Darkness at the Edge of Town Read online

  Darkness at the Edge of Town is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Alibi Ebook Original

  Copyright © 2017 by Jennifer Dowis

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Alibi, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  ALIBI is a registered trademark and the ALIBI colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN 9780425285862

  Cover design: Marietta Anastassatos

  Cover images: Shutterstock

  randomhousebooks.com

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Jennifer Harlow

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  I am going to throw up.

  The doughnuts I ate in the show’s green room five minutes before churned like a washing machine inside my stomach, slowly making their way up to my throat. I knew it was a bad idea to eat four of them, but what could I do? There were sitting there, calling to me like the Sirens in The Odyssey. I couldn’t resist them any more than Odysseus could. It wasn’t like there was anything else to do in that room. I’d read all the magazines and was left entirely alone with no distractions except a full buffet of my favorite foods: eclairs, doughnuts, and candy bars. My willpower was only so strong.

  I blamed my predicament on Miranda Holiday, my agent. If she hadn’t been so damn good at her job that she actually sent in a request for my favorite foods to be available, I wouldn’t have been willing the doughnuts to stay in my stomach where they belonged. If they were there, of course I was going to eat them. I ate when I was nervous; she knew that. I should have requested a fruit basket when I realized I’d gained almost ten pounds in less than a month. But no matter how many talk shows or interviews I did, I’d get nervous just before going on and pig out. I should have been over the pre-show jitters after five weeks of practically doing nothing but interviews, but no. I’d been on everything from CBNN to The Pierce Anthony Show to Today, but it never got any easier. But this, the show, was the one I’d been dreading/eagerly awaiting since Miranda first told me they’d contacted her. The Shelly Monroe Show.

  Shelly Monroe, the queen of the airwaves, interviewed royalty, presidents, and dictators. She was the grandmother of the modern talk show. She paved the way forty years ago and had been a constant friend in millions of homes for decades, including mine. I’d watched her since I was seven years old with chicken pox. Her guests fascinated me. One day she had on a sex worker and the next a movie star—anyone with a story to tell. It was the hour she did on Ted Bundy that introduced me to the concept of profiling serial killers, which ultimately led me to the FBI. And if I hadn’t been with the FBI, I never would have crossed paths with Jeremy Shepherd, which landed me an entire episode of The Shelly Monroe Show. Talk about full circle.

  My stomach gurgled again, that time loud enough for a PA on the other side of the room to hear. My babysitter, a twenty-something with a hoop through her eyebrow, had pretty much ignored me, but after the rumble she glanced over, that hooped eyebrow cocked. I smiled unevenly.

  “You nervous?” she asked.

  “A little,” I admitted.

  “Shit, after everything you went through, this should be nothing.”

  “One would think,” I said under my breath.

  Chatter from her headset made the girl turn away from me. “Yeah, gotcha,” she said into her microphone. She turned back to me. “It’s almost time. Come on.”

  Oh, fuck, I thought. Here we go.

  I swallowed down the regurgitated doughnuts and sighed. She was right. I’d gone toe-to-toe with some of the vilest people imaginable, but it was a stupid talk show that was finally going to give me a heart attack. The PA led me behind a curtain backstage, which hid me from the audience and vice versa. I wanted to peek out to see them all, especially after they began applauding, but I refrained. It was on the list of no-nos reiterated to me by the assistant producer. The clapping went up a notch—okay, it was bordering on frenzied—a second later. Shelly had strolled onstage, wearing her signature Anne Klein pantsuit. I couldn’t help myself. I peeked out and saw two middle-aged housewives dressed in floral skirts on their feet, hooting and hollering as if they were at a football game. Who didn’t love Shelly?

  After what felt like ten minutes, the applause died down and both front and backstage were as quiet as a church during Mardi Gras.

  Then she began to speak.

  “Thank you, thank you for that wonderful greeting,” Shelly said in her Texas twang. “I hope y’all are as excited as I am to meet today’s guest. She is something special, without a doubt. Most of us have never encountered the darker side of life. Murder, violence, evil are just concepts we watch on television. And thank the good Lord for that, no?”

  There was a collective chuckle through the audience.

  “But our guest today has come face-to-face with pure evil more than once. In fact, she sought pure evil out. As an agent in the FBI’s elite Behavioral Analysis Unit, Dr. Ballard managed to profile and apprehend Sheriff Stephen Meriwether, also known as the The Rosetta Ripper…” She paused for dramatic effect. “A child killer who later escaped and attacked Dr. Ballard and her husband, tragically killing the young doctor. Yet even after this personal tragedy, Dr. Ballard returned to the FBI to help them track the man known as the Woodsman, the monster responsible for the deaths of five women along the Eastern seaboard, who was later identified as bestselling author Dr. Jeremy Shepherd, a former guest of this very show. Once again, Dr. Ballard put her very life on the line to bring Dr. Shepherd to justice. So please help me welcome an incredibly brave woman and true American hero to the show, Dr. Iris Ballard.”

  My cue. I took a deep breath and stepped out from behind the curtain onto the iconic blue-and-white-decorated stage. The audience applause was as loud as it was for Shelly. That was humbling. I waved to my adoring fans as I walked toward Shelly. She was smaller in person than she looked on TV, shorter than me by a few inches, with her frosted blond hair falling into a pageboy cut framing her pointed face. When I reached the famous blue-and-white-colored couch I’d seen almost every week for twenty-five-plus years, I was almost giddy. I didn’t know if it was the wild cheering, the lights, or the fact that Shelly Fucking Monroe was hugging me as if I were an old friend, but I giggled like a little girl.

  Somehow, when she let me go, I shut down my near hysteria. Shelly took her seat in the matching armchair and I sat on the couch, smoothing my red-and-white-plaid skirt out. My agent, Miranda the Cruel, insisted I wear a skirt at every interview. Something to do with playing up my femininity and toning down my image as a killer with two notches on my belt. I ceded to her expertise. Earlier in the day she had just gotten a publisher to agree to pay me over a million dollars for my autobiography. For that kind of money I’d have done interviews as Ronald McDonald if she told me to.

 
; “Thank you for being on the show,” Shelly said, as she always did.

  I gave the customary response: “Thank you for having me.”

  “So, let me just start with asking how you’re doing,” she said as if we were old friends. “It’s only been six weeks since Jeremy Shepherd held you captive in your own home and you were forced to…defend yourself. I can’t imagine something that horrific occurring, let alone having to live through it.”

  “Well, I almost didn’t,” I pointed out. This got a laugh. Who didn’t love gallows humor? “But, I’m okay. I’m fine. It was hell to live through, without question, but I’ve gotten so much support not only from my friends and family but from what feels like the whole of America. I can’t thank everyone enough who sent emails or messages with their support. They warm my heart.”

  Keeping busy almost twenty-four/seven with interviews, meetings, and flying across America helped too. For almost six weeks there hadn’t been a day I’d had more than a moment to myself.

  “As I mentioned before,” Shelly continued, “I met Jeremy Shepherd. He sat on that very couch, and let me tell you, just from my impression of him during our interviews, from our dinners together…I would have let him babysit my grandbabies,” she said, voice going up an octave. “He seemed so…nice. Together. It’s still almost impossible for me to think of him as a rapist and serial murderer.”

  “He had everyone fooled,” I assured her. “Some serial killers can appear nice, charming even. That’s how they get close to their victims. Shepherd was especially skilled at this. A handsome, rich, famous sociopath? It was almost too easy for him to blend in. Not just blend in, but excel at life. But like all serial killers, he wore several masks. The pleasant, intelligent psychiatrist was one, the philanthropist another, but his real face? He hid that from everyone but those five women.”

  “And you.”

  “Yes, and me.”

  Shelly sat back in her chair, and I knew they were coming. The hardballs. I was ready. “In other interviews, you were quite candid about your own personal demons: depression, alcoholism, prescription drug abuse, which all stemmed from a prior attack in which your husband was murdered right before your eyes. I have to ask because some of Dr. Shepherd’s supporters often bring it up: do you still struggle with those?”

  “You never stop struggling with them, Shelly,” I admitted, “but strangely, what happened with Shepherd forced me to finally take control. I haven’t touched a pill harder than aspirin or had a single alcoholic beverage since I began working with the FBI again. Shepherd attacking me—taking on the case, actually—was a wake-up call. You never know how much you want to live until you’re about to die, I guess.”

  “So something positive came from all your experiences?”

  “Actually a lot of good came from it, and not just for me. The families of the victims called me right after the news broke, and thanked me for bringing their daughters justice. They had finally gained some sense of closure. Everything I went through was worth just that.”

  “And I’m sure the money pouring in isn’t a terrible thing either. I heard before coming out you just signed a seven-figure deal for a book and an Oscar-winning actress wants to produce a movie about your experience.”

  My cheeks turned red from the blushing. “I’m not going to lie; those aspects do not suck.” The audience chuckled again.

  Shelly turned to the camera with the red light on. “When we come back, Dr. Ballard will take us through her harrowing encounter with the Woodsman, Jeremy Shepherd. Stay tuned.”

  Cue applause. I reveled in every second of it.

  —

  Sitting by my hotel window overlooking Central Park in my complimentary Egyptian cotton robe, dipping my filet mignon in the best béarnaise sauce on the East Coast, I was happy. Yes, me, Iris Ballard, the eternal pessimist. Didn’t think it was possible myself. Two months before, I was finding new ways to slowly kill myself, popping pills like Mentos and drinking half a bottle of vodka a day. Yet, there I was, sitting in a five-star hotel having just signed a million-dollar book deal, eating a fifty-dollar steak and being well and truly at peace. It was as if I were a different person. Gone was crazy Iris Ballard, the woman locked away in her house shunning the rest of the world. She died in my basement, killed by a madman with a grudge, which was funny because that was actually how she was born two years before. Crazy Iris emerged the moment her husband had his brains splattered mere feet away from her. The old Iris Ballard died right along with her husband, and somebody new, a veritable monster, took over her life. But that woman died as well, so who sat in that hotel room with a smile on her face? A national hero who movie stars gushed over at lunches, who Shelly Freaking Monroe hugged. A vast improvement, no?

  The press descended on Grafton, North Carolina, my adopted town, before I’d even checked out of the hospital. Every major network, newspaper, and blogger swarmed my house, the college I worked at, even my students’ dorms. I could understand why. I was the infamous, disgraced former FBI profiler who’d fought to the death with the Woodsman and won. Add to that, the serial killer was a famous self-help guru who nobody—even the FBI—believed could be a murderer…up until he broke into my home and tried to kill me. It was kind of hard for people not to believe he had homicidal tendencies after that. And I killed the bastard myself. Callous, I know, but he deserved it. Not just for raping, torturing, and strangling five innocent women but because I had no other choice. The bastard shot my dog, knocked me out, chained me up in my basement, and proceeded to torture me as well. If anyone ever had it coming, it was Jeremy Shepherd.

  Not that I could take all the credit. He would have killed me too if not for my best friend and ex-partner, Luke. Special Agent Luke Hudson, who once again rode in and saved my sorry ass, getting shot in the process, a fact I hadn’t heard the end of. When we talked on the phone, which was about every other day, and I said something catty, he just countered with, “Well, you wouldn’t even be alive to have an opinion if I hadn’t come when I did. I got shot for you, so I’m right always and forever. The end.”

  Okay, he never really said that, but I knew he was thinking it.

  I dipped the last of my steak into the sauce and swallowed it down. Melted just like butter on a hot griddle. I had to say, the best part of being a media sensation in demand by every network, publisher, Hollywood producer, and newspaper had to be the income. Along with the movie and book deal, CBNN had unofficially offered me a position as an on-call expert when crime stories cropped up, and I had a formal interview the next morning. If I could work out of their Charlotte, North Carolina, affiliate, I had every intention of taking the job. I had no plans to return to teaching at Grafton College. I had no illusions about my teaching skills. I’d never liked my job and with the money I was raking in, if I was smart about investing, I could live off that for years. My house would get paid off, with a new roof to boot, and I could probably even take a cruise. Growing up dirt poor, I’d learned you couldn’t always get what you needed, let alone what you wanted. Hell, I was lucky to get a new pair of shoes once a year. I was definitely looking forward to not worrying about money every other week. And all I had to do was almost die a horrible, painful death to get there.

  As I pushed the room service cart into the hallway, my new iPhone rang. I groaned and shut the door. Only four people had the new number, and I was sure it was Miranda calling to tell me all the things I’d done wrong that day. I told too many jokes, I shouldn’t have shaken the publisher’s hand so hard; on and on and on she’d go. When I actually accepted the call, I was already tense and ready to fight.

  “Hello, Miranda,” I said.

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” a familiar male’s voice said, “but it’s not Miranda.”

  A wide smile crossed my face at the sound of his voice, as I’m told it always did. To quote Marilyn Monroe, “I got goose-pimply all over” whenever I heard his voice. It wasn’t a sexual thing—or at least that’s what I told myself—it was more exc
itement. It had been two days since our last call, and I had so much to tell him.

  “Oh, it’s you,” I said, feigning annoyance. There was just something about Luke’s voice that brought out the teenager in me. “What do you want? I am far too busy and important now for those who knew me when.”

  His warm chuckle on the other end made my smile grow wider, if possible. “Oh, so sorry to bother you, your highness, but I just wanted to see how Shelly Monroe and the meeting with the publisher went.”

  I fell back into my chair and threw my legs over the armrest. “Shelly went great. She did mention she was upset you declined her request for an interview. I told her the FBI is a harsh mistress who doesn’t like it when active agents splash themselves across the television.”

  “So I assume I came up in the interview. Again,” he said with a tinge of annoyance.

  I’d never known him to be annoyed by anyone but me. I did give him a plethora of reasons, so I never blamed him. “Of course, but I only said good things. You know what a great liar I am.”

  “Well, I’m sure I’ll hear about it many, many times in the next few days. Every time you go on one of those shows, I get a play-by-play of everything you say about me. I’m getting sick of my own face on TV. People stop me on the street and start interrogating me about you, about things that are nobody’s business.”

  “Come on, you must enjoy being the top cop in America a little? You’re the most famous, heroic FBI agent since Eliot Ness. You told me the last time we spoke Reggie was making noises about promoting you.”

  “Well, the fact that reporters are camped out in front of the building and flooding the phones with questions about me can’t be helping my chances. Not to mention the guys are getting resentful. You know what someone emailed everyone? A picture of you and me in wedding clothes, except I’m the one in the dress.”