“Right,” McGowan says. “So you keep saying.” Then, “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were all are starting to believe in the bogeywoman.”

Kit sees it then. A dark spark in the woman’s eyes. And she knows the detective is being more serious than she’s letting on.

Kit knows.

Carla McGowan has begun thinking about Daphne.

Carla McGowan has begun thinking of Daphne.

“It’s a copycat,” she tells the chief of police, Barbara Pollen, on the phone in her apartment on Third. “Whoever is doing this is a fan of Samhattan’s Daphne. Do you know who I mean when I say that?” She pauses. Half-expecting a guarded response. But Pollen simply says yes. McGowan notes this. “I’d never heard of her before yesterday. Seems like I’m the only one. Hear me out, please. Principal Taylor gave me a file last night, a file I’m not sure you’ve seen yourself, on the murdered girls Kell Darren and Nicole Welsh. Yes, you know of them, of course. What was that? And you believe that? Randy Scotts pushed them from the parking structure? He confessed to that? Well…I’m not so sure, Chief. Hear me out. Please. I understand, but what have we got to lose? Yes, time. I suppose so. But maybe we gain back what we’ve already lost if we open our minds a little bit here. Okay, so…Darren and Welsh kept journals. Yes, I’m sure you did. But did you read them? I don’t mean to point a finger, I’m literally just trying to catch a killer. So…in this box there are photocopies of these journals and pictures from their bedrooms, all stuff you’ve apparently seen. Thing is, eventually, something interesting occurs in their journals. Both of them. In sync. As if the two girls were writing side by side, which, by way of other documents in the box, I know wasn’t the case. Still, almost to the day, almost to the hour, Darren and Welsh began to dance around the concept of…Daphne. The legend, yes. So, the two girls, their experience with the Daphne story is identical: both admit to having heard the name as kids, but both say, and I quote here: ‘I hadn’t thought of it in years.’ It’s likely they got to talking about the story together and so their journals mirror one another’s, but it’s where they heard the story, shortly before they’re killed, that’s interesting: for Darren it was at a bus stop. For Welsh, outside Hi-Fi Grocery. Neither say who told them the story, but I think it’s likely the same person. And why? Here we have this story, this slice of Samhattan history, that nobody seems to want to talk about, then suddenly these two girls get the whole story, or a version of it anyway, and within days they are both dead. In their journals, independent of one another, they admit to being afraid of Daphne. This might not constitute much if the girls weren’t high schoolers. Seems more like the kind of thing a child would be scared of. Welsh writes about, and I quote, ‘feeling bare hands around the house.’ Yes. There’s a particularly chilling entry about feeling a hand upon hers in the shower, and how she pulled the curtain aside, expecting to see her mom, but nobody else was in the bathroom. Yes, I understand. Young people are hysterical at all times, in their way.