“You look just like her,” he says.

“Fuck you.”

“No, Jessica. Fuck you. You thought you could catch me. But I’m always one step ahead. Did you really think that dressing up like your mother or standing in that alley was going to be enough? Did you really think I would come? I kill when I want to. You don’t choose. I do.”

His smile makes my skin crawl, but I need to focus on the phone he doesn’t know I have, the hands he has freed, the space into which I will run if I have the tiniest chance.

“I liked your T-shirt,” he says. “Did you like mine?”

I imagine the picture of his last victim with her fate carved below her number.

“You’re sick,” I say again.

He smiles. “You made me more creative.”

“Why did you kill my mother?”

For a moment, I don’t think he’s going to answer, but then he sighs and says, “I’ve been watching your show, Jessica. You know that. How could I not? You’re a strong girl. I like to think I’m the reason.”

I take a deep breath to stop myself from spitting in his face, then he stands and walks over to Mom’s gravestone and touches the words.

“I killed her because I had to.”

I stare at his face, trying to match it with the hidden image Mom took the day she died.

Is he the man in the photographs? Was his blurry image sitting unseen in a forgotten camera all this time?

“She changed everything,” he says.

I could run now, but I need to know. I need to hear what only he can tell me.

“You were there all along,” I say. “You weren’t a monster. You were our fucking neighbor.”

The Magpie Man smiles and says, “I was both.”

When I was seven, when my whole world fell apart and my dad chose to live in the wreckage, I didn’t pay much attention to the man who replaced Bernie’s dad.

Even before that, he was just a shape, just a noise next door, another stranger in a world full of them.

“Why?”

“She saw,” he says. “I had no choice.”

I glance at Jamie, his tears soaking the rag in his mouth.

“She was taking photos, snooping on me. She hated me living next door, in his house, moving in with her friend. But she picked the wrong day to spy.”

I think of the four blurry images, the mixture of colors that has now seeped into my dreams.

“What did she see?”

The look on his face chills me. “She saw what I was burning.”

I don’t think she did. I think she was trying to, but whatever it was, she couldn’t get it clear enough. She tried, she failed, and he killed her anyway.