“I mean, no one knew why,” Fairglass said, “but yeah. He threw himself out of his mom’s car on the freeway. People said there wasn’t much left of him.”
Ledger remembered what was left of Bell, scraped off in chunks against the road. He could imagine.
“And this is Mary Chapman,” Martin interrupted as he pulled another photo from the collection. “Her brother sued Ford. Or tried to. He was convinced there had been a fault in her car or something. Apparently, he’d gone over to check on her one day and found her sitting in her car, in the driveway of the house. Dead.”
“How?” Ledger asked.
Martin shrugged. “Her heart just stopped,” he said. “There was no sign of foul play or anything like that. Nothing wrong with the car, so her brother’s case just gave up the ghost. She just died.”
Two generations of obituary knowledge identified about a third of the other photos. Some of them were before Martin’s time, but he said he’d have a look in the archives to see if he could find anything else. Most of them “just died somehow.” A ten-year-old who got lost in the woods while camping with the scouts and was found two weeks later in a ditch. The woman in her forties who collapsed while out running. Another teenager who drowned in the lake, although his body was never found.
There were a few that might have been foul play: the hit-and-run, a mugging, the woman who died during a carjacking. But not enough to make it look like, well, another serial killer.
“But why would Bellhaveall these?” Fairglass said as he slumped back in his chair with a heavy sigh. His disappointment was obvious enough that he got a glare from his dad for it. “If it wasn’t some protege or something, proving their worth, what good were they to him?”
Martin tidied the photos into two piles—identified and not—and got another envelope out of a drawer for the second stack.
“Demons and monsters?” he said. “They kept it quiet during the trial, nobody wanted Bell to get off on an insanity plea, but Bell believed all that stuff.”
“Seriously?” Fairglass objected. “You never told me that. I’m writing a book, Dad!”
Ledger finished his second cup of bad coffee and set it on the desk. That part was, obviously, not a surprise to him, so he tried to nudge the two of them back on track.
“If they weren’t all victims,” he said, although they had been, just not of something that Fairglass could put in his book, “what’s the connection?”
There was a pause, and then Martin sighed heavily, blowing out stubbled cheeks. “Unexplained death?” he said dubiously. “Like I said, Bell believed in the supernatural. Maybe there’s some TikTok or whatever out there about fooling a sick old monster into believing he’d found another one?”
There wasn’t a TikTok, but Ledger’s hands were tied by the lie he’d started with. He tried to work out what track to go to next. Fairglass solved that for him by pointing at the boy who’d got lost in the woods.
“He was Albert’s uncle,” he said. “I remember everyone at the time said how tragic it was for the family to have lost two of their boys so unexpectedly.”
Martin frowned. “I never knew that,” he said. “But…”
He shuffled the pictures around to pull out the woman who’d been found dead in her car. Mary Chapman.
“They had an aunt,” he said. “I think—I’m almost sure—her married name was Austin. The same as the girl who died in the car-jacking.”
“They can’t all be related,” Fairglass said.
“It’s a small town,” Ledger said. “If you look back far enough, we can probably find someone related to both of us.”
Fan of Bell’s work or not, Fairglass looked offended at that idea. “I don’t know about that,” he said. “But I can look into it, see if there are any other connections between the people we’ve been able to identify. Maybe this is part of how Bell picked his victims? Something to do with bloodlines? Or if he thought the family was cursed already?”
Martin snorted and gathered the pictures to tuck into their chosen envelopes. “That’s speculation,” he said. “For now.”
Fairglass waved that off and looked intently at Ledger.
“I assume it’s OK to use any of this in my book?” he said.
“Sure,” Ledger said as he stood. “If you can make it make sense, feel free to use away.”
He got his wallet out of his back pocket and pulled a business card out to hand over to Fairglass.
“Call me if you find out anything else?”
“Of course,” Fairglass said. “And we can talk about your interview.”
It was the first time Ledger thought that not fulfilling his contract might have a silver lining. But he needed the Fairglasses on his side for now.
