MY name is Andrew Thomas and I live in a world that believes I am a monster.

Once upon a time I was a suspense novelist.  I had money.  I lived in a beautiful house on a lake in North Carolina.  I had friends.  Lovers.  I knew what respect and a mite of celebrity felt like.

Then someone came along and destroyed all of it.

His name was Orson Thomas and he was my fraternal twin.

Under threat of blackmail he took me to a remote cabin in the high desert of Wyoming.

He was a psychopath.

He showed me a side of myself I will spend the rest of my life annulling.

But the horror of what happened in that desert is another story.

In the end I escaped.

My brother was killed.  His accomplice—a soulless individual named Luther Kite—I shot and left for dead, tied to a chair on the front porch of Orson’s cabin in the vast and snowswept desert.

That was November 1996 and I faced returning to a world that feared and hated me.

Bodies had been unearthed at my home on Lake Norman.

I was suspected in my mother’s death.

I was suspected in Walter Lancing’s disappearance.

I was the writer turned serial killer.

Orson and Luther had framed me in every way imaginable.

I couldn’t go home.

I was wanted.

And though I’d done questionable things in the name of self-preservation, I was by no means a murderer.

So I ran.

The village of Haines Junction, Yukon saved my life.

I’d been running two years when I found it—through desert villages in northern Mexico, the Baja Peninsula, the towns and cities of America.

I worked a summer in a lumber yard in Macon, Georgia.

I was a busboy for one week in Baltimore.

A ranch hand for a west Texas winter.

I slept in tents.

Homeless shelters.

Bunkhouses.

Fields beneath stars on cool clear nights.

I grew my hair out.

I didn’t shave.

I didn’t bathe.

I left places.

Arrived at new places.

I stopped reading.

Stopped writing.

I fulfilled my alcoholic tendencies.

I traveled by bus.

Hitchhiked.

Jumped a train once through South Dakota.

I never talked to anyone.

Because my name had become synonymous with murder and matricide I lived in constant fear, suspected everyone.

At a construction site in London, Kentucky, the foreman asked if I liked to read thrillers.  Maybe he was just being friendly.  I wasn’t there the next day to find out.

My face appeared on FBI posters.

I was the subject of television specials.

Books were written about me.

My novels sold like crazy.

People wanted to know how a serial murderer writes.

They said my stories were windows into an evil soul.

I became notorious.

A darkly comic figure of pop culture.

My name instilled fear.

My name was a punch line.

My name meant murder.