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“I don’t know anymore. Do you?”

He scratched his head. “He’d only have to know what happened out there. You said he told you he was trying to understand his father. Who’s to say Sidney didn’t just tell him what he said to those girls, including Geneva.”

“Then he’d have to be pretty sick himself to start taunting her with those words now. And I don’t know how I’d be able to prove it.”

“Well, a lie is a lie. And it’s not like this was just some small white one, Mercy. The only reason Junior finally admitted he was seeing his dad is because you brought him proof of it. Everything he said after that sounds like a convenient cover. What do you want to do now?”

“What would you do?”

He raised a brow. “You’re the investigator. This is the kind of thing I’d have used to impeach the kid on the witness stand. That’s not what this is.”

“Holland,” I said. “If I could get him to talk to me again and let me explain what I’ve found out so far, maybe he’d change his mind and help me.”

“He still believes Geneva’s hiding something,” Dad said. “Do you?”

I considered it for a moment. I wanted to feel certain of my answer. “I don’t know,” I said. “But being less than forthcoming isn’t the same as helping a serial killer off all her friends then letting him strangle her too. And she didn’t fake the vandalism to her car. She was with me when it happened.”

“All true,” he said.

I turned back to the table. Dad had rearranged the letters we felt came from the same person or group. The ones containing gibberish at times. The ones we believed Sidney had at least in part responded to.

“What are you trying to do here?” I asked.

“Figure out a timeline.”

“But we’ve done that.”

“I grouped them by postmarks,” he said. “But that seems random, too. These had to have been sent by several people, not just one.”

“Like a cult,” I said. “Acolytes.”

“Or gamers,” Dad said. “What if that’s the connection? The letter writers were connected with each other online. It would explain the geography, I guess.”

I looked over what he’d done. I counted nine different postmarks. My eyes watered the more I looked. But once I started, it was hard to stop.

One group of letters came from Michigan addresses. Looking at the dates on the postmarks, they were sent several weeks apart from each other.

I rummaged through the notepads on the desk. Somewhere, we’d written down the chronology of when each was sent. I found it on the bottom of a pile.

“Do we have a map?” I asked.

“Like a road map?” Dad asked.

“Or an atlas.”

“Sure,” he said. “I was born in the mid-1900s, remember. I’ve even got encyclopedias out in storage.”

He disappeared to his office and came back a few minutes later. He handed me a large road atlas. It had maps of each state. But in the back, there was a foldout showing all of North America.

As I spread it out, my dad smiled. He shook an index finger and disappeared again. When he came back, he handed me a box of silver tacks. “Why the hell didn’t I think of that?”

I smiled, realizing what he thought. “Actually,” I said as I opened my laptop. “I was just gonna feed the data into an AI chatbot.”

Dad frowned. “Sacrilege!”

Then we got to work. After a few minutes, I had to admit that my dad’s method provided much more satisfaction. I read off the dates and post office locations. He tore the map out of the atlas and taped it to the wall. One by one, he marked the spots where each letter originated.

It took over an hour. By the end of it, he stepped back and we both marveled at the pattern that had emerged.