Chapters (57)
- Books by Gregg Olsen
- Dedication
- Prologue
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- Forty
- Forty-One
- Forty-Two
- Forty-Three
- Forty-Four
- Forty-Five
- Forty-Six
- Forty-Seven
- Forty-Eight
- Forty-Nine
- Fifty
- Hear More from Gregg
- Books by Gregg Olsen
- A Letter from Gregg
- Acknowledgements
What I have to tell you does not define who you are. Not at all. You are my beautiful daughter. I have done everything I can to spare you the reality of your conception. But you are here reading this, and you deserve to know the truth. You also can decide if you want to help me. If you don’t, I will die loving you anyway. If you don’t, please take care of your brother. Take him to my sister Ginger Rhodes’ place in Wallace, Idaho, and leave him there until after you are sure I am safe or dead. Your birth father will never harm him.
I’m reeling. We had no family. We never did. Mom said that her parents and siblings died in a car crash when she was a little girl. Seven, I think. Though now I am beginning to question everything I thought I knew. And as I do, my eyes take in a sentence that no one should have to read.
Your father is Alex Richard Rader. He is a serial killer. I was the victim who got away.
I want to scream, but I don’t. Tears stream down my face and I half-glance at the bank’s camera trained right at me. I feel scared, paranoid and very, very angry. The words feel toxic. Serial killer? Victim? Got away? Each syllable comes at me like a bullet to my temple. I almost wish they were bullets. Abruptly, my skin feels dirty and itchy. My hands are shaking. She could have told me. She should have trusted me. She made our vagabond lives utter hell. Why didn’t she just go to the police? She had always said that her stalker was an ex-boyfriend, a man who had come into her life after my father. She’d been kind to him and he just wouldn’t let up. We were living in military housing in Fort Lewis, south of Tacoma, then. I was barely out of diapers. She said that the police on the base refused to do anything to help her, that her stalker hadn’t broken any laws. And yet she felt so threatened that she thought that being on the run was the only solution for our safety. I want to laugh out loud now about the absurdity of her story, but she’d been so unbelievably convincing. Every time a freak would stalk and kill someone when a restraining order had been put in place, she would point to it as an example of the world we lived in—and the danger of living life out in the open.
“No one can help a victim until it is too late. It’s a chance we’re never going to take,” she’d said on those occasions.