25. Kennedy #2
I dismissed that suspicion almost as quickly as it came. It couldn’t be Dec chasing me through the woods right now. Couldn’t be Dec who was brutally murdering people and hacking them up. It just… couldn’t.
But who else had Freya asked me about recently?
All I knew was that it had to be a man, and he also had to be tied to the letter K somehow, because that was how the Carver had signed his recent letters.
Another gunshot shattered the silence behind me. I screamed and pushed myself to run even faster, mind spinning like a broken carousel, thoughts slamming into one another.
Then something finally surfaced, brought to light by another rush of adrenaline.
A moment. A voice.
It was the day Heather Voss’s foot was delivered to my porch, when my quiet neighborhood turned into a circus of flashing lights and swarming investigators. Police. Forensics. Reporters shouting questions. Neighbors gawking.
Through all of it, I’d overheard something. A name. Kai.
It was echoing louder in my mind now, punching through the chaos.
‘ Kai, I’m thinking we should go and take another look at the pickup spot ,’ a man had called out to a colleague. A fellow detective, perhaps.
At the time, it hadn’t meant anything. But now, with everything else swirling in my brain, it hit differently, because Kai started with K, and it was also a fairly common nickname for…
“Malachi,” I whispered, suddenly feeling dizzy.
As his name slipped off my tongue, I stumbled into a thick wall of brambles and nearly tripped.
No. It couldn’t be…
Could it?
No, of course not. There was just no way Malachi could be the Carver.
He was the main person investigating this whole thing, and he’d always been so nice to me.
So thoughtful and protective. He’d comforted me after each new horror appeared, and always made me feel safe.
That didn’t sound like the behavior of a sociopath who got off on playing games with my life, did it?
Besides, Kai was probably a nickname based on various other names too, or even a full name in itself. It didn’t mean—
That train of thought was rapidly cut off as another memory shoved its way in. Something Freya and I had researched and even discussed in one of our podcast episodes.
Elijah Dougherty, one of the most infamous suspects in the Carver killings, had raised his brother's three children after he and his wife tragically passed away in an accident. Those children were named Hannah, Kai, and Cameron Dougherty.
Years later, Elijah died by suicide after relentless speculation and torment from the public over their suspicions that he was the Carver.
Freya and I had wondered what happened to the kids —especially Kai and Cameron.
We'd heard from Hannah Wilson (née Dougherty), but the other two had seemingly disappeared.
No press. No social media. No online footprint at all.
At the time, we assumed they’d decided to keep a low profile to escape their uncle’s legacy. And that still made sense to me… until something else clicked.
When Malachi first contacted me, I’d told Freya and given her his full name.
She’d asked if he was local, because the surname Sieger was familiar to her.
Then she told me that she used to live next door to an elderly couple with that name.
She’d also told me that they lost their daughter and son-in-law years ago in a car accident.
An accident that, I later realized, had left Malachi an orphan.
At the time, I’d assumed the grandparents raised him and any other siblings he had. But Freya never actually said that. Which meant someone else in the family could’ve taken the kids in and raised them instead. Someone like their paternal uncle.
An uncle who could very well have been named Elijah Dougherty.
Yes. It had to be him. The pieces fit too cleanly to ignore.
On top of that, Malachi had also told me a few personal things during our recent late-night chat; things that I now realized were key bits of information.
Firstly, he’d mentioned that his uncle was a college professor.
Was, implying he was no longer alive. And Elijah Dougherty was also a college professor when he was alive.
Furthermore, he’d taught computer programming…
and Malachi had informed me that his uncle was ‘very tech-oriented’, which led to him being highly computer-savvy at an early age.
Oh my god.
It was all clicking into place now, the pattern forming with brutal clarity.
The Dougherty siblings hadn’t just kept low profiles over the years.
Instead, they must’ve decided to change their last names entirely to escape the dark cloud of suspicion that came with the Dougherty name in this part of the world.
Hannah had taken her husband’s surname—Wilson—and the younger two had gone with their mother’s surname. Sieger.
So Malachi Sieger wasn’t the original name of the man I thought I knew.
He was actually born Malachi Dougherty. And he’d very conveniently kept that from me, not to mention his colleagues in the police department, even though the fact that he was directly related to a former prime suspect was a pretty big deal.
Perhaps not such a big deal if he’d been open and honest about it. After all, simply being related to a former suspect didn’t automatically imply guilt. But Malachi hadn’t been honest about it. He’d hidden it very carefully, and he’d obviously done that for a reason.
Now, I was willing to bet that I knew exactly what that reason was. He hadn’t just changed his last name and hidden his true identity to escape the social stigma, as was likely the case for his sisters. He’d changed it to disappear… because he wasn’t really running from his uncle’s legacy.
He was the legacy.
Malachi had been the Carver all along.