

Nearly all of them also have a record, more attitude than sense, and a deep dislike for all things police related.

Including me.

The last time I had the pleasure, three preteen Fogerty cousins chased my Jeep Cherokee down their drive, hurling rocks and landing a few good dents in her.

I’m pretty sure Harlan gave them the go-ahead from the porch.

Now he’s staring at me like he wishes he could come at me with every Fogerty in his arsenal.

A loud creak sounds from the direction of the bench and my gaze swivels.

A door on the back wall swings open and the faces I have been watching all week file in.

The diverse group includes old, young, and all ages in between, as well as a wide variety of careers—firefighter to banker to homemaker.

It covers the financial spectrum too. I spot a Cartier watch on one middle-aged guy, and jeans on a twenty-two-year-old with more holes than my landlady’s sourdough.

Though to be fair, the jeans might have cost three hundred dollars.

I’m decidedly in the Millennial realm, with a Gen-X attitude to boot, and can’t—don’t want to—keep up with Gen-Z trends.

However, whatever these jurors’ differences may be, they at least have one thing in common.

Every single face is unreadable.

An anxious heat crawls all over me. I’m desperate to know how this is going to go.

After all these months, I need to know. But my search for a hint in their expressions is fruitless.

The hard lines and blank stares tell me nothing.

Like everyone else, I’m going to have to wait to hear from the jury foreperson’s lips whether the dead will have justice.

Or not .

I’ve spent hundreds of hours working this case.

Weeknights, weekends. Overtime. I’ve eaten more slices of cold pizza and drunk more bad coffee—because long work days stretched into long work nights—than a person should and still be alive.

I’ve done everything I can to ensure a guilty verdict.

Uncovered every shred of evidence and wrapped up every loose thread I could pull on to make sure the horrible excuse for a human being sitting behind the table opposite me answers for his crimes.

My belly stirs.

Have we done enough? Proved enough? If we’ve failed…if I’ve failed…

Three women are dead at Kurt Fogerty’s hands. Strangled and left to rot.

Aria Benner was his first victim, discovered two years ago by boys playing in a creek along U.S. Highway 174, the east-west corridor running through Mitchell County and past the town of Riverview—the county seat, and where I sit now.

The place I’ve called home for the past ten years.

Riverview is a small town on Willow Peak, a modest mountain—actually more like a plateau than a traditional mountain—at the tail end of the Appalachian Plateau, about twenty miles south of Huntsville, Alabama.

This tight community overlooking the south side of the Tennessee River is self-sufficient, compassionate, and shut-down-school isolated when sleet or the rare snowfall makes our roads impassable.

It’s home to sweet tea, fireflies, a surprisingly sophisticated art scene, and the nicest people you’ll ever meet.

It is not—usually—home to murder.

Aria was one of Riverview’s own. A bright, nineteen-year-old, straight-A, University of Alabama sophomore. She disappeared while driving home for summer break. Her murder devastated our entire community, slashing a gaping wound into its heart that still hasn’t healed.

And how could it, when the monster responsible was still out there?

For a year, every potential lead led nowhere. Truth be told, there wasn’t much to go on. The most critical clue was a message written on the inside of Aria’s arm in ink from a black Sharpie—“Not a Perfect Princess Now.”

Despite our efforts to avoid it, that bit of information was leaked, spawning the horrid nickname for the murder.

Fortunately, there were other details—other specifics—that weren’t leaked. Other details that ultimately helped us catch the six-foot, forty-three-year-old, heavyset, thin-haired, bearded devil sitting twelve feet away. But not before another woman’s body was discovered a year after Aria was found.

Hailey Peterson wasn’t from Riverview. She wasn’t even from Mitchell County.

She was a Rhodes College freshman passing through on her way to Marietta, Georgia, for spring break.

Her Nissan was found abandoned in a gas station parking lot on I-65.

Her body was found in a shallow embankment three miles east of where Aria’s remains were discovered, the same cruel message written on Hailey’s forearm.

Given the location of the bodies, the particular stretch of highway, a fortuitous slice of video from a rest stop not far from the I-65 turnoff for US-174, and a single text from Hailey to her roommate that “some trucker” was following her, we eventually narrowed our suspect list down to Kurt Fogerty.

And that’s where it ended. Armed with only circumstantial evidence and a gut feeling, we couldn’t prove Fogerty’s involvement.

For six months we tried to build a case that would hold up, but never got there, leaving us to collectively beat our heads against the wall—me, the D.A.

’s office, the sheriff’s department—our hands tied by the lack of proof that would rise to the level of “beyond a reasonable doubt.” We all knew it was Fogerty. We just couldn’t make it stick.

So we lived with the terrible knowledge that if something didn’t change, one day soon, Fogerty would strike again. Another woman would die.

And she did. Six months ago, while driving his kids around in his Gator, a poultry farmer found twenty-five-year-old Teresa Anders buried in the woods on his property.

Like the deposit sites, this one was in Mitchell County off US-174, though a little farther from the road. And the body wrapped in a tarp .

Fogerty was getting smarter.

Teresa was an Auburn grad student—young and bright-eyed, or at least she was in pictures I saw—a perfect match for Fogerty’s victim profile. She also had the egregious taunt written on her forearm. But this time, Fogerty made a mistake.

The coroner found two hairs caught beneath the nails of the pointer and middle finger of Teresa’s right hand.

Two hairs that belonged to Kurt Fogerty.

Somehow, she had been able to do what the others hadn’t, and in whatever fight she put up, managed to take a bit of Fogerty with her before she left this world.

It was enough for a warrant for his truck, and the trailer he shares with his mother one county over when he’s not on the road.

That was where they found photos of each of the women printed from their social media accounts, and trophies Fogerty kept—a ring from Aria, an earring from Hailey, and an earring from Teresa.

We weren’t able to save Teresa Anders, and I know I’m not the only one who loses sleep over that. But Teresa Anders saved who knows how many women because of her fight, her bravery, her refusal to go quietly.

Assistant District Attorney Tasha Clay, sitting second chair next to D.A.

Lincoln March, is dressed impeccably in a navy suit and silver stud earrings, her straightened black hair gathered in a low bun.

Somehow my best friend manages to simultaneously radiate elegance, a woman-of-the-people vibe, and the heart of a legal warrior ready to take on whatever societal demon the system throws her way.

That might be my bias at play, but I doubt it.

I’m sitting a few feet behind her and, though her back is to me, the nervous foot tapping of her three-inch heels on the tile floor tells me she is as anxious as I am.

She doesn’t know which way the jury is going to go, either.

The idea that we could lose, that Fogerty might walk, pierces my heart like a blade through my chest. So many people are counting on the right outcome—the only just outcome—and not only those of us tasked with the mission of slaying this monster.

Justice won’t bring these women back, but it might restore a modicum of sense to a world gone mad .

I scan the jurors’ faces again, praying silently, as Judge Mary Ortiz finally looks up from whatever papers she’s been shuffling.

Through the red cat-eye glasses perched on her face, curtained by the curly black locks matching her robe, she calls the defense attorney and D.A.

March to the bench. Tasha’s boss—tall, slender, and bearing a full head of salt-and-pepper hair—strides to the front of the courtroom alongside Fogerty’s attorney.

The three have a brief discussion I can’t make out, followed by a series of nods, then potent silence as both men return to their chairs.

Tension pulses through the room, as Judge Ortiz turns to the jury and clears her throat. “Members of the jury, have you reached a verdict?”