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Chapter 6

Before long, I was back on the dating apps and talking to a new guy who was promising in his mediocrity. He wasn't especially attractive, but he was gainfully employed, and sometimes that was enough. I was waiting for the new guy—who I had listed in my contacts as "Dog Boy" because he had an image of his dog as his dating app profile picture—to tell me what he liked to read and I kept picking up my phone, sighing loudly, and setting it down again.

"Don't you have work to do?" Carole asked.

"I am doing work," I replied, and opened my document for the first time that day.

I quickly flipped over to Twitter, where I posted "The eight-hour workday should be ABOLISHED" before returning to the job in front of me. I was just getting into the groove of things when Carole interrupted me, a distraction I resented, though I was constantly interrupting myself.

"Hey," Carole said.

"What? I'm working," I replied, gesturing to the computer in front of me.

"No, it's not that. They found another body in that ravine you're always talking about."

"Oh my god," I said.

I was sad, of course I was. Did that even need to be said? Every new body was another woman lost. Three bodies, however, was a magic number because three transformed the murders from random acts of aggression into those of a potential serial killer. Discovering an active serial killer was like discovering a monster in the closet—something that generated mass fear and paranoia despite the rarity of their existence.

Like Anna Leigh, there was something familiar about the face on the screen. This time, it wasn't because of some ethereal connection that I deemed destined by the universe and the stars, but because I actually recognized her.

"I know her," I said.

"You know her?" Carole asked.

"I mean, I don't know her," I clarified. "But I've seen videos of her online."

Jill was a personal trainer. She had once weighed 350 pounds and, through a strict regimen of diet and exercise, she had whittled her way down to 120 pounds. Jill was semi-famous on the internet for her weight loss. She posted videos that included pictures of what she looked like before and after, with the implicit promise that such a transformation could occur for the viewer too.

"I tried every diet there was," she said. "Then one day I'd had enough and knew things had to change." She said this like there was some secret to her success, a switch that flipped in her brain that she could turn on for the viewer too if only they watched enough of her content.

Before she got skinny, Jill worked as a dental technician. She posted pictures of herself wearing scrubs and smiling in the dentist's office. Her face didn't show her as a person who was suffering, but we were supposed to intuit those feelings from her size.

"I have a smile on my face, but I'm suffering on the inside," she wrote.

After she lost the weight, Jill became a personal trainer at her local gym. Her clients posted photos of their workout stats, thanking her for pushing them until their muscles burned.

It was Jill's followers who first raised the alarm about her absence. They were owed a new workout video, one that promised to help them sculpt the perfect abs, and she was late in posting.

"When is the new video dropping?" her fans demanded.

Within a couple of days, this reached a fever pitch and they started calling her names, "fat slut" and "dumb bitch," hoping they could threaten her into posting.

None of those threats worked because Jill was already dead. When her body was found, the comments went from angry to apologetic.

"I know you'll never see this, but I'm sorry and I miss you."

"You were such an inspiration. You helped me get into shape after my son was born."

"I hope you got to eat pizza occasionally while you were still alive."

"She was so beautiful," Carole remarked to me. "Such a shame."

Carole, in the nature of certain older women, made endless comments about other people's bodies and critiqued her own food consumption to the point that it was difficult to eat around her.

"I'm so bad!" she said whenever cake was brought in for a birthday.

"I don't need this," she said when our boss arrived with surprise donuts.

"I can't believe you can eat that and be as thin as you are," she remarked to a long-since-departed intern.

"Hannah, it looks like you ate well over the holidays," she told me when we returned to the office after Christmas one year.

I wanted to be body positive, to love myself in the skin that I was in, but loving yourself wasn't like flipping a switch. I grew up watching MTV, ogling girls in low-rise jeans that could never cover my own hips. When I slept with a man and he stopped contacting me, I always had to wonder, If I were thinner, prettier, better, would he love me? Jill had obtained the fantasy, the one I still harbored despite my posts claiming that "any body is a beach body." As it turned out, the fantasy wasn't enough to save her from unhappiness or death.

After her body was found, one of Jill's fans leaked copies of her journal online. It was unclear how she had gotten ahold of it and forum members argued that the journal was private, that it should be read only in the name of investigation and not for the purpose of satisfying our curiosity. In the journal, Jill chronicled how much she weighed, what she ate each day, and what she was feeling. The less Jill ate, the more feelings she had, which was a logical correlation to me. Hunger inspired all sorts of emotions inside of a person, and those emotions almost never included self-love. She wrote things like "I meant to only eat a small handful of almonds, but I kept going back for more. I feel like an endless pit that will never be full. I am hungry for so much." It was painful to read such confessions after her death, especially considering the outpouring of love delivered by her fans on all her social media pages.

Energy bubbled on the forum. Certainly, we mourned Jill's death as we mourned the deaths of all murdered women, but her murder provided us with more clues. Two bodies found in one place could be a coincidence; three was a pattern.

A forum user managed to obtain a list of Jill's personal training clients, which we systematically combed through, looking for clues as to the identity of the killer. We also looked through her social media pages for comments that were particularly threatening, a task that proved to be difficult because any woman with a forward-facing presence was met with hostility.

I agreed to take on part of Jill's client list. I even got Carole to help with a few, though she ended up accidentally posting the names on her Facebook instead of searching for them and I had to help her delete the posts.

The name William Thompson was on my list. Later, I would look back and blame myself for not figuring it out sooner. In my defense, there was nothing about William that screamed "serial killer." His online presence was limited. He had an Instagram account where he mainly posted pictures of scenic places that he'd visited. There were a couple of shirtless post-run shots and I admired his attractive physique. He didn't have a Facebook page or a Twitter account that I could find. There was a link to the law office where he worked, and though the name niggled at the back of my brain, I didn't put together that it was the same law office where Anna Leigh had been an intern. The truth was that I couldn't imagine a man like that wanting to murder anyone. His life looked good, peaceful, and if movies had taught me anything, it was that serial killers always had some underlying trauma. What kind of trauma could this rich, attractive white man have experienced?

It was disappointing in retrospect that I hadn't looked at him and gotten an eerie feeling. I always thought of myself as a person who was capable of sensing things about other people. I bragged to friends that I always knew when couples broke up just from the vibes I got from their online posts. I'd predicted pregnancies and eating disorders, and yet, I was unable to see what was right in front of me.

"No luck on my end," I posted on the forum.

"This is kind of fun," Carole said after a day of investigation.

I smiled at her. Being on the forum was like being in a secret club, and I had just initiated a new member.

My mood dampened a little when I got a text from Meghan calling for a rain check on our happy hour drink plans. She didn't say why, but I knew it was because of her boyfriend. It was always because of her boyfriend. For so long, the two of us had pined over men together and she had gone and gotten herself a man without me. Sometimes the deepest betrayals were things that women did to one another.

My mood further dampened when I posted a new graphic to social media, one featuring all three of the murdered women. It was almost like an art installation, watching the faces pile up on the graphic. On a whim, I checked Max's Instagram. I didn't think about him as much as I once had, only when I was sad, lonely, bored, or eating cheese. I got an error message saying that the page wasn't available. I frowned and switched over to the account that I ran for the nonprofit and discovered that his page was still active and the most recent photo showed his hand intertwined with Reese's and the caption "Love." Oh, I realized. He'd blocked me.

I sent a cry out into the universe for Dog Boy to message me back. I would never have to think about Max again if I found someone new or someone better. The universe, or more accurately Dog Boy, failed to heed my cries.

Abandoned by my best friend, my former lover, and my potential future lover, I was left alone with no one but the murdered women to keep me company.

I went home and watched five hours of Jill's workout videos. I moved along with her until I got tired and then I boiled water for pasta and heated up a jar of spaghetti sauce on the stove. Jill bounced up and down, her tiny legs straining against a black exercise band.

"You don't need much equipment to get in shape," she said. "I started out not knowing anything. It's more about moving your body in a way that works for you."

I didn't yet know how she died, how the killer wrapped a rope around her neck until she was no longer breathing. She'd strained against him, but no amount of exercise was enough to overpower a man like that.

"Don't worry if you can't do everything," Jill continued. "You'll get it someday."

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