Page 74 of The Truth You Told

“All right,” Shay said, a little reluctantly. But what was she supposed to do? Just let Max walk out of here in the midst of some kind of emotional emergency?

“Okay,” Max said, as if the agreement weren’t monumental at all. And of course, it wasn’t to her. She’d known what Shay was going to say. “Remember the beach?”

When Shay had told Max about the baby she’d thought had been a new beginning. She swallowed back tears and managed a “Yeah.”

“When I asked if you thought I could hurt someone because I was interested in the Alphabet Man”—Max forged ahead—“you said yes.”

That jolted Shay enough to get hold of her emotions. “Hey, I didn’t say yes.”

“Close enough,” Max said, rolling her eyes. “You said, ‘I think you’re a survivor.’”

“Well, I do think you’re a survivor. It wasn’t just a dodge,” Shay said, a little huffy at being read so easily.

Max laughed. “It’s fine, dude. I get it. Anyway, I was kind of asking because of a reason.”

Shay tensed. “Okay.”

“I’m not having violent fantasies or anything like that. Unclench,” Max said. “I wondered if you could believe I was violent on such little evidence. It kind of ... validated a theory I had.”

“A theory?”

“Stay with me,” Max said. “You’re going to want to argue, but just wait for it, okay?”

Shay didn’t know if she could actually promise that, but she nodded.

“You know how I’ve read every article printed on the Alphabet Man case?” Shay just stared at her, until Max rolled her eyes. “It was a rhetorical question. You used to be quicker than this. Anyway, in addition to all those, I went to the library and found some people online who were discussing the case.”

“Max,” Shay couldn’t help but chide. “Stranger danger, babe.”

“I didn’t ever talk to them,” Max said. “I just, you know, lurked.”

“Still.” Shay had been born in the era where it had been drilled into their heads that every stranger on the internetcouldbe a pervert, but it was different these days. The thought alone made her feel incredibly old.

“Oh my god, you’re so old,” Max said, both reading Shay’s mind and sounding her age. Shay had wanted nothing more than for Max to have her bratty teen years, and here they were. “Okay, okay. So between the articles and the lurking, I started seeing a recurring thing.”

“A thing?” Shay asked.

“Don’t sound so skeptical,” Max said, pulling out a map. There were purple x’s all over it. “These are the body drops for all the known victims.”

Shay couldn’t help herself, she leaned forward. She knew a lot of people loved digging around in serial killers’ brains, but Shay usually hated this stuff. It was why she’d been so panicky about that stupid goddamn gun years earlier. People might have looked down on her job at the bar, but she had gotten to chat with people, joke with people, make them happy and then go home and turn her mind off. She’d take that any day of the week over what Callum did.

And she wouldneverdo anything like this if she wasn’t being paid for it.

“They look pretty random, right?” Max said. She held up one of those pencil-metal things that every kid used in sixth-grade math. A compass. She stuck the point in the center of the map and then drew a circle using the tool.

Whatever radius she’d set it to was perfect, because it went through about 40 percent of the body drops. And while the line didn’t touch all the x’s, there werenoneinside the circle. “What?”

Max’s finger touched the small indent left behind by the pointy end of the compass.

Shay squinted. “The hospital?”

“At the very center,” Max said, as if she were saying something monumental.

“You really think he took a compass and measured out from, what, his home base?” Shay asked.

“No, but I think he made sure he didn’t come within a certain distance of anything that could be tied to him,” Max said, and then held up a finger. She put the compass down once more and drew a second circle. That picked up about another 30 percent of the body drops. Max tapped the two indents. “I think he lives somewhere around here, and works at the hospital.”

“That could be said of half of Houston,” Shay pointed out. She was exaggerating, of course. But the circles were large, especially if you took in the area covered by both of them.

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