by Mason Cross
“You’ve wanted to do this all evening, right?” she whispered.
I shook my head. “No.”
“No?”
“I’ve wanted to do this since you pulled me over two days ago.”
“Probably just as well you held off,” she said, kissing me again. “This is not an appropriate way to introduce yourself to an officer of the law.”
And then there was no more time or breath for talking.
When it was over, we lay still in the dark, her left arm and her leg still tangled around me, the bedclothes partly on us, mostly spilling onto the floor. I stared at the ceiling and listened to the sounds of the birds on the lake as I got my breath back.
“I could use a cigarette,” she breathed.
“You smoke?”
She shook her head. “Never started. Knew I wouldn’t be able to stop.”
We lay in silence for a while longer. I thought about me and her, how this had been unplanned and inevitable all at the same time. I wondered if we should have started, and if we would be able to stop.
“What’s this?” she asked, running a fingertip over the scar on the side of my stomach.
“A bad memory.”
She nodded understanding, and asked nothing else. “You think it’ll be okay tonight?” she said after a while. Her voice sounded sleepy. “It feels like I’m sleeping on duty.”
“If it helps, I’m sure we can find some way to keep you awake.”
She punched my upper chest lightly and I could see the outline of her lips in the darkness as they curved into a smile.
“If we’re right and Connor’s not the guy,” I continued, “I think whoever it really is has to lie low for now. Otherwise there will be more questions raised about Connor’s guilt, and there are enough of those already. We’ll be ready for him tomorrow.”
“Okay,” she said.
“We should get some sleep,” I said.
“Absolutely,” she agreed.
“What are you doing?”
“Want me to stop?”
“Nah. I’ve always thought sleep is overrated, don’t you think?”
60
Carter Blake
Two hours later, Isabella Green was sleeping deeply, her chest rising and falling where it rested against my arm. I was still staring at the ceiling. The occasional hoots of the owls and tiny splashes on the lake were the only sounds other than our breathing.
I had started to doze off after the second time, the dopamine haze hitting me like a tranquilizer. But then I had thought of something that had snapped me all the way awake, and I hadn’t been able to sleep since. A two-word phrase that confirmed what I’d been thinking.
Courage conquers.
Adeline was alive.
She was alive, and somehow, she was the key to everything. I knew McGregor and Feldman thought that Adeline was important too, but they were wrong about why. They believed that David Connor thinking he had seen his dead sister was important. Maybe it was the trigger, maybe it was a symptom. Either way, the man who had faded into the background of the town was suddenly making lots of noise about something everyone else wanted to forget about. And then people started dying.
The first guy he hired to look into it, for a start. Then Vincent González. Then the hunters, then Haycox, then Roussel. All killed within days, most of them with the same MO of the Devil Mountain Killer. Maybe McGregor and his men thought there was a possibility Connor was the 2003 killer, but they were certain he was behind the current series of killings.
Devil’s advocate. What if they were right? David killed everyone. Or at least the victims in this decade.
The body under the house only reinforced that theory. If David hadn’t killed the person under the house, then he had to be the unluckiest guy in the world, to mount up so much circumstantial evidence.
But did it really reinforce the theory, or did it undermine it? If Connor had snapped and started murdering people, then why was the body beneath his house so old? Even if it didn’t date back as far as 2003, it would suggest he had gone a long time between that murder and the new ones.
So that left two possibilities, in the scenario where he was the sole killer. Possibility one: he had been incredibly careful about choosing and disposing of his victims over the ensuing years, before suddenly casting caution to the wind and leaving them where they could be found, presumably because the illusion of seeing Adeline had sent him off the deep end. Possibility two: he had killed once, years ago, and then been dormant for a decade or more, before the Adeline spark had set him off again.
It was possible. The standard pattern of a serial killer is to keep killing, leaving shorter gaps between victims, taking greater risks, until they are captured or something else happens. Gaps in killings are often explained by a stint in jail, or travel elsewhere. Such a gap in killings matching up to the movements of a suspect is often what helps to identify them. But David Connor hadn’t been to jail, and from what I had been told, hadn’t left Bethany for any long period. He had spent summers working in Atlanta, yes, but there hadn’t been any unsolved series of linked homicides in that area; at least none that I was aware of. But nonetheless, it was possible.
There were examples of killers who had inexplicably stopped for a period of years. The Green River Killer, the Grim Sleeper. Those were just the ones we knew about. The FBI has hundreds of unsolved serial investigations on its books. In a lot of those cases, the suspects died or went to jail or moved away. But it’s likely that some of them just … stopped. Kicked the habit. No one knows why they started, no one knows why they stopped. That’s one of the reasons they were never caught.
So the theory that David Connor was the perpetrator of the current murders, or even that he was the newly returned Devil Mountain Killer wasn’t out of the question. I could understand why McGregor thought he had his man. It was seductive in its neatness.
But if Connor had been the killer in 2003, he would have had to be incredibly smart or incredibly lucky to escape the scrutiny placed on him as a suspect. It wouldn’t be impossible, but it would be unlikely that he would stick around town, behaving himself for fifteen years and only springing back into action now. And that was what it all came back to: why now?
Then there was what Green and I had spoken about. He had been convincing when questioned on the recent murders, rattled when the body was discovered. I knew that meant something, and the fact Green had picked up on it too only reinforced the instinct.
Who was the body beneath the house?
It could be anyone, I supposed. But again, statistics suggested a possibility that was more likely than not. If you murder someone, it’s usually a close relation. Your spouse. Your child. Your parent.
Connor’s mother had died when he was a child. I knew if I made a phone call or two I could get a birth date and a death date. There would be a death certificate, listing cause of death. Maybe even a grave we could go and visit. But Connor’s father had no firm date for the end of his life. He had left his teenage children. It was in character, so nobody questioned it. They just sighed and felt sympathy for his abandoned offspring, barely more than kids. All we knew for sure was that Jake Connor had vanished more than fifteen years before, and had never been heard from again. Now there was an unidentified body found beneath his house. A body that could certainly be fifteen years old.
Adeline was the key. If the body under the house was her father, she would know why.
I started dozing off again. I could drive down to Atlanta in the morning, hope that Jane Graham was secure enough in her deception that she hadn’t moved on.
As I started to feel the pull of sleep, Isabella Green screamed.
61
Isabella Green
I’m walking through the woods, on the ridge above the lake. I’m quietly humming a tune to myself; the chorus of a song I heard on the radio:
about going home and not being scared. I know Momma will be worried about me, out here alone in the twilight.
It’s the best time of day, though. The sun sinking below the trees on the other side of the lake, turning the sky into blood-red and orange. I have to keep my eyes jammed into slits as long as I’m facing west, and then the trail curves around to the north and now the sun is out of my eyes and it’s like a cool, blessed relief. The woods turn into blues and greens and the afterimage of the sun overlays everything like a brand. I feel and hear the twigs crack under my feet and I know I must be the only person to come this way in days.
And just as suddenly, I know I’m wrong.
The girl has her back to me. She’s taller than me, and skinny. She’s wearing a black dress with no sleeves. And then I realize it’s her who’s humming the tune. She’s singing it softly, saying she’s not scared. I catch my breath and stop in my tracks. For some reason, it’s really important that she doesn’t know I’m here.
But I know it’s too late when she speaks to me.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
I stumble over my words, manage to get out: “I’m … I’m just leaving.”
“It’s too late for that.”
I want to turn around, but my feet are planted to the ground, just like one of the tall ash trees. The sky has clouded over and the rain is starting to fall.
Adeline Connor turns around to face me. She looks normal, and I don’t know why that surprises me. And then she smiles and the blood starts dripping from her mouth and from her wide-open eyes.
And then my feet aren’t planted anymore and I turn and run back along the path. I can hear her breathing like she’s next to my ear but I don’t dare turn around to see if she’s gaining. And then I slam into something hard, at waist level. I look down and it’s a blue Ford Tempo. It’s all crushed up in front and there’s blood all over the windshield and then I––
“I said, are you okay?”
Blake was leaning over Isabella, his hand on her shoulder where he had been gripping her to pull her out of the nightmare. It was still dark. Isabella could only just make out his face, the shadows in the hollows of his eyes. She moved his hand from her shoulder and took a second to reorient herself.
“What was it?” Concern, but also curiosity in his voice.
“I saw Adeline Connor. She was young. I was too, I think, and—” she stopped herself there. Blake shouldn’t know the rest of it. Not ever.
Her eyes were adjusting to the dark. She saw his mouth open, like he was about to say something, and then he changed his mind. Instead, he reached over and brushed the hair out of her eyes, where it had been pasted by the sheen of cold sweat on her forehead.
“Try to get some sleep,” he said.
She smiled to herself in the darkness, knowing that it was a ridiculous suggestion. She didn’t sleep, not after a dream like that. But then he shifted position and she settled into the crook of his arm. Her ear was against his chest, and she could hear the beat of his heart. Steady and strong. Like the beat of the song she was humming in the dream.
I’m not scared.
And before she knew it, it was morning and the light was streaming through the window, and the bed was empty.
Wednesday
62
Carter Blake
When the room began to get light around seven, I slipped out of bed, being careful not to wake Green. She was lying on her side, her right arm tucked beneath her head, a lock of her blond hair covering one eye. Even in her sleep, I could make out the little line between her eyebrows, as though she was concentrating on something.
When I got out of the shower, she was awake. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at the screen of her phone.
“They haven’t found anything else at the house,” she said, no surprise in her tone.
“I don’t think they will.”
She looked up at me. “I’m heading up there just now. Maybe it would be a good idea if …”
“If we didn’t go there together?” I smiled.
She gave me a relieved look. “Thanks. Listen, I don’t want you to think I want to hide this. Last night was great.”
“That’s an understatement.”
“But maybe we should keep it quiet.”
“Very sensible. In fact, I’m going to head back down to the city today.”
The line between her brows appeared again. An unspoken question.
“I’m going back to look for Adeline.”
She blinked. “Adeline is dead.”
“I’m not so sure now.”
I laid it all out for her as I pulled my clothes on. The slow-burn suspicions that had begun to build in the back of my mind almost from the moment I had left Jane Graham in Atlanta. The email from Honorific. The two words she had said – courage conquers – that just might have given the game away. When I got to my theory about who was under Connor’s house, she nodded, as though she had come to the same conclusion, but she let me continue until I had finished.
“If it’s really her, if you can still find her … what makes you think it’ll be different this time?”
“Because on balance, I believed her last time. She fooled me. And she was able to do that because she’s spent a decade and a half making sure she believes it herself. It’s like she’s made herself into a new person by sheer force of will.”
Green stared at me for a long moment, her expression impossible to read.
“Okay,” she said finally. “It’s worth a shot. But Blake?”
“Yes?”
“Try not to be long.”
I leaned down and she stretched her body to meet me halfway for a long kiss.
“You won’t even know I’m gone.”
She smiled, and then it faded. I saw in her expression an echo of the way she had looked right after the nightmare.
“I don’t mean just for that,” she said. “This isn’t over, is it? No matter what anyone thinks.”
I shook my head. “I’ll call you as soon as I have something.”
I put my jacket on and grabbed my car keys as Green watched me thoughtfully. I paused at the door and we exchanged a look. Without breaking eye contact, she stood up, letting the sheets fall from her body, and walked naked across the room to me.
“Hurry back.”
Outside, the sun was peeking above the trees on the far side of the lake. I unlocked the car and was opening the door when I heard my name called.
I turned around to see Feldman standing twenty feet from me, his hands braced on his sides, the right one a couple of inches above his holster. I looked around for his car. I didn’t see it. He hadn’t wanted us to hear him.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
He took his time with the response. “I live here. You don’t.” He turned his gaze to where Green’s car was parked, and then shot a brief glance at the window of my cabin, where the light was burning behind the curtains. “I thought I told you to stay away from Isabella.”
I pushed the driver’s door closed and walked over to where Feldman stood, taking my time. He watched me approach. His hands didn’t move, but I saw the muscles in his upper arms stiffening. I stopped two feet from him. His lips pulled into a smirk, but his eyes were utterly mirthless.
“What?” he said. A challenge.
I looked him up and down, then looked around us at the deserted lot and the lake beyond the trees.
“I’m just wondering why you think … whatever this is, is more important than a multiple murder case.”
“Already caught the murderer, Blake.”
“You really believe it too, don’t you?”
He looked away and broadened the smirk, as though wishing he had his buddies here to get a load of this guy. Then he took a step forward and leaned in toward me.
�
�You really want to fuck with me? Out here?”
He reached for his gun. It was almost out of the holster when we heard Green’s voice.
“Feldman!”
He froze. The two of us kept our eyes on each other. Then he took a step back, letting gravity pull the pistol back into its leather holster with the soft noise of the air being displaced. He turned his head.
She was standing at the door of the cabin, wearing a white terrycloth robe. Feldman’s jaw tensed.
“What are you doing here?” she called out. Trying to sound natural, but I knew she had just seen what was about to happen.
“We’ll talk later,” he said. He shot me a look that was heavy with portent and turned on his heel, walking back toward the approach road.
Green watched me as I walked back to the car. I paused when I had gotten the door open again and held up my hand in a wave goodbye. She didn’t return the wave.
63
Carter Blake
I was reluctant to leave Green after the confrontation with Feldman. But I knew she could more than handle herself. Besides, it wasn’t her Feldman was angry at. The reverse of anger, if I read the signals correctly. No, all things considered, getting out of town for a while was the best thing I could have done.
Two hours after I reached Atlanta, I found myself standing on the sidewalk outside a two-story concrete apartment complex. A significant downgrade from the previous address I had visited. I was about to try the buzzer when the door opened and the woman who called herself Jane Graham emerged from within, looking down at her bag as she put her keys into it. She flinched as I cleared my throat.