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help.
    •  •  •
    Castillo told me he wanted to help these six kids. And my dad, too.
    He didn’t know yet if they’d all scattered in different directions or were still together somewhere.
    And he didn’t know if my dad was a hostage of some kind or—he suspected—more “involved.”
    But he said he didn’t care about any of that right now because he wanted to do more than capture these guys. He said they were in a real bad place and needed real help. He said they might be murderers and my dad might be helping them somehow but that he was only interested in making sure things didn’t get worse.
    And I believed him. Even if he was lying, it didn’t matter.
    I had to believe in something .
    Maybe I should have just said no. I didn’t.
    I said yes.
    He asked if I needed anything.
    They already took everything, I said.
    He nodded.
    I’m Castillo, he said and held out his hand.
    Hi. I shook his hand. I’m Jeffrey Dahmer.
    •  •  •
    It was a shitty thing to say. But I wanted this guy to know that I knew exactly what I was. What these other guys were too. He didn’t have to pretend anymore.
    Maybe I also wanted Castillo to feel as sucky and revolted as I did.
    I think it worked.
    •  •  •
    Science types always write things down. Always. They collect data, make notes. Repeat.
    Think about biology class again. No one there EVER asks you what you think or feel. (One of the great failings of all Science, I think.) It’s all about Observe and Record. Almost as if something wasn’t really REAL or TRUE until it was logged officially in black and white.
    If you had a big secret, you’d probably just keep it to yourself. Somewhere in the back of your mind. Safe. Private. But to science geeks like my dad, it wouldn’t yet be REAL that way.
    So even for his darkest and wildest secrets, he took notes.

    These were some of the “notes” Castillo showed me on his smartphone.
    We was driving in his car to God knows where. It was, like, seven in the morning.
    The pictures he was showing me were ones he’d taken of my dad’s journals the night before. Pictures from the secret journalsin the secret room. The ones I hadn’t wanted to look at.
    And the big secret?
    Squiggles and cartoon chickens.
    Ridiculous.
    But it wasn’t just ridiculous. It was something else.
    Because Castillo had spent most of the night doing what I couldn’t/wouldn’t do: reading my dad’s journals and notes. Looking at the files on his hidden laptops. And according to my father’s notes, the six missing students were just the tip of the iceberg. A tip already sharp and dark with blood. And the iceberg lurking scarcely beneath was a hundred miles long.
    According to my father’s journals the clones schooled at the Massey Institute weren’t the only ones. According to my father’s journals there’d been some special testing—tests done by him against DSTI’s will but with their half knowledge. He’d managed to adopt out another twenty clones into the world. Babies made from the DNA of famous serial killers, then given out to specific families.
    Some of the families had no idea what their sons were.
    Some did. Some were even paid to raise their sons in specific ways.
    Bad specific ways.
    •  •  •
    According to my father’s journals, it was time to free all of them.
    To tell these clones who they truly were and release them out into the world.
    Like he was letting loose a wild animal.
    Or a disease.
    Like he’d freed me.
    •  •  •

    Castillo asked me what these were.
    I had no idea.
    McCarty? M. Carty. Didn’t know.
    Al Baum? Didn’t know.
    He was totally convinced there was someone, some kid, named “Al.” Maybe the Albert in the missing six from DSTI/Massey but probably, he suspected, another Albert altogether. One of those other secret kids adopted out by my father. The clone of some old serial killer named Albert Fish, or even—Castillo suspected from my father’s cryptic scribbles—another