Chapter 14 THEO
THEO
Alex passes out and I push down my panic as I get her cleaned up and dried off and tucked into bed.
I ignore the pit in my stomach as I clean the bathroom.
I swallow the creeping nausea as I methodically comb through her house, checking for loose baseboards and tiles, looking under every piece of furniture, and going through all her clothes and bags.
It takes me an hour to find everything.
Small piles of cash are hidden throughout the house in obvious places, amounting to just over seven thousand dollars.
A platinum diamond ring is tucked away in an empty bottle of aspirin, and my first thought is that it doesn’t look like something Alex would wear, even though she doesn’t wear any jewelry besides small gold hoop earrings.
Her driver’s license takes me the longest to find, because she taped it underneath the bottom of the bookshelf.
I put it all in a neat pile on the table and stare at it, panic overtaking me.
I never would have left.
I don’t want to do this again.
I’m going to have to start over.
Oh, fuck, she’s going to run from me.
I know what I have to do to stop her, I just don’t like it.
It’s the middle of the night and Alex is passed out drunk, so I have hours.
I grab everything and head to my house, taking everything into my office.
I pull up the camera feeds of Alex’s room on one monitor and pull up search engines on the other two, grabbing her license and looking up her real name.
The first thing that pops up is a homemade missing persons poster from March. The photo looks like it was taken at a holiday party, and I barely recognize her. She’s thinner, with waist-long honey-colored hair styled in a wavy, layered blowout, and she’s wearing heavy makeup.
Her smile is wide, but it looks wrong to me somehow.
She’s got on a tight, short dress and leans against the arm of a tall, muscular man in a dark blue suit, a thick platinum band on his left hand. He’s maybe my height or a little taller, built much broader than I am, with sandy hair, blue eyes, a ruddy complexion, and a very square jaw.
He’s not unattractive, he just looks like a fucking asshole.
I look at the information on the missing poster, nausea churning in my gut.
MISSING PERSON:
ALICE MARIE MURPHY, nee SILVA
DOB: 2/26/1998
HEIGHT: 5’ 2”
WEIGHT: 100 LBS
HAIR: BLONDE
EYES: brOWN
LAST SEEN: 3/9/2023, JAMAICA PLAIN, BOSTON
CONTACT DANIEL MURPHY WITH TIPS
There’s an official missing poster put out by the Suffolk County Police Department with her ID photo on it and an article about her going missing from March, full of photos of her.
There’s one of Alex in a pink bikini top at the beach, her hair in a coiffed twist, and one of her wearing a Red Sox jersey sitting in box seats with her husband, and another of her holding a mimosa with an untouched plate of picture-perfect food in front of her.
She’s always smiling, always poised, always a little tense around the eyes.
I find her Facebook and her Instagram next. Her Instagram is sparse, with a few nicely framed photos of flowers, museum exhibits, and food, all with vague, positive captions. The several most recent posts are all missing person posts, obviously made by her husband.
Her Facebook is less sparse. Her husband has posted and tagged her in tons of missing person posts, at least once a week since she disappeared.
I scroll back to the year she made the account and start going through it.
There’s standard teenage girl stuff, innocuous posts about her life and things going on at school.
There are photos of a happy teenage Alex with lots of friends at summer camp, school dances, birthday parties, track meets, and lots of selfies with silly filters.
It takes me a minute to realize that I’ve never seen Alex smile like she does in these photos, unguarded and giddy and sweet. The smiles I’ve seen from her are polite and friendly and warm, but not real.
Oh, fuck. I’ve never seen Alex actually smile.
I keep going through the photos on her page, and there are lots of old photos with her parents. She’s with them at Red Sox games, in matching pajamas on Christmas, sightseeing in San Francisco, at art openings with her mom or running a 5K with her dad, and my heart hurts looking at them.
They all look so happy together.
I search her parents’ names and feel a wave of nausea as I read an article from a local paper about a college professor and his artist wife who died in a car accident.
It was raining hard, and they got rear-ended by a drunk driver at an angle, spinning their car out into the next lane, where they were hit by a semi.
I should have been in that fucking car.
Oh, my god.
William and Andi Silva look like they were nice people.
Her father was a tenured engineering professor at MIT, and her mother was a fine artist, a painter who was well-known on the East Coast art scene.
Her father had no social media, but her mother did, and Alex features in most of her mother’s posts.
There’s one where her mother calls her their “miracle baby,” the attached photo of a beaming Andi and William in a hospital, maybe in their late thirties or early forties, holding a swaddled newborn Alex.
I scroll through more posts, seeing a happy woman with a happy marriage and a happy family, pausing on a photo of Andi and an adolescent Alex standing next to a massive painting of Alex holding a white rabbit.
The rabbit’s gaze is nervous and trapped, and the painted version of Alex looks lost and scared, in stark contrast to the content, happy version of her standing with her arm around her mother’s waist.
From what I can tell, Alex was a happy kid who was wanted and loved, probably spoiled, and most likely very sheltered.
I flip back to Alex’s page, dread creeping up the back of my neck when I see that Alex’s social media gets sparse and concerning after her parents died.
She made one long post memorializing her parents the week they died, then posted nothing until her status changed to Married five months later, a few days after her eighteenth birthday.
She posted infrequently after that, maybe once every three or four months, and every post going forward references her husband.
There’s no posts or photos of her alone or with friends, nothing indicating any hobbies, nothing without him.
The first two years of their marriage, based solely on pictures, changed Alex immensely.
She lost a lot of weight, her body going from athletic to delicate looking.
She grew her hair from her shoulders to her waist, got it highlighted and cut in soft layers rather than the blunt cut she’d worn before, the way she wears her hair now.
Her skin got tanner and her whole wardrobe switched from normal but stylish clothes to extremely feminine things, tight and short and usually in pale colors.
She’s beautiful, but based on how she looked before she got married and how she looks now, I don’t know that any of it was entirely her choice.
Alex looks perfectly put together in every photo with her husband, her smile poised and radiant and never reaching her eyes. She looks fragile next to him, and I feel uneasy when I notice how she seems like she’s always curling in on herself slightly.
I click onto her husband’s page and swear quietly, finally realizing why Alex has gone to such extensive measures to hide.
Detective Daniel Paul Murphy has been employed with the Boston Police Department since the year after he graduated high school.
He’s also eleven years older than Alex, and since they got married right around her eighteenth birthday, he’s a fucking piece of shit on top of being a bastard.
I scroll through their pages simultaneously. Daniel was promoted to Detective four years ago, and around the time he got promoted, Alex started going longer without posting anything. By the time the first missing poster pops up on his page, she hasn’t posted in over eight months.
Daniel, however, posts about her. He calls her “Bunny” and seems to like showing her off.
There are photos of her in the kitchen making Thanksgiving dinner, her smile strained as she holds up a perfectly roasted turkey, photos of her surrounded by his nephews and nieces in a pool, photos of her in a tight white dress posed perfectly in front of a ten-foot Christmas tree in their giant, charming house that I doubt he afforded on a cop’s salary.
There’s a series of glossy Christmas photos with his family from over the years, and Alex always looks perfectly happy, unless you line the images up against the ones of Christmas with her parents.
Then, she looks downright miserable.
I sit back, reeling, watching Alex sleep.
No wonder she’s not adjusting well. She probably has huge fucking trust issues and isn’t ready for such a serious relationship yet.
If I had known about her marriage, I would have known I needed to follow my plan and take it slow.
I knew she probably had a fake identity, and I should have looked into it before.
I was in her apartment, I had access to all of this, and I overlooked it.
God, I’m a fucking idiot.
I don’t know everything that happened, but I’ve got enough missing pieces to start making assumptions, and none of them are good.
She can fill in the details later, but right now I need to recalibrate and figure out how to get her to trust me.
Getting her to see our connection is going to take a lot longer than I thought.
I push my hands back through my hair, sighing harshly. I can’t keep being a fuckup. She deserves better, and I can be better. We’ll start this over. I can fix this.
I just need her to not fucking run away from me first.