“Who’s Alan Morrow?” I ask, glancing around them.
Nico clicks ahead a couple of slides to a mugshot of an older man with silver-gray hair and eyes so deep set they might as well be holes carved into his face. I immediately hate looking at him.
“A serial killer who murdered eight people between 1974 and 1979.” Nico addresses the room. “He targeted emotionally bonded pairs. Couples. Siblings. Close friends. He’d force these pairs into what he called ‘trials,’ which were engineered scenarios designed to make each person turn against the other to prove that love can be broken. He presented each pair with a choice. Cut off your fingers or die. Eat pieces of the other person or starve to death.”
The gummies I ate threaten to make a reappearance. I press my lips together, forcing myself to breathe through my nose because I willnotrun out of the room to throw up. I don’t knowwhy this is getting to me so badly, when I had no problem eating my chicken parm through the chop suey conversation.
Forcing someone to cut off their own fingers? What kind of sick freak even thinks of that?
“Each trial had a winner and a loser,” Benji tells me, rubbing one eye as he talks. “Morrow killed the loser and let the winner go. He stayed anonymous during the trials. He talked to the players through a camera. Nobody could ever identify him.”
“Could you remind me of his background?” DJ asks, putting the bag of Peach Rings on the table.
“His mother physically abused his father,” Benji says. “They divorced when Morrow was eight, and they sent him to boarding school. Morrow felt abandoned by both of them. Then his fiancée left him three months before their wedding because he was too controlling, and that second abandonment triggered a pathological need to prove that all love is fake. He believed no one ever loved him.”
Mom probably would have felt sympathy after hearing this, but I search my chest for even a flicker of sympathy for Morrow and come up empty. Plenty of people get abandoned and don’t decide to torture other people to prove a point about human nature. I may be trying to be more like Mom, but there are limits. Some things are just black and white, and feeling sorry for a serial killer is not something I can do.
“His last victim managed to escape when he was putting her in the dumpster, and a good Samaritan was able to capture a picture of his car before he could drive away,” Donny says, his voice heavy with memory. “None of his surviving victims ever truly recovered. One woman scratched her arms so badly during the public trial that they were bleeding everywhere.”
“How do you know that?” DJ asks.
“I consulted on the original case in 1979,” Donny says.
Shit.
I can picture the woman so clearly, her arms torn up and scabbed over, wanting to punish herself because she was so ashamed of whatever choice she’d made to survive. Did she choose herself over someone she loved? Did she have to hurt them to save her own life?
I’d die ten times if it meant the person I loved would live.
Except I already failed that test, didn’t I? I might have been thinking I was going to get help, but that doesn’t change the fact that I left Rosie behind and ran, and she died alone because of it.
I snap the hair tie against my wrist, the sting pulling me back before anyone notices I’m spiraling. I grasp onto the first question I can think of.
“How do you know it’s not a copycat?” I ask.
“We don’t,” Nico says. “That’s why we have to go to the dump site. Scan for residual energy before the trail goes cold.”
I open my mouth to ask what residual energy means, but Benji’s already answering. “When an entity manifests enough to affect the real world, they create disruptions in the local magnetic field,” he says. “Those disruptions linger for days.”
I nod like I totally understand, but honestly, most of that went straight over my head. I’ll probably understand it better after I finish the stack of books waiting in my room.
Griffin stands up, stretching his arms over his head even though we’ve only been sitting for fifteen minutes. “Where’s this dump site?”
“Pittsburgh,” Nico says.
“A local case. Good.” Griffin nods. “Eden’s not ready for her first overnight road trip to some backwoods town where we all have to sleep in the van together and wake up accidentally spooning.”
My brain stutters over that image before I can re-focus on what he actually said: I’m going to the crime scene? I can feelmy heart kick up, but I do a quick scan of the room and see Zoey yawning into her hand. I pretend to yawn into my own.
Nico’s voice deflates me like a balloon: “Eden’s not going.”
Griffin pulls a face. “She’s not?”
“She’s had no field training.” Nico turns to Donny, crossing his arms as he pulls his shoulders back. “Taking her puts everyone else at risk.” He says it deadpan, so sure that I’ll put his people in danger.
I curl my hand into a fist, and am glad when Griffin gives Donny an incredulous look. “Boss?”
Donny studies me. I’m sure he can see exactly how desperate I am to prove that I can do this. “It’s unusual to find a case so soon after bringing someone new on board,” he says, “but this would be a unique opportunity to learn how we do things. Eden, you’ll come and observe. Griffin and I will handle the investigation, and DJ will manage operations from the van.”
