The Psychopath Next Door

32: It All Started With That Damn Cat

Calla had no interest in hair.

She'd watched enough true crime documentaries to know all about the souvenirs that most serial killers took from their victims. Fingernails. Strips of skin. Blood samples. The occasional finger. Perhaps a piece of jewelry, or some other identifying item the victim had worn up until their untimely death.

And of course, there was the classic keepsake: a lock of hair. Sometimes entire sections of it, stowed away in a shoebox and buried in the backyard. Like a morbid time capsule.

Calla understood it. She really did. Hair was unique. Hair had texture, and scent, and was so tantalizingly human. What better way to preserve the last snapshot of someone's life than by hoarding such an intimate part of who'd they'd been?

But she personally had no interest in it. And not just because the idea of stuffing a lock of hair in her nightstand did nothing for her. No, it was more than that.

Because hair would never be enough.

I'm going to find you, she thought, staring over at the torn page on the coffee table, the familiar red scrawl calling out to her from across the room. I'm going to find you, and I'm going to make you mine.

Since finding that page, she'd imagined how she might end the Greenwitch Killer, each method more gruesome than the last. She imagined what it would feel like to slice through their skin. To feel them convulse beneath her fingers. To watch the light leave their eyes.

She would keep a vial of their blood—no, a jar. She would extract their teeth. Peel the skin from their lips. Break the joints of their fingers, and then sever them, right down to the bone. She'd hang those fingers from a string and loop them over her bedpost, a demented dream catcher for all of her nightmares.

Who knew? Perhaps she'd keep a lock of hair, after all. Fold it in the depths of her favorite book and smile when she looked at it each morning.

I'm going to find you.

"So...I'm dead?"

Vincent's question was met with silence, drawing Calla slowly—oh, so slowly—from the depths of her wild fantasies.

The trio sat in Cooper's apartment, spread out across the living room like the points of a star. Cooper, perched on the recliner; Vincent, slumped against the couch cushions in defeat; and Calla behind the kitchen counter, her hands splayed on the faux marble. Amelia Daniels had been called in to work the night shift. And, as Vincent had predicted, she'd left her son almost a dozen voicemails and even more texts, begging him to call her and stay inside once he got home.

Calla's phone buzzed for the fifth time in half as many minutes. Her own mother, telling her to come home, and come home now. She ignored it.

"Like..." Vincent tried again, his voice startlingly loud in the silence. "I'm...dead dead? That's it?"

Cooper did what he'd been doing for the past ten minutes: he said nothing. He just sat there with his head in his hands, his fingers wound so tightly in his hair that she feared he might rip every strand from his scalp.

Hair. Why was she thinking about hair again?

"No," Calla finally said, finding her voice. She hadn't known what to say when they'd first found that fateful page, torn straight from Snow White's fairytale. She'd been buried too deeply in her fury. But once it became clear Cooper would be no help, she'd been forced to resurface, to explain—in excruciating detail—what that red five meant. The killer had circled a single line on the page: kill her, and bring me back her heart as a token. The words meant no more to her than they did to either of the boys.