Call Me Killer by Linda Barlow Read Free Book Online

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    He hadn't acted like a guilty man who was concerned that I might unearth damning evidence against him. That was good, right?
    I hadn’t sensed violence in Griff. But because of my lack of trust in my own ability to judge, I couldn’t be sure. If he was a psychopath who could lie without a flicker, he could probably fool me, no matter how many emotional antennae I put out.
    Whatever. The more I searched the internet looking for information about the case, the more disgusted I felt. On his behalf, I mean. Griff had been railroaded by every newspaper in the country. There were stories from as far away as Indonesia and Japan about how he’d killed his girlfriend and hidden her body.
    The true crime websites had long threads devoted to speculation on how he disposed of her. They rarely considered other suspects or other explanations of why a wealthy college senior with everything going for her might want to disappear.
    I briefly wondered whether anyone was looking for me. I’d just disappeared, telling no one at the college where I was going or when I’d be back. I doubted anyone would even notice, though. Well, besides my Mom, who still expected me to call her daily.
    Not that I don’t have friends and people who care about me. It’s just that I’ve trained them over the years to accept that I need my space. When the world starts closing in on me—my mother’s world especially with all the bullshit that goes along with her lifestyle—I get antsy. Sometimes I just have to disappear for a while before I can face all that shit again.
    I’d tried to escape it many times, but in a way I guess I was like Griff—there are some things you can’t run from, you can’t hide. You just have to hope that if you keep a low profile, someday they’ll get bored and leave you alone.
    ‘Course I was lucky compared to him. I wasn’t suspected of a crime. Leastways, not as far as I knew. I wouldn’t put anything past my mother once she heard I wasn’t where I was supposed to be. She wasn’t above telling the cops some bullshit lie just to get them more serious about finding me.
    Stop it, girl. You’re whining again. What a tough life you have, right? Snap out of it!
    I set aside the slimy tabloids and true crime boards. I wanted to get back into the real stuff—police files and such. For that, I’d better get back to the now-secure computer I’d created at Griff’s.
    I hate injustice, I really do. I particularly hate it when injustice goes viral. It can seem like the whole fucking world has turned against you. It was hard to hold your head high when the tide of some humongous digital lynch mob was beating down your door.
    It had been almost a year since Hadley Allison had disappeared.
    I knew what that meant, even if Griff didn’t.
    The press would revive the story. They love anniversaries. Anything to sell more papers and get more website clicks. There hadn’t been another good crime mystery in the news for a few weeks as far as I could remember. All the more reason for them to dig this one up again, do web and TV specials, send reporters around to try to interview Griff.
    If he didn’t kill her, someone else had. Somewhere there was a killer running around free.
    Well, maybe not. Maybe she’d just taken off. But that was hard to do. I didn’t think even I could successfully vanish for a whole year and not be found. And believe me, I’d thought about how to do that shit a time or two.
    Take off and be totally anonymous, living off the grid. Peace and quiet. Time to work, time to think. No crazy family riding my ass. No teachers or mentors demanding that I use my talents for something more serious than hacking or gaming or solving arcane problems that were nothing more than “intellectual masturbation,” as one of my professors had put it.
    No evidence didn’t mean no crime. But somehow my heart had already absolved Griff. I couldn’t account for that, so I didn't even try. I’d only known him for a few