“Emmett?My god, I barely recognized you!”
“Oh, yeah. Guess I look a little—”
“You look incredible.”
Emmett blushed. “No.”
“Seriously. How much weight have you lost?”
“About fifty pounds?” Fearing Aaron would think he’d taken up an eating disorder or a recreational addiction to meth, he added, “CrossFit.”
Aaron opened his mouth to question him further, but simply smiled. “Well, it’s really working. Good for you. You ready to head back?”
He led Emmett into a conference room where three women already sat. The interview lasted forty-five minutes, and despite a couple of tricky questions, he answered well and was warmly received. The group was particularly drawn to his experience working with underserved youth. The story of his proudest achievement—tutoring a student living with his family in a single-room occupancy hotel who went on to ace his SATs and receive a full ride to UC Riverside—drew a glowing “I love that!” from Aaron’s boss.
Though his experience wasn’t an exact fit, Emmett felt more at ease in this interview than any before. At one point he cracked a joke and had the whole room laughing. His shirt didn’t come untucked once.
“You did great,” Aaron said when it was over, shaking his hand. “We have one more person to see, but I hope to have good news for you early next week.”
It wasn’t until he was walking out of the building and passed a stunning twenty-five-year-old size two that Emmett started to question his chances.
He checked Instagram, surprised that his photo had generated more than thirty likes, seven new followers, and a handful of comments.
joanna_225You look amazing!!
dkpurcell1Looking great, keep it up!!!
powaygal
gordita_officialgood luck, you got this!
nino.hofstetter85Nice, lookin good man
He was tickled and halfway through responding to each of them when he received a new direct message. Mom, asking what diet he was on. He was about to reply with the same lie he’d told Aaron when he noticed a message request. An account named lacrosse_dad71.
Good to see you looking so well, sport. Hope you can find it inside your heart to forgive me for everything that happened. -H
Emmett physically recoiled from the message, his fingers already scrambling to block. He didn’t need to confirm the profile was Hank’s.
Hours later, the message remained with him. He was still rolling it around in his head as he lay in bed that night. It repeated, mutating like a corrupted echo, as the masked surgeon sewed the open halves of Emmett’s torso together with rough twine. Good to see you looking so well, sport. Hope you can find everything that happened inside your heart.
Good sport, looking so well. Hope you can find your heart and forgive me.
Give me your heart, sport. Give me everything you can find inside.
Investigative Report Prepared for Monstera BioSciences
BY PRENTICE & DARROW LLP
Excerpt from “Part 2: Family Life” (p. 45)
Until the age of fourteen, the participant spent every other weekend with his father, Louis Truesdale, at his town house condominium in Point Loma. Despite his consistent presence in the participant’s life, Truesdale features only peripherally in his son’s online writing. Friends and family described relations between the men as cordial but distant, strained by their dissimilarity and Truesdale senior’s anger issues—factors that may be relevant to the participant’s later crimes.
Lou Truesdale’s life story is one dominated by rejection and violence. Originally from the Sacramento Valley, he dropped out of high school at age fifteen after his alcoholic father threw him out onto the streets. He fell in with an outlaw motorcycle gang, and by nineteen, he was serving a four-year sentence for the voluntary manslaughter of a man in a bar.
Following his release, Truesdale appears to have made an attempt to turn his life around. He earned his GED, found work on construction sites, met and fell in love with a young woman named Cheryl Funderburk, and moved with her to San Diego. In 1985 the pair had a son, Christopher.
Less than a year later, Funderburk became the subject of a murder investigation after her body was found in Mission Hills Park. Truesdale was arrested for murder, but was eventually released without charge after police began to suspect that Funderburk, addicted to methamphetamine, had been killed by a drug dealer to whom she owed money. Truesdale, spurned by his late partner’s family, who believed he had murdered their daughter in a violent rage, was left to care for his young son alone.
