Everything in the house had been put back in its rightful place, but the photographs on that corkboard remained upside down. It was a grim reminder that he wasn’t going insane. If all this stuff was just in his head, those computer printouts would have been right side up. Someone had been inside. Someone had rearranged their things and had forgotten to put the pictures back the way they had been.
He wanted to believe that, wanted to convince himself that this was nothing but a bunch of screwed-up kids paying tribute to a freshly dead cult leader. Jeffrey Halcomb’s suicide had yet to hit the Internet, and there was no doubt that news outlets would be announcing his passing first thing in the morning. But despite the lack of information, he couldn’t shake the feeling that Halcomb’s followers already knew. All it took was a single person, a quick phone call, to set off a chain reaction.
He glanced at his desk, a computer printout of Halcomb’s potential victims resting beneath his arm. The kids, Audra, January, the Stephenson couple; each name accompanied by the date of their demise. He had scribbled the word “DEAD” next to the question mark by Sandy Gleason’s name. And then there was Schwartz. And Hillstone.
See you soon? J.
He shuddered, snatched up his phone, scrolled through his contacts, and hit SEND when he reached Josh Morales’s name. “Hola. This is Josh. I can’t—” Voice mail. Lucas hung up before the end of the recording and dialed the main Lambert number instead. Lumpy Annie answered after the third ring.
“Hi, hello, this is Lucas Graham again.”
“Oh.” Lumpy Annie sounded unsure. “Hi again, Mr. Graham. What can I do for you?”
“Is Officer Morales there? Josh Morales? Can you send for him? I’ll hold. I don’t mind.”
“Sorry,” she finally said. “He was here earlier, but after what happened with your friend Jeffrey Halcomb, he went home.”
An invisible hand squeezed the air out of Lucas’s lungs.
See you soon? J.
“So, he was there . . .”
“That’s right,” Annie said. “It was near the end of his shift anyway. He should be back in tomorrow.”
Except he won’t be.
Lucas swallowed against the lump in his throat.
He won’t be because he’ll be dead.
At that very moment, Lucas hadn’t been so sure of anything in his entire life.
“Mr. Graham?”
He pulled the phone away from his ear and stared at it. He disconnected the call, slowly placed his phone on the desk blotter.
Thirty years ago, when the police had kicked in the double doors of Lucas’s current home, they had found Jeffrey Halcomb surrounded by corpses.
Audra Snow had been draped over his knee, like a damsel in distress having fainted at the sight of all of her lifeless friends. Except Audra’s shock had been overpowered by the cold burn of metal sliding into her womb. Her shock had come at the sight of the man she loved tearing her open from breastbone to pubis. She may have passed out before Halcomb had plunged his hands into her body and lifted out a baby of eight and a half months—a girl—but something told Lucas that she had seen him do it. She had felt that part of her being torn out. She had seen the squirming child, the umbilical cord that still connected it to her before her head had started to swim. Before her vision had gone dark.
The police had witnessed the rest—Halcomb lifting the newborn he’d cut out with sloppy knife skills over his head in an offering to some unseen force. Streams of thick, congealing blood trailing down his arms and across his naked chest. They had screamed at him, Put the baby down! and Halcomb did as he was told. No physical resistance as the baby’s cries dwindled to wheezing, to gasping, and then to nothing at all. Lucas imagined Jeff being cuffed while wearing that disarming smile, one that said, Come on, guys. Don’t do this. You know you want to join me. I can love you better than anyone ever has. I can show you the way to salvation.
But now Jeff was dead, and somehow the anger Lucas had felt had morphed to utter helplessness. He wanted to vomit, purge himself of an overwhelming sense of sadness he hated himself for feeling. Lucas wasn’t supposed to feel bad for Jeff. Monsters were meant to be put to death with nothing more than a dismissive wave of the hand. They were supposed to die, and when they did, the world was meant to celebrate. And yet all Lucas wanted to do was curl up into a ball and cry.
That was when it finally hit him—Jeffrey Halcomb’s true reason for wanting Lucas to move into the house where it had all happened. He wanted Lucas to feel exactly this, to have these inexplicable pangs of sympathy. Because there was something about standing in that living room and looking around, from stairs to kitchen, and thinking, This is where it all happened, just a normal place, just normal people. It was humanizing, a kernel of emotion growing in the deepest recesses of Lucas’s heart.
He narrowed his eyes at the envelope stuffed with old photographs, peered at the stacks of newspaper clippings he’d read a dozen times over. He glared at all the stuff Echo had given him out of the goodness of her own heart . . . those pictures making him that much more vulnerable, susceptible to the past, to the dead, to the deed. It was almost as if she’d handed those artifacts over to keep him rooted in Pier Pointe, a condolence to Jeff’s refusal to grant Lucas his interview. Sorry about Jeff—but here’s some stuff to keep you busy, to keep you right where you belong.
Something tripped over itself in Lucas’s chest.
A bubble of air lodged in his esophagus just above the hollow of his throat.
Suddenly, despite being seated, Lucas gripped the edge of his desk. Because what if . . . what if Echo . . .
You mean the visitor, he thought. The woman from the prison.
The same woman he’d called and asked to come over, who was now upstairs in the spare bedroom sleeping on the blow-up mattress to give him peace of mind.