Anna’s cursor lingers above the upload button. One click, and her hard work will be out there for all the world to see. It used to exhilarate her. Filming and editing gave her a brief respite from the worries of her everyday life. But now, every time she tries to upload her latest video, she freezes up. She can’t overcome the paralyzing fear that something in it might give her address away, even though she was so careful to edit out any identifying information. But according to him, it’s already too late. Her location has been compromised. Still, she can’t bring herself to hit the button. She drags her mouse away, bringing it instead to the messages tab.

Her inbox hangs on the loading screen, as if warning her to turn back. Ignorance is bliss, after all. But after a few seconds, that chance is gone. Anna can see that, once again, he has sent her several messages. For the past few days, she’s been too anxious to read them. After steeling herself, she opens the conversation and reads all of the messages she’s missed.

WhizKid20: Please respond…

WhizKid20: So you’re just never going to reply?

WhizKid20: You’ll regret ignoring me.

WhizKid20: I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE.

Her hands are shaking as she reads his final message.

WhizKid20: If you don’t reply to me in the next 24 hours, I WILL RUIN YOU.

It had been sent two days ago.

***

After quickly skimming the article, I turned to Wally. His gaze was locked on the screen, no doubt parsing the text for every possible detail. “This is it…” he breathed. “Allie, you were able to access Anna’s email. Did you try her YouTube channel?”

I shook my head—I had been so preoccupied with Austin’s email that the thought hadn’t occurred to me. I pulled up the website and logged into her account using the same credentials as her email account. After successfully logging in, the screen displayed a dashboard with so many options, I didn’t know where to start.

“Thanks,” Wally said, giving me an approving pat on the shoulder before hastily retracting his hand. “Uh… mind if I take over?” I gladly relinquished the seat to him and watched with bated breath as he navigated to Anna’s direct messages and scanned through the many conversations she’d had with her fans. One in particular captured his interest.

A user by the name of ‘WhizKid20’ had reached out to Anna three months ago, introducing himself as a male fan who had been watching her videos since she first started posting. Their conversation started out relatively benign, with Whiz Kid complimenting her vlogs and telling her he couldn’t wait to go to college himself. The two went back and forth over several weeks. Whiz Kid would initiate conversations, mentioning interesting things that had happened to him or giving feedback to Anna’s latest videos, and Anna would give short but sincere replies. But then, things began to take a disturbing turn.

On March 15th, Whiz Kid confessed that, with a little bit of sleuthing, he had figured out where Anna lived, and said that he happened to live very close by. He said it would mean a lot to him if they could meet in person, but Anna curtly declined. Whiz Kid refused to take no for an answer, continuing to pester her for the rest of the month. Anna began ignoring his messages, so he grew more and more aggressive. He sent his final message on March 30th, threatening to ruin Anna’s life if she continued to spurn him. In response, Anna finally blocked him. A few days later, she was murdered.

Wally bolted from the chair and began pacing around the room. I leaned forward, rereading the messages over and over again. The dates coincided perfectly with Anna’s death. And, knowing that another vlogger had gone missing in the area, this threat was even more alarming than Austin’s. Anna might not have been his first victim.

“What the fuck,” Wally muttered. “She received two separate threats in the span of three days and she never mentioned a word of it to me? To anyone?! Why would she hide something like this?”

In her vlogs, Anna seemed so energetic and carefree, but even before receiving those threatening messages, that bubbly exterior must have hid a deeper unhappiness. She hadn’t seen her father in years, her mother was pressuring her into a career path she hated, and she was struggling in school. It seemed even Wally, her closest and most trusted friend, didn’t truly know how troubled she was. Perhaps Anna was an even better actor than I was.

“I mean, she was more stressed out than usual, but I chalked that up to her mom putting more pressure on her. I should’ve tried harder… if only I’d asked her…” Wally’s voice wavered, and tears began welling up in his eyes. He caught me staring and quickly turned away, wiping his eyes.

“You can’t blame yourself, Wally,” I said softly. I knew her death had deeply affected him, but I’d never seen him cry before. It was hard to watch. “There’s no way you could’ve guessed what was going on. And even if you had tried to pry, she probably wouldn’t have told you. It seems like she didn’t want anyone to know.” I walked over to him and put a hand on his back, trying to console him, but he twisted away and turned to face me.

“Look, Allie, I appreciate you trying to comfort me, but you just don’t understand. Friends are supposed to watch out for each other, rely on each other. Not that I’d expect you to know anything about friendship—” Wally cut himself off, no doubt realizing how harsh his last remark was. But he’d already made his feelings clear, reminding me that I was an outsider to humanity.

Wally coughed and cleared his throat. “A-Anyway,” he continued, glancing at me guiltily before averting his gaze. “We don’t have time to dwell on what I should have done. Right now, we need to focus on catching Anna’s killer.” He returned to the laptop, pulling up the news article that had started us on this path.

“Yeah,” I mumbled as I joined him, standing off to the side as much as I could while still being able to view the screen.

We began looking into Melissa Bordeau, the beauty vlogger who went missing. She had more in common with Anna than just making videos. Like Anna, she had wavy brown hair and an upbeat, energetic on-screen personality. She even followed the same patterns of intonation as Anna. While exaggerated positivity wasn’t uncommon among Internet personalities, it was still quite striking how similar their on-camera personas were.

The more we delved into things, the more it seemed the two were connected. Both Melissa and Anna had likely been targeted because of their videos. The killer could easily reach out to them, pretending to be an ardent fan. He would start with friendly conversation and establish a rapport, easing his quarry into a false sense of security before eventually asking to meet in person. And that’s when he would strike.

Anna knew better than to take the bait, but he came after her anyway. After she denied his advances, he must have begun stalking her in person, waiting until the perfect opportunity came along—an evening jog in the forest, with Anna alone and at his mercy. After he strangled her, he ditched her body deep in the woods, no doubt confident that she would become just another missing person. Which meant a message from her would be the last thing he’d expect.

After much deliberation on how to approach things and what exactly to say, Wally and I unblocked WhizKid20 and gave him the response he had been so desperate for.

Uni Anna: So sorry, I didn’t mean to ignore you! A lot happened to me these past few weeks, so I haven't had the chance to check my messages until now.

All we could do now was wait for him to spring our trap. We doubted the killer would take what we’d sent at face value, but surely a message from his dead victim would be too intriguing to resist.