“Might have done that, too. Look, Mike, I’ll hand it to you, no strings, but you have got to share the rest of what you know. We can stop this bastard if we work together. If you keep us out—”
“If I’d kept you out, as I should, then I’d have had that damn thumb drive, and the chain of evidence would be intact!”
“Most likely,” I say, leaning forward, “you or your guys would have opened that door downstairs and blown themselves up, all the evidence would be ashes, and not a damn thing useful would have come out of it. We didn’t make that mistake because we understand who we’re dealing with.”
His voice hardens just a touch, skimming off the charm. “And you think I don’t?”
“Have you met Melvin Royal?” I ask. I feel a cold ball forming in my stomach, heavy as lead, just from having his name on my tongue. “Interviewed him? Interrogated him? Even been in the same room with him?”
“No.”
“I lived with the man for years. I slept next to him. I saw him when he was angry and happy and stressed. I know how he thinks.”
“Respectfully, ma’am, if you knew how he thought, you’d have known what was swinging in your own goddamn garage.”
It’s sharp, but I’ve felt that piercing observation before. I don’t let it stop me. “There’s a difference. I have the knowledge of him now, and what I knew then. And each informs the other. I’m an asset, Agent Lustig. You’re going to need me.” I take in a slow breath. “Because Melvin Royal isn’t like the other killers you hunt. If he was, you’d have already found him, wouldn’t you? You caught all the others he escaped with.”
He’s silent on that. I catch Sam’s eye. We have a lot to talk about, but he just nods in agreement with me for now.
“Hey, Mike?” Sam says, crouching down to a height nearer my chair. Like me, he still reeks of smoke and sweat. It’s more suffocating in this clean, pleasant room. “Don’t shut us out. You’d rather have us where you can see us. We make great bait. Right?”
“You’re killin’ me,” Lustig says, and then I hear him moving. I hear the crackle of wind in the speaker, and the sound of passing traffic. “Tell me where you are. I’ll come pick up the USB, and we’ll talk.”
I hit the button to mute the call instantly and say, “No way in hell—”
“I wouldn’t,” Sam assures me, and unmutes. “Tomorrow, Mike. We’ll meet wherever you want. Call in the morning.”
He hangs up before Lustig can answer. We both look at the phone, waiting for it to ring again, but it doesn’t. After a full minute, Sam stands up. He looks as tired as I feel. “He could have traced it,” I tell him.
“Yeah, I know,” he says. “But unless something shifts in a major way, he won’t. I’m taking a shower. If SWAT’s here when I come out, at least I’ll be clean for jail.”
I have to laugh. He’s right. We have to trust Lustig this far, if no farther. And now that Sam’s said it, the idea of a hot shower sounds meltingly good. For a dizzying moment our gazes meet and hold, and I wonder what it would be like to stand in the shower with him, fully naked with another person for the first time since . . . since Melvin. It’s an involuntary thing, the picture that comes into my head, and it makes my breath catch, my pulse trip.
Then Sam looks away and says, “I’ll go first.”
“Such a gentleman.”
“Damn right.” He walks away to the bedroom on the left, the one nearest the stairs, and closes the door behind him—no, he almost does, and then it opens again, and he leans out. “Don’t watch that fucking video without me, Gwen.”
He knows me too well. He knows that I’d force myself to do it, now that we know it was filmed somewhere other than that basement. I’d make myself watch it for clues, anything that might tell me where it was done, and by whom. Maybe familiarity would provide some kind of buffer from the human suffering captured on it.
I nod, but I don’t promise, and he disappears. I hear the shower start. I don’t open the video, but I do grab a pair of blue nitrile gloves from a pack I carry in my bag, then take a handful of papers and move them back to the coffee table. Preserving fingerprints is probably useless; whatever evidentiary value these had ended when we stole them from the cabin. But being careful wouldn’t hurt anything, either.
The papers look like the normal life of just about every person on earth—receipts for supplies, an online order for electronic games and gadgets, bills for electricity and propane. They’re all billed to a bland corporate name that the FBI can track, if that leads anywhere at all. I assume, due to the lack of a bill, that the water and septic were his own. Some clothing orders, all male, in sizes I note down on a sheet of rose-pink paper from the desk, though I am certain that finding the owner of that cabin is going to be difficult, if not impossible. A job for the FBI, for sure, now that he’s alert and on the run. This man, I think, is quite the record keeper; he not only buys in bulk, but he tracks every single purchase. There doesn’t seem to be any differentiation between the trivial—like bulk orders of toilet paper and paper towels—and what might be important, like the purchase of sets of steel chain in varying lengths. I start separating the pages out into what is likely nothing, and what might be something. The distant, steady drum of the water in Sam’s shower calms me, and by the time it shuts off, I almost feel centered again.
When he opens the door and comes out, he’s wearing what must be a hotel-provided bathrobe and slippers, and his sandy-blond hair has been toweled dry but is still slick at the ends. He looks warm and at ease. “Sorry,” he says, indicating the clothes with a sweep of his hand. “Mine need a wash. They reek.”
“Mine do, too,” I say. “Don’t suppose they have a laundry service . . . ?” We have extra clothes in our backpacks, but I don’t know when we’ll next have a shot at cleaning things. So he goes to call the front desk while I head to the shower.
It’s magnificent, and I linger in the water, letting the pounding spray on the top of my head drive out the images I glimpsed on that video. I want to call the kids again. I want to make sure they’re okay, even though I’ve already done that, even though I know that they’d look at it as half-crazy behavior. I get out of the shower and dry off, find the robe—lush and fluffy—and slide my feet into the clean, new slippers. This feels like a kind of luxury I’ve never really known before. I can see how someone could get used to it.
I hear my phone buzz, and I grab it. I check the number, which at a glance seems familiar—Mike Lustig’s, from before?—and I click on and say, “Hello?”
I get dead air, and a rattle of static after, and my defenses come up fast. “Mike?”