I call one of the few numbers in my phone. It rings just once before it's picked up, and I hear the ever-tired voice of Detective Prester of the Norton Police Department--the town nearest where we lived, no, live, because we will go back to Stillhouse Lake, I swear we will--say, "Ms. Proctor. It's late." He doesn't sound happy to hear from me.
"Are you one hundred percent sure that Lancel Graham is dead?"
It's an odd question, and I hear the creak of what is probably an office chair as Prester sits back. I check my watch. It's after one in the morning. I wonder why he's still at work. Norton is a sleepy little town, though it's got its fair share of crime to deal with. He's one of two detectives on staff.
And Lancel Graham used to wear a Norton PD uniform.
Prester's reply is slow and cautious. "You got some pressing reason why you think he isn't?"
"Is. He. Dead?"
"Dead as they come. I watched them pull organs out of his corpse on an autopsy table. Why are you asking at--" He hesitates, then groans, as if he's just checked the time, too. "No fit time in the morning?"
"Because it kind of freaks me out to get yet another threatening text."
"From Lancel Graham."
"From Absalom."
"Ahh." He draws that out, and he does it in such a way that I am immediately put on my guard. Detective Prester and I are not friends. We are, to some extent, allies. But he doesn't fully trust me, and I can't really blame him. "'Bout that. Kezia Claremont's been doing some digging. She says it's possible Absalom's not a he. More of a them, maybe." I respect Kezia. She'd been Officer Graham's patrol partner, at least some of the time, but unlike Lancel Graham, she's fiercely honest. It had been a pretty devastating shock to her, finding out her partner was a killer.
Not as much as it had been for me.
My voice is tight and angry, for all that. "Why the hell didn't you warn me? You know I'm out here with my kids!"
"Didn't want to panic you," he says. "No proof yet. Just suspicion."
"In the time you've known me, Detective, do you find I am prone to blind panic?"
He lets that go without a comment, because he knows I am right. "I still say it'd be better for you to come back home to Norton, let us protect you here."
"My husband turned one of your cops into a murderer." I have to swallow a ball of sick fury. "You left Graham alone with my kids, remember that? God only knows what he could have done to them. Why the hell would I trust their safety with you?"
I still don't know everything about what Lancel Graham did when he abducted my children. Neither Connor nor Lanny will tell me anything about it, and I know better than to push them. They've been traumatized, and though the doctors had said they were in good health, and nothing more had been physically done to them, I still wonder what kind of psychological damage they've endured. And how it will bend them in the future.
Because bending them, shaping them, breaking them is what Melvin Royal wants. It's the kind of thing he takes a deep, unsettling delight in doing.
"Any word about Melvin?" Mel, a little voice in me, timid and ghostly, still whispers. He never liked being called Melvin, only Mel, which was why I now make it a point to only use his full name. A petty kind of power is still power.
"Manhunt is pretty heavy all over, and of those who broke out, about seventy-five percent are already back behind bars."
"Not him."
"No," Prester agrees. "Not him. Not yet. You planning on running until he gets caught?"
"That was the plan," I say. "But that plan just changed. If Absalom has more people to send after us, then they're going to find me for him. It's what he wants. It's why he's out. Running just prolongs this nightmare, and it means I don't have any control of my life. I'm not giving that up to him. Ever again."
There's that squeak of his office chair again. This time I'm almost certain he's leaning forward. "Then what the hell are you doing, Gwen?"
He still calls me that, by my new identity, and I appreciate it. The woman who'd been known as Gina Royal, wife of an especially horrible serial killer, is gone, another corpse Melvin left behind him. She's better off dead. I am Gwen now. Gwen isn't taking any more shit.
"I don't think you'll like it, so I'm going to spare you the details. Thanks, Detective. For everything." I almost mean it. Before he can ask any more questions, I shut off the phone and stick it in my coat pocket and stand there in the moist, chilly wind a moment. Knoxville hasn't quite shut down for the night yet, and I catch hints of music from passing cars on the street, see human shadows moving behind curtains in other motel rooms. A TV flickers across the courtyard, visible through cracked curtains. A plane passes overhead, slicing the sky.
I hear the door to the room open, and Lanny steps out. She's put on some shoes and her jacket, but beneath that she's still in her pajamas. That relaxes a little anxious fist inside me. If she'd changed into her jeans and loose flannel shirt as well as running shoes, it would have been a sign she was afraid.
"The brat's still asleep," she says as she leans on the rail next to me. "Tell me."
"It was nothing, baby."
"Bull crap, Mom. You don't get out of bed and make outside calls for nothing."
I sigh. It's cold enough that the wind drags the breath out in a faint, white plume. "I was talking to Detective Prester."
I see her hands tense on the rail, and I wish I could take this away from her, this fear, this constant and crushing sense of oppression. But I can't. Lanny knows as much as anyone how dangerous our situation is now. She knows most of the truth about her father. And I have to rely on her, at the tender age of almost-fifteen, to bear up under that weight.
"Oh," my daughter says. "Was it about him?"
Him means her father, of course. I give her a slight, hopefully reassuring smile. "No news yet," I say. "He's probably a long way from here. He's a hunted man. Most of the prisoners who escaped with him have already been caught. He'll be back behind bars soon."
"You don't believe that."
I don't. I don't want to lie to my daughter, so I just change the subject. "You need to go back to sleep, sweetheart. We're moving early in the morning."
"It is the morning. Where are we going?"
"Somewhere else."
"Is this how it's going to be?" Her voice is quietly fierce this time. "God, Mom, all you do is run. We can't just let him do this to us! Not again. I don't want to run. I want to fight."
She did. Of course she did. She was a brave kid who'd been forced to face ugly truths about her dad when she was just ten, and it wasn't surprising that she's still angry at her core.
She's also right.
I turn toward her, and she twists to look me in the face. I hold her gaze as I say, "We are going to fight. But tomorrow you're going to go somewhere safe, so I can be free to do what has to be done--and before you argue with me, I need you to stay with your brother and make sure he's protected. That's your job, Lanny. That's your fight. All right?"
"All right? You're dumping us off on somebody else now? No, it's not okay! Please tell me it's not Grandma."
"I thought you loved your grandmother."
"I do. As Grandma. Not to stay with. You want us to be safe? She can't protect us. She can't protect anybody."
"I'm going to make certain she doesn't have to. Meanwhile, your father will be watching me, because finding me is his top priority." I pray that to be true. It's a huge gamble, but there is a very limited circle of people I can trust to look after my kids. My first instinct is to take them to my mother, but I also have to admit it: my daughter is right. My mom is not a fighter. Not like us. And this is an entirely different level of danger.
I don't tell her yet, because I need to think it over, but Javier Esparza and Kezia Claremont have offered to guard my kids if I need them. They're a formidable couple. Javier is a retired marine and runs a gun range; Kezia's a police officer, tough and smart and capable.
The drawback is, they live outside of Norton, and relativel
y close to Stillhouse Lake. That beautiful, remote place started out for me as a refuge, a sanctuary, but it turned into a trap, and now I don't know that I can ever feel safe there again. We certainly can't go back to our lakeside house; we'd be easy targets.
Javier's place, though, isn't at the lake. It's a remote, fortified cabin, and I intuitively believe that Melvin, and Absalom, would look everywhere but the place we'd just fled.
"Are you leaving us with Sam?" Lanny asks.
"No, because Sam's coming with me," I tell her. I haven't asked him yet, but I know he will; he wants to find Melvin Royal as desperately as I do, for just as personal a reason. "Sam and I are going to find your father and stop him before he hurts anyone else. Before he can even think of hurting you and your brother." I give her time to think about it, and then I say, "I need you to help me, Lanny. This is the best option we have, other than running and hiding again. I don't want to do that any more than you do. Please believe that."
She looks away and, with studied indifference, shrugs. "Sure. Whatever. You still make us do it." All the running we've done before has been necessary. It had been the right thing to do at the time. But I understand how terribly hard it has been on my kids to live in constant vigilance.
"I'm so sorry, honey."
"I know," she finally says, and having made that pronouncement, she gives me a quick, unexpected hug and goes back into the motel room.
I stay out there for a while in the cold, thinking, and then I dial Sam Cade's phone number and say, "I'm outside."
It only takes him about a minute to step out on the narrow second-floor walkway beside me; his room is right next to ours. Like me, he is fully dressed. Ready for a fight. He leans on the railing right where Lanny stood and says, "I don't suppose this is a booty call."
"Funny," I say, casting him a sideways look. We aren't lovers. Not that we aren't, in some ways, intimate; I think that eventually we might circle around to it, but neither of us seems to be in a hurry to get there. We have baggage, God knows. Ex-wife of a serial killer, constantly under threat from Melvin's groupies, his allies, the baying hounds of Internet vigilantes.
And Sam? Sam is the brother of one of my ex-husband's victims. Melvin's last victim. I can still see that poor young woman's body strung up by a wire noose. Tortured and murdered for pure, sadistic pleasure.
We're complicated. When I first met Sam, I'd believed he was a friendly stranger, no connection to my old life. Finding out that he had deliberately tracked me, stalked me, in hopes of finding evidence I'd been complicit in my husband's crimes . . . that had nearly broken everything.
He knows now that I'm not guilty, and never was, but there are still deep cracks between us, and I don't know how to fill them, or if I should. Sam likes me. I like Sam. In another life, without the rancid shadow of Melvin Royal between us, I think we could have been happy together.
For now, my vision is limited to surviving and ensuring the survival of my children. Sam is a means to an end.
Which, thankfully, he completely understands. I'm sure he sees me exactly the same way.
"What's up?" he asks me, and I dig the phone out, pull up the text, and pass it over. "Shit. But Graham's dead, right?" I hear the same free-fall disorientation in his voice, but he recovers faster. "They're sending someone else?"
"Maybe more than one," I tell him. "Prester says Absalom might be some kind of hacker collective. Who knows how many people they have in their network? We need to be even more careful now. I'm dumping this phone and buying a new one. We use cash, we stay off cameras as much as we can."
"Gwen, I can't keep doing this. Hiding isn't--"
"We're not hiding," I tell him. "We're hunting."
He straightens and turns to face me. Sam's not a big man, nor overly tall; he's got a lithe strength, and I know he can handle himself in a fight. Most of all--and this is everything to me now--I know that I can trust him. He isn't Melvin's creature, and he never will be. I can't say that of many people anymore.
"Finally," he says. "So, the kids?"
"I'll call Javier. He offered to take them before, and we can trust him."
Sam's already nodding. "It's a risk leaving them behind," he says, "but not as much as trying to protect them while we're going after Melvin. Sounds right." He pauses. "Are you sure about this?" He asks it almost gently. "We could leave it to the cops. The FBI. We probably should."
"They don't know Melvin. And they don't understand Absalom. If it's a collective, they could hide Melvin indefinitely while they track us down for him. We can't afford to wait it out, Sam. Hiding doesn't work." I take in a sharp breath of the cold air and let it out as a warmed stream of fog. "Besides. I want him. Don't you?"
"You know I do." He looks me over impersonally. Assessing a fellow soldier. "You're sure you don't need more rest?"
I laugh a little bitterly. "I'll rest when I'm dead. If we want to get to Melvin before the cops do, we're going to have to be tougher than him, and faster, and better. And we're going to need help. Information. You said before you had a friend who might be able to assist?"
He nods. There's a hard set to his jaw and a glitter in his eyes. Sam's not usually easy to read, but in this moment I see all his rage and heartbreak. Melvin is free out there, free to stalk and kill more women like Sam's sister. Melvin will kill again. If I know anything about my ex-husband, I know he will want to go out in a blaze of selfish, murderous, Grand Guignol fury.
The FBI is after him. The police of every state adjoining Kansas are as well. But it's unlikely that they'll turn him up quickly in the Midwest, because the first thing Melvin has done, I am certain, is to make his way southeast, toward us.
Absalom tracked us this far, and that means that Melvin won't be across the country, or across a distant border to a nonextradition country. He might not be here yet, but he's coming for us. I can smell it in the wind.
"We'll go at seven in the morning," I tell him. "I want the kids to rest a little more. All right?" I look at my phone. "I'll call Kezia and Javier to set everything up."
In a quick move, Sam takes my phone and slips it into his pocket. "If Absalom has this number, you can't use it to set up the kids' shelter," he says, and I immediately feel stupid I didn't think of it. I must be more exhausted than I think. "I'll wipe calls and contacts and leave it for someone else to steal. Better it stays on and leads Absalom on a false trail for a while." He nods across the street, at a lit-up convenience store. "I'll go get one new phone tonight. We use it to call Javier and dump it immediately. We don't buy any more phones close to this location; that's the first place Absalom will search for purchases."
He's right on every point. I need to think like a hunter now, but I can't forget that I'm also prey. Melvin made me vulnerable before by luring me, manipulating me, to end up where he wanted me to be. Now we need to do the same to him.
For years, I clung to a terrible fiction of a marriage--a life in which Melvin Royal controlled every aspect of my reality, and I failed to realize or fear it. Gina Royal, the old me, the vulnerable me . . . she and the kids were Melvin's camouflage for his secret, terrible life. On my side of the wall, I had only known that it all seemed so normal. But it never was, and now that I've left Gina Royal behind, I clearly see that.
I'm not Gina anymore. Gina was tentative and worried and weak. Gina would be afraid that Melvin would come hunting for her.
Gwen Proctor is ready for him.
I know in my heart that it all comes down to us. Mr. and Mrs. Royal. In the end, it always has.
2
LANNY
My little brother, Connor, is too quiet. He's barely said a word all day, and he keeps his head down. He's gone behind those walls he builds up, and I want to kick them all down and drag him out and get him to scream, hit the wall, do something.
But I can't even exchange two words with him without Mom's radar picking up trouble . . . at least, not until after the door closes behind her, and she's outside on the motel balcony. I know my
mother. Mostly I love her. But sometimes she doesn't help. She doesn't know how to let her shields down anymore.
Connor's awake. He's good at pretending to be asleep, but I know his tells; for two years when Mom was away--in jail and at trial, accused of being my dad's accomplice--we'd shared a room because Grandma didn't have much space, even though I was ten and he was seven and we were too old to be sharing a room. We'd had to be each other's allies, watch each other's backs. I'd gotten used to knowing when he was really out, and when he was just pretending. He never did cry much, not as much as I did. These days, he doesn't cry at all.
I wish he would.
"Hey," I say. I make it quiet, but not too quiet. "I know you're faking it, loser." He doesn't answer. Doesn't move. His breathing continues smooth and even. "Yo, Squirtle. Don't play."
Connor finally sighs. "What?" He sounds totally awake. He doesn't even sound annoyed. "Go back to sleep. You're grumpy when you don't get your not-beauty rest."
"Shut up."
"Hey, you wanted to talk. Not my fault you don't like what I say." He sounds normal.
He's not normal.
I flop back on the bed. The bed smells like the dollar store, like old sweat and nasty feet. This whole room smells like the dollar store. I hate it. I want to go home . . . and home is the house Mom and Connor and I worked to make so nice. The one with my own bedroom, and a wall I painted with purple stenciled flowers. The one with Connor's bugout zombie defense room.
Our house sits right on Stillhouse Lake, and it represents something I thought we'd never have again: security. My memories after the day we had to leave our first home--the one in Wichita--were a blur of plain rooms and gray cities, for years. We never stayed anywhere long enough to feel like we were home.
Stillhouse Lake was different. It felt permanent, like life was really starting again for all of us. I had friends. Good friends.
I had Dahlia Brown, who started out being the kind of girl I hated and ended up being my best friend in the world. It hurt to leave her back there, like some discarded, broken toy. She didn't deserve that. I don't deserve it, either. I had a sort-of boyfriend, but it's a little bit of a shock to realize I don't really miss him at all. I haven't thought about him.
Only Dahlia.
We'd left our house just as it was, and I wonder if it's been completely trashed by now. Probably. News of just who we are, who our dad is, had broken in the middle of all the craziness with Officer Graham, and I remember what happened to our old places when people found out. Spray paint on the walls. Dead animals on the doorstep. Broken windows and vandalized cars.