She paused before clicking search. “There could be nothing at all, right?” she said to the empty kitchen.

The first image that came up was his mugshot, and of course she knew it—it was as familiar to her as the hateful, lax faces of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, as familiar as the snarling goblin face of Fred West. For a moment the bitter taste of coffee lapped at the back of her throat, and she wondered for an agonizing second if she was going to be sick on the kitchen table, but then her stomach croaked and settled. In the photo, Michael Reave was looking straight at the camera, his tousled black hair not quite meeting his collar. There was none of the blankness you often saw in these sorts of photos; Michael Reave looked aggrieved, even faintly rueful, as though the arresting officers had made some sort of foolish mistake that they’d feel bad about soon. He was unshaven, but it suited him, and the little lock of white hair at his temple only made him seem appealingly quirky. As pictures of serial killers went, it was a reasonable one.

A serial killer.

“Fucking hell, Mum. Fucking hell.”

There was a Wikipedia page, which in the little introductory paragraph explained that Michael Reave was a convicted serial killer from the UK, known in the British tabloids as “the country ripper,” “Jack in the Green,” and, more popularly, “the Red Wolf.” He was finally caught in 1992, but not before murdering five women in Lancashire and Manchester, with another possible ten victims elsewhere. The article noted that it was widely thought he was responsible for a great many more missing women, but that Reave had always protested his innocence, and continued to do so. The page was oddly truncated; Heather knew Wikipedia well enough to know that anything involving grisly murders tended to have paragraph after paragraph of lovingly researched detail, but here there was little to go on. She scanned through what there was, her lips pressed into a thin line of revulsion. Michael Reave was known for leaving flowers with his victims, sometimes planting them in wounds—Heather looked away for a moment, trying not to picture that—and sometimes winding blossoms through their hair or placing them in their mouths. The “Red Wolf” nickname was one he had apparently given himself; he had left a note with one body reading simply: “the red wolf hunts.”

Heather clicked back to the search page. Under the image tab there were pictures of some of his victims. They were young women mostly, their old-fashioned haircuts catching them in time like flies in amber, their images forever linked to the man who had killed them.

The house was very quiet. Heather sat, thinking about her mother, sitting in this kitchen, probably at this table, writing letter after letter to a man who had butchered women. Her daughter in the other room watching television, her husband out at work, while she wrote letters to a killer.