Page 83 of The Woman I’ve Become

“No,” Alicia argues, squaring her shoulders. “It was you. You told that Talia person you were doing a memoir.” She points a finger at me. “It was you who triggered him.”

“Does it really matter what prompted his move?” I argue. “He’s here. That’s the real problem.”

Alicia sinks down on the sofa next to Julia. “What do we do?”

“We make a plan,” Julia assures her. “Decide how we’re going to handle him if he shows up.”

As much as I would love to believe these two and I are on the same team when it comes to any aspect of this, I would be a fool to trust either one. I’ve been many things in my life, but I was a fool only once.

Julia shares a look with Alicia, then says to me. “Our choices are limited. We can kill him or we can go to the FBI.”

Killing him works for me. Except I already did.

I think I’ll keep that to myself for now.

37

“You said you can prove he’s the Judge.” Julia eyes me speculatively. “How? He was only twenty-five back then, and in the five years prior to that, the Judge murdered twelve victims. So you’re saying he became a serial killer at twenty?”

After all that’s happened, Julia still isn’t convinced. I get it. She was obsessed with the guy. She doesn’t want to let go of that lifelong fantasy. Dreaming about him probably helped her get through all the nights in that cage. The thought makes me want to gag.

Perhaps all those years in captivity caused her to go backward in her emotional development. Nah, I’m not giving her that kind of credit. Not when I know what I know.

“Actually,” I counter, “he started before that.”

“How can you possibly know any such thing?” Julia is pacing again, no doubt aggravating her bad leg since her limp is noticeably worse.

No sympathy. I have lingering side effects from a TBI that damaged my brain and left me in a coma. I win.

“That day,” I begin, “after we did what we did, he smoked a cigarette and went to the kitchen to make coffee. I thought about going to sleep since I’d had zero, but I wanted to find any dirt I could on him. That was the whole point of me going with him that morning. So I did some poking around. His wallet was on the bedside table. I listened to ensure he wasn’t coming back while I had a look. His driver’s license was from Maine. I assumed the name on the license, Casey Denton, was his real name.”

“Maybe it was a fake license. He may have had other ones. Did you search his room?” Julia stops her pacing long enough to wait for my answer.

“Course I did. I found a bag, like a backpack. He had two passports—Casey Denton and Casey Duval. There was a Casey Duval license, too—from Connecticut.”

“Then you don’t know which was his real name.” Alicia scrutinizes me. “How did you make a determination?”

“I didn’t then. I put everything back like I found it when I heard your voice,” I say to Julia. “You know the rest.”

The old ache I used to feel nudges me now even after two damned decades. I knew how hurt Julia would be, but I really had good intentions when I went with Casey that day. At least as good as a seventeen-year-old foster kid who’d been abused by nearly everyone she had ever known could.

“When did you determine which was his real name?” Julia prompts me as she settles on the sofa once more.

“It was much later. After my escape. I pulled myself together, settled the score with you, and moved on. After I left you with the Monster, I was determined not to look back. But then Casey contacted me, and I had no choice. Then I had Olivia, and I started to think about those men—the keepers—and the women they would hurt and maybe kill in the future. I knew I had to do something. Since taking the steps I did were likely going to garner Casey’s attention again, I felt it was best if I knew all I could about him. Leverage is an important tool.”

Honestly, I had hoped he was dead. But I wasn’t so lucky. Not then, anyway.

“More than ten years after he took me to that bastard,” I say, tension throttling through me, “the private investigator I hired found all kinds of information on him just like that.” I snap my fingers.

Alicia casts an accusing glare in my direction. “You said you never went to a private investigator.”

“I lied.” So sue me.

She shakes her head. “Nothing about you is on the up and up.”

Not much anyway. But she doesn’t have any room to talk.

“The PI found Casey’s hometown,” I continue. “He was born in Beaver Cove, Maine. A small rural community north of Greenville, almost in Canada. His family lived there in a run-down place basically in the middle of nowhere. The PI spoke to his mother. She was still alive at the time.”