Jon Athan - Am I Beautiful?

Through his gritted teeth, Adam asked, “But what about me?”

“You just have to calm down. I know you don’t want to feel… ‘useless’ or anything like that, but we don’t have a lot of options right now. Just try to relax. If not for me, for Riley.”

Adam wiped his face and turned away from his family. He didn’t want them to see him cry. He grabbed a paper towel from the counter and pretended to dab his mouth. He wiped his nose and cheeks instead.

He grunted to clear his throat, then he said, “I’m sorry. I’m going to make some phone calls in my office.”

“You barely touched your breakfast,” Amber said. “Please don’t shutdown on me. Take care of yourself, Adam.”

Adam smiled at her and said, “I will. I’ll, um… I’ll grab a bite at lunch. I promise, I just really need to get my mind straight. Really, it’s nothing.”

Amber saw the pain in Adam’s smile. It was the first time a smile saddened her. She didn’t know how to help him. She was afraid her family—her perfect little life—was falling apart before her very eyes.

Voice trembling, she said, “I’m here if you want to talk.”

Adam approached his family with his head down. He kissed Amber’s cheek, then he kissed Riley’s forehead. Riley looked up at her dad with her big, wet puppy eyes, but Adam couldn’t look at her for more than a second.

He said, “I’m here, too. I’m still here.”

A vacant, steady stare. An open mouth. Beads of cold sweat. A stiff neck.

Adam couldn’t hide his dread. The expression of shell-shock returned. He had locked himself in his office, sat behind his desk, and stared at his cell phone for an hour after breakfast. No one called him and he had no one to call. There were no meetings on his schedule. He knew Dallas was self-quarantining at home with his own wife, and he wasn’t expecting to talk to him unless there was an emergency.

Amber and Riley were in the living room—down the hall, around the corner. He was stuck in the house with them, but he never felt so alone. The walls were closing in on him. They were safe and healthy inside their home, but he couldn’t shake the sense of impending doom looming over him. His gut told him to prepare for the worst.

A quick pop and a ding came out of his iMac’s speakers, pulling Adam’s gaze away from his cell phone. He squinted at the monitor. He had received a message on Facebook. The sender didn’t have a profile picture. The sender’s name read: Mickey Miller . It rang every alarm in Adam’s head. He scooted forward in his seat as he opened the message.

It read: Am I beautiful?

“Mi–Miki?” Adam stuttered under his breath.

He opened the profile. It was devoid of pictures and friends. He went back to the message and read it again—then he re-read it three more times. He was sure it came from Miki. There was no other reason for a random person without a profile picture to ask him such an unusual question. He reached for his phone to call the cops.

“No, no,” he whispered as he pulled his hand back. “What if it isn’t her? What if I’m over-reacting? It could be spam. It’s spam, isn’t it?”

He opened Google and searched about recent spam trends. There had been an increase in cybercrime since the pandemic began. A lockdown couldn’t stop criminals from improvising. He read about scams from people posing as women trying to lure men into chatrooms. Every case featured a person with a fake profile picture and a link to a malicious website, though.

He looked at the message from ‘Mickey Miller’ again.

No profile picture.

No link.

He tapped his foot and bit his fingernails, eyes darting between his cell phone and the iMac. His fingers hovered over the keyboard as he considered responding to the message.

“It’s bait,” he said. He shook his head and closed Facebook. He muttered, “Don’t get paranoid. Don’t lose control.”

He visited a local news website to distract himself. The news about the pandemic always aggravated his anxiety, so he browsed the crime section instead. Although online scams were becoming more common, the Los Angeles Police Department had reported a decrease in regular crime due to the recent lockdown restrictions.

He read about a couple of burglaries, robberies, and murders— the usual . One article made his pupils dilate with fear and revulsion, though.

The headline read: Ten-year-old girl found dead in a Huntington Park public restroom .

The article read like a splatterpunk novel, describing every grisly detail of the murder. He was already upset by the fact that a child had been slaughtered in public, but a passage at the end of the article left his head spinning. It described the smile cut into the child’s cheeks and it announced the police’s investigation into a serial killer in the Los Angeles area.

The victim’s facial injuries reminded him of the article he had read earlier that month about a murder in Skid Row—and that murder reminded him of Miki. The pieces fell into place, creating a crystal-clear image in his mind.

“It’s Miki,” he whispered.

He grabbed a black marker and a stack of index cards from a drawer. He jotted down the date, the location, and a description of the murder victim on one of the index cards, then he pinned it onto a corkboard on the wall to his left. He raced back to his chair and searched for the article about the dead body found in Skid Row and repeated the process for that victim.

He scoured every local news website for articles covering similar crimes. He searched articles from March, then February, and then January.

“Holy shit,” he muttered as he filled out another index card.

He discovered an article about a child’s mutilated body found caught in a bear trap in Griffith Park. Again, the victim’s face had been mutilated. However, the article also featured an interview with a survivor of the attack— Sebastian.

It was reported that Sebastian was with a boy named Brian in Griffith Park when they were approached by a masked woman. Sebastian told the police that the woman had claimed to be a princess as well as the most beautiful girl in the world. He described the attacker as a woman with black hair, dark brown eyes, and scarred cheeks.

Lightheaded, Adam leaned back in his seat and held his hand over his chest. He could feel his heart hammering away at his sternum. He gazed at the monitor, eyes wet with tears as if he were staring at a picture of a long-lost love.

“It–It’s you,” he whispered, voice cracking.

He sat there and sulked for a few minutes before working up the courage to continue his investigation. He searched for another hour, going all the way back to June 2018. To his relief, he didn’t find any other murder victims with disfigured faces.

He reorganized the index cards on his corkboard. Brian’s death in Griffith Park was pinned to the top. Under it, he placed the index card detailing the murder in Skid Row. And at the bottom, he pinned the index card describing the death in the public restroom at Huntington Park. He was positive Miki was responsible for the murders. He couldn’t think of a motive, though. He didn’t know any of the victims, so revenge didn’t seem likely.

Regardless, he blamed himself for the murders. I turned her into a serial killer, he thought. But why doesn’t she just kill me?

Tap, tap, tap .

Adam ignored the knocking on his office door.

“Adam?” Amber said from the hallway. She knocked again, then she asked, “You okay in there?”

In a monotone voice, Adam responded, “Yeah.”