Page 31 of Trapper Road

“I dug into Leonard Varrus a bit,” he says. “The guy in the Lost Angels press release.”

The muscles along my shoulders tense. “And?”

“I got ahold of the so-called evidence he has proving you were helping Melvin. I’m forwarding it now.”

Just then my computer dings with an email from Sam. I click it open to find a screenshot of a thread on a message board. I skim it quickly.

SlyceNDyce: Dude, how do you know so much about Melvin Royal?

Melvin’s Little Helper: Let’s just say I have access to inside information

SlyceNDyce: You’re full of shit

Melvin’s Little Helper: Everything I’ve posted so far checks out, doesn’t it?

Melvin’s Little Helper: I take your silence as agreement.

HathFury: Isn’t it obvious from the handle? Melvin’s Little Helper knows so much about the murders because she was involved in them. Hello, Gina Royal. Glad to have you on the boards. We have questions for you.

Melvin’s Little Helper’s IP address is circled in red, and I recognize it immediately. It’s mine. There are other screenshots attached as well. I read them all with a sick sense of dread. They recount in detail aspects of Melvin’s murders — how he picked his victims, how he incapacitated them, which tools he used, and what sort of reaction they elicited. The posts go into horrible, disturbing detail.

Whoever Melvin’s Little Helper is, they have an intimate understanding of Melvin and his crimes. The other posters are right; there are things he talks about that even I didn’t know. Information that never came out at trial.

Information that only Melvin could know.

I close my eyes and picture the photo hanging on my office wall of a graveyard with an anonymous marker marking the spot where Marvin was buried several years ago. I know he’s dead. I shot him myself. I saw his body. I watched as they put him into his coffin and again when they buried him.

Melvin Royal is dead.

Then who is Melvin’s Little Helper, and how do they know so much?

And why is my IP address attached to his messages?

The answer is obvious: Because someone’s setting me up to look like I’m Melvin’s Little Helper.

I jump from the bed and start to pace. “This is bullshit.”

“I know,” Sam says. How he can sound so calm is beyond me, but at least one of us is able to do so. My blood is boiling with outrage.

“It’s like those fake videos all over again. They’re falsifying the IP address to make it look like I posted this shit and people are going to believe it, just like they believed those videos.”

“Do you want me to put Mike on it?” he asks. “He can run it through the FBI systems, and they can prove the IP address is spoofed.”

“Might as well,” I say, feeling defeated. “It won’t matter, though.” I let out a long breath and sink back onto the bed. “They’re never going to leave us alone, are they? They’re just going to keep making up stories and faking evidence with no repercussions.”

I ran from this stuff for as long as I could, until I realized that running was causing my kids more harm than good. It wasn’t fair to them — they could never settle down, make friends, establish themselves in school. They were always aware that any moment we could be uprooted, disappear in the night with new names and new identities in a new town.

Eventually I had enough, and I decided to stand my ground. I accepted that there was no outrunning the threats because they were never going to stop. I decided the best course of action was to accept that there would always be people out there painting targets on me and my family. The best I could hope was to weed out the truly dangerous from the trolls.

Now, I’m tired of it. I’m tired of firing up my computer only to be met with the same tide of hate filling my inbox. I hate that people send me photos of crime scenes with my kids’ faces superimposed on the dead victims’ corpses. I hate the endless descriptions of how these people want me to pay by torturing my children.

And I’m really fucking tired of the Lost Angels. It was their documentary that got locals in Stillhouse Lake so fired up that they forced us to move.

I’m tired of my kids not being able to lead normal lives. This is having a toll on them just as much as constantly being on the run always did.

I’m done just accepting this shit. The problem is, there’s not much I can do to stop it. I keep logs of the threats, the email addresses, the IP addresses, and send them to local law enforcement and the FBI, but it’s not like our case is high priority for them. Even with Sam’s friend working for the Bureau, there are too many cyber threats and not enough agents to handle them.

It’s time to stop relying on others to put an end to it. It’s time for us to take action ourselves. Most threats come from anonymous users online, but this time we have an organization. We have a name.