So My Ex-Boyfriend is a Serial Killer

Chapter One

Memory is a monster. But we’re doing our best to use mine for good.

Muriel, Hana, and I are having our weekly meeting when the new neighbor arrives.

We have a month and a half before we walk the trails with the cadaver dogs and I am determined to have a list of possible burial sites by then.

Any new thirst traps entering the neighborhood are just going to have to wait.

“Oh, he’s cute,” calls out Hana from the front window. She’s an Asian American postgrad student with perfect bangs and a pastel aesthetic. “Come and see!”

“What does he look like?” Muriel has white skin, short grey hair, and is a retired librarian. She is amazing.

“Tall with tattoos, dark hair, and a vague air of brooding.”

“How can you tell about the brooding?” I ask.

“Oh, that’s easy,” says Hana. “It’s all in the set of the chin.”

We work out of the study at the back of my house.

Hana calls it the war room. A large map of the local area including nearby national parks is on one wall, and newspaper clippings about missing women are on another.

Then there are the photos I took the year I dated my ex.

Happy snaps of him smiling at various lookouts.

Selfies of the two of us posing beside streams. Ryan loved hiking and getting back to nature.

Guess it’s why he buried the bodies of his victims out in the wild.

“I don’t mind some brooding now and then. How old do you think he is?” asks Muriel.

“I don’t know,” says Hana. “Thirty or so? Not forty. Somewhere in between.”

“They still need too much training at that age,” comments Muriel. “Too young for me.”

“I actually think he’d be perfect for Sidney.”

Muriel snorts. Which is a valid reaction to the idea of me hooking up with anyone.

I raise my head. “Wait a minute. Weren’t you just telling me how much dating sucks?”

“That’s completely beside the point,” says Hana.

Hana and Muriel befriended me nine years ago before the trial.

I had already started to keep most people at a safe distance.

Cyber sleuths, digital detectives, and armchair investigators have a habit of making my life hell.

They either message me demanding information or accuse me of being an accessory and/or psycho killer.

But these two women met in an online true crime forum and offered to help me remember all the places my ex had taken me.

And they kept offering until I accepted.

Because we know Ryan revisited sites where he buried victims’ bodies.

He once took me for a romantic picnic where the remains of Briana Petersen were later found.

Six women were reported missing during the year he attended a local college.

One was later accounted for—she’d been escaping a domestic violence situation.

But only one body has been located out of the suspected five.

Finding those four missing women and returning them to their families is our goal.

Along with proving my ex was guilty of far more than just one case of manslaughter.

And I need to do it before he serves out the rest of his fifteen-year sentence.

I will not allow him to hurt someone else. No fucking way.

Most of the local police seem to think he’s just a boy from a good family who snapped for unknowable reasons and made a single horrific mistake.

And most of the general public seem happy to go along with this point of view.

But it’s bullshit. There is a small online true crime group researching my ex and the missing women.

I am not going to sit around and wait for someone to clean up a mess I helped make, however.

“Sidney, come and see,” repeats Hana.

I smile and shake my head. It’s been almost a decade since I’ve taken an interest in anyone of any sex. The first time I fell in love was such a disaster I can’t be trusted to date. Though I guess just watching wouldn’t get me into trouble.

“Why don’t you go and take a look?” asks Muriel, who is a secret romantic at heart. But she buries it well. “You never know…he might be the one.”

“I’m not sure I believe in the one. Plus I have a lot going on right now. I don’t want to get distracted.”

Muriel is not convinced. “You’ve been using that excuse since I met you. It’s time you got a life.”

“Why don’t you go look?” I toss back.

“Because I’m old enough to know better. Now go and ogle the man and make your friend happy.”

And I know when I am outnumbered. I join Hana in the living room at the front of the house. “What’s going on?”

“He took something inside. At least we’re not the only ones spying.” Hana points across the street. “The old couple have been in their garden for ages. And the students in the share house next to them are hanging out on their patio.”

Mrs. Lawson, one of my neighbors, is also out walking her dog. The frown on her face when she sees me standing there is mighty. I behave like a grown-ass adult, however, and resist the temptation to hide behind the curtain. It’s not easy being the neighborhood pariah.

“What’s her problem?” asks Hana.

“She thinks me living here brings down the property values or something.”

“We should toilet paper her tree.”

“That could be fun.”

A man walks out of the house next door. He is indeed tall, with tattoos and longish dark hair. Hana wasn’t lying about any of that. And when he grabs a box out of the back of the moving van, the muscles in his arms stretch and strain.

“He is fire,” I admit.

Hana happy sighs. “I like it when he lifts heavy things.”

“Yeah.”

“He doesn’t need that place,” say Hana. “He can live in my head rent free.”

I smile. “That’s very generous of you.”

“I know, right?”

A young family was renting the small brick bungalow. But they left after someone threw a rock through their window. Doubtless it was meant for me. Maybe Mrs. Lawson was right about those house prices after all.

“I have a life,” I say for absolutely no reason.

“Do you though?” Hana wrinkles her nose. “Really?”

“Yes.” I laugh. “I do things and see people. Like you two and Mateo and Heather. My friend Salim just stopped by the other day.”

“Mateo’s your self-defense teacher and Heather’s your therapist. You pay them; they don’t count. And who’s Salim?”

“He’s lovely,” I say. “He, ah, he brings me things.”

“Are you seriously trying to claim the mailperson as your friend?”

I frown. “Maybe.”

Hana shakes her head sadly at me.

My life isn’t small and pathetic. It just looks that way from certain angles.

But what’s important is the work we’re doing to bring the missing women home.

Not the diminutive size of my social life and/or lack of skills regarding same.

Most of my friends from high school and college ghosted me.

Same goes for the cousin I was close to growing up.

I don’t blame them, though I did feel abandoned.

And me shutting down from the horror of it all wasn’t helpful.

There’s nothing quite like the social awkwardness of having accidentally dated a serial killer. What my ex did was abhorrent, and he deserves to rot in jail and burn in hell. But my only crimes were being idiotic and in love. Two things that still give me plenty of guilt.

The new neighbor takes another box inside before wandering back out into the sun. And then walking in this general direction. Hana and I jump back from the window in a panic.

“This is it,” says Hana. “You’re going to meet him.”

“Shit.”

“What’s happening?” Muriel shouts from the study.

Hana yells back, “He’s coming over.”

“He is? Now this I have to see!”

Thank fuck for thick walls and double glazing. Because my only friends have well and truly forgotten their inside voices. Which is when he knocks on the door.

“I’m not dressed for gentleman callers,” I say, giving Hana a nudge. “You like him. You answer it.”

“No way. It’s your house.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Not happening,” declares Hana. “I’m doing this for your own good.”

It’s tempting to wait until he gives up and goes away, which is what I usually do.

I don’t hate people. But the truth is most of them tend to have a negative opinion of me.

The ones in this town, at least. Not to mention my dark blonde hair is overdue for a wash and tied back into a short ponytail.

And my white tank top and old baggy blue jeans are clean apart from a small coffee stain from earlier.

A woman needs to be free to be ugly in her own home.

It takes me a minute to deal with the locks on the door, and my twenty-inch baseball bat waits out of sight against the wall.

Just in case. Then there he is in black jeans, a faded band tee, and sneakers.

He has tattoos on one arm and the side of his neck.

And he’s both taller and broader up close.

I’m average height and weight, and I barely reach his chin.

His polite smile warms into something more at the sight of me.

Women with oily hair must be his weakness.

“Hey,” he says in a deep voice.

Butterflies do not take flight in my belly. It’s just gas or something. “Hi.”

Hana giggles softly somewhere behind me.

“I, ah, found this in the mailbox. Looks like they delivered it to the wrong house.” He hands me a battered envelope. “I just moved in next door. Probably should have led with that.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

The thing about social niceties is that without practice they fade, and you can go a little feral.

Same goes for being attracted to someone without being weird about it, apparently.

Because I just stand there staring at the offered limb for a moment.

And then for a few more. “Um. Sidney. I’m Sidney. ”

“Noah.” His hand is huge, the fingers scarred and callused. But his grip is gentle. “Nice to meet you.”

I’m never washing this hand again.