Excerpted from “I’m Not Sorry and I’d Do it Again” by Irina Sterling
Published by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York | First Edition, November 2020
Copyright © 2020 by Penguin Random House LLC
All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-5658-9234-7
Chapter 47: The Homecoming
Reports of my diagnosed psychopathy are wildly overblown.
I blame the media for that more than anyone. Certainly not any of the clinicians who’ve come to talk to me since my arrest. Professionals, every one of them. It was those sleazebag reporters who loved calling me “the female Dexter.” Lazy-ass comparison. Dexter Morgan killed out of compulsion and his dad (I think) gave him a code so he only turned that compulsion on people who deserved it.
If you’ve spent even one second looking at my “victims,” you’d know that isn’t the case with me. I wasn’t following anyone’s code but my own. I wasn’t looking for approval from daddy. Or Jackson fucking Reed.
The thing about surveillance is patience. Twenty-three years of hunting predators had taught me that. You wait. You watch. You learn their patterns.
I watched Jackson emerge from my mom’s trailer like a man who’d seen a ghost. Which, in a way, he had. I knew what he found. Those finger bones in my old bedroom—my pride and joy—had made him realize he didn’t know me at all.
Even with that realization, I don’t think it ever occurred to him I was there watching him. Fair enough, he had no reason to think I’d come a’calling. He didn’t know he’d been caught in 4k and blasted on TikTok–that I had to sit there and watch him go on a date like nothing had happened between us.
I’ll be real. Seeing him lean across that restaurant table, using the same smile he’d given me on that mixed girl while my world teetered on the edge of exposure? That’s what made me book the flight. The prosecutors called it “pre-meditated murder conspiracy,” but every woman reading this knows what it really was: the moment you realize that a man who’s seen you naked—really naked, not just physically—has already forgotten your name.
I know he’ll never forget it now.
I wasn’t happy when I saw he had people with him–Marcus and that butch camera lesbian of his. I had planned on working my magic back at the hotel, assuming they weren’t all staying in the room. But as luck would have it, I didn’t need to wait that long.
They pulled out of the trailer park at 2:47 PM. I followed at a comfortable distance, three cars back, switching lanes occasionally. Marcus kept checking the mirrors—good instincts, but I’d been doing this since before he’d enlisted.
The truck stop came into view at 3:23 PM. And they pulled in.
Like everything else in Memphis, I knew that place like the back of my hand. I’d bought I don’t know how many taquitos and cans of red bull there. Cleaned blood out of my finger nails in the ladies room, and given head in the men’s room. The men’s bathroom had a service door that led to the storage area—management never locked it properly. And those security cameras had never been plugged in; they were purely decoration.
We can always be grateful that Indians are so damn cheap.
Jackson obviously needed a piss. And Marcus didn’t. He stayed and pumped gas. Nancy was on her phone, probably to the cops. Whatever.
I entered through the side door, my coveralls scrubs making me invisible—just another white trash worker grabbing coffee between shifts. The syringe in my pocket contained enough ketamine to drop him in seconds. Not enough to kill—I wasn’t there to kill him and anyone who says otherwise is a liar.
He was washing his hands when I entered the men’s room. His eyes met mine in the mirror, and God love him he failed to recognize me again. The man has a textbook case of context-dependent recognition. Give LCpl Memphis some plastic surgery and a nice dress, he only sees Irina. Give Irina some coveralls and a do-rag, and all he sees is the janitor.
Fucking clown.
The needle went into his neck before he could fully turn, before he even thought to ask why a girl was in the men’s room. I caught him as he fell, my arm around his waist like it was the most natural thing in the world.
“Shh,” I whispered.
Another thing the media got hung up on was insisting I must have had a male accomplice, which was the most insulting thing I’d ever heard. Terrell was the first. And I don’t mind admitting the whole reason I cut him up in the first place was because I couldn’t carry his heavy ass body. Not all in one piece anyway.
But you do something enough times, you get good good at it, and I’d already positioned a janitor’s cart by the service door—the wide industrial kind with the trash barrel removed. Hotels use them for laundry; I’d learned that during my escort days. Jackson folded into it perfectly, his body crumpling in that specific way unconscious people do. I threw a clean tarp over him, piled some cleaning supplies on top. Just another invisible service worker wheeling supplies out back.
The trick to moving dead weight isn’t strength—it’s leverage and preparation. I’d backed my van right up to the loading dock, the cargo door already open, a furniture dolly waiting inside. The hardest part was the transfer, those twenty seconds of vulnerability. But… practice makes perfect.
Roll the cart to the van’s edge, tip and slide, let gravity do most of the work. Anyone watching would see a woman loading cleaning equipment. They’d never look twice.
He went in easily, his breathing steady but unconscious. I zip-tied his wrists and ankles, more from habit than necessity. The ketamine would keep him under for at least an hour.
I destroyed the phone, scattering the pieces along different mile markers as I drove.
The grain silo sat fifteen miles outside Clarksdale, right along the Mississippi. Another old haunt of mine. Abandoned since the 90s, but structurally sound. I’d already set up the necessities—a generator, water, the steel chair bolted to the concrete floor, the tools I might need.
At the silo, I’d already installed a come-along hoist mounted to an overhead beam—the kind mechanics use to pull engines. This place held memories: I’d dumped two bodies down the grain shaft my senior year of high school. Not Terrell or Mr. Park, obviously. And no, I’m not going to say who. Just know they had it coming. Now, fifteen years later, their bones were somewhere beneath sixty feet of rotted grain, and I was grateful past-Crystal had left the hoist for future-Crystal to find.
Jackson’s unconscious body went onto a moving blanket, which I’d reinforced with cargo straps to create a crude sling. Clip the hoist’s hook to the straps, crank the lever, and he rose off the van floor like a marionette. The steel chair was positioned directly under the hoist point. Lower him down into the seated position, the hoist bearing the weight while I positioned his arms and legs. The zip ties went on while he was still supported, no strain on my back. Every woman who’s had to change a bedbound patient knows these tricks. It’s not about muscle; it’s about mechanical advantage.
See, no male accomplice required.
For those of you YouTube assholes who are feverishly skimming this book so you can make your reaction videos, I want you to know the editors at Penguin didn’t want me going into this level of detail. They were worried it would be a how-to manual for future murderers.
I told them the same thing I told the women in my coaching cohort: If people had the balls to do the things they dreamed of doing, they would have done them already.
Anyway, by the time I finished securing him and stowing the equipment, I was exhausted. Not physically—I was in the best shape of my life—but emotionally. I sat down on the ground in front of Jackson and started crying, resting my head on his knee.
I knew this was it: the end of Irina Sterling. The end of my penthouse apartment, my speaking fees, my verified Twitter account with two million followers. I had worked so hard to build that new identity out of the ashes of the ugly duckling who became a hooker. And now it was all gone. Because of this asshole.
But sitting there, looking at the camera and tripod I’d brought with me, I felt oddly calm. Maybe even relieved.
The old Crystal was crawling out from under Irina’s designer clothes, and she had different ambitions. If I couldn’t be America’s guru anymore, maybe I could be something else. Something more honest. I didn’t have to hide what I’d done anymore–the service I’d done for countless women. Maybe Jackson wouldn’t understand when I told him everything. But the women would.
The camera would document everything—and the women of Memphis, of Jacksonville, North Carolina, of Atlanta, Georgia–they would know what I’d done. The ones who’d watch this footage someday and see not a monster, but a mirror.
I think at this point, even if you’re one of my haters, you can agree that at least that part of my plan worked out.
I positioned my own chair carefully in frame, then sat down to wait. Twenty minutes, maybe thirty before the ketamine wore off. I pulled out my phone and scrolled through Twitter one last time. My last tweet: “Something is coming. I hope you’ll remember everything I taught you.” Already forty-seven replies. Including from Victoria.
I fought to suppress my smile as his fingers twitched first. Then his head rolled. I watched him surface from unconsciousness like a swimmer rising from deep water, that moment of confusion before reality crashed in.
His drooping eyes found mine, then the camera, then the restraints. The recognition was beautiful.
I smiled, stood, and gave him the same greeting I did every morning I saw him at Camp Lejeune. “Ooh Rah, Sir.”