There were quite a few pictures of drunken cocktail parties from the late eighties and early nineties. The women wore bold-colored dresses with shoulder pads and big hair. The men sported rock-star haircuts and Miami Vice tans. Her mother looked radiant in slinky dresses and stiletto heels, the belle of the ball. Men flocked around her, while Bram was always lurking somewhere on the sideline. He didn’t dance, but Julia couldn’t stop dancing. She seemed much too excitable to be married to a man like Kate’s dad.
Kate recognized some of the men in the pictures: a younger Quade Pickler sporting a mullet; handsome Cody Dunmeyer; Mr. Mason, father of Emera, the girl who had gone missing on the way to a concert. Wait. Her heart began to race. She scrabbled through the pictures. There was Tabitha Davidowitz’s father dancing with Julia. Julia’s head was thrown back, exposing her pale throat—you could almost hear her laughing.
Kate couldn’t believe it. She began searching frantically through the box of photographs, looking for more of the victims’ fathers, but most faces she couldn’t make out. The snapshots were overexposed or underexposed, or the picture-taker had been too drunk to hold the camera steady and the image was blurry.
In one picture, Bram and Julia were arguing in a dark corner of a dance club, surrounded by distracted friends. Julia’s lipstick was smeared, and her eyes were blurred with tears. Bram’s fists were balled tightly in anger. Whoever had killed Julia was left-handed. Kate’s father was left-handed.
Kate’s heart ached dully as she scooped up the last picture from the bottom of the box, taken at the asylum. Julia’s face was pale and drawn. She’d lost a lot of weight. Yet there was an ethereal beauty about her, a tender grace untouched by the situation. “The monster’s wife” was scrawled across the photograph in Julia’s handwriting.
Kate tried to shake off her suspicions. Yes, her father could be socially awkward, jealous, and possessive. But so were a lot of people. He was an admitted obsessive-compulsive. He sometimes disappeared for hours at a time. He was uncommunicative and narcissistic, but he’d never hurt Julia, no matter what she did to him. Not in a million years. He was no monster.
He’s lonely. He’s isolated. He doesn’t have a clue how to bond with other human beings.
She went downstairs, where she opened all the curtains and let the afternoon sunshine into the stuffy house. She stood in the middle of the living room trying to locate the exact spot on the floor where her mother had carved those forbidden words into the varnished wood. She inched the heavy armchair to one side, moved the coffee table over about a foot, peeled back the braided rug, and there it was. “Fucking cunt.” So raw and ugly. It chilled her to the bone. A rolling wave of fear crested and broke. Psychopaths were very good liars. They were highly intelligent and deceptive. They could fool the people closest to them. They were known to fool their own psychiatrists— Kenneth Bianchi, the Hillside Strangler, Ted Bundy.
Kate had to know. She walked into her father’s study and started rifling through the old steel file cabinets. She became aware of her crazy heartbeat as she tore through his archived patient files, looking for Makayla Brayden, Tabitha Davidowitz, Susie Gafford, Lizbeth Howell, Vicky Koffman, Hannah Lloyd, Emera Mason, Maggie Witt.
Nothing. Maybe he’d hidden them away?
Terrible, unwanted thoughts crowded into her feverish brain. What if the police were wrong? What if Stigler was dead? What if her father had attacked him with a knife, then dragged the body outside and driven away in Stigler’s SUV? What if he’d staged the entire scene to throw the police off his trail and staged his own death? Perhaps he’d staged Savannah’s death to frame Blackwood, staged Susie Gafford’s accident and her mother’s suicide?
All the signs were there. Bram organized his days with precision. He was a person of habit. He was methodical, detail-oriented, deliberate, cautious—you could set your watch by him. He was always disappearing; he was secretive and brooding. He was a physician, and therefore spent a lot of time around children and their families. He could’ve used his position in the community to lure his victims. He was well-respected, having held the same job for decades.
Kate chipped away at layers of denial with a delicate stubbornness. What if her father had followed Julia down to the river that night? What if he’d begged her to come home with him, but she refused? What if he’d lashed out in a rage, striking her with a tire iron and then staged her death to look like a suicide? What if this event had triggered something deeply sick inside him, something that had been festering for years but which he’d managed to suppress? What if it gave him free rein to finally be himself? To kill?
Did he know about Savannah?
She knelt down in front of the bookcase and traced her fingers over the spines of her father’s paperbacks and hardcovers, searching for Grandiose Times at Godwin Valley by Dr. Jonas Holley. And there it was. Bottom shelf.
She slid out the dusty book, and it fell open at “Patient J.” Somebody had flagged passages in orange highlighter. “As we delved deeper into her background and it was revealed how her father’s abuse had shaped her life, Patient J finally trusted me enough to reveal that one of her children was the product of an affair.”
So he knew.
But was he capable of such brutality? Such ugliness? Such inhumanity? Was he truly a monster?
Stunned and bewildered, Kate sat behind Bram’s desk and opened the wooden drawers, rifling through his bank statements, business licenses, insurance premiums, and tax returns. Proof, she needed proof. At the back of a drawer was a manila folder labeled FOUR OAKS, MAINE. The deed to her grandparents’ farm was inside.
He’d need access to an isolated location where he can indulge his fantasies.
The barnyard used to smell of silage, and the milking parlor housed the restless cows, who mooed and stomped their hooves and raised their tails, releasing arcing streams of urine, which made Savannah giggle.
Kate went down to the basement to fetch the keys to her grandparents’ farm. This was crazy. This was dumb. But nothing was going to stand in her way.
56
KATE FOUND A LOCAL news station on her car radio. “Multiple law enforcement agencies have joined the search for Professor William Stigler, who is wanted for questioning in the disappearance of Dr. Bram Wolfe, also from Blunt River. Police have put out a BOLO for the missing vehicle, a black BMW X5 SUV. It is unknown at this time what exactly happened inside the professor’s house on Lakeview Drive, but our sources indicate foul play. Dr. Wolfe’s daughter, Savannah, was murdered sixteen years ago—the man convicted of the crime was executed last week…”
Someone in a charcoal-gray Jeep Renegade was following her. It freaked her out a little, because the windshield was tinted and she couldn’t make out the driver’s face. He dogged her for a couple of miles before she lost him in heavy traffic outside Sanford. Maybe it was nothing. She told herself to calm down. Classic paranoia, believing someone was following you. Next she’d be hearing voices.
In the distance, she could see the mountains with their snow-powdered peaks. She turned up the radio.
“Authorities are scouring the nearby woods with cadaver dogs and a Forensics team is using ground-penetrating radar in the backyard of the property to identify any abnormalities in the soil that might point to a clandestine gravesite…”
Kate shot forward in her seat. Gravesite?
“Police officers have been seen taking dozens of evidence boxes out of Professor Stigler’s home… sources tell us… police have found photographs going back several decades… a pattern of missing and murdered girls in and around the area… we’ve just learned that some of these children and their families participated in research projects run by Professor Stigler…”
Kate’s head spun. If they found human remains on Stigler’s property, that would mean Palmer had been right all along. And if Stigler was a serial killer, then Kate’s father was most likely dead.