“Oh, crap.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I special ordered their gift, and I don’t think it’ll be done.”

  “I’m sure they will understand, love.”

  “Maybe, but that doesn’t make it better. I’ll give the guy a call.”

  “Will we see you here for dinner then?”

  “Of course. Can I bring anything?”

  “I was hoping you would ask. Morgan invited A.J.’s grandmother. She has accepted the invitation. Can you pick her up? And, of course, A.J. is more than welcome.”

  “I can do that. Remind me to thank Morgan.”

  “You’re a grown woman, Cara. I’m sure you can remember such a basic thing on your own.”

  “You would think so, but I seem to be having problems remembering anything these days.”

  “’Tis all the stress from the situation you find yourself in. It will get better in time.”

  “I hope so. I’m beginning to worry about myself. I’ve always flipped from one subject to another, but it used to make some sense. There used to be a thread to it. Now I’m just all over the place.”

  “Often you don’t see the connection between two things until you have the luxury of looking back at them. If you are having problems, love, perhaps you should change your vantage point.”

  “Good idea, but I think the only thing I haven’t tried is standing on my head.”

  “Then I’ll leave you to it.”

  With that she was gone.

  I texted A.J. and extended the invitation. He said he’d already gotten word from Jovana; she would be there as well. He was very touched that his grandmother had been invited. I reminded him that he’s part of a family now, caught myself before I said ‘for better or worse,’ and that if it hadn’t been for him, Morgan would have had to walk down the aisle naked. His “damn, wouldn’t have minded seeing that” made me laugh; too bad he wasn’t close enough to smack.

  Jovana had A.J. pass along the message that there was no need to help clean up the ballroom. Morgan’s father had paid for a crew to take care of it. Yay!

  Next I called A.J.’s grandmother and told her that A.J. and I would pick her up and that my parents’ house is three steps beyond casual for these things.

  I called my engraver guy; he said he could have the gift done by tomorrow afternoon. Yay again.

  I called Adeline and offered to go over and fix lunch and visit. She said that she was spending the whole day painting and that she’d see me soon.

  Most of the day to myself. A.J. usually works a short day on weekends. Today, a shoot with a mom and dad and a bunch of little ones, might take longer than usual. He said he’d be back in time for dinner. Grocery shopping and the mall could wait; I felt a solution to my mysteries coming on.

  Logging on to the Internet, I had no idea where to start. That’s one of the nice things about the Internet; you can start just about anywhere.

  I started out with the obvious and figured I’d branch out from there. I typed Jerkface’s sister in the search engine and hit return. I got a hundred ninety-three thousand results in point two six seconds. Great. I typed in a plus sign and added Jerkface’s name; that cut it down to just a hundred eighty-seven thousand.

  I puttered around the Internet for a while, very hit or miss, and happened onto a site that offered to find Jerkface and his sister for me for just under twenty dollars. I was tempted. I decided to look to see if there were any sites that would give me such information for free, and although I didn’t find that, what I did find was a site that listed Jerkface and a handful of people in his life. My guess is the intention was to sort out the person you are looking for from everyone else with the same name.

  The right basic geographical area and his sister’s name were there for Jerkface.

  The right geographical area and her brother’s name were there for Jerkface’s sister.

  They both had two other matching names. I assumed one to be their father and one to be their mother, or stepparent or whatever.

  I jumped up and celebrated that minor victory with a cup of tea and a happy dance in the kitchen while it brewed.

  Once I had my cup of tea beside me for its magical powers, mostly of caffeine, I tried to find information on the parents.

  First I tried the sex offender registration stuff. I figured if Jerkface’s father was a perv years ago, he’s probably still a perv. There is no cure for evil, and sexual abuse on a child isn’t acting out. It is evil. Couldn’t find him.

  I spent the better part of my whole cup of tea searching anything that came to mind with no luck.

  Frustrated, I typed ‘how to find a person for free on the Internet’ and everything I needed appeared before me. I love the Internet.

  I printed out some articles and some step-by-step instructions. How to look people up through everything from social networks to military records, from reverse email directories to professional organizations and yearbooks. I even found a way to look up a person’s family tree that was helpful.

  More tea.

  I know that I should have opened tabs or extra windows or whatever, but I just can’t do that, so my printer was pretty busy for a while.

  I took all the printed material, highlighted what I thought might match, then went back to the computer and searched on that information, printed it out, and highlighted some more.

  By the time it was time for more tea, I had every horizontal surface in my apartment covered with paper, had a really good feeling about finally getting to the bottom of all this, and was secure in the knowledge that if Teagan was available to help me, I’d get it done in half the time.

  “Hey.”

  “Hi, you busy?”

  “Not really. Jessie has a meeting.”

  “Today?”

  “Yep. What about you?”

  “A.J.’s working.”

  “And you questioned Jessie having a meeting?”

  “Okay, stupid response, can you come over?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “I think I’m onto something with the whole Jerkface thing.”

  “Four minutes, put on the kettle.”

  It took us about four hours, but we had a solid case, documents to back it up, and were mostly convinced we were right.

  “Now what?”

  “We could call Steph.”

  “Do we trust her?”

  “Cara, I don’t trust anybody about this. This is scary to be looking at proof that you have found a serial killer. And, I’m not even sure what the ramifications for all of this are going to be. What if it rains back down on the family?”

  “Oh, it’s gonna rain.”

  “We can’t do nothing.”

  “Teagan, if we found it, then the professionals can find it.”

  “If they want to, but I’m beginning to think they don’t want to.”

  “Why?”

  “I have no clue.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Since it is the family that will pay the price, I think we should talk to Mom and Dad.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Do we go to them or ask them to come to us?”

  “We always go to them, but this is something profoundly different. I think they should come here.”

  “Agreed. I’ll call Mom and see when they can come.”

  Teagan called Jessie to let him know she would be late. I called Mom and told her I needed to talk to her and needed her to come to my apartment. It was a rare request. She said she and Daddy would be here in less than thirty minutes.

  I looked around and saw the mess that is my home. The first time my parents have been over since A.J. moved in, and I didn’t even bother to straighten up. Another rare event.

  When Mom and Daddy were settled on the couch with a cup of tea, Teagan and I did a tag team approach to fill them in on as many details as we had and how we got there.

  Teagan started. “We’re going to present this to you just like we would present it to a lawyer or the cops, and we need you to be completely honest about what you hear. If we’re crazy, or wrong, or should just back away, we need you to tell us. If we need to go to the cops, or the FBI, or whatever, we need to know that, too. Some of this stuff you probably already know, and I apologize if we are repeating something, but we’re going to go from top to bottom.”

  All she got was a nod of agreement. My parents were in listening to something important mode. They’re really good at that. Probably comes from all those doctor’s reports when my sister was sick. My parents can take it all in, process it, and then ask really intelligent, cogent, and relevant questions.

  We explained all the background stuff. About Billy getting hoodwinked into having me work on Louis’s condo. About Louis’s car accident, the first time I went to the condo, and meeting Joe-the-cop, Louis’s one time partner, who was now christened Jerkface. I told them about Jerkface showing up at the condo and then showing up at my apartment after I’d found the journals. I admitted to my parents that Jerkface sat on the couch they were now sitting on to read the journals with me.

  I looked over at Teagan. She gave me a look to continue.

  “Almost the minute I brought the journals back to this apartment to read, things started getting strange, but I didn’t know that at the time. The journals were ugly, but they didn’t tell me anything at the time. I’m not sure of the exact order things happened, I wasn’t writing it down, but as close as Teagan and I can come to it, this is what happened.”

  Teagan handed me the papers we’d been working on.

  “Jerkface started lying to me right from the start, but I didn’t know enough to know it was lies, and me, being me, I just took it at face value. First it was the journals. Then he said that he had a warrant, and he used flattery, saying that my brilliant detective skills helped to figure out that Louis, Bernie, and another lady that doesn’t matter for this discussion all had the same three letters in their car tags and that he talked to other cops and that they thought I might be onto something. Since then, I contacted a friend of mine that knows about math, and he said that the chances of there being any connection between those three because of the tag numbers was basically the same as a random event. Jerkface is a cop and would have known that, so from the very beginning he was just playing me for a fool, and I kind of thought he was, but since he was a cop and everything, I ignored my instincts.”

  Teagan said gently, “We need to stay on track.”

  “True. Sorry. So, anyway, Jerkface just started showing up at the apartment and at Louis’s condo. Seems like where I went, he went. When Teagan beat him up at the condo, he later said that his black eyes were caused by hitting the counter, but that doesn’t make much sense. Who trips in spit?”

  My father’s eyebrows went up, but he didn’t say a word.

  “Anyway, so, Jerkface is showing up at the condo unexpectedly, or we caught him there by accident, and then he shows up at your house, and at the time, I thought he was at the cemetery, but now I’m thinking it really was his sister.”

  Teagan was getting frustrated. “You want me to do this?”

  “I told you to do it from the beginning.”

  “Fine. We split this whole problem into pieces. First piece is Louis. We aren’t sure how Cara ended up cleaning out his condo, but it seems that Billy was hoodwinked into contacting Cara, and she was hoodwinked into cleaning the condo.”

  “I already said that.”

  She gave me a look. I decided to let her do it her way. “Louis was a good guy. The ladies we talked to at the condo complex all agreed he was a good guy. He went out of his way to help them. He went out of his way to help the physical therapist who was trying to get him back in shape to get back to work. He was even nice to her brother. He donated a bunch of picnic tables to a group home. Cara went back through his bills this afternoon, and he made regular donations to worthy charities. He’d just renewed his life insurance for ten years. That doesn’t sound like a serial murderer to us, so we kept looking for more pieces.”

  Teagan flipped to the next page.

  “Then we have Jerkface. He seemed scary from the beginning. When he met Cara at the condo, he tried to intimidate her from the start. He showed up at this apartment uninvited. He probably ran her plates the first time he saw her at the condo, or since he’s the one that hoodwinked Billy, he might have already known where she lived. Either way, it’s obvious he’s okay with bending the rules when he wants something and just plain ignoring them when it works for him. Thinking back on it, he pushed and pushed Cara. At first so that she would become more involved, then so she would back off. According to Steph, his fingerprints were not in the places they should have been at Louis’s. He claimed that he was working on an undercover police thing, but there’s no way. He got mad at Cara’s neighbor and started waving his gun around, the cops showed up, but he was back on the street fast enough to break in and get run off by her neighbor again. He’s driving a Mini Cooper, which is expensive on a cop’s salary. He’s threatened Cara several times. At first he was subtle, but he got more and more aggressive, and it all got more and more frequent. And before you get mad, Cara did try to get help from the very beginning. That first time that Jerkface showed up at her apartment she called dispatch, and they told her that Jerkface was a well-respected cop. It’s not like she was a total idiot.”

  You know what they say, with friends like Teagan…

  She continued, “So, Jerkface had our attention. Cara and I were able to find a little bit about him on the Internet. Seems there’s a blog or a social network page or a website for just about everything these days. You just have to know where to look and be willing to see it. Jerkface has a few people mad at him out there. Mostly for things that pretty much tiptoe on the edge of something that would get him in trouble, but he never really jumped in the pool. Things like having a guy’s car towed. The guy claims that he was in an argument with his girlfriend and that Jerkface threatened to arrest him, but instead towed his prized show-quality car. Another guy said that Jerkface is known for harassing people in Old Town. A woman said that she rebuffed Jerkface, her words not mine, and she’s been getting tickets for all kinds of stuff ever since. We couldn’t find anything that would stick as abuse of power, but certainly a show of power.

  Mom leaned forward and poured herself and Daddy more tea.

  Teagan continued, “Jerkface’s sister is a problem. Her name is Kirsten Branden Gagnon. We heard on the news that she was taken out of Jerkface’s home when he was twelve and she was ten. We really couldn’t find anything about that; family court is usually confidential. We were able to find her high school stuff, but other than a couple of comments by people from back then saying that they missed her for a few months here and there, nothing huge. She popped up on the radar again when she was about eighteen. She did a car commercial. We found a bunch of more recent stuff, all of it getting darker and darker. A poem she wrote for some contest. Entries on people’s social network pages. Nothing huge.”

  I think we were starting to lose Daddy. His eyes were starting to glaze over.

  “Then we found a picture of her in the newspaper from years ago. She was a bridesmaid at some girl’s wedding. That picture listed the name of the girl getting married. We started looking up anything we could find on the bride. We found the bride’s mother, who had a different last name. We searched for information on the bride’s mother and found a picture of Jerkface’s sister with the bride’s mother and her own mother. That caption told us that Jerkface’s sister and her mother do not have the same last name. So then we did searches for Jerkface’s last name, and Kirsten’s last name, and her mother’s last name, and any and every combination we could come up with using all of them. We found it when we searched for Kirsten, a ‘B’ for Branden, and her mother’s last name, Usha. My God, Mom, look at this.”

  Teagan handed my parents copies of what we’d found.

  “The trail is so convoluted, no wonder the cops didn’t find it. What do you think?”

  “Well, love, this might be the most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Mom handed the pictures to Daddy.

  “You can tell some of those pictures are altered. She put the face of one person on the body of someone else. Not sure who or why. She has articles about some of the dead girls, but they would never show up in a search because she has blanked out their names or strategically placed something over them so you can’t read it. It looks like an art project done for shock value. If we didn’t know there was a connection between her and those girls, if we hadn’t followed every twist and turn, we would have just written it off like the rest of the world did, just another angst ridden person throwing negative dregs of delusion onto the World Wide Web.”

  “Love, tell me, if this girl is as unwell as these papers suggest her to be, why would she leave this up on the Internet?”

  “We wondered the same thing. The only thing we can come up with is that she’s either so mentally damaged that she is unaware or that she figured that no one would put her together with her dead mother. Oh, I forgot that part. Her mother has been dead since she was about twenty.”

  “Still, it would seem a girl that has gotten away with so much evil for so long would be more care-filled.”

  “Well, we looked that up too. According to some professionals there comes a time that most murderers either feel confident because they have been successful for so long that they think they’ll never get caught or on some level they actually want to get caught.”

  I floated my theory, “I think everything was going along just peachy keen, and then Louis started to do research on the murders because he just couldn’t stand to be away from police work. I think that it was an innocent random event, just like the matching letters on the car tags. I think it happens all the time, and people just don’t notice because most random events never turn into something worth noticing. They’ve written books and movies about it, but until you experience serendipity, the power of random circumstances, you don’t really pay attention, and even if you happen to notice, you figure it’s a onetime thing and never watch out for it again.”