Killman Creek (Stillhouse Lake #2)(2)

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?”