Then there was Sandra “Sandy” Gleason, whom Jeff called Sunrise. She had been as young as Shelly “Sunnie” Riordan—only fifteen—when she met Halcomb for the first time. In the only interview she ever gave, Sandy confessed that Jeff had tried to impregnate her on multiple occasions. When Sandy came to realize that Halcomb was courting her for a baby and not her charming personality, she made a break for it. She hadn’t been followed because Halcomb had since deemed her a waste of time. Lucas narrowed Sandy’s location down to somewhere in Vallejo, California, but she proved to be even more elusive than January Moore.
Back in New York, he had tried to reach out to the citizens of Veldt, Kansas, but none of them wanted to talk. Even Mira Ellison, who’d given a vivid account of what Jeffrey Halcomb had been like while still living in their hometown, refused an interview. Lucas had managed to get her on the phone, only to have the woman insist he never call her again. I don’t know any Halcomb, she’d said, then immediately hung up.
He couldn’t find anything on the Gate of Heaven, not a number or a location in Veldt. The only speck he managed to glean off his endless Google searches was that Veldt had suffered a bad fire in the spring of 1984. There was no tracking down Pastor Gregory Halcomb or his glossolalia-gifted wife, Helen. It was as though the Halcomb clan and the church they founded had simply vanished . . . and, for whatever reason, the folks of Veldt seemed too terrified to speak about where their church and its parishioners had gone.
Lucas tried to reach Trevor Donovan and Susanna Clausen-King, two other characters who had breezed in and out of Jeff Halcomb’s life after his exile from Kansas. He had circled their names in red marker on a long list of potential interviewees, but all searches resulted in dead ends. Janessa Morgan—Laura Morgan’s mother—had been an option, until her name ended up as a hit on an obituary site. Washington State congressman Terrance Snow and his wife, Susana Clairmont Snow, would have been an ideal source, but the couple had passed away in a fatal US 101 crash in 1986, just north of Olympia’s Schneider Creek.
When it came to the ghosts of Halcomb’s past, January Moore and Sandra Gleason were Lucas’s only leads.
And then there was the neon-blue sticky note he’d slapped onto his legal pad full of unanswered questions. The names “JOSH MORALES” and “EPERSON” were scribbled across it with the number for Lambert Correctional printed below. Josh—despite being a little starstruck—had made a good point: Lucas had written a book about the Black Dahlia, and he hadn’t had a killer or witnesses to interview then. A book was a book. If he had been able to pull it off a few years ago, he had a decent chance of a repeat performance.
But that was all over now. He could have worked around Halcomb, but Jeanie was altogether a different matter. She’d found him out. He couldn’t, with any semblance of a clear conscience, stay in that house any longer, even if it meant breaking his end of Halcomb’s already defunct deal.
Lucas stared at his box of papers, then allowed his gaze to travel across the expanse of his study. He’d pushed a folding table against the far wall, the wood paneling above it blocked by a corkboard. Computer printout pictures of nine dead people were pinned to it in three neat rows. He had hoped to get to know those people more intimately than he could through newspaper articles. He wanted to know how a group of kids—who, as far as he knew, weren’t much different from his twelve-year-old daughter—had been duped by one man. How could they have simply given up their lives because they were asked to do so? What had Jeffrey Halcomb promised them? Or had it been more like the Jonestown Massacre—had he made them poison themselves? And where had they gotten the poison? Had it been something as standard as rat poison or a pesticide from a gardening store?
He shook his head, looked away from the photos of the nine that had died far too young. It doesn’t matter, he thought. It’s done. Over. He didn’t know where he and Jeanie would go or how he’d afford it, but they couldn’t stay on Montlake Road. Lucas wanted his life back, wanted to recapture the success of his career—it was why he had omitted the details of the house in the first place. What Caroline didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. Stupidly, he hadn’t stopped to consider that Jeanie was the one who would be most affected if the truth came out. He had sorely underestimated his kid’s intelligence.
He scooped up the papers on his desk, straightened them with a quick tap against the varnished top, and dropped them into the box that sat on his chair. You’re living in the past, he told himself. Maybe it’s time to move on, find something new. Maybe taking a job as a reporter for a news site wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe, rather than being stuck in one place, he could find a gig as a travel writer for a big-time blog and traipse the world, become the interesting person he hoped his daughter would see him as. Maybe, someday, instead of Jeanie seeing photographs of her mother in front of the Colosseum, she’d be looking at photos of her dad in Tibet, in front of the Taj Mahal, on the beaches of Fiji, on top of a snow-covered mountain in the Austrian Alps. Maybe it would be better. Defeat was a bitter pill, but perhaps it was the very medicine he needed to fix his broken life. Sloughing off his old self would give him a new start. He could only hope that Jeanie would see his moving on as strength rather than weakness.
“Okay,” he murmured into the quiet of his study. “I surrender.” Except that, even after saying it aloud, he didn’t believe it. Not for a second. A part of him wanted to give in, to forget the fight. But the other half of him knew that this was what he was born to do. You’re a writer, Lou. Not a journalist and not a goddamn travel writer—a true-crime writer, chasing the darkness.
But Jeanie.
He couldn’t.
Not like this.
The doorbell chimed.