Outside Starbucks, she says, “If it gets weird, just shout,” then she walks in, orders her coffee, and sits down.

A few minutes later, I do the same, making sure she can see me.

We’re twenty minutes early. My coffee will be finished or cold by the time Ross arrives. But this is how to be careful.

Every now and then, Hanna looks at me, then away. No smile, no wink, no sign we know each other. She’s better at this kind of thing than Emily, who would make it blatantly obvious we were together. Hanna just sits reading, or pretending to read. She would make a great spy.

I keep checking the time, and almost exactly when we agreed, Ross arrives, looking as nervous as I feel.

He sees me and holds his hand up, then comes over without ordering. “Hi,” he says.

“Hi.”

“You want another?” He points at my empty cup, and when I shake my head, he walks to the counter.

He seems normal, just a guy meeting a girl in a coffee shop to compare murder stories.

It takes forever for him to get his coffee, and when he comes back, he sits across from me and sighs. “This is weird.”

I smile. “It is. Thanks for coming.”

“Thank you. I wasn’t sure you would even reply to my message.”

He doesn’t know I was banking on him, or at least people like him, getting in touch.

Up close, you can see his hair is already going gray at the sides, and he keeps looking at me, then away. He rolls his wedding ring around his finger, only stopping when he drinks. In the moments when his hands aren’t doing anything, they shake.

“So,” I say. “What do you think of the show?”

Ross smiles and says, “I’ve only watched you. I’m not interested in the others.”

I feel a flicker of hope, because if he feels that way, maybe others do too.

“When I found out you were doing it, I had to watch,” he says. “I had to see what you were like.”

“And?”

“The speech you made…I wasn’t expecting that. It brought everything back. I want to help you.”

“No one can figure it out,” I say. “The police can’t stop him.”

Ross nods. “Tell me about it. You’d think there’d be a breakthrough by now. You’d think he would have slipped up…that someone would know something.”

“I used to think he was a monster,” I say. “Not like a bad man but an actual monster. That would explain why he was never caught.”

In movies, monsters aren’t caught by detectives. They are caught by reluctant heroes. They bite off more than they can chew.

When you’re a kid and the Magpie Man keeps killing, your imagination eventually does the rest.