The Killing Kind by M. William Phelps

foster family was, Heather missed her mother, father, sister, and especially “her [step]brother” and her sister’s babies, Sommer said. That pull, for some, is too much. They often jump back into the dysfunction, even knowing how bad it is for them.
    “She missed her [step] brother the most. She was very close to him,” Sommer said. “And she just got tired of that environment [at the foster family’s home] because it just wasn’t what she was used to.”
    Sommer was describing how codependency works. Dysfunctional families breed codependency. If left untreated, experts say, codependency gets worse. General symptoms include low self-esteem, not knowing (and exhibiting poor) boundaries, caretaking, control, obsession, denial, not being able to experience intimacy, not being able to take rejection, abandonment, people-pleasing. This was a script for Heather’s life—only she didn’t know it.
    Sommer slept over at the foster family’s house one night. She and Heather sat on the bed in Heather’s room and talked about boys and crushes. Sommer wanted to know about the boys Heather liked.
    Heather had something else on her mind, however. “I’m running away from here,” she said. “I need to see my [step]brother.” Heather was tired of the structured, disciplined atmosphere of a foster home and missed her family terribly.
    So Sommer and Heather busted out a window and took off with the clothes on their backs. They were fifteen.
    Heather never went back. She fell deeply into her addictions and started to sleep at friends’ houses and other family members’ homes. She was classified as a runaway child, now part of an institutional system she would begin to spend time locked up in.
    “She just went from house to house to house,” Sommer said. “And that was when she started smoking crack.”
    The life destroyer.
    Crack.
    Poison.
    Heather was a fragile girl who had experienced a lifetime’s worth of grown-up activity (and emotional pain) by the time she hit puberty. Now she was messing with one of the most addictive drugs (cheaper than alcohol) the street had to offer.

CHAPTER 24
    B ack on October 17, the day before Heather went missing, Sommer took a call from her best friend. “I just got out [of jail] and I’m at my dad’s house,” Heather explained. She sounded defeated and tired, but was happy to hear Sommer’s voice. It was clear Heather wanted to see her BFF. “I need you to come here now.”
    “I’ll be right over.”
    Heather and Sommer often met at Nick’s house in Gastonia, using the house as a staging area to decide where they were going to party for the night. It was early afternoon on this day. Sommer was with her boyfriend, George Baston (pseudonym). They had no way of getting over to see Heather, so they started walking from George’s house.
    As they trekked down the road toward Nick’s, Danny Hembree came rolling up. Danny was the type of guy that preyed on the young girls around town and lured many of them to have sex with him by providing drugs. He had a fixation with this: paying girls to pleasure him.
    “He’s a sex addict,” said one girl who knew him.
    Violent sexual deviant was more like it.
    Danny Hembree was driving down the road and spotted Sommer and her boyfriend walking. He pulled up beside them.
    “Hey, I’m Danny,” he said, with his arm hanging out the window. There was that pronounced Southern drawl, obvious in every word he spoke. “Where y’all going?”
    Sommer explained.
    “Heather sent me to pick y’all up,” he said. “I want to take you to see her. Get in.”
    Sommer looked at her boyfriend, who deferred to her judgment.
    “Okay,” Sommer said. “That’s fine. Save us the walk, anyway.”
    Weirdo was what Sommer thought upon seeing Danny Hembree that first time. He just had that look in his eye, she later said. Like in his mind, he was always up to something, contemplating, scheming.
    Of course, Danny knew the Cattertons. He was a regular