Chapter 8 #2
It is because hate is similar to fear. You can’t control it when it grabs you. It’s primal. It can overshadow everything. It can make you complicit in shit you never thought you’d ever partake in. It can make you lie to yourself, fool yourself, keep you from knowing yourself until it’s too late.
I go back to my phone.
Two more articles pop up: Next Possible Victim for Confession Artist Killer, with a question for a subtitle: Is everyone in the US who resembles this sketch potential prey?
The other: Who Have You Wronged?
Like it’s directed right at me. Shit. Not now. I can’t think of it all right now.
I go back to reading.
Variations of CA Has New Target keep flashing on my screen. A notification for a Reddit thread pops up, a question about what the killer is trying to accomplish.
I swipe them all away and google dangle feather earrings with gems. Tons of choices pop up from all sorts of stores.
Thank God. Many have the gems at the very top instead of in the middle of the feathers, but I’m comforted to know that a lot of feather earrings are being sold and am confident that, with more searching, I can find some more similar to mine.
Then I hop on Twitter-slash-X.
The dumping has already begun, all the hashtagging: #ConfessionArtist, #SketchKiller, #CAConfession, #SKConfession, #PsychoKiller, #JusticeKiller, #FiveDays.
The confessions in response to the initial two sketches never came in because no one took the situation seriously. But after the first two bodies were found, the paranoia kicked up. Way up.
People who thought they looked like the third sketch started tripping all over each other fessing up to anything and everything—and on every corner of social media.
It was a shit show of folks putting it out there that they’d shoplifted when they were desperate or for the thrill, bullied someone in high school, cheated on their taxes, had affairs, lusted after their own siblings .
. . I shudder to think of the huge hits marriages are taking from this psycho’s cruel game.
Probably many have lost friends and maybe their jobs over some of their admissions, worrying that it wasn’t worth the gamble to keep secrets stuffed away if it meant their life might be at stake.
Someone named Maggie Jo, @MaggJoWentworth, last name and all—just posted:
#CAConfession—When I was married I used to screw this guy and his wife caught us cheating. She was one of my bf’s and he was my husband’s bf. We blackmailed her into not telling my husband or any of our other friends.
Holy crap. And the replies:
Yeah, you do look just like the sketch, you’re dead.
You deserve it, Bitch
Don’t think that’s what he means by confess. Better start listing actual names if you want to be absolved.
Enough of that. I move on to the next, from Kara, @KaraCrossWhite:
#CAConfession—I must come clean about a lie I spread as a health insurance exec: I made big $$ to pump idea that Canada’s single-payer system meant huge lines and terrible healthcare. I was paid to lie and I did it for a lot of $$.
I don’t read the replies but tap on the posters’ profile pictures and see they have similar hair and features. But noses are off, foreheads vary, hairdos differ with assorted curls, waves, and parts.
Madness. I want to fling my phone across the room. I do not want to be thinking about any of this when my plate is already full with my still relatively new business and looking after Jess.
But there are two people dead. It’s unthinkable.
I must admit, a part of me is relieved that others have begun sharing their sins because that means many other women out there assume the photo might be of them, confirming what I’ve told Jess.
But none of it makes sense. If this guy knows what people did when they were in eighth grade, why does he need them to confess only now, years later?
And me? If this is me? Should I sit tight and gamble that it was some other poor woman? Or should I share the thing I feel most guilty for?
No. Absolutely not. I could never let that one out. I can’t do that to Jess. I can’t abandon her. Or Sam.
And after the ordeal in my old job, I refuse to feel like a victim ever again.
My short time on the force—four years—was chock-full of complications. At the end of my third year on patrol, when I was preparing to take my exams to become a detective, I worked under a lieutenant named Roger Hartley.
Old school, old mentality, old ways. Cop culture. Cover-your-ass culture. Like DNA passed from adult to offspring. Cops being cops.
It was Roger Hartley who commented on the way I looked, that he preferred my uniform tight or that he’d love to see my long legs in a short skirt or shorts instead of the stock-issued pants. He bugged me to go for drinks: “Hey, gorgeous, when are we gonna grab a beer?”
When I’d say no, he’d ask if I was still planning on shooting for detective and bring up the fact that he was very good friends with the captain, and that he might just have to inform him that I’m not much of a team player.
Of course, he said this with a wink, as though he was only joking around, as if he was evolved enough and woke enough to mock the idea of quid pro quo.
One day, he told me several of the guys were getting together at a nearby pub and that I should stop in, that a few of the female techs would be there, too.
He was there when I arrived.
And very much alone.
He stood and hugged me. I returned it, dropping my arms quickly, but not before catching a whiff of his acrid booze breath. His clothes smelled earthy and sour.
“Where is everyone?” I said, even as I knew I’d been tricked.
He looked at his watch. “They’re coming.”
There was no need to stare at the door. I knew. And I was not happy.
He downed his vodka and insisted I order a drink. I ordered a glass of ice water and told him that my boyfriend was waiting for me to have dinner, that I couldn’t stay long. Hartley ignored this, said to the bartender, “Give her a pint, whatever you have on draft.”
“Sam Adams?” the bartender asked.
I nodded.
When Hartley’s gaze slid from my mouth to my neck, to the area between the buttons over my chest where the fabric of my blouse slightly gaped, I set my beer down and told him I needed to be on my way. He mocked me, calling me a stick-in-the-mud.
Later, after I endured his attempt at chitchat, he walked me to my car. He was sozzled. I couldn’t let him drive drunk, so I asked him how he got to the pub.
“Walked,” he said. “I live a few blocks from here.” He pointed west. “You could walk me home.” He gave me a drunk, lopsided smile that pulled his face into a rough, sloppy sketch drawn on for the evening.
I said no thanks and told him I’d see him at work the next day.
He spread his arms wide—a come-to-papa gesture—and pulled me toward him. I reciprocated stiffly, bending at the hips to give him a rigid, arms-only hug. As I pulled away, he jerked me in tighter and smashed his lips onto mine.
I snapped my head to the side and pushed him away, but not before he dragged his tongue across my cheek, like a wet, squishy slug.
His hand grabbed my left breast hard and pinched.
He looked calculating, as if his drunkenness had only been an act.
As I drove home, I had to grip the steering wheel hard to prevent my hands from shaking.
There was no sense in reporting the grope to Captain Mercer. He and Lieutenant Hartley were tight. I was supposed to be tough, a pro at slapping down boundaries. A cop, for God’s sake. I’d entered this profession knowing full well it was Johnny Law, not Jenny Law. What did I expect?
I had a friend in college who wrote a thesis on workplace harassment, and she told me, after learning that I intended to enter law enforcement after everything happened with Sophie, that the field ranked among the worst when it came to every kind of workplace and sexual harassment.
Plus, I had not been raped. What had happened to Sophie years earlier had been so much worse.
The atmosphere at the station might have been loaded with suppressed aggression, and a few of us women constantly breathed its fumes, but as far as I knew, actual sexual assault was kept in check. They knew better, and I knew the responsibility fell on my shoulders to guard myself.
Even with everything I’d been through with Sophie, I still considered it my fault for saying yes to Hartley and meeting him for drinks in the first place.
That’s how deeply ingrained this shit can be.
And, of course, he was drunk. Everyone liked him.
He was fun, he was jolly, and told ribald tales that kept the other officers in stitches.
That night I decided this was something I needed to carry around with me—annoying, bothersome, but not the heaviest of my burdens.
I still believed in the system, that this was a glitch—an endless wringing out of an old grease-stained towel that hadn’t been tossed away yet, but eventually would be discarded.
Turned out, though, that the next day Hartley informed me there’d been complaints about me. My productivity.
When I asked who had lodged them and what exactly they were, he wouldn’t say, only that I needed to watch my performance.
I continued to stuff it all down, but I was like a pot beginning to simmer.
Images of Sophie and me in the cold woods kept resurfacing.
I worked twice as hard as other officers, took extra shifts and never slacked, until one day another coworker, a younger female officer named Lilly with even less seniority than me, told me about her very similar experiences with Hartley.
Prodding for drinks. Following her to her car. Insisting on hugs. And she said she was groped, too.
That set me in motion. I was legally bound and morally obligated to do something, to get her to the proper channels for filing a complaint. And if she didn’t, I would need to report that I’d witnessed a grievance, even if relayed to me in private.