Making my way back to the main floor, I considered, for the countless time, what to do. Confirm my suspicion with the other victims? Consult with the task force? Call the cops? Search for additional evidence? Wait for more proof?
Pretend the knowledge away entirely?
It was clear I wouldn’t be able to answer that question until I first and foremost confronted Noah. I needed to talk to him and either have him tell me I was crazy and way off base or attempt to give me an explanation for the taking of so many lives.
Stopping in the kitchen to grab a glass of water, I noticed a glow coming from the backyard. The small window in the shed was streaming light out in the thick dark, as if it were a lighthouse. Both a beacon and a warning.
When a shadow interrupted the light, my heart seized. Noah was here.
My eyes cut to the butcher block.
What could he have been doing out there at this time of night? There was nothing inside but yard tools and storage bins stuffed with holiday décor. It was too late for yard work and too early for Christmas decorations.
My mind was on autopilot when I pulled the large carving knife from its slot, my body running on the same command as I stepped out back, heeding the beacon and ignoring the warning. My hand clutching the knife didn’t tremble and my mind didn’t waver. In a fog of uncertainty, I was one assured wisp.
No sounds came from inside the shed, but the door was cracked open as though expecting someone. I didn’t knock or call his name; I didn’t hesitate. Pulling the door open just enough to allow me entry, I didn’t survey the surroundings before sealing the door behind me.
Perched on a metal stool beside the workbench was my husband, though he didn’t appear anything like the man I’d spent nearly half of my life with. It was Noah, but a variant that existed in some alternate reality.
His usual ensemble of dress slacks, button-down shirt, and oxfords had been exchanged for black, utilitarian clothing. His dark combat boots were a harsh contrast to the chestnut wing tips he lived in most days of the week. His hair wasn’t carefully parted and combed back but disheveled and untamed, the mop of obsidian falling across his forehead and ears.
Even the way he sat in front of me—his posture, the way he held himself, the flash in his eye that hinted at the danger lurking within—nearly everything I’d come to know about my husband appeared to be false given the man in front of me now. The Noah sitting before me was the submerged mass of the iceberg I’d spent seventeen years unacquainted with.
He’d been waiting for me. That was clear from the acknowledgement in his eyes, a sentiment that shifted when he noticed the knife clutched in my hand.
One dark brow crept into his forehead. “’Til death do us part?”
My breath echoed inside me. “Don’t mock me.”
“I know better than to mock a woman clutching a ten-inch blade of steel.” He shifted his position on the stool.
“Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m clutching a knife?” I asked, trying to keep from staring at the objects he had precisely arranged on the workbench, a collection of items whose existence I wanted to pretend away.
His head moved indiscernibly. “I know why.” His gaze moved from the knife to my face. I looked away before his eyes could connect with mine. “When I couldn’t get a hold of you earlier, I called my mom. She told me about your visit, what she told you, and how you left so abruptly after inquiring into the origins of a plant. I take it that wasn’t the first white clematis you noticed growing in the yard of a victim’s family.”
When his hands clasped, I found myself surveying them with new eyes, knowing what those hands were capable of. Lives had been taken at their bidding.
The same hands that had held our daughter as an infant, the ones that had drawn me to him in a moment of passion, the instruments that changed light bulbs around the house—the same tools used to snuff out the lives of thirty-three men.
The knife wobbled in my hand.
The corners of his eyes creased when he examined the quivering knife my fingers were clutched around. “Give me the knife, Grace.”
Tightening my grip around it only made the shaking intensify. “Why? You’ve got plenty of weapons in your arsenal to pick from.”
My eyes dodged to the workbench, surveying the items he’d emptied from a black backpack, no different than the kind students carried to school, though its contents didn’t include textbooks and pencils.
Rope, vials, syringes, duct tape, plastic sheeting, leather gloves, a cloth. It wasn’t exactly the laundry list one would associate with a serial killer, but that’s what made it all the more chilling. Only a person who was confident in their ability to issue death would neglect to carry a gun, knife, or a typical insurance policy where taking lives was concerned.
“I don’t use knives. Too messy.”
My lip quivered. The confession made. The truth exposed.
“What are you going to do?” I backed away a step when he reached for one of the glass vials, connecting it to a syringe with the kind of deftness that only experience could muster.
“That depends on you.” He tested the syringe in the air once it was assembled.
My back collided with the shed door. “And what if I run?”
“I’ll chase you.” His eyes went from the needle to me. “It won’t take me long to catch up.”
I’d witnessed enough of Noah’s running to know I’d be lucky to make it out of the backyard before he caught me.
“If I scream?” I threatened, even as my voice wavered.
One side of Noah’s mouth twitched. “I’ll join you.”
“If I fight?”
A flash of expectancy lit in his eyes. “I’ll welcome it.”
I lifted the knife, holding it between him and me, accepting there was no fight I could muster that would succeed against someone who’d practiced the art of hand-to-hand combat as long as Noah had.
“If I call the police?” I stabbed the knife into the air when Noah rose from the stool.
One hand raised, he reached into his back pocket with his other. Noah pulled out his phone and set it on the end of the bench closest to me. The mask of a stranger he’d been wearing when I stepped inside the shed fell away, revealing the face of the man I’d fallen in love with hiding beneath.
“I’ll hand you the phone,” he answered, indicating at his cell before pointing at the syringe beside him. “Or I’ll give you the power to end my life the way I’ve terminated so many.”
The knife clattered to the ground. It was too heavy a weight to bear. “Why, Noah?”
He looked at me through the ends of his hair, eyes glowing against the dark strands. “Because somebody has to.”
“Somebody has to what? Murder?”
“Has to sacrifice themselves for a change.” His chest moved as he exhaled silently. “You might not agree with my method, but I know you don’t view these monsters’ deaths as a tragedy.”
My attention wandered back to the items spread across the bench. “There are other ways to punish them . . .”
“Jail? Registering them as sex offenders?” He scoffed, the stool whining as he took a seat once more. “Please, stop lying to yourself—evil breeds off of society’s softness, our bias toward tolerance.” He blinked at me, half pleading, half condemning. “There is a time for tolerance and second chances, but not where child rapists are concerned. There is only one solution to their pandemic.”
My throat constricted. “Murder.”
“I consider it euthanasia. Putting down a sick animal. Easing the suffering of the innocent ones.”
The skin prickled at the base of my neck as the knowledge that my husband was a mass murderer—the villain I’d been searching for—and sat three feet in front of me, confessing his crimes.
“You’ve taken thirty-three human lives, Noah,” I whispered.
“And left unchecked, I will continue to take more.”
“I’m a civil servant tasked with upholding the law.” My v
oice pitched a key higher.
He propped his foot on the bottom railing of the stool. “I know.”
“What do you expect me to do?”
“Whatever you feel is right. I won’t stop you.” He waited for me to say or do something.
But how did one react to a spouse who admitted to such crimes? How did one ever understand or move on from something like this?
“I will show you how to end my life and mask it as a suicide if you feel that’s the best outcome. No one would ever have to know I was this ‘Huntsman’ as they’ve labeled me.” A sardonic huff resonated deep in his chest. “I’ll tell you how to do it so no one would suspect otherwise. Not even our smarter-than-the-average-bear medical examiner would rule it anything other than suicide. That way you and Andee wouldn’t have to live with the Huntsman’s shadow the rest of your lives.”
My eyes shut as I leaned into the door behind me. “And our husband and father killing himself would be so much better?”
“Considering the alternative, yes,” he replied.
Teeth working at my lip, I opened my eyes and finally made myself look into his. Not only to look, but to see. “I could never kill you.”
His head cocked. “You’d be surprised what you’re capable of given the right motivations. Trust me.”
“All this time. I feel like such a fool for not seeing it, not even suspecting . . .”
“Killing isn’t my only skill,” he said, hands clasped. “Deception. Illusion. Diversion. The reason I’ve gotten away with this for so long is because I possess particular skills most members of society tend to shy away from.” Noah pushed his sleeves up to his elbows. Thick ribbons of muscle and sinew pressed beneath the skin of his forearms, veins winding like trails to hidden destinations into his hands. Now that I knew, the trained killer before me was so evident . . . so goddamned obvious to perceive.
This skin between his eyes creased as he continued. “I wanted to believe good could overcome evil. I was desperate to witness light overshadowing dark, but that’s not the way things work on this planet. You can fight evil with virtue if you want to lose. To win that war, evil must be met with a different kind of evil.”
The way he spoke, it was almost as if he were addressing a crowd. It was a speech, a call to arms, a manifesto. His eyes burned with conviction, the same kind I’d remembered feeling during my first years as a prosecutor. That fire had long burnt out for me.
I swallowed. “What different kind of evil?”
Reaching below the bench, Noah pulled a thick binder out of an old storage bin. It rattled the items on the bench when he set it down. Opening to the first page, he angled it my direction.
“The kind guided by righteousness. The kind sustained by justice.” His palm hit the stack of papers where a photo of Robert Creeden, along with snapshots of his victims below, stared at me. “A variety immune to corruption, uncompromising in its mission.”
An elementary school photo of Natalie was interspersed among the handful of other girls, their names and ages handwritten below each picture. One monster had destroyed the lives of those five girls, and who knows how many more.
And perhaps what was a different kind of monster had said enough was enough, and terminated Creeden’s life.
I couldn’t stop staring at Natalie’s school photo. Her demeanor, her appearance. She looked so different from the troubled young woman I’d met years later. Her smile was easy, her eyes glowing with possibility. I’d never known that girl.
“Does anyone else know?” I asked, flipping to the next page, where Volkner and his known victims were listed.
“You would have been the first I told, but giving you that kind of knowledge would have served no purpose but to torment and endanger you.”
My eyes shot accusations at him. “You’re a court-appointed psychiatrist whose goal is helping this type of people. Helping, not executing.”
My harsh words seemed to bounce off of him. All he did was flip to the next page in his book of death. “I help the ones who haven’t perverted themselves beyond the point of saving. The others, I aid in a different way. “
I leaned into the bench, feeling numb from the waist down, stiff from the waist up. “You went into your profession to get close to them, didn’t you? You didn’t give a shit about therapy?”
One of his shoulders lifted beneath the black thermal shirt. “At first, I believed that lie. Counseling, therapy, pills—with the right combination, it was enough to cure the demons these types of criminals carried within them.” A gravelly rattle rumbled in his chest. “I realized a few weeks into my practicum that was a myth.”
I bit my tongue when the next question rose inside. Then I accepted this was no time to hold back or temper questions—not when I’d learned my husband was the serial killer that had torn a rift between the entire nation. “And when Natalie killed herself . . .”
For the first time since stepping into the shed, something I said pierced him.
“Robert Creeden was my first,” he said, voice strained, fists locked. “Someone should have taken him out of commission long before he got to my sister, but society cowering beneath our precious, infallible laws allowed him to continue his ruinous reign, punctuated by one feeble reprimand at a time.” Noah leaned forward on his stool, staring at me. “I saw the flaws, I leaned in until I got a really good glimpse, and if getting my hands dirty saved one victim like Natalie, it would be worth it.”
A couple more pages into his book revealed John Newton, murder number five. Beneath his booking photo were the names and pictures of eight boys, none of them older than ten.
I sighed when I felt like crying. “You’ve saved hundreds.”
He was silent for a minute, lost in his thoughts while I lost myself in his binder. Most of the photos I’d seen during my own investigation, but there was something different about viewing the information with the eyes of a human being, instead of those of an attorney intent on bringing a killer to justice.
With the task force, my focus was on the murdered pedophiles, concerned with finding justice for their untimely deaths. Tonight, my attention was allotted to the victims. The children. The justice they’d been cheated of, the innocence they’d been stripped of. Who represented them and their abbreviated childhoods?
The answer was sitting in front of me.
“I didn’t save her.” His words were barely audible, evaporating into the still air.
“God, Noah.” I choked on his name, raw grief grating at me. “Some things become too damaged to save.”
“None of this would have happened if I’d protected her like I should have.”
“You were a boy,” I argued.
“If I couldn’t keep her safe, how could I hope to keep you safe? Andee?” The skin between his eyes creased when he stared into his open hands. “This is the culmination of those doubts. The Huntsman was spurred from guilt, manifested with fear, and sustained by duty.”
My head throbbed from the churn of confusion twisting within. My views of morality, my concepts of right and wrong, what it meant to be human—I was smack in the middle of an existential crisis at the very moment I needed unwavering certainty.
My fingers brushed across the coarse loops of rope, trying to picture Noah twisting it around another being’s neck. “Are you a psychopath?”
“No.” He scooted back on his stool when I moved down his bench, inspecting his murder tool kit. “I don’t have a compulsion to kill. I have a responsibility.”
My hand curled around the spool of duct tape, his words battering the fortress of my principles—the beliefs that had been tattered and attacked by the prevailing winds of change for weeks.
“I’m the gleaner of the slack. The necessary evil. The monster no one wants to acknowledge, but everyone sleeps better at night knowing is out there.” His eyes roamed the small space sealing us off from the rest of the world. “I’m a pariah, spreading the fire that burns within me to the demons that walk this earth.”
&
nbsp; My hands skipped over the syringe, fingertips skimming down the soft leather of his black gloves. “You’re a hero to some.”
“And a villain to others.”
Picking up a small tool I assumed was for picking locks, I turned it over in my hand. The terror I’d felt stepping into the shed had given way to curiosity, encapsulated with disbelief. “How do you choose them? Your victims?”
The corners of his eyes creased with obvious surprise from the turn my question had taken. “They’re men I know, beyond a shadow of doubt, are guilty of harming children, men whom the legal system has recently let walk, usually due to some trifling technicality, and who have a great likelihood of reoffending.” He rattled off his answer as though it were memorized. His personal Lord’s Prayer. “That’s my golden rule, though I have dozens of others I follow that were created to safeguard the mission.”
“Like?” I pressed.
His shoulders pressed through his shirt. “Choosing targets that are geographically sporadic. I knew better than to create a cluster here in the northwest despite the abundance of targets out my back door. I didn’t want to make locating me easy if the public ever discovered the truth.”
Setting down the metal tool, I’d come to the end of his kit’s death-dealing contents. Or maybe I was only at the beginning, I realized when I turned to face him. “I can confirm you couldn’t have made it any more difficult to find you.”
He leaned back when I inched closer, as though one of us were noxious. “You found me.”
Lowering my face so it was in front of him, I studied his eyes, the very ones who’d borne witness to the taking of thirty-three lives. There was no evil hiding within them, no shadows of depravity. They were the same eyes—marked by sadness, ever-brooding in nature—I’d looked into when I’d vowed to share the highs and lows of life with him.
“I found you because we’ve shared the same last name for seventeen years,” I replied, leaning away once I was satisfied the devil himself had not taken up residence in my husband’s body.
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