My son told me he was a Serial Killer. I belived him.

People look at me strange when I tell them that I have an eighteen year old son. I'm thirty-three. When James and I go out it isn't uncommon for people to ask if he is my little brother. He could easily pass for being in his twenties, and so could I. The past eighteen years haven't been without their trials, but I like to think I did the best I could given the situation. During my freshman year of high school I knocked up my girlfriend. Her parents were going to put the baby up for adoption but my mom stepped in and helped me get custody.

My son is a straight-A student. He is a point guard for the school basketball team. I scrounged together enough money to get him a halfway decent car. He's popular in all the ways I wasn't. By the time I was his age I had a two-year old son, a GED and a job at the local Pella factory. We live in a two-bedroom apartment duplex a few blocks from his high school. He does his homework without much prompting and spends his downtime with friends or in the living room kicking my ass at Call of Duty.

At one point I thought he might be gay. I wouldn't have cared, but I thought it was weird that a boy his age had never had a girlfriend. I asked him about it and he smiled saying,

“No dad, I'm not gay. I just want to wait until I'm a little older to get out there. Wouldn't want you to be a grandfather in your thirties.”

That was our sex talk. Between the internet and the sex-ed class I had to sign a permission slip for, I figured he knew the basics. A few months ago he told me he going to out late. When I asked why he told me that he had a date. I didn't ask any questions. I slipped him a hundred dollar bill and told him to be home in time for breakfast. He was a good kid. I trusted him.

After that it became a semi-regular thing. He'd let me know on Friday afternoon that he was going to be out late that night. Each Saturday morning he'd be home and sitting on the couch playing on the Xbox before I climbed out of bed. I never met any of his dates, but I figured he was keeping it to himself. Like I said, I trusted my son. He had a good head on his shoulders and I had no reason to suspect that anything was amiss.

I don't normally watch the news. Between my Facebook feed and Twitter I usually knew enough about current events not to care. For whatever reason I found myself sitting in front of the television at five in the afternoon and decided to watch the news. I kinda wish I hadn't. The television switched from a commercial to showing the anchor sitting there with a somber face. She looked at the camera and said,

“Later tonight we'll cover a developing story. Several area women are still missing as police look for clues as to whether or not the disappearances might be related.”

We lived in a sleepy little town. The idea that something like that could be happening so close to home shook me a little. The idea that my son could be out and about with something like that happening in town scared me a little too much. I talked to him about it. He told me not to worry. James was a big kid. He stood just under seven feet tall and had a wide frame. I wasn't worried about someone getting the jump on him, but as a big guy myself, I knew that having a large frame meant very little if someone else had a gun.

James assured me that I had nothing to worry about. Just to be safe I swiped his cell phone while he was asleep. I installed an app that allowed me to see his location at all times. Maybe I was just being paranoid, but I remembered being seventeen and thinking that I was invincible. I didn't give it much thought. After setting the app to hidden mode I put it back on the charger in the kitchen and didn't pay it much mind after that. I figured if I ever got worried while he was out I could pull up an app on my phone and see his location. As long as it wasn't too out of sorts I'd relax and go back to watching Netflix.

I started following the case of the missing women online. It was developing into a bit of a media sensation in our area. Six women had gone missing over the course of ten weeks. They varied in age and appearance. No bodies had been recovered, but police were operating under the assumption that foul play might be involved. When the seventh woman went missing, my heart skipped a beat. I hadn't seen Rochelle in ten years. She came back around when James was about seven. She tried to do the mother thing but didn't have the chops for it. After a few months of broken promises and missed appointments I got filed a motion for the court to do a drug test. After she failed the test I had my lawyer file another motion stripping her of any visitation with our son. I didn't want my son to have to deal with that.

It was Saturday morning and I was very apprehensive about going downstairs. James and I didn't talk about his mother very much. She had spiraled out of control after giving birth to him and used just about any drug she could trade her body for. By the time she had come around to visit him she had aged twenty years in only seven. Her arms were covered in track marks and her teeth were yellowed to the point of decay. To be honest, I was surprised she stayed alive long enough to be abducted. With a heavy heart I approached my son in the living room and said,

“Son, we need to talk about your mother.”

James sighed and paused his game. He looked up at me and said, “What did she do this time?”

I sighed and said, “She went missing last night. Police say there were signs of a struggle at her trailer.”

James stared at the television like he was looking through it and unpaused his game. He continued looking forward as he said, “Yeah, well that really isn't news. Is it?”

James and I didn't talk about his mother because he didn't like talking about her. One of the main reasons I involved a lawyer was because during one of her visits she picked him up and took him over to her apartment. Apparently she had a few customers come by while my son sat on the couch. His first real visit with his mother turned into junkies sitting next to him on the couch as they plowed twenty bucks a pop to nail his mother. Three hours later a guy James called Steven dropped him off at the house. He was there when I got off work. I asked him what happened and all we would say is that his mother didn't want him there anymore. He had sat outside without a jacket for four hours.

Of all the things that could of happened to him, I was relieved more than anything that it had been so minor. I'd heard horror stories about situations like that which ended in much more gruesome outcomes. I immediately put James into therapy after that. Within a few years his affect returned to normal and the visits to the therapist became less frequent. Up until that night he had asked me about his mother about once every couple of months. In the time since I think he might have brought her up once.

The following week he let me know he was going out on another date. My penned up worry manifested that night in pulling up an app on my phone. He drove to a random address on the other side of town and then out to a spot in the middle of nowhere. I installed the week several weeks prior and didn't give it much thought. However I hadn't been aware that it had been tracking his movements. According to the logs he had been to that location in the middle of nowhere at least four times in the previous six weeks. I looked over his stops and his routes and noticed that one of the places he had been was Rochelle's trailer the night she went missing. I was suspicious but unwilling to grasp what every cell in my brain would have been shouting out me if it was any other kid.

I threw my phone onto my bed and pulled a bottle whiskey from my nightstand. I drank myself to sleep and woke groggy the next morning. James was downstairs playing Dark Souls and eating a Pop-Tart. I knocked back a Red Bull and stumbled out to my car. I had decided to go out to that spot in the middle of nowhere and check out where my son had been taking his dates. I really wish I hadn't. I really, really wish I hadn't.

My GPS led me to a gravel road that had fallen into disrepair. After driving down it for about a quarter of a mile with dense forest on either side, it opened up to a clearing with a small pond. I pulled up at the edge of the gravel and got out of my car. I could see remnants of a campfire near the pond. I walked over to it. The ashes were still warm. I sighed with relief. My son had found a quiet field with a pond in the middle of nowhere and was swooning his dates under the stars. I was almost proud of him, and then I noticed the footprints leading toward the pond. It looked like someone had dragged something heavy to the edge of the water.

I walked closer to the edge of the water and stared into the murky water. I turned back towards the fire pit and noticed blood stains on the grass behind me. With some trepidation I waded into the water and about ten feet out my worst fears were confirmed. I stepped on something hard. I reached down to feel what it was and it was a thick logging chain. I pulled on it to reveal a waterlogged body wrapped in a blanket. I pulled away the cloth to reveal a bloated face. It was Rochelle. I quickly wrapped her body back up and pushed it under the water. I ran back to my car and sped home.

I sat in the driveway for fifteen minutes trying to figure out if I was having a panic attack or a heart attack. My heart pounded in my chest so hard that it hurt. Tears streamed down my face as I tried to rationalize what I had found. I tried to convince myself of fifty different conspiracy theories that explained why my son was innocent. Someone knocked on the driver's side window of my car and I about jumped out of my skin. It was James.

I climbed out of the hesitantly and he immediately wrapped his arms around me saying,

“Whatever it is, it's okay dad. Just tell me what happened.”

He was such a good son. For a brief moment I forgot about the pond and his mother's body. I followed him inside and after changing into some dry clothes I joined him in the living room. I sat in my easy chair as he sat across from me on the couch. After a few minutes of silence I stared at the floor and said,

“I found your mother.”

He responded, “Oh.”

I don't know what I expected him to say, but his response hit me hard. It wasn't surprise or even anger. It was that same flat affect he showed on the rare occasions I had caught him doing something he wasn't supposed to do.

I looked right at him and said, “Please tell me you didn't do anything stupid son.”

He looked off to the side and said, “Define stupid.”

I raised my voice a little, “God dammit James, did you kill your mother?”

He laughed and said, “The bitch was dead a long time before I clocked her over the head and dragged her to my car. Any bitch that would try to sell her son for dope has been dead for a long time.”

I couldn't speak. I had always wondered about that night, but James never talked about it.

James continued, “You know really, I lucked out. The bastard that paid for me gave me a ride home and told me never to go back to my mother. I guess it could have been a lot worse, but really that was the day I snapped. I understood how meaningless life really was. Of course I killed her. That bitch deserved to die six times over.”

Tears filled my eyes as my son confessed to more than fifteen murders. I sat there dumbfounded as he gave details and descriptions that no child his age should have been able to produce. When he finished telling me everything I just sat there. What could I say? What should I have said? My son confessed to being a serial killer and the only thought going through my head was trying to figure out how to make sure it didn't ruin his life.

I finally worked up the nerve to say, “We need to get you help son. This isn't healthy-”

James cut me off, “No therapists are going to help me dad. You've been good to me so I'll spare you the bullshit. We both know that I turn eighteen in about a month. I'll be out of your hair. Besides, I have bigger plans.”

I stared at my son and tried to wrap my mind around the beautiful monster he had become. Seventeen years of being his parent and I had never in a million years imagined that he would turn out so broken. I quit my job about a week later. By his eighteenth birthday I had burned through most of my savings drinking and trying to forget what I had learned. Sure enough, the day after his eighteenth birthday he was gone. Any part of me that held hope for him was lost a few weeks later when police discovered the bodies in the pond. By that point he was long gone.

I received a post card a few weeks ago. It was a picture a sandy beach. On the back were the words,

“Hey Dad, just letting you know I'm fine.

I tossed it on the table next to the door and went back to drinking. Part of me wants to go to the police and tell them everything. It probably wouldn't be that hard to track him down. Still, he's my son. I'm willing to do plenty of things, but serving my son up for crimes that would land him on death row sits outside my level of civic duty. The guilt gets a little worse each day. For now all I can do is hope that he really is fine. I have no idea where he is. I don't want to know. All I can do is hope that he's stopped killing. He really was a good boy. He's tall and charismatic. I'm sure he'd make it big if he just