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  Thome laughed. “No, it wasn’t always like that. He kept work at work, if that makes sense. He did a good job when I was growing up. I can’t complain.”

  “I really wish I’d gotten to see him tonight.”

  He looked at her. She was a beautiful woman, with rich dark skin and fierce eyes. He turned back to his drink and shook his head. “I’ll make sure he knows what he missed out on.”

  Linda took another sip of her wine. “So, what are we celebrating? You invited me out here for a surprise celebration for your dad, and since he’s not here, you might as well tell me. What’s the occasion?”

  Thome raised his glass. “My dad’s no longer a criminal.”

  “What?”

  “We won the appeal. His conviction got overturned. He’s no longer a felon. Whole case got dismissed. I kept begging him to let me work on it ever since I graduated law school. It wasn’t until recently he agreed. Sure enough, we won.”

  Linda massaged her temples with the tips of her fingers. The wine was hitting her harder than she expected. The music in the place was too loud and she felt uncomfortable in wearing such a tight dress surrounded by such younger people. “I imagine he’ll be going back to his old life, then, in some form or another.”

  “I hope not,” Thome said.

  Linda turned toward him. “Really? Why do you say that?”

  “Because he has a fresh start. He’s a brilliant person. He could do anything he set his mind to. It doesn’t have to be tracking down maniacs and staring at dead bodies all the time. You can only deal with so much of that stuff before you start taking it home.”

  “Yes!” Linda said, smacking the bar with the flat of her hand. “That is exactly what I always said about your father. Thank you! He could go back to school or start a business or become a teacher. I don’t know. Anything. He could live.”

  Thome nodded and said, “Damn right.” He raised his margarita glass to her. “To living.”

  “To living,” she said, and clinked her glass against his. She swallowed the rest of her wine. She said good evening and thank you for a lovely evening and went home.

  * * *

  The house felt cold and alien as she stepped through the front door. She shut it and made sure she locked it behind her. The dining room light was on. She tended to keep it on when she was out, so that no ever knew if someone was really home, and because she hated walking into a dark house.

  I wasn’t supposed to come back here alone tonight, she thought.

  There was a point where someone was supposed to stop chasing a dream. To stop injuring themselves over the expectation of a thing that was never going to happen. She told herself she was at that point and had probably been at it for a long time. It was time to move forward. There was a difference between facing up to pain and wallowing in it.

  She slid out of her shoes and walked barefoot into the kitchen to get a bottle of water from the refrigerator. The aftertaste of wine had left her mouth dry. She twisted the cap and drank as she turned to lean back against the counter. The post office mail bin was sitting across from her, its contents piled high enough that she could see the items scattered across the top. A utility bill. An advertising index card. A letter addressed to her in handwriting she didn’t recognize.

  Linda set the bottle down. She didn’t remember seeing any letters before when she carried the bin out of the post office, or when she’d carried it into her house. You’d been in a rush, she told herself.

  She picked up the envelope and saw her name and post office box address, and in the left-hand corner, printed in elaborate script, the name and return address for Sunshine Estates.

  She ripped it open, careful not to tear the letter inside. She unfolded the page and glanced at the name printed on the bottom. She flung it across the room like the paper stung her fingers, watching it float through the air, side to side, until settling on the floor.

  She stood over the letter, hands clenched into fists, and read it.

  My Dearest Doctor,

  I hope this letter finds you well. Safe and warm within the comfort of your home.

  Perhaps I will find that comfort as well. Indeed, I intend to try.

  Until Then, I Remain,

  The Master

  Linda pulled a paper towel off the roll and used it to pick the letter up from the floor. She set it on the counter, then picked up the envelope it had been sent in and laid that on the letter as well. There were chemicals the police could use to develop fingerprints on paper. They could also swab it for DNA. First thing in the morning, she’d call Carrie Santero at the county detectives’ office and ask her to come over to pick it up. Linda would have called her then, but they’d never exchanged cell phone numbers. I guess we may turn out to be friends after all, she thought.

  The letter from The Master did not bother her all that much. She was not afraid of Tucker Pennington. The man she’d seen at the courtroom that day was too pathetic to frighten anyone. She had spent her professional career looking into the eyes of the crazy and the cruel, and had gone through far too much in her personal life to waste any time being afraid of someone like Tucker. Anyway, the letter had come to her PO Box. It wasn’t like he knew how to find her home.

  She walked over to the front door and made sure it was locked. She pulled back her front curtains and checked the windows there, making sure they were locked as well. She checked the rear sliding door and it was locked, and the wooden plank she kept along the base of it to keep anyone from sliding the door open even if they broke the lock was there as well.

  The house was secured and there was no question in her mind about it this time. She reached behind her back and unzipped her dress, pulling the zipper down to the small of her back, and shimmied out of it until it was pooled at her feet. She laid it across the back of one of her dining room chairs to remind her to take it to the dry cleaner’s when she went out the next day.

  She walked up the stairs in her bra and panties, feeling warm air blowing from her vents across her stomach and thighs and the tops of her feet. When she reached the landing, she heard something above her and stopped moving. It was nothing loud or ominous. The creak of a beam. Something on her bedroom floor or on the wall outside. Houses creaked. They creaked with age, or when the heater kicked on, or when an animal scurried across the top of their roofs.

  She listened and heard nothing. If she hadn’t been alone, it would have meant nothing at all to her, she thought. She went up the rest of the steps and flicked off the lights when she reached the top, leaving the staircase and hallway in darkness.

  The light from the bathroom was still on. She crossed in front of the large mirror and shuddered, feeling like scalding hot water was dripping across the center of her back. Something foreign there. Something watching.

  She turned on the lights in the bedroom and looked around. Nothing was disturbed. The closet door was closed. The bathroom shower curtain was open. The bed frame was too low for anyone to be hiding under. Stop being ridiculous, she told herself.

  She turned off the lights and jumped into bed, using the knob at the end of her bed’s headboard to vault off the floor. It was an old childhood need to be safe under the covers instead of standing vulnerable in the pool of darkness on the floor. All of it silly and irrational, she knew, but there was comfort in the familiarity of her bed. That much the letter had been right about.

  The house settled, and she settled, breathing steadily until everything else fell away from her like loose pages from an old book. There was a point to stop chasing dreams.

  She was a young girl again, floating downstream in a small boat. She looked down at a worn book sitting in her lap, between her hands. She opened it and saw that each page was a different scene from her life.

  Her family. Her childhood. Even Antoine. All of it was there. Her crowded bedroom at her mother’s home. Boot camp. The army kitchens. Her marriage to Jerry, both the love and the fear. Dr. Shorn helping her get into college. All the hours she’d spent
studying. One of the pages was a picture of Jacob. As she flipped through each page, she realized she did not need to keep the things she no longer wanted.

  She pulled pages out by the handful and sent them into the wind. They floated gently down toward the water and were taken away, swallowed by the current. Page by page, until the book was almost empty.

  She heard that same creak from before, coming from the dark woods along the shore, but she was in her boat and too far away to worry. The last few pages came away freely in her hand and it felt so good to let them go.

  A sudden wind rose from the woods that rustled its dark leaves and sent them scattering. Sticks and rocks came flying past her, and one of the rocks struck her in the chest. It hit her so hard, she gasped aloud and could not breathe.

  An inescapable warmth flooded through her being. It spread down from her chest and spilled over her arms and legs. The river rose around the boat until water came up over its sides. Water pooled around her body, surrounding her in its warmth. The boat sank.

  Linda slid below the surface of the water where the pages of her life still floated. They were her want and hurt and love and regret and she slipped beneath all of them. She left them behind as she descended toward that final place. There was a flickering light at the bottom of the river, and when she reached it, it went dark.

  III

  WEST, SOUTH, AND EAST

  10

  Dave Kenderdine never had a really good answer to the question, “What’s the most fucked-up thing you ever saw?”

  Most rookies ask that question of their sergeants and field training officers and other senior cops. They ask it as a way of preparing their brain for something they’ll someday encounter that exists far beyond the scope of normalcy. A way to gauge what the job can show you, far beyond the textbooks and movies and stories they’ve heard.

  With almost twenty years on the job, he’d seen some crazy shit, of course. He had a few decent stories, but none of them were showstoppers. In a coffee klatch of other cops who were standing around sharing war stories far better than his, he’d always had to shrug and say, you know, just the usual.

  Hansen Township ran three-man squads during the day shift. Kenderdine as the sergeant and two patrol officers. A kid fresh out of the academy they called Howdy on account of his red hair and freckles, and another kid with fourteen months on the job named Wallace. Being the junior guy, it was Howdy’s job to bring coffee and Dave sipped his while the two patrol officers took turns reading the incident reports out loud.

  “They had a domestic last night. Check this out. Lady reported her out-of-control seven-year-old wouldn’t go to bed.”

  “So she called the cops?” Kenderdine asked.

  “She called the cops,” Howdy said.

  Kenderdine shook his head. “Children and Youth should start a file right now. If Mom needs police intervention for a seven-year-old, that whole family is doomed.” He took another sip. “What else did they have?”

  Howdy flipped through the next few incident reports on the clipboard. They were nothing but vehicle lockouts and streetlight checks. He turned to the last page and laughed. “Eighteen-year-old kid with a brand-new Mustang was stopped at red light. It turned green and this dumbass decided to stomp on the gas and peel out to show off for everybody. He lost control and went right into a tree. Car’s totaled. Moron.”

  “Insurance won’t cover that one,” Kenderdine said. “Not if it was from negligence. Hope he didn’t owe too much on the payment.”

  Wallace sipped his coffee. “Guess what I saw on my way in. I never saw anything like it before in my life. I thought it was something out of a horror movie.”

  “What was it?”

  “This huge buck with antlers wide as my arms. I mean, trophy antlers. The kind they hang in the gallery at Cabela’s. He was all scraped up and bloody, right? Gashes on his sides, all the way up to his neck. It was dark, but I could see something hanging from them antlers on the one side. I get close enough with my high beams and it’s the head of another deer.”

  “You’re shitting me,” Howdy said.

  “I shit you not. It’s the severed head of another deer with its antlers all locked up in this one’s. I couldn’t believe it.”

  “You get a picture?”

  “No, he ran off.”

  “You’re lying. Sarge, you think he’s lying?”

  Kenderdine shrugged. “It happens. Two bucks in rut decide to duke it out over some pretty little doe. They start fighting and get entangled. Bigger one starts twisting and turning and yanking to get free. Next thing you know, one of their heads pops off and the other one has to carry it around for a while. I’ve heard of it.”

  “If I saw that I’d shit my pants.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” Kenderdine said. “When you see things like that, it takes a while for your brain to figure it out. You’re there in your car, driving along, safe in your own little world. Your music’s going. You got your coffee. Everything is normal. Then you see this deer, and that’s normal too. Even when you see it’s got a second head dangling from its antlers, it will take your brain a little while to process the horror of it. It’s not till later on when you realize how fucked-up it was. Same way with the stuff you see on this job. When it’s all going down, it’s complete mayhem, but you’re just in there trying to get through it. It won’t be until later on, when you’re far removed from it, when you’re lying in bed there trying to fall asleep, that it hits you.”

  Wallace nodded sagely at Howdy, like he knew exactly what the sergeant was talking about. “He’s right.”

  “Shut up, dipshit. You’ve only been here three months longer than me and I handled the last crash because the lady had a bone sticking out of her leg and you said you were gonna throw up.”

  “I told you my stomach was queasy from all the beer I drank the night before. That’s all it was,” Wallace said. “Sarge, what’s the most fucked-up thing you ever saw?”

  Kenderdine tossed his empty coffee cup in the trash. “Has to be the two of you sitting here instead of doing police work. Let’s roll out.”

  He’d seen a few things, sure. Bad crashes with mangled bodies. A fight between two women in the Dollar Store parking lot, a real fight, with punching and kicking and hair pulled from each other’s scalps right at the roots, all while both of them were holding babies.

  He’d seen a suicidal guy jump off a bridge and land on the rocks below. Kenderdine was talking to him, trying to get him to come off the bridge, and the guy just stepped out into the sky and dropped. He didn’t scream or anything. He fell straight down and made a splattering sound when he hit.

  Twenty years dealing with the public meant you were bound to see some messed-up things. But none of it had been too much to cope with. Nothing that kept him up at night or made him regret being a police officer or afraid to raise kids in this world. Nothing truly pants-shittingly terrifying. He hadn’t seen anything too much to take in twenty years.

  He saw it that day.

  * * *

  They received the call that morning as a check-the-well-being. County to any available Hansen Township car. Linda Shelley hasn’t shown up for work at the Juvenile Detention Center. Can’t reach her by cell phone. Available units, please respond.

  Kenderdine picked up his radio mic and told them he was en route.

  Within minutes he was on the right street, checking the mailboxes for the right address. Single homes. Three or four hundred grand each. Quarter-acre lots. Some had decks on the back and some had swimming pools. He found the one he was looking for and parked on the street alongside the curb. He was right in front of the house, which was a mistake, and something he’d yell at his guys if they did, but sometimes it shook out like that.

  Police training is to park a few houses before the location you’re responding to. It’s a good habit because cops never know exactly what they’re walking into. They don’t know who is waiting for them. A routine alarm call could get far from routine rea
l quick. You could be walking up to a house with a deranged sniper holed up on the third floor, zeroing you in on their scope. The idea of parking away from the house and walking up on foot is that you can sneak up and assess the situation before anyone knows you’re there.

  But sometimes the goddamn addresses are off, or spaced too far apart, or you don’t see it until you’re right up on it, and then the only thing you can do is just stop in front of the house. So Kenderdine did. He got out, shut his door, and looked at Linda Shelley’s house. It was quiet. Well-maintained. No signs of disturbance. A regular house in a regular neighborhood on a regular day.

  He’d met Dr. Shelley at the Detention Center a few times. She seemed kind of cold. The kind of woman that’s so smart, she gets angry at people who aren’t. Looks-wise, she reminded him of Pam Grier. He’d always had a thing for Pam Grier.

  A black SUV was parked in the driveway and Kenderdine called it in on his radio and gave them the tag. “Comes back to that address,” the county responded.

  There were red streaks smeared across the top of the door frame and on either side. She must be in the process of painting the front of the house, he thought. Some kind of weird design choice, maybe, he thought. It was dry and dark against the white paint of the door frame, set against the white stucco front of the house’s entrance. It almost looks like blood, a quiet voice in the back of his mind whispered. Yeah, right, he thought. Blood smeared on the door frame of this house in this normal suburban setting where the sun is shining and the wind is blowing and somewhere far off a dog is barking. Cars drive past with people going to work. The mail is being delivered. A morning talk show is being played on a nearby television telling people to get out there and enjoy all that sunshine, folks, winter will be here soon.

  He knocked on the door. “Dr. Shelley? Police department.”

  He pressed the doorbell button and listened to it ding-donging inside for several seconds. He stepped back onto the front yard and looked up to search the windows for signs of movement. He pressed the doorbell again and knocked several times. “Linda Shelley, are you home?” he called out.