Victim Six

Chapter Forty-five

March 16, 8 a.m.

Port Orchard

While the minivan idled, Paige Wilson looked in the handheld mirror and glowered. This was not the style she was going for. Teal eye shadow and an overly intense smear of slightly orange blush just above her cheekbones had been painted with a practiced hand, to be sure. There could be no faulting the skill of its application-if you liked that kind of look. There was no way out of it, and Paige knew it. She was seventeen, but the heavy hand of her “queen mother’s” Max Factor makeup made her look more like a TV hooker or someone’s washed-out mother looking for a third husband at the Bethel Saloon.

“When you are up on the float,” Maggie Thompson said in her deep smoker’s voice, “you have to use everything you’ve got to project a positive image.”

“Yeah, but I’m not going up on a float.” Paige climbed out of the minivan in the lot of the Port Orchard Lighthouse. “I’m giving an interview.”

“Oh, honey, every time someone is looking at you, you’re on a float.”

Maggie was overstuffed in a turquoise velour tracksuit that had never seen the track. She’d been serving as the queen mother for Port Orchard’s Fathoms o’Fun pageant for as long as anyone could remember. She was a pleasant but pushy woman in her sixties who knew that managing young beauty queens was akin to herding cats: damn near impossible.

Paige was an ash blonde with sparkling green eyes who had won the competition with a stirring rendition of the Dolly Parton sentimental charmer redone to utter bombast by Whitney Houston: “I Will Always Love You.” Paige missed most of the notes, of course, but she had the hand gestures down pat, the kind of big motions that made her look every bit a TV pop star wannabe.

Clutch fist. Raise arms. Hold out palms. Make a pushing motion.

Besides, her competition was a girl who demonstrated batik on a T-shirt and another who read a haiku dressed in a kimono. Batik and haiku were the runners-up, relegated to the back of the float and a mere $100 in scholarship money. Paige was crowned the winner, picking up a $1,000 scholarship and a rhinestone-studded tiara that she loathed, as it pinched the top of her head and nearly made her cry.

“I know it hurts a little,” Queen Mother Maggie had said, “but behind every beauty there is a little pain. Think of a rose. Thorns hurt, don’t they?”

When Lighthouse reporter Serenity Hutchins wrote a front-page article about Paige being crowned the previous summer, she headlined the article: FATHOM’S QUEEN TURNS A NEW ‘PAIGE.’

In the months of following her coronation, Paige and her court did the obligatory store openings, posed with Navy sailors in Bremerton, huddled on a parade float that showcased Port Orchard and its place as one of Kitsap County ’s most pleasant towns. Paige gamely did whatever Maggie and the creepy float driver requested. She thought that by being the best Fathoms Queen ever there would be some kind of a reward, that a glimmer of something good would present itself and lead to greater opportunities.

Anywhere but here, she thought. Anywhere but Port Orchard.

Despite the possible renewed activity of the Cutter that spring, Charlie Keller insisted that Serenity do the traditional follow-up story on the beauty queen and what she had learned in her yearlong “reign” representing Port Orchard and the festival.

So there she was. Paige Wilson, that damned torture device of a crown on her head, sash (“warm iron, never hot…the rayon will melt”) in place, and wearing a Target tea-length dress that her queen mother had insisted on, knew that she had to turn on the charm for the reporter. She had to tell Serenity just what she wanted to hear. Anything that approximated the truth was never to pass her lips.

She imagined how the interview would go if she could just tell it like it really was.

The guy who drives the float tried to have sex with one of my princesses.

The queen mother is a complete control freak. No wonder her kids are either in jail or never talk to her.

The lousy thousand bucks wasn’t worth all the aggravation they put me through!

Serenity approached and smiled at her by the front desk. The interior dialogue stopped.

“You look so pretty,” the reporter said.

The pageant automaton kicked in: “Thank you. It is a total honor to be here. I’m having quite a year and am so excited to tell you all about it.”

Serenity led Paige into an interview room and offered her coffee.

“We’re not allowed to,” she said. “Water would be great!”

Serenity smiled. “All right…let’s talk about your work with the South Kitsap Food Bank.”

Neither woman wanted to be there just then, but they both had their jobs to do.

And so did one of the Lighthouse’s most devoted readers.

The Fun House smelled of Clorox, sweat, and strawberries. Melody Castile was on her knees, scrubbing the floors of the mobile home while Sam Castile messed with some leather gear that he’d ordered from a bondage catalog he found on the Internet. While Max was off with his Aunt Serenity for a day at the Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, the Castiles focused on some housekeeping and role-playing.

Just another Saturday afternoon.

“What do you think of this, bitch?” Sam asked, planting his feet in front of Melody. He was naked except for a black leather jockstrap with a detail of silver studs across the pouch that formed the outline of a human skull. He folded his arms across his chest and flexed. His eyes glared at her.

Melody stopped scrubbing and looked up.

“Mmmm,” she said. “Love it. I want it.”

“I found something I want,” Sam said, stepping back and going toward the dining table next to the front door.

Melody felt a distinct coolness of her husband’s dismissal. It stung a little, but she didn’t say anything. She waited for Sam to continue.

“I’m thinking of something younger,” he said.

Melody nodded and went back to her cleaning, now running her sponge over the surface of the chest freezer. “Sounds like fun.”

Actually, it sounded like more trouble.

Sam walked back toward her, carrying a copy of the Lighthouse. “Let’s go get her,” he said, tapping his finger on the front page.

Melody acknowledged the black-and-white photograph of a young woman pushing several cans of tuna across a counter to an unkempt old man in a torn windbreaker.

“Pretty,” Melody said. She smiled.

Sam rubbed his hands over his hairy chest, letting his fingertips linger on his nipples.

“Yeah. And I hope stupid too. Hot and stupid. That’s how we like them, right?”

The article was headlined:

Fathom’s Queen Helped Feed the Hungry

“Yes,” Melody said. “That’s how we like them.”

Max Castile went into his father’s office to hunt for the video game that he’d been promised if he made his bed every single day for a full week, which he had. The room wasn’t necessarily off-limits-at least no key was required to get inside. The office was set up with three computers, a brand-new Sony DVR, a TV, a library of unmarked videos and DVR cases, and a jumble of wires that led from one machine to the next. His dad was at the shipyard, and his mother was out in the yard, digging a ditch alongside the old vegetable garden. Max had been helping her but made an excuse to go inside to use the bathroom.

Really, all he wanted was that video game disk.

He ran his eyes over his father’s cache of equipment, most of which he’d already seen. Only one item looked unfamiliar: a headset connected to a small metal box. A decal on the box indicated a brand name. Max picked it up. He tried to sound out what the headset and box were all about.

DigiALTAVOICE.

The word was hard to sound out, and Max set the device down again next to his father’s computer.

“Max, I need you to turn on the water,” his mom called from the yard.

He saw the disk he wanted and grabbed it.

“Okay, Mom!”

Chapter Forty-six

March 21, noon

Key Peninsula

Melody Castile drank some wine and stared and let the warmth of the alcohol take her back in time. A face stared dead-eyed back at her. It was the visage of a toy, merely the representation of a woman. A doll. She applied some mascara to the eyelashes and quickly learned to use the gentlest of motions. Too much of an upsweep and the lashes would slip from the lids and stick on to the tiny bristles of the little round brush. The face was cold and firm, and she worked slowly to make sure that the blush looked all right.

This is like playing dolls, she thought, feeling a smile creep over her lips. It surprised her a little. What she was doing to please her husband was not something that could easily be explained. It was her way of giving him a gift, a “pretty joy,” as she called it. She fiddled with the woman’s mouth, inserting a six-inch section of broom handle that she’d sawed off expressly for that purpose. She worked the jaw, slightly stiff and very cold.

“You have no idea how much fun you are. How good you are. You’re my baby’s little whore. Do me proud,” she said, stepping back to regard her handiwork. “My, my, you really are a pretty thing, if I do say so. And I do.”

Melody gathered her things from her worktable and straightened up the mattress in the Fun House bedroom.

This is going to be so good, she thought. He’s going to be so pleased.

She sipped more wine and imagined a conversation that she was all but certain would take place. Someday. She wasn’t sure exactly when, but someday.

“Tell me about the head, Melody.”

“You want to know about that, don’t you? Everybody does. I don’t really see what the big deal is. It’s just a head.”

“What did you do with the head?”

“You already know.”

“Yes, but I want to hear from you.”

“I’m sure you would. I’m sure you would like to know every juicy detail. Maybe you’ll want to write a book someday. Say some shit about me or Samuel. Get some money.”

“This isn’t about a book. Or money. It’s about the truth.”

“So you say. Okay, I’ll play along. I’ll accept that you want the truth for some sick, twisted reason.”

“Whatever you say. Just tell me.”

“It was just for fun. Just something to do. I’m sure you’ll try to pin all sorts of meaning to it. But you know meaning is what boring people come up with to explain why their lives really don’t suck. Why they are better than everyone else.”

“The head. Tell me about it.”

“I’m getting there. We just thought it would be fun. I painted her up like a little doll, and she gave Sam a blow job whenever he wanted. I’d hold the head and work it up and down on him until he came. I know it sounds nasty, but we had fun.”

“Tell me about the makeup.”

“I did it for him. And I will tell you, it wasn’t easy. He’s pretty picky. I had to get it just so. You have no idea how many times he made me haul that head back to the worktable and redo it.”

She started to laugh.

“You think this is amusing.”

“Don’t you?”

“Not really. How did you keep it? Preserve it?”

“You know we kept it in the freezer. I defrosted her by running warm water over her and painted her up and gave my man what he wanted. He always would say, ‘Shut up and suck,’ and, of course, she didn’t say much at all.”

“How often did he have sex with the head?”

“I don’t know. Ten times. He even took it into the shower a couple of times and played with it in there. Everything gets boring after a while. Even certain kinds of sex.”

Melody downed more wine and tried to think her way through all that she was doing and what was likely to come.

“You don’t understand him, and you never will,” she said aloud, her eyes seemingly incapable of landing on any single place. She tried to focus on her face in the mirror, but the commands in her head seemed to distract her. “You don’t understand how it was.”

She smiled. She tightened her fists, balled up like weapons. She relaxed.

“Not everyone is the same,” she began again. “Not everyone feels the same needs. Sometimes a man’s needs are outside the norms. But that doesn’t make them wrong, you know.”

She tilted her head. She imagined right then that she’d be able to pull out some charm, something that would sway the listener when the time came to tell her story.

Whenever that was…it had to be done right.

Sam Castile let out staccato laughter as a puffed-up journalist on the Discovery Channel prattled on about how serial killers like to relive their crimes by amassing souvenirs of items that belonged to their victims.

“They frequently get aroused by touching-fondling, if you will-the reminders of their kill,” the man said.

Sam turned to his wife as they snuggled in bed. “What a moron.”

“I know what you mean,” Melody said. Her affect was blank, but she tried to imbue her words with a touch of indignation.

“You’re my lioness,” he said. “I bring things to you sometimes, just for love.”

She touched the silver chain that hung heavy around her neck. It was all that he allowed her to wear. She knew then that love had nothing to do with their relationship. It was parasitic all the way around. She preyed on him. He preyed on her. Together, they were a force to seek out others who could be drawn, albeit unwillingly, into their game.

“My fantasies are not about an object but the intangible,” he said hotly into her ear. “You know what turns me on. What makes me hard.”

She knew, of course. Fear turned him on.

Yet, he did keep some things from those who didn’t win the game or who bored him. Or displeased her. High up in the garage rafters was a bright yellow canoe, its floor stained with blood. In the kitchen drawer, under the mess of things for which there was no defined storage place, was a cell phone with numbers, starting with the 604 area code, captured in its speed-dial directory.

Chapter Forty-seven

March 26, 8:15 p.m.

Key Peninsula

His father was out in his shop and his mother was preoccupied with something in the computer room. Their warning, threatening as it had been, had done little to stop Max Castile’s desire to ferret out the source of the noise he’d heard coming from the mobile home. He lingered in the doorway of the main house, looking at his mother as she clicked through Web pages and answered e-mail. A glass of Chablis sat next to her mouse. It seemed as if after every download she took a sip.

Max pulled the door closer to its frame and returned to the kitchen, where he retrieved the flashlight from the drawer and padded across the lawn. He moved as silently as he could, not wanting to stir a leaf or snap a twig. He did not turn on the flashlight. He planned to use that once he got inside. He’d seen where his folks had kept a spare key, in the hollow of a plastic “rock” that had been set there for that purpose.

He fumbled for the rock in the dark, finding it after a couple of tries.

The key went into the lock, and he turned the handle.

The foul air hit him hard. It smells like a dirty diaper, he thought.

He passed the light over the dinette table and shone it around the small kitchen. The place was so clean, he wondered about the source of the odor.

With the flashlight directed at the floor, he went to the bedroom. He passed the beam over the mattress.

It was not a dog or other animal: it was the naked body of a girl.

What is she doing here?

Her eyes fluttered a little.

“Hey, lady,” Max said. “Who are you?”

“Help me.”

Adrenaline surged through Max’s body, and he dropped the flashlight. It hit the floor and spun in a near complete revolution, casting a spray of illumination over the mattress, where the woman whimpered in a ragged, hushed voice.

Max picked up the flashlight and crawled close to her.

Duct tape had fastened her ankles and wrist to the exposed metal frame of the interior of the mattress. She’d been gagged with some cloth, but it had slipped enough to allow her to speak.

“Hurry,” she said. “Before he comes back.”

“Who are you, anyway? What are you doing here?”

“My name is Carol. Please…please get me out of here.”

Max sat mute for a moment. She hadn’t explained what she was doing there, but he didn’t press her. He knew that this was not some computer game; it was real.

“How?” he asked, knowing to keep his voice low.

“Over there.”

He followed her gaze to the wooden chair next to the wall. The chair was facing the wall, leaving its rails like a cage. Protected by the wooden slats was a box of tools: a box cutter, screwdriver, electric drill, and spools of duct tape.

“There’s a knife in there,” Carol said, struggling to use her eyes to indicate where Max should go. “Shine the light. You’ll see it.”

The box was wooden, with hinges that had the patina of age. Max remembered when he and his mother had bought several such boxes when they’d gone shopping in Port Orchard some months back.

The beam met the shiny glint of a utility knife, and Max lurched for it as if it might move on its own to elude him.

“Please,” she begged again, tears streaming from her eyes now.

Max was unsure why his own eyes had misted, but they had. It made what he had to do all the more difficult. As he bent at her bound feet, he winced as he sliced.

She let out a cry, and he was afraid he’d cut her. She wriggled her feet, bloody and bruised.

“It’s okay,” she said, her voice a rasp. “My hands next.”

“Max!”

Jolted by his name, Max turned around. It was his mother’s voice.

“I have to go,” he said.

“You have to get me out of here. Cut my wrists,” Carol said.

He looked at her.

“Max! Max!”

In the flash of awareness of what he had to do, what had to be right, Max Castile sawed on the tape.

“Thank you. Thank you,” Carol said. “Thank you…Max.”

The boy said nothing in response. He dropped the blade and ran for the door. He didn’t look back, but Carol, battered, nude, and scared to death, was right behind him.

He didn’t remember picking it up, but Max had the flashlight back in his hand. The beam stabbed over the cedars and firs.

“Max, there you are. Where have you been?”

Melody was in the middle of the yard.

“Just looking for the raccoon that was eating the dog food,” he said, his words choppy with fear and the breathlessness of what he’d just done.

“What have you done?” Melody screamed at her son. In the light coming flooding the grassy space of the yard from the kitchen window, she could easily see a smear of blood on her terror-filled boy’s T-shirt.

She knew.

Melody looked over at the Fun House. Then she saw the white figure of Carol Godding stagger into the woods.

“Sam!” she screamed in the direction of the garage. “Sam, get your ass over here. We’ve got a problem!”

She looked down at her son and grabbed him by the arm so hard, Max thought she would pull it from its socket. “You,” she said, “get to your room. Shut up! Say nothing about whatever you think you just saw. This is a grown-up game, and you had no goddamn business playing over in the mobile!”

As angry as she was, Melody Castile knew better than to call it the Fun House.

Max studied his mother’s face and wondered what kind of game could be so cruel.

Chapter Forty-eight

March 27, 8:30 p.m.

Key Peninsula

It took Carol Godding a moment to orient herself in the darkness of the forest. She had no idea where she was or where she should go. She only knew what direction Max had gone when the woman’s voice had summoned him, and knew that that was not where she should go. She shivered as she tried to gather her wits. Where? The moonlight illuminated a narrow slit of water on the forest floor, a small creek. She followed it, trying not to make a sound, but her lungs heaved with each step. A woman who had never been on a Washington beach without flip-flops because the rocky shoreline was too jagged, Carol did her very best to ignore the pain in the soles of her bleeding feet and pressed on as fast as she could.

Where am I? God, please help me!

A dog or coyote howled somewhere far away, and Carol froze for a split second. She had no idea which way to turn. She looked up through the fir trees that surrounded her; the sky was indigo, the moon nearly three quarters full. She wished that the boy who had found her on that mattress had given her the flashlight. Had she managed to escape, only to wander aimlessly in the darkness of the forest?

She fought down a wave of panic. Only one direction made sense: forward. Away from where she came.

She was sure that her captors were searching for her.

The white-blue spectrum of light confused Carol, burning her eyes as it bore down on her. She was weak. Terrified. Disoriented. She’d had nothing but strawberry gelatin since her capture, and she couldn’t think clearly enough to comprehend what she was seeing. A light from God? Had the moon crashed into the roadway?

As the headlights of the car came closer and the sound of the engine and tires on asphalt grew louder, a wave of recognition broke over Carol, and she started to wave frantically. She no longer cared about modesty; the fact that she was naked meant nothing to her now. She just wanted the car to stop and take her away from there.

“Help! Please! Help!” she said, her voice growing in volume with each word. “Help me!”

The car slowed, and then swerved slightly to avoid her. The taillights went bright red, and the driver pulled over to the side of roadway, forty yards from where Carol stood motionless for a second, her eyes still blinded by the brightness.

A plume of exhaust pulsed as Carol ran toward the car.

Gravel flew as the driver accelerated.

“Don’t leave! Don’t go!” she cried out, tears flowing down her cheeks.

The car disappeared over the hill. Help had vanished.

Carol was crying, wondering if what was happening to her was real or a terrifying dream. She dropped to her knees on the roadway, gravel digging into her skin as she cried out for help.

Why didn’t that car stop? Why didn’t the driver save me?

A beat later, she heard the squeal of brakes. The driver had turned around and was coming toward her. Thank God! She was going to be saved. The headlights were trained on her then, and she squinted, shivering and crying. She was going to be saved. The car stopped, and she blinked in the intensity of its high beams.

Chapter Forty-nine

March 27, midnight

Port Orchard

On Saturday night, while her parents were at the Clearwater Casino in Poulsbo, Paige was stuck babysitting her younger brother in the Wilsons ’ home on Beach Drive in Port Orchard. Foamy water curled and smacked against a stone bulkhead as she watched a ferry go to Bremerton. It wasn’t the last boat of the night, but she was sure it was full of people who’d been out partying in Seattle. They were the lucky ones. They understood that the world was a bigger place than Kitsap County.

Paige turned off the floodlights that illuminated the thin edge of the shore. Whenever her parents went out to gamble, it was a sure bet they’d be home very, very late. If she didn’t have to watch her little brother, Kerry, she could slip away and party with the rest of her friends. It didn’t seem fair. She’d done everything right. Good grades. No drugs. And a beauty queen to boot. Yet, as she lay on the couch with HBO flickering over the flat-screen TV, she couldn’t help but wonder if she’d end up stuck in Port Zero for the rest of her life.

She popped on her Facebook account and posted some comments on her friend’s “wall.”

Watching the brat again! I hate him! I hate this town! LOL!

Later, her phone pinged with a text message from a number she did not recognize.

YOU EVER DO ANY MODELING? HAVE A LEGIT AGENCY. WOULD LIKE TO TALK.

Paige answered with the speed of a practiced teenage two-thumbed texter.

U R GROSS.

He answered, CALL ME.

I M NOT STUPID, she texted back.

YOUR LOSS. BYE.

The HBO special she was watching about life in a house of prostitution concluded, and Paige went off to bed. As she pulled up the slippery satin duvet, she heard the ping of her cell phone once more.

It was a new text from the supposed modeling agent:

DIDN’T MEAN TO BUG YOU.

She texted:

OK. NO BIGGIE.

STILL THINK YOU COULD BE A MODEL. GOOD LUCK TO YOU.

Paige slipped under the covers. It was after 1 A.M., and the house was deadly quiet. She’d checked on Kerry, and he was asleep, butt up in the air. The cat was out for the night. The dishwasher had cycled. It was the same as any other Friday night. She wondered if every other Friday night for the rest of her life would be the same. Sure, she’d get older. She’d go out on her own. She figured that her Fathoms scholarship would get her nothing more than a quarter at Olympic Community College in Bremerton. The only way out of the town was either to get pregnant by a boy whose family had money or something totally unexpected taking place.

She picked up her cell phone and pushed the call feature for the number of the man who had offered her what she hoped was her golden opportunity.

A ticket out of town.

Paige didn’t tell anyone about the contact with the agent. She didn’t want to hear anyone say that the Fathoms o’ Fun crown had caused brain damage. She remembered what a boy at South Kitsap had posted on Facebook when she won the pageant:

Paige Wilson is a Port Orchard “ 10,” but that’s a Seattle “ 4”!

She would prove them wrong. All of them.

Melody Castile looked one last time at the home page that she and her husband had put up with images of young, pretty women they’d pirated from the Internet. She knew it was as easy to erase as it had been to create. A gallery of women with pearly smiles, streaked hair, and big dreams had been search-and-click-easy to find. It was a hidden site, the kind that could only be found if a link was provided. No search engines picked it up. Password protected and accessed by approved readers, it was a phantom Web site. A trap.

Melody hit the delete button, and Dantastic Models was no more.

Although no one knew it, neither was Paige Wilson.

The Poplars Motel was a few blocks south of the Kitsap Mall in Silverdale. If there had been any poplars at one time, they’d been replaced by a rotating assortment of the kinds of businesses that populate strip malls off major thoroughfares: teriyaki huts, copy centers, bridal boutiques, and the like. Paige Wilson had heard of casting calls taking place in motel and hotel rooms, so she thought nothing of the request to meet at one. She’d talked to the woman who ran Dan Prendergast’s agency, Mercedes, and she indicated that Dan was based in Oxnard, California, and would be in the Kitsap area only for two days.

“Dan saw your photo on the Lighthouse Web site,” she said. “Always looking for fresh faces.”

“I was a little concerned,” she said, “but I went to your site and saw that he represented a lot of different girls.”

“Oh, yes. One of our girls might be on America’s Next Top Model next season,” she said.

Mercedes asked if she’d be coming with her parents or a chaperone. “No worries if you do,” Mercedes said. “Just, sometimes they get in the way. Good intentions can ruin things. Not everyone understands the process. No nudity, of course, but some of the shots will be slightly provocative. Wholesome but sexy.”

Paige understood where Mercedes was coming from. She felt Queen Mother Maggie Thompson would put a halt to things before they got started, saying that modeling was not in keeping with the Fathoms image. Her parents, on the other hand, would tell her to get her head out of the clouds and focus on reality.

Maybe a job at Wal-Mart?

“Bring your laptop,” Mercedes said. “That way we can download some test shots right away.”

Paige played the conversation over in her head Sunday afternoon as she pulled her red beater Datsun into the parking lot of the Poplars. There was no risk. Mercedes sounded so nice. At the worst, she’d get some test shots that she could upload on her Facebook when she got home.

“Paige?” a voice called out as she emerged from her car.

“Yes?”

“I’m Mercedes. Dan’s running late. He’s at Red Robin having lunch. We’re supposed to go meet him there.”

Paige started for her car.

“We can take mine,” Mercedes said. “We’re coming back here anyway to take test photos.”

Paige looked admiringly at the silver yin-and-yang necklace that hung from Mercedes’s neck.

“It’s special, isn’t it?” Mercedes smiled.

Paige reached over and touched it. “I’m a silver girl too,” she said.

“My husband bought it for me. Handmade. I just love the things he does for me.”

“You’re lucky,” Paige said.

“We all are,” she said, not meaning a word of it. “Lucky as can be.”

Paige Wilson craned her slender neck. “Hey, I think you missed the entrance to the Red Robin,” she said.

“Oh, dear,” Mercedes said. “I’ll turn around up ahead.”

Paige shrugged. “No problem.”

The car pulled into an office park that had been built to resemble the feed silos of a farm and circled around the empty buildings.

Paige crinkled her nose. “What’s that smell?”

“Just a second,” Mercedes said.

From behind the passenger seat, a hairy hand with a chloroform-soaked cloth came at her.

There was no struggle.

With the exception of Midnight Cassava, there hadn’t been much of a struggle with any of them. Celesta had fought a little. Skye had fallen into darkness with the second breath. Midnight had put up a tough-chick fight by the elevator. That had been messy. Carol had slumped like a sack of flour to her garage floor. And now Paige Wilson looked like she’d fallen asleep after a long car trip.

Melody turned in her husband’s direction as he returned the cloth he’d used to subdue Paige to a Ziploc bag. He was grinning, and she knew she’d pleased him. Still, she had to ask anyway. His approval meant everything.

“Are we good, babe?”

“Always. Let’s go back to her car. You can drive it home. I’ll take her.”

Kendall Stark smoothed out the wrinkles in the pale blue blanket that enveloped Cody as she tucked him in. The blanket’s edges were frayed, and she noticed how Steven had repaired it with iron-on batting tape. She wondered when he’d done that. She wondered if the case that was ripping her apart had stolen other small moments of family life that she’d never even known about. All she could think about was the Cutter. Her mind was swirling with the thoughts of the case, the missteps she’d made, the anguish she’d been unable to lessen. As her son’s sleepy eyes began to shut, she thought about his innocence-and the innocence of those who’d died at the hands of the serial killer. He was unaware of the evil of the world. That was, she thought, a beautiful thing.

The one gift that autism had given him. The only gift.

With Cody asleep, Kendall kissed his warm forehead and headed toward the door. The evenings always went like that. Her phone buzzed, and she ignored it.

Serenity snapped her phone shut. In a way, she was relieved that Detective Stark hadn’t answered. She’d make up an excuse if Detective Stark asked her later why she’d called. In the split second it took for her to push her speed-dial and get the detective’s voice mail, she’d begrudgingly found herself sliding down a slippery slope.

She’d never forgive herself for doing so.

The odd voice who’d called her moments before had said only sixteen words:

I’m going to pick up your little beauty queen and take her for a test ride.

It was a threat. And a chillingly specific one at that.

Chapter Fifty

March 29, 7 p.m.

Port Orchard

Deana Wilson was fuming in her granite slab kitchen. She and Brent, her land-use-planner husband, had dinner plans at the Boat Shed in Bremerton, and Paige was nowhere to be found. Deana had received a text message from her daughter the day before, indicating she’d be spending Sunday with a girlfriend, then going off to school the next morning.

At forty-two, Deana was a gorgeous woman with a sophisticated bob haircut and teeth so white, they glowed in the dark. Her beauty had been passed on to her daughter. Thankfully, for Paige, not her self-centered tendencies.

You can be so thoughtless, Paige! Deana thought as she paced the cream and sand living room. You should have been home hours ago!

She called a number of Paige’s girlfriends, but no one had a clue where the teenager was. Next she took a seat on a kitchen bar stool, looked out at the rippling wake of a passing ferry, and dialed Maggie Thompson. Deana told her that Paige hadn’t come home from school and how she’d repeatedly tried her cell, but there had been no answer.

“I’m sorry, Maggie, I’ve checked the calendar, and I don’t see any Fathoms event for today.”

“We have one scheduled for Olalla Elementary a week from Monday,” Maggie said. “That’s up next. Nothing today.”

“I have that one marked down,” Deana said, looking at the Currier & Ives calendar that hung by the corn-yellow wall phone that Brent had never got around to taking out when the family went cellular. Deana made a mental note to remind him to take care of it. A phone was not a kitchen accessory unless it was a charming antique. A corn-yellow wall-mounted Princess phone missed that mark by a mile.

“Did you try Danica and Taylor-Marie?” Maggie said, referring to the two Fathoms princesses. Danica Moses had been the batik artist, and Taylor-Marie Ferguson had read the haikus.

“Yes, I called them first. They have no idea where she is.” For the first time Deana let a tone of worry enter the conversation. “Maggie, they told me that they didn’t see her in school today.”

“Don’t fret. I’m sure she’s all right. I’ve worked with a lot of these girls, and they can get pretty touchy. It isn’t easy being a queen, you know.”

It was a not-so-sly reference to the fact that Maggie had once held the title herself.

“I know,” Deana said. “But honestly, that girl can be so insensitive. She’s so selfish.” She paused. “You know what I mean.”

Maggie sighed into the phone. “Yes, I do. Not as bad as 2003, but our Queen Paige is giving us a moment or two.”

Deana Wilson thanked Maggie and hung up.

Queen or not, when she gets home, Paige is going to get it, she thought.

An hour later Brent came home and immediately dialed the Port Orchard Police.

“You know something, Deana?” Brent said, while shaking his head as they waited to give a description of their missing daughter. “If she’s run away, I’m going to blame you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you.”

Brent couldn’t stop himself. “If there’s a more self-centered mother on the planet, I haven’t seen any evidence of it. Just so you know.”

Deana averted her gaze.

A twinge of shame with a capsule dose of reality?

She didn’t say a word.

Kendall carried her phone away from the sofa where she, Steven, and Cody had been curled up, munching buttered popcorn and watching a DVD. She hated the intrusion of a phone call, but it was urgent and it was Josh.

“Heads up on a missing girl,” he said.

She slowly let the air leak out of her lungs as she got up and walked to the privacy of the kitchen. “Oh no. Tell me.”

“This year’s Fathoms queen, Paige Wilson. Parents don’t know if she ran away or what. Port Orchard Police are working it but want an assist.”

“When?”

“Yesterday.”

“Sunday,” she said.

“Right. That’s what I thought.”

“Nothing for us tonight. But tomorrow, first thing, we can give the Port Orchard guys a hand.”

Kendall went back to the TV, and Cody took his place in her lap.

“Everything all right?” Steven asked, knowing by the look on her face it wasn’t.

“We don’t know. Might be looking at another victim.”

Steven showed his concern by patting her hand.

“Jesus, babe,” he said softly.

She nodded and put her fingers to her lips. She didn’t want to talk about it just then. It was all she could think about, though. Whatever was showing on the TV was invisible to her.

If Paige Wilson had been taken by the Cutter, her nightmare had only just begun.

It beckoned. The tiny tear in the aluminum foil over the window was an invitation to do what he’d been told never to do. It took about thirty seconds to decide to once more break one of the biggest family rules. Max Castile wasn’t tall enough to see through that window without a boost, but he was smart enough to roll the wagon his father had him use to haul wood next to the mobile so he could step up to see what was making those noises.

To see for sure what he imagined was going on inside the mobile.

Max climbed up onto the wagon. It teetered as its wheels sank into the damp soil. He squinted. Getting a good look wasn’t easy. It was frustrating. It was like trying to line a thread through the eye of a tiny needle. He moved his head from left to right to try to capture what it was. He could make out his father’s beefy frame, naked save for a black hood over his head. Tattoos from his tour with the Navy, an anchor and a dagger that curled around his shoulder, were shiny with sweat. Seeing his dad like that seemed so wrong; he averted his eyes for a second. He could make out another leg, also naked, but he could not see who it belonged to.

“No,” came a muffled whimper.

Max just stared, his eyes glued to the fragments of flesh he could see move in and out of the view through the slit in the foil.

They looked like the menacing figures on the magazines he’d seen in the Navy footlocker.

Max twisted his neck and pressed his face against the glass, looking at the figure on the mattress. His heart rate quickened as the boy processed what he was seeing. He climbed off the wagon and went toward the house.

Chapter Fifty-one

March 30, 9 a.m.

Port Orchard

It was slightly foggy when Kendall Stark showed up at Maggie Thompson’s two-story wood frame house on Baby Doll Road, up Mile Hill Road from downtown Port Orchard. The queen mother had been in the middle of a quilting project when she answered the door. She carried strips of aqua and green pieces of fabric in her slightly nicotine-stained fingers.

“The piece I’m working on for my grandson is called ‘Under the Sea,’” she said, leading Kendall into a living room cluttered with fabric, batting, and a large tracing that laid out the scheme she was following, a quilt depicting King Neptune and various sea creatures in gaudy hues.

“Pretty,” Kendall said, gently scooting aside a stack of rumpled material to take a seat on a tan leather recliner.

Maggie grinned, her teeth a buttery yellow. “I won a rosette last year at the fair, so I’m pretty good at this.”

“I can see that,” Kendall said, indicating the gold and blue ribbon hanging above the jumbled fireplace mantel. Before Maggie could launch into quilting tips, Kendall quickly turned to the reason she’d called for an interview appointment.

“Did Paige say anything to you that will help us find out where she’s gone?”

“At first I figured she just skipped school and went to Seattle for the day. A lot of these kids around here do. They complain about how boring Port Orchard is and how there’s nothing to do. Boring here, you know. Pepsi?”

“No thanks,” Kendall said as Maggie popped open a can of diet soda. “If she was bored, did she say where she’d go?”

Maggie shook her head. “Look, I’ve been doing this Fathoms gig for years, and one thing I’ve learned is, you can’t trust these girls one iota. Over the years they’ve gotten more and more deceptive. They say they care about the homeless, the environment, and what have you. All they care about is getting some money and being able to brag they were a beauty queen.”

Maggie Thompson was on a roll, and Kendall just leaned back and let the woman go on.

“Paige was a phony. I guess they all are. I honestly don’t know why I bother carting them around, getting them to look classy, when they’re just some backwater girls with no ambition. Not like Shelly Monroe.”

Kendall knew Shelly Monroe. She was the Fathoms Queen in the late 1970s and used it as a springboard to a semi-successful television career. She’d been a weather girl in Seattle for a few years before landing a long-running gig on a game show on which she rolled oversized fuzzy dice. She had even written an autobiography called Double or Nothing: My Life in the Wacky World of Game Shows.

“Not everyone is a Shelly,” Kendall said.

“I get that. But honestly, the girls of the last ten years or so seem to think that everything should be handed to them. They want this. They want that. Their constant requests are so tiring, and there’s no end to them. Can you tell I’m a little burned out?”

Kendall nodded in agreement. “Yes,” she said, steering the subject back to the reason she was there. “Let’s talk about Paige. Had she said anything at all to you to indicate a problem? Boyfriend troubles? Something she was planning on doing? Anything at all?”

Maggie sipped her soda and thought for a moment. “I heard her talking to Danica, one of the other girls, about how she wanted to do some modeling. I think she signed up for an agency online…”

Danica Moses was still bitter that she’d been first runner-up in the pageant and made no bones about it when Kendall found her at her job at the Wendy’s restaurant in the Wal-Mart parking lot on Bethel Avenue. She was a pretty girl with brown eyes and long cinnamon hair that she wore in braids she’d twirled together herself. She wore a blue polo shirt with the word TRAINEE embroidered over the left breast in flamboyant script.

She sat with Kendall in a booth near the salad bar.

“I took my duties seriously,” she said. “Paige didn’t. That’s the truth. She didn’t care about winning the title, and I’m glad that she showed her true colors by skipping out.”

“You don’t seem to like her much, Danica.”

Danica looked over at her boss, an Indian with piercing dark eyes that reminded her that, despite the police interest, she was still on the clock.

“Don’t get me started. She just thought she was better than this town, that’s all.” Danica looked around. “Do you think she was even that pretty?”

Kendall wasn’t there to discuss whether there should be a do-over of the Fathoms Queen pageant. “Pretty enough to win, I guess.”

Danica made a face. It wasn’t the answer she was hoping for. “Well, I love this town,” she said, catching another glimpse of her boss. “I love this restaurant. I would have served my time as Fathoms Queen before doing anything to harm the good name of Port Orchard.”

Serve her time? Was being a beauty queen like being a prisoner?

“Maggie Thompson told me that you and Paige talked about a modeling opportunity.”

Danica’s face went scarlet. “It wasn’t like that. I wasn’t interested in being a model. I want to go to college and get a nursing degree. I actually care about people. Paige was all about the easy way out of Port Orchard. She found some modeling agency on the Internet. I saw it on her laptop. I asked her about it. She didn’t say much.”

Danica seemed antsy, as if she had to use the restroom or get back to work. Kendall figured the latter. The boss was drumming his knuckles on the gleaming countertop.

“Well, then, what did she say?”

“Not much. Like I said,” Danica went on, “she bragged a little like she always did. She thought that she was so much better than the rest of us because she won first place. She picked out an ugly crown, if you ask me.”

Kendall hadn’t. “Did she say she was going off to meet anyone?”

“No, she didn’t. I expect she wouldn’t tell me that anyway. You know, in case things didn’t work out. I don’t think she trusted me.”

On her way back to the office, Kendall ate a hamburger she’d ordered off the Wendy’s dollar menu. It wasn’t that great, but it certainly wasn’t overpriced. If Paige Wilson had gone off to Seattle to meet with a modeling agent, she’d come home soon enough. There was no way to check her laptop to determine which Web site Danica had seen when the two girls were talking about Paige’s modeling plans.

Kendall learned from Josh that Paige Wilson’s laptop was missing, along with her cell phone and car. Skye’s cell phone had been missing too. She wondered if there was some connection.

Or if she was merely grasping at straws.

Chapter Fifty-two

March 31, 1 p.m.

Vashon Island , Washington

The water was corduroy as bands of blue and gray etched the surface of Colvos Passage, the mile-wide stretch of Puget Sound that separates Kitsap County from Vashon Island. The island’s western side is a sparse mix of beachfront cottages and farmhouses facing an equally rural southern Kitsap County. Robert Carmichael and his sister, Leah, were bored out of their minds as they took a break from their grandparents’ place up the hill from Lisabeula, a park that had once been a campsite for Scouts and Native Americans long before Scouting was anyone’s idea of fun. The teens hiked down the steep road along a creek to the five-acre park. Fifteen-year-old Robert was hoping to get a glimpse of a pod of whales, as he had during the dull visit the year before. Leah, almost fourteen, didn’t care what they did. Their grandmother had been on Leah’s case for text messaging when she should be “engaging” with human beings.

Grandma didn’t get it.

They followed a trail to a madrona tree that had slipped down the hillside, its red bark rubbed off, leaving a green and brown indentation where others had tied a rope swing. During a hot summer’s high tide, it was the perfect setup for swinging and jumping into the water. The tide was out, and the wind coming down from the south brought a brisk chill. March was a far cry from summer weather.

Robert grabbed the rope, stepped up on the big knot at its base, and gripped another knot above his shoulders.

“Watch this,” he said, looking over at his sister, who was frustrated with her Sidekick.

“There’s no signal here. This sucks,” she said.

“So what? Engage with people, remember,” Robert said as he started to move over the beach toward the water.

“If you were a person, I might.”

Robert kept going as his sister dug her feet into the rocky beach, a disinterested gaze on her face that she’d perfected. He caught a glimpse of something red next to a silvery and gray remnant of a fir.

“Over by that driftwood,” he said, “someone left a backpack. Check it out.”

“Last time we found a dead harbor seal here,” Leah said. “Anything would be a step up from that stinky thing.”

She got up, put her phone in her back pocket, and walked over to the log. She bent at the knees to get a closer look.

“Hey, it’s a purse. It’s been out in the water. Not as gross as a dead seal, but not so great, either.”

Robert jumped off the rope swing and landed with a thud, his feet digging two deep holes in the gritty beach.

“Let me see. Could be some money in it.”

“If there is any, you better split it with me.”

Robert shot his sister a dirty look. “If there is any money, we’re going to give it back to the owner, stupid.”

“I hate you, Mr. Perfect. Whatever.” Her eyes widened all of a sudden. “That’s a Dooney,” she said as her brother picked up the soggy red leather purse.

“A what?”

“Dooney & Bourke.” Leah squatted next to Robert, who hadn’t a clue as to what she was saying. “An expensive purse. Too bad it’s ruined.”

He undid the clasp and dumped the contents of the purse onto a flat space atop the driftwood. A makeup brush; a lipstick; a pair of sunglasses; a set of car keys on a circular key fob with the DB logotype on it; a soggy packet of tissues; a tampon that had done what it was supposed to do-absorb liquid; a hairbrush; a tin of Altoids; a Mont Blanc pen; and a wallet that matched the red leather of the purse.

Leah didn’t bother telling her brother that the pen was expensive too.

“Not much here,” Robert said, opening the soggy wallet. “No money.”

Leah started to put her earbuds back in place. “That sucks too.”

From behind a clear plastic shield, fogged from the elements, the teenage boy retrieved a driver’s license. Although the photo had flaked off, the name was still legible: CAROL GODDING.

“Let’s head back to Grandma’s,” Robert said. He scooped up the contents of the soggy purse and put everything back inside.

Leah scrunched her nose in an exaggerated manner. “You’re bringing that?”

Robert shrugged as they started up the hill. “You said it was expensive.”

“When it wasn’t waterlogged. Now it’s a piece of crap. But if you’re going to keep it, can I have the pen?”

Melody rubbed the interior of the freezer with a rag soaked in diluted bleach. There had been so much to do to get the place ready for the new girl-the new toy. She could hear her husband laugh as the girl in the next room begged for her life. She hated the sounds the playthings made. It wasn’t because she felt sorry for them; it was more out of embarrassment. She knew that no amount of pleading or begging could set any of them free.

Not until Sam had done what he wanted.

Not until she’d done what Sam commanded her to do.

The freezer gleamed, and she noticed that she had missed a spot of blood. She wiped it again. Gone…then back.

She noticed for the first time that her knuckles were bleeding.

“Damn you, bitch!” she called out. “You made me bleed. Daddy! She made me bleed!”

The moaning in the other room stopped.

Good, Melody thought. She shut up. Good girl.

The freezer sparkling clean, Melody set down her cloth and took a pair of brand-new steak knives from the Fun House’s kitchen drawer. She hooked her fingers through a spool of fence wire and started toward the bedroom door.

Sam summoned her from another room.

“Coming!” she called out.

Elizabeth Carmichael studied the kids’ find. A concerned look pinched her normally tranquil face as she considered the sodden purse, the pen, and the wallet her grandchildren had found on the beach near her Vashon Island home.

“Did you see anything else down there?” she asked.

“There’s nothing to see, Grandma. Just some water and seagulls. Real exciting.” Leah wanted nothing more than to have her grandmother send her to her room so she could listen to music and text her friends at home in Seattle ’s North End.

“Leah, this is serious. We need to call the police about this,” Elizabeth Carmichael said, going for her kitchen telephone. “I’ve heard this woman’s name on the news.”

Before she shrugged it all off and plugged her iPod earbuds back in, Leah couldn’t resist getting one more comment in. “Can’t we just take it to a lost and found somewhere on the island? You must have a lost and found around here somewhere.”

“We have no such thing,” Elizabeth said as she dialed the number for the King County Sheriff’s Office, which served the island with a small station and a couple of patrol cars.

“My grandchildren unearthed something on the beach at Lisabeula,” she said. “I think it belonged to that woman missing from Port Orchard. She was on the news. Carol Godding.”

After her grandmother hung up, Leah eyed the pen one more time.

“You’re not keeping that,” Robert said. “Get real, Leah. This stuff belonged to a woman who might have been killed by the Kitsap Cutter.”

Robert Carmichael watched the news too.

Kendall stood on the rocky shore and looked west across Colvos Passage to Kitsap County. A dog barked. Gulls swooped down into the wake of a green and white Foss tugboat towing a two-block-long boom of peeled logs toward Olympia or Tacoma. A deckhand tossed a cigarette into the water. Kendall had never been on that side of Vashon Island before. The view of the southern- and easternmost part of the county was somewhat deceptive. Million-dollar residences that aspired to look like Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard shored up the frontage along the passage. Those were the homes of the people of means; seldom were they visited by the likes of her and her badge.

A young King County deputy with a buzz cut pointed to the location where Robert Carmichael had indicated he’d found the purse.

“See that fan of roots?” he asked Kendall, pointing to a mighty old fir that had succumbed to the crumbling cliffs on one side of the passage or the other.

She nodded.

“Near the base of that.”

Kendall sighed. There was no chance that there was any more evidence. The tide was high. Everything that might have been a clue was submerged.

The deputy handed her the Dooney, sealed in a large clear-plastic bag.

“Anyhow, I hope this helps,” he said.

“Of course I do too,” she said, knowing Carol Godding was more than merely missing. In all likelihood she was, indeed, victim four.

The day after the quarreling brother and sister found Carol Godding’s purse, a Native American fishing crew dropped their nets in Colvos Passage near Olalla Bay, about a mile south of Lisabeula. The water, rippled shiny like corroded shellac on an old tabletop, accepted the weighted nets, and the men on the boat took a moment to kick back and pass the time. Fishing was always about waiting; and in the case of Native Americans, it was also about putting up with the glares and hostile looks of the fisherman on the causeway bridge who cannot match the catch of a net dropped into the blue. At about 4 P.M, it was time to reel in the curtain of nets.

“Pretty heavy,” one of the younger men said as the winch strained to lift a load of salmon.

“Maybe you snagged a deadhead,” another said.

“Not that bad,” the first fisherman shot back. “Just a good haul.”

Yet, it wasn’t a good haul. As the net broke the rippled surface of the passage, first a hand appeared, then the arm, and finally, the remainder of a nude and battered body.

Carol Godding had risen to the surface.

Chapter Fifty-three

April 2, 9 a.m.

Port Orchard

The nude corpse on Birdy Waterman’s stainless-steel table was not like the others who had been defiled by the Cutter. In fact, even those who profile such things would have discounted Carol Godding as a possible victim of the same man who had murdered Celesta, Skye, and Midnight. At forty-five, Carol was no ingénue. She might have been a lovely woman in life, but the waters of Puget Sound, the knotted fury of the fishermen’s nets, and, of course, what the killer had done to her had stolen that all away. However, the forensic pathologist also noticed two small scars behind Carol’s ears, indications that she had likely had a face-lift. There were also several tiny and recent scars running along her abdomen, the telltale signs of a tumescent liposuction procedure.

Birdy knew that Carol had recently gotten divorced. Birdy had never married herself, but she understood the reaction to aging. The need to halt it all before it was too late. Some women didn’t see themselves for the greatness they held but as a package, a vessel, that had been coveted by men. Carol Godding had likely spent the last few months of her life pulling out all the stops to get herself back in the game before a ruthless killer stopped her.

Birdy noted how Carol’s wrists and ankles were striated by wounds exactly like those of the other victims. She hated to use the gimmicky name for the perpetrator, but in seeing the teasing injuries made by a blade on Carol’s torso, Birdy had to admit that the Kitsap Cutter had struck again.

She took out the camera and started documenting the body as found. There was an indignity to the process, and Birdy knew it. A woman like the one on the table had been consumed with how she looked, how she was progressing in her personal makeover.

The one that would put her life back on track.

“You’re late,” Birdy said as the Kitsap County detectives entered the room.

“You started early,” Josh said.

“Reset your watch. I started on time.”

“Sorry, Doctor,” Kendall said, setting down her things and disappearing into the changing room. She kept talking through the cracked doorway. “We got held up by some media calls. Word is out about Ms. Godding being victim four.”

Birdy looked up from the body.

“Word is about right, I’d say,” she said.

As Kendall emerged in her pale green scrubs, Josh went to change. Again the door was kept open.

“This gal’s no spring chicken,” he called out. “What would a sexual sadist want with her?”

The two women looked at each other and shook their heads.

“This isn’t necessarily about sex but about the feeling that the killer gets from the pain that he’s causing,” Kendall said.

She also wanted to say something about how the victim on the table was younger than Josh was, by about six years, and he still considered himself hot stuff.

Yet, she didn’t.

As the three hovered over Carol’s remains, there was an unplanned moment of silence. Each took in what could not be ignored. The body had been pierced by a knife a total of fourteen times. The wounds had not been deep, no more than a quarter inch at best.

The stabbing had been part of the game.

“Did she bleed to death?” Kendall finally asked.

Birdy stopped taking pictures. “No. Look here.” She tilted the head slightly as she opened Carol’s blue eyes.

“Patriotic, this gal. Red, white, and blue,” Josh said, clever and cruel at the same time.

Neither woman commented on Josh’s second inappropriate comment of the hour.

“Petechial hemorrhaging,” Birdy said. “I expect the hyoid has been crushed too. This victim was manually strangled. No ligature marks.” The pathologist pointed at some bruising on the neck. “Look, you can see the fingertips here.”

“Looks like dirt,” Josh said.

Kendall peered at the skin. “I see them.”

Josh took a step closer. “Yeah, I guess so. But if she was strangled, that doesn’t fit the MO of the killer.”

“She was raped, wasn’t she?” Kendall said.

The pathologist made a nod of resignation. “I’ve swabbed. This perpetrator is careful, smart.”

She reached for her scalpel to do what the killer had done. The blade of her knife was not so different from the one that had tortured Carol Godding. Birdy performed a zipper pull, opening up the battered body.

Dr. Waterman fixed her eyes on Josh. “Just so you know,” she said, “if I see any of this report in the paper tomorrow, I’ll go to the sheriff and have you bounced off this case for good. You understand?”

Josh Anderson’s face went a little pink. “Look, Birdy, I’ve never compromised a case. Ever. I resent what you’re implying.”

“I’m not implying anything, Detective. I’m stating a fact. That’s what I’ll do.”

“Look,” he said. “I’ve never compromised a case for any reason, and you know that.” He looked at Kendall, maybe for support. She stayed mute.

“Josh, I end up with the result of what these maniacs do,” Dr. Waterman said. She looked over at Carol. “We have a serial killer working in our own backyard, and some of the things that have been in the paper could compromise what I think we both want: an end to this.”

“You know something, Doctor,” Josh said, dispensing with familiarity, “you couldn’t be more wrong.”

“I hope so,” she said. “I actually don’t mind being wrong now and then. I learn from it.” She was thinking of Celesta just then and how the early discounting of her disappearance as an abduction had delayed an effective investigation. She wished she could turn back the clock for all of them-Celesta, Skye, Marissa, Carol, and in all likelihood Paige.

With the skill that comes with practice, Birdy rolled Carol’s body over so that she could view the wounds on her back. She’d been sliced in four places, not deeply but teasingly shallow. She noted the locations on the body chart that accompanied every autopsy. It was a bald, alien-like figure that reduced the person to nothing more than an outline.

Carol’s skin was slightly gray, with the exception of the wound areas and some postmortem bruising on her shoulder blades. There, a couple of shiny specks glinted. Birdy looked closer.

Something was adhering to Carol’s back.

In the arsenal of equipment in her Rubbermaid tote, Birdy found a UV light. Turning it on, she ran the bluish beam over the body. Tiny particles pulsed under the glow.

What were they?

Painstakingly, the forensic pathologist collected each minute fleck, fifteen in total. They looked like pieces of fiberglass.

Kendall and Josh walked across the parking lot without speaking. Kendall couldn’t take her mind off the victim, and Josh couldn’t stop brooding over the lashing that Dr. Waterman had given him over his relationship with Serenity Hutchins.

Josh broke the silence. “She’s a good reporter,” he said.

“No one’s that good, Josh. Birdy is right. If you’re not blabbing case facts to her directly, then she’s digging into your stuff when you’re not around.”

“She’d never do that.”

Kendall lingered by the door. She wasn’t ready to go inside without telling Josh what everyone in the Sheriff’s Office was already saying.

“This is the biggest case we’ve ever had, and you’ve compromised it. Get it together, Josh. Someone out there is torturing and killing innocent victims. Your ego is of no consequence in the grand scheme of things.”

He didn’t reply. He knew she was right.

Josh Anderson dialed Serenity the first chance he had. She was at her desk, working on an article. The newsroom was mostly silent, and she almost resisted answering. Personal calls were allowed, of course, but things hadn’t been going well with Josh lately.

“I need to talk to you,” he said.

“I’m in the middle of something,” she said.

“This is serious, Serenity. Meet me.”

She looked at her computer screen and let out a sigh. “I guess so. Tonight?”

“No. Now.”

“Now?”

“I’ll be there in five minutes. See you out front.”

“Where are we going?” Serenity asked after getting into Josh’s idling BMW in the customer parking spot in front of the Lighthouse editorial and advertising offices.

“Nowhere. We just need to talk. But not here and not on the phone.”

He drove down Mile Hill and pulled into the mostly empty parking lot at the South Kitsap Mall behind the A &W.

He turned off the engine and turned to Serenity.

“Where in the world are you getting the information that you’ve been putting into the paper?”

“I’ve told you,” she said, coolly. “I have my sources.”

“I know. Who?”

“I can’t-or, rather, I won’t-say.”

“Damn it, Serenity. I got ripped a new one by Dr. Waterman today at the Godding autopsy. She thinks-everyone thinks-that I’m your goddamn source.”

“You know you’re not.”

“It doesn’t matter. Perception is everything. So tell me: Who is your source?”

Serenity looked out the window. She paused, considering. “I can’t say. Not for sure. But I think the guy who’s been calling me is the Kitsap Cutter. I mean, I really do think he is, Josh.”

“Jesus, are you sure?”

She looked back at him; this time her eyes flooded with tears. “I am. I really am. It scares the hell out of me too.”

Josh leaned closer and put his hand on her shoulder. “Who is it?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that he’s not finished. He told me that much. He says he won’t stop until he’s caught.”

To the right of her desk, Kendall had hung photographs of the Kitsap Cutter’s victims. While the brutality that each had endured indicated a specific type of sexually sadistic serial killer, the women themselves were a diverse bunch. They weren’t a collection of “throwaways,” as some media people characterize a victim like Midnight Cassava. Carol was an accomplished professional woman; Skye, a recent college graduate.

Kendall wondered if there was some similarity in their backgrounds that had attracted the Cutter to them, or if their selection had been completely random. She looked at Paige’s photo and retrieved her file. Why her? What had made her stand out? She read the article in the paper about her being crowned Fathoms o’ Fun Queen and how she was going to use her achievement to feed the homeless and embark on a career in the entertainment industry.

Her eyes wandered over Celesta Delgado, victim one, and then to her file. She studied the witness statements and Dr. Waterman’s autopsy report. Her hands had been expertly removed. Was the killer a butcher? Chef? An ardent hunter? She perused the article Serenity Hutchins had written when the partially clad body was found in Mason County. She recalled what she had learned about brush picking and saw the photo that had been published the previous summer showing Celesta as the hostess at the grand opening for the remodeled Azteca.

Victim two, Marissa, had also been profiled by the Lighthouse reporter, although less sympathetically than Celesta. Marissa’s mother had conceded that her daughter had had a “troubled” past, including arrests and convictions for prostitution and check kiting. Her head had been removed and the two parts of her body discarded in two different places, at two different times. The head in the box was meant to shock, which it did. She was found nude.

Skye Hornbeck, victim three, had been an adventure seeker-the opposite of Celesta, who had merely aspired to a cozy middle-class life with her future husband. Skye had been strangled and stabbed and was missing a necklace, but there was no way to tell if the other victims had had any personal effects taken by the killer.

Celesta’s engagement ring was presumably somewhere with her hand.

Marissa couldn’t hang on to any jewelry, hence the wrist tattoo of her daughter’s name.

All had been dumped in water. The killer surely had a boat. But so did a hundred thousand other people in the Seattle Tacoma area. Finding the right boat was like finding a needle stuck in the muddy bottom of Puget Sound.

Impossible.

There was no way she could stop herself. There was a kind of rush that came with reporting the news of a serial killer’s latest victims. Serenity Hutchins knew that some kind of evil being had anointed her to be the messenger of his deeds. The afternoon that Carol Godding’s body was snagged in the fishermen’s nets, she posted an entry on the Lighthouse news blog-there was no waiting for the print edition.

The posting was headlined:

CAROL GODDING’S BODY FOUND IS PAIGE WILSON THE KILLER’S NEXT VICTIM?

She wrote that while the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office had not made an official statement that the missing beauty queen was a victim of the Kitsap Cutter, she had it on “good authority” that they suspected as much.

A source close to the investigation indicated that Wilson is the fifth victim, and there likely will be others.

She didn’t say that the source was the killer himself.

Sam Castile read the blog and grinned.

“‘Close to the case?’ She has no idea just how close she is,” he said to himself.

Chapter Fifty-four

April 2, 8:35 p.m.

Key Peninsula

Kendall looked at the map pinned to her office wall. A casual visitor would not have understood the meaning of the red dots marking Little Clam Bay, Anderson Point, Lisabeula, and the Mary E. Theler Wetlands.

She and Josh had canvassed marinas all over Kitsap County and Gig Harbor in Pierce County. Each of those was marked with a gold star. The detectives knew that the person dumping the bodies was doing it from a boat. A lot of good that did them. Puget Sound was often referred to as the “Boating Capital of the United States.”

“You look intense,” Josh said after sauntering into her office, looking as if he were on vacation or about to climb onto a bar stool.

Without a care in the world.

Kendall was stressed and made no attempt to hide it. “Why wouldn’t I be, Josh? There’s a maniac out there, and everyone from the FBI to the Seattle PD thinks we don’t know what we’re doing.”

“We’re doing the best we can,” he said.

“Not good enough.” Kendall let it go. She didn’t want to get into it with Josh just now. It seemed that he’d let his personal life cloud his occasional good sense, and it irritated her. “Look, the killer is a boater. We know that. He has to moor his boat somewhere around here.”

“He could trailer it and launch it from a boat-ramp too.”

Kendall disagreed: “I don’t see how he’d have time to haul it in and out, dump a body, and get back to whatever rock he lives under.”

Josh sat down with his long legs stretched out. “People like that always find the time,” he said.

Again the noise beckoned. Max Castile thought he’d heard a small animal bawl from behind the mobile home, shrouded from view by a stand of native cedar and a hedge of black bamboo his parents had planted. He’d been admonished to stay away from the mobile “for safety reasons,” and he was the kind of obedient child who knew that when his parents said something, they meant business. From his bedroom window, Max could see into the detached garage. His father was crouched over his workbench, silhouetted by the fluorescent tubes that hung overhead on a pair of galvanized chains. As he looked into the garage, Max imagined that he had become a character in a video game and that his dad was some kind of metallic scorpion that he could take out with a blast of his laser. Sometimes he wanted to do just that. He tiptoed past the master bedroom, where his mother had fallen asleep holding a novel in her lap. The book rested in her hand as if she were about to turn the page.

The boy decided to go through the kitchen to get a flashlight. If his mom caught him there, he’d say something about needing a glass of water or being scared. Something she’d believe. The light was in the utility drawer next to the fridge. He slid it open slowly, quietly. Max fished out the flashlight and started to follow the noise across the darkened yard. It faded in the wind, and he stopped to listen.

Where is it coming from? What is it?

Nothing.

He picked up a large stick and waited for the noise again.

“Pleee-eee-se!”

Just as he thought: it was coming from the direction of the old mobile home.

Max checked behind him. No one was watching. His father had never bothered to skirt the trailer, so he crouched down low and looked to see if there was something caught under the structure.

“Pleee-eee-se!”

It was coming from inside the mobile home.

As Max reached for the door handle, a hand pulled at his shoulder and nearly knocked him to the ground.

“What are you doing here?”

Max spun around and faced his mother. Melody Castile ’s eyes were fierce with anger. It was a mom’s usual look of disapproval multiplied by a thousand.

Max blinked back tears.

“Mom, I thought I heard something.”

She gripped his shoulders and shook him. “What did your dad and I tell you? This place is not for you!”

“I’m sorry. I just thought…”

Without another word, she yanked her son back toward the house.

Paige Wilson had heard shards of the confrontation between mother and son as she lay on the mattress in her own filth. The duct tape that had been applied to her mouth had slipped off, allowing her to call out for help. As she rolled her head back on the mattress, Paige felt the familiar pressure of the bobby pins that held her crown to her head.

How had all of this happened? she wondered, retracing the text messages, the promises of a modeling contract, the meeting in the parking lot at the Poplars…and finally the smelly cloth going over her face before falling into darkness.

She tried to burn into her memory the last thing she had seen: a Department of Defense parking decal, silver and blue, with a beginning sequence of identifiers: D7D. She’d seen the familiar stickers her whole life. Whoever owned the car had been employed at the shipyard or maybe the submarine base at Bangor. Rental cars don’t come with DOD decals.

Whoever had her was not some modeling agent and his assistant from California. Lying on that mattress, in the middle of nowhere, she knew she was a long way from Top Model. A long way from anywhere at all.

She whimpered helplessly in the dark and tried to come to grips with her situation and think of how to get out of there.

Paige had been a virgin before she was captured and violated. She had told her friends otherwise, as if bragging about having had sex made her seem adult. She didn’t want to be called “the Virgin Queen,” so she’d made up a lie about a boyfriend at a prep school in Tacoma. Paige had been all talk. She’d let the float driver fondle her breasts once, but that was the sole extent of her experience with men.

Now she was cut, bleeding, and all but certain she was going to die.

After returning to the house and putting Max in his room for the rest of the night, Melody went to the garage, where Sam was washing out the inside of Paige Wilson’s car. He wore gloves and used a chamois that she’d purchased from a late-night TV pitchman. They’d laughed at how the pitchman could tout the uses they’d devised for his product. Certainly it could soak up soda pop from the floor, but it also did a good job obliterating fingerprints.

Sam stopped what he was doing. “What’s with you?”

“What’s with me? That’s a good one.”

“Are we playing games here, Mel? Because if we are, I’m missing something.”

Melody was tense, her arms folded across her chest, her hair matted against her sweating forehead.

“Max almost went into the Fun House. That little bitch we picked up was making some noise. You need to make her quiet.”

Her tone was indignant-she expected him to do something. Now.

“Oh, I need to?” Sam set down his dripping chamois. His eyes were ice, and the veins in his neck plumped with blood. “What’s the matter with you? You go shut her up. For good.”

“I don’t do that,” she said.

He jabbed a finger at her.

“You do as I tell you. That’s our deal, babe.”

Bernardo Reardon, the detective with the Mason County Sheriff’s Office who’d met with Kendall and Josh when Celesta’s body was a heap of waterlogged flesh the previous March, looked down at the report submitted by the state crime lab in Olympia. It had been among a batch of documents found in the trunk of a fired lab worker’s car.

It was unremarkable except for one small notation.

Trace analysis recovered distinct particles of marine fiberglass and sealant used by U.S. boat manufacturers prior to 1980.

He got Kendall on the phone in her office and told her what he knew.

“Basically, whoever dumped the body had an older boat,” he said. “All have been water dump sites, so I guess that’s no real news.”

Kendall thumbed through Birdy’s autopsy report on Carol Godding.

“Godding also had particles recovered from her shoulder blades,” she said.

“Maybe they’ll match.”

Kendall was thinking about the age of the boat.

“Almost thirty years old,” she said. “Can’t be too many of those around here.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Bernardo said. “I mean, a boat that old is not exactly a classic, you know, like a Chris-Craft.”

“Old, but not a classic,” she repeated.

Serenity allowed the thought to come to her, though she’d resisted it before. Sam Castile had a boat. An old one. Sam had a proclivity for bizarre, controlling behavior. Even Melody had said so. Serenity recalled the clues she’d seen at the log house when she and her parents had visited there. Something was strange. She’d recalled how Josh had asked her about the rolling pin and how she’d dismissed it out of hand.

Her heart pounding, she called her sister.

No answer.

“I’m sorry for bugging you about this, Melody. Don’t take it the wrong way. But I’m worried about Sam. He might be involved in something. Something bad.”

She thought better of leaving such a message and waited for the prompt so she could erase it. It felt good to have it out of her system. But no such prompt came.

Sam Castile held his wife’s phone to his ear and stared at her.

“We’re going to need to take care of the little bitch,” he said. “You hate Serenity.”

“Yes, I hate her,” she repeated.

“She’s always had everything that you wanted.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“I need to remind you, bitch, because you’re so goddamn stupid, you wouldn’t know how to do anything if I didn’t tell you how.”

It soothed her a little when he treated her like she was nothing.

“Your parents never understood you the way I do,” he said, turning around to measure her reaction. “They underestimated what you are and who you are.”

“I know. I know.”

He started toward the Fun House. “Taking care of her will not only stop her from asking stupid questions, it will be payback for everyone for what they did to you. Best of all, we’ll have a hot time doing it.”

He didn’t seem to care that in killing Serenity he was breaking one of his rules. Rules, he knew, were never meant for him.

Chapter Fifty-five

April 3, 2:10 p.m.

Olympia , Washington

Police in Olympia, an hour to the south and east of Kitsap County, found Paige Wilson’s red Datsun abandoned in front of a mystery bookshop in the historic downtown section of Washington ’s capital city. A traffic enforcement officer named Jerry had chalked it earlier in the day, but it wasn’t until the bookstore was closing that evening that someone noticed that the car wasn’t going anywhere. Police ran the tags and notified Kitsap County when they learned it was registered to a Brent Wilson and that there was a missing person hit out on the car. It belonged to a missing beauty queen, Paige Wilson, seventeen.

Early the next morning, Kendall Stark drove down Beach Drive to the Wilsons’ place to let them know their daughter’s vehicle had been recovered-and, more importantly, that there was no trace of Paige.

Deana Wilson was in the driveway when Kendall pulled in. She wore a pale blue bathrobe, and her hair was wet from the shower. She’d read the news blog and contacted everyone she could think of-the reporter, the editor, the sheriff-to see if it was really true.

“We can’t reveal our sources,” the Lighthouse editor had said.

“We don’t know where they got their information. We don’t have any information confirming your daughter was abducted by anyone,” was the canned response from the Sheriff’s Office.

Kendall had called to say she was coming by. The wary look in Deana’s reddened eyes indicated that she already knew the detective had not brought good news.

“I put our son on the bus a few minutes ago,” she said,. “I found myself just standing here, waiting, not wanting to go back into the house until you got here.”

Her face was pale, and her features, without makeup, seemed to recede into the anguish that consumed her.

“Let’s go inside,” Kendall said.

Deana nodded and led Kendall across a pathway of cedar rounds to the front door.

“You found her,” Deana said, without looking at Kendall. They walked to the kitchen, where her husband sat framed by the view of Puget Sound and the gray mottled trunks of a grove of alders.

“No, no,” Kendall said, acknowledging Brent Wilson. “We found her car.”

Brent, a man who almost never betrayed any emotion about anything, started to cry upon hearing the news.

“This is not good,” Deana said, gripping her husband’s hand on the kitchen table, where they’d seated themselves.

“We don’t know what it means,” Kendall said, trying not to offer false hope but not wanting to lie to the couple, who were already fearing the worst possible outcome.

“I know,” Brent said, pulling away from his wife. He’d composed himself by then. “It means that she’s gone. It means that she’s dead.”

Before Kendall could say a word, Deana let go of her husband’s hand and pushed away from the table.

“We’ve read the papers. We know that there’s some kind of freak out there.”

“That’s an enormous leap, Ms. Wilson,” Kendall said.

Deana gulped. “Then where is she?”

Kendall told her the truth. “We don’t know.”

“Please find her,” Deana said.

Kendall nodded. “We’re doing everything we can.”

After leaving the Wilsons ’, Kendall returned a call that Josh had made to her while she was inside delivering the news. He told her he’d received word from the state crime lab in Olympia. They’d expedited the forensic exam.

“We’ve got a whole lot of nothing on the car,” he said. “The interior is devoid of any prints, any blood, anything at all.”

“Not even a trace of Paige?”

“Right. They found one thing and one thing only. On the steering wheel they picked up some latex particles.”

“Gloves?”

“You got it.”

Kendall braked to a stop to allow a family of Canada geese to walk across Beach Drive to the water. “That tells us plenty, doesn’t it, Josh?”

“Yeah-that the perpetrator is careful.”

“We knew that. It also tells us the worst possible news. If we’d thought for one second that Paige might have run away, that’s out the window. No teenager is going to wipe her car, vacuum it out, and wear gloves while she’s doing it.”

“Nope,” he said. “No teenager’s going to vacuum her car-period.”

The geese safely out of the way, Kendall drove the winding road past the veterans’ home and toward downtown Port Orchard.

“You know it, and I know it, Josh. Paige Wilson is the fifth victim.”

“Probably, Kendall.”

“We have to find her before we’re too late.”

Josh let out a sigh. “We both know that if time hasn’t already run out, it will.”

Kendall first broached the subject of a pattern to the killings with Steven after Cody had been put to bed that Friday night. The dates associated with the case nagged at her. She sat on the edge of their bed with an eighteen-month cat calendar that she’d purchased for her mother but had never given her because it would only remind her that she didn’t know what day of the week it was most of the time.

She marked the dates that the Cutter’s victims had vanished, or were believed to have vanished. Every one had been on the far left of the calendar-a Sunday.

“Don’t ask me,” Steven said. “I’m an ad salesman, and I’ll buy just about anything.”

She smiled at him and knew that he was right about that.

On Saturday morning she went looking for Josh, whom she knew would be in the office. Despite the fact that he now had a girlfriend, he did not have much of a life. She found him once more by the coffeepot in the break room.

“Josh, there is a pattern here,” she said, pulling him aside.

He poured an avalanche of dry creamer into his cup and followed her.

“How so?”

“Sundays. All of the vics disappeared on a Sunday.”

She held out a sheet with the dates highlighted.

March 29 (Celesta)

April 26 (Marissa)

September 26 (Skye)

January 31 (Carol)

He looked interested but unconvinced. “I thought that Skye disappeared on a Saturday,” he said.

Kendall nodded. “Right. But maybe she wasn’t actually captured by the killer until Sunday. His day.”

“Are you thinking something religious here?”

“No. There’s nothing that this creep has said to anyone, left at any scene, to suggest he’s a religiously motivated killer. I’m wondering if it’s simply because it’s convenient for him to capture his vics on weekends.

“Because he’s not working.”

Kendall set down her calendar notes.

“I’ve thought that through. I’m thinking that Sunday is the day he captures them, but he really needs Mondays off. Monday is the day he gets himself together for the workweek. Since his killing has been intermittent, I’d say he doesn’t get every Monday off.”

“I hate Mondays,” Josh said.

If she was correct, Kendall knew that she could add another name to the list: Paige. She went missing on Sunday too.

Chapter Fifty-six

April 5, 4 p.m.

Key Peninsula

It was Saturday afternoon, and an Almond Joy was calling her name from the newsroom’s vending machine. Serenity Hutchins was poking around her desk for some spare change when she answered her sister’s call.

“I need you,” Melody said, in tears. “Can you come over?”

Serenity looked around. The newsroom was quiet. She was working on a background piece about Paige Wilson, the missing teenager.

“Now isn’t the best time,” she said.

“It’s about me and Max,” Melody said. “Something terrible has happened. I need you.”

Serenity stopped searching for quarters. She had never been close to her sister, but she adored Max. Melody sounded completely out of sorts.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“This isn’t the kind of thing I can talk about on the phone.”

“Well, give me an idea. I’m on deadline here.”

“I’m terrified, and I need my sister.”

The despair in Melody’s voice moved something in Serenity’s heart. She longed for a genuine connection with her sister.

“I’ll be there in an hour.”

“Don’t tell anyone,” Melody said.

The Castiles ’ gate had been left opened. Strange, Serenity thought, but a nice change from the usual inconvenience nevertheless. She loathed the damn gate, the faux cameras, and the motion detection lights that her brother-in-law had installed at the entrance to the property. She drove up the curving, rutted gravel driveway and parked in front of the garage.

Melody, dressed in dirty blue jeans and a cream-colored sweater, met her by her car door.

“Serenity, thanks for coming,” she said, each word an anxious gulp. “I really needed you, and you’re here.”

Serenity got out the car and embraced her sister. Melody had never been much of a hugger. Now, however, Serenity could feel her sister’s arms pulse as they wrapped around her shoulders. When she pulled back to look into Melody’s face, Serenity expected it to be wrought with emotion.

Yet Melody’s eyes were devoid of expression.

“What is it?” Serenity asked. “Where is Max?”

“He’s in the house,” Melody said. Her body was shaking and she made crying sounds, but nothing came from her eyes. Not a single teardrop.

“Where’s Sam?” Serenity looked around the yard, then turned to her sister again. “What’s going on? What did you want to talk to me about?”

“Serenity,” Melody said, “I want out of this marriage… I’m worried about Max. His father, you know, isn’t quite right.”

No argument there, but Serenity didn’t say so.

“I don’t know what to do,” Melody went on.

“You get a lawyer, that’s what you do. What happened?”

“I’ll show you,” Melody said. “Let’s go inside. I think I know what happened.”

Serenity expected her sister to lead her to the front door of the house, but instead Melody started in the direction of the mobile home.

“What’s in there?”

“I think that’s where it happened to him. I think Max was abused.”

Serenity felt her pulse quicken as they went down the moist dirt pathway through a stand of black bamboo.

“Oh, God! Are you sure?”

“I’m not sure. But I think you can help.”

“I’ll do what I can, of course.”

They walked down the moist dirt pathway.

Melody put her hand on Serenity’s shoulder, pushing gently as they went up the steps. “I found something. I’ll show you.” She opened the Fun House door so Serenity could go inside ahead of her. The interior was dark. Serenity noticed right away that the front windows had been covered with aluminum foil.

“I saw this done once in a pot-growing operation in Kingston,” she said.

A hand reached from the darkness and pressed a smelly cloth over her nose and mouth.

Chapter Fifty-seven

April 6, 9:50 a.m.

Port Orchard

Kendall Stark hung up the phone and turned to Josh Anderson. He’d assumed it was a media call into the Sheriff’s Office about the possibility of the Kitsap Cutter’s fifth victim, Paige Wilson. Kendall had used words like “off covering the beat” and “big story that needs care.”

She looked hard at him. “That was Charlie Keller,” she said. “He’s worried about your girlfriend.”

“What about her?” Josh asked, popping a starlight peppermint into his mouth.

“Says she didn’t show up for work this a.m. He even went to her apartment. No one’s there.”

He crunched the candy. “She’s a big girl.”

“When did you see her last?”

“I don’t know. Saturday morning, I guess. Hey, we’re not exclusive.”

Kendall shook her head. “Not that you seem to care, but I’m guessing that she’d rather be dead than have her editor write ‘Is Paige Wilson Victim Five?’”

“You’re right about that,” he said. “She’s all about the big story.”

“Keller says she said something about going out to her sister’s place.”

“Her sister is a piece of work. Good. Glad to know that she’s helping her.”

“Aren’t you worried?”

“ Kendall, what’s the big deal?”

“The big deal is that a woman who links all of our victims has gone AWOL. I’m guessing, Josh, you’d care more about her if you hadn’t slept with her.”

Josh’s face went a reddish shade. Kendall ’s words had stung. “I care,” he said. “We had a bit of an argument on Friday. I just figured she was cooling off over the weekend.”

The little boy with the dark, knowing eyes watched quietly as other children in the classroom took out well-worn crayons and started to follow the instructions of Sally Marshall, their teacher. Inside, he seethed.

“I want you to think about your favorite things,” she said.

“Like our dog?” another boy asked.

No one who saw Ms. Marshall would think she was anything but an elementary school teacher. A plain brunette, she never failed to wear the kind of cutesy attire that would appeal to small children. That Monday morning she wore a pair of iron-creased jeans, a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar, and a vest with an appliquéd tic-tac-toe board. The X’s and O’s were attached with Velcro.

“A picture of your puppy would be wonderful, Patrick, but how about a picture of your dog and you together?”

“I’m not a good drawer of people,” he said.

“Do your best. That’s what we all should do.” She hovered over a few of the kids before moving to the next row. The kids up front-Patrick, Jared, Ashton, Sonata, Mimi, and Gabrielle-were her favorites, and the other kids knew it.

Throughout the classroom, little hands began to draw. Some rendered images of family vacations. Mickey Mouse, or the approximation of some happy little rodent, appeared on at least two. Some girls drew rainbows and horses.

“After we finish,” the teacher went on, “we’ll have one of the class moms take them to laminating, and that way we can use them as placemats.” She stopped at Madison Foster’s desk. The little girl was drawing the picture of a house with a pointed roof, a brick chimney, and a row of fir trees.

“Maddie, that’s lovely. Where is that place?”

Maddie, a sullen girl with missing front teeth and a slept-on ponytail, looked up, her hand still moving the black crayon as she colored a curlicue of smoke.

“Ms. Marshall! That’s my house!”

The teacher put her hand on Maddie’s shoulder. “Oh, of course it is!”

The truth was far from the depiction on the paper. Maddie lived with her mother and four brothers in a single-wide mobile home at the end of a long driveway from the main road. Half the time there was no heat, and for sure there was no chimney. No row of fir trees. Just a front yard littered with appliances, a Frigidaire graveyard.

The teacher heard one of the boys in the back laughing, and she turned around. Jeremy Wagner was standing next to Max Castile’s desk and pointing.

“What’s that? You’re gonna be in trouble, Max. Here comes the teacher.”

Max looked up and threw his crayons to the floor, sending them rolling down the aisle. He flipped over his paper.

“Max, what in the world?” Ms. Marshall put her hand on her hips. “Why did you do that?”

Max didn’t say anything, but Jeremy jumped right in.

“Ms. Marshall, Max drew a gross picture!”

“Max, may I see your paper?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “You can’t. I don’t want to get in trouble.”

“Let me see it.”

Max, a boy never given too much emotion, started to cry. His tears only seemed to fuel Jeremy’s rant and the growing interest of other kids in the classroom.

“Max’s in trouble! Max’s gonna get a talking-to. Nasty picture. Nasty!”

Sally Marshall tugged at the corner of Max’s paper and eased it off his desk. She flipped it over and let out a gasp.

Slumped in a small, steel-framed, plastic-upholstered chair across from the receptionist’s impeccably buffed counter, the boy with tousled hair, brown eyes, and the shrunken countenance of a kid in trouble just stared at a map of the states. It was decorated with a border of presidential portraits that ended with William Jefferson Clinton. All matted fur and cheap yellow marble eyes, the school mascot, a stuffed lynx, gave him the evil eye.

It was not as good as the hunting trophies his dad had hung in the log house. Not near as convincingly alive.

He wasn’t sure what the principal and Ms. Marshall were saying, but he knew it was all about him.

And the voice, from the principal, was harsh, despite the attempt to keep his words low. “We need to reach his parents.”

“I’ve tried.”

“Obviously, Sally,” the principal said, “you’ve neglected to update the boy’s contact information with their cell numbers. People change their numbers about once a year. We’ll need to call the authorities. State law.”

“I know,” Ms. Marshall said, her voice now brittle. “I understand protocol.”

She emerged from the principal’s office and knelt low in front of Max.

“Honey, we’ve tried to reach your mom and dad, but no one’s home. Do you know where they are?”

The boy shrugged. “I dunno. My dad’s off on Mondays.”

“Do you know if they have a cell phone?”

He shook his head. “They have cell phones, but I don’t know the number.”

Composed now, the teacher spoke directly into Max’s eyes.

“Since we can’t reach your parents, we have to call the police to come in. They have people who might be able to help you.”

“What did I do? I didn’t mean it.”

She held out her hand. “I know. Let’s go and wait in the nurse’s office until the officers get here.”

“Is it because of what I colored?”

The teacher nodded. “That’s right. They’ll need to ask you a few questions about what you colored.”

The call came into the Sheriff’s Office at 1:03 P.M. A dispatcher logged the time and routed it to the investigative unit. Josh Anderson, who had made three calls to Serenity since the morning, looked at the blinking red light and swallowed a piece of black licorice that had made his front teeth the same color.

He picked up, but it wasn’t her.

Kendall watched as he scribbled a few illegible notes on a desk pad. As he always did. She’d seen him unfold an eighteen-inch paper and fight through his chicken scratches to come up with the answer a prosecutor sought. No BlackBerry notes. Not even a steno pad. Josh Anderson was too young to be so old-school.

She looked at the pad.

Max Castile, 8, sexual abuse. The words were circled for emphasis. She noticed another name on the paper: Trey Vedder, Port Orchard Marina.

“Josh, what’s going on?” she asked.

He looked up. “Teacher and principal reported a disturbing drawing. It falls under guidelines. They report, and we follow up.”

“What did he draw?”

Josh reached for his jacket. “Don’t know yet. Reporting teacher said was that it was sexual. I believe her exact words were ‘horrifically sexual.’ One thing you should know, Kendall…”

“What’s that?”

Josh looked worried. “The boy in question is Serenity’s nephew. A nice kid. I met him once.” He picked up his car keys and started for the hallway.

“Where are you going now?” she asked.

“I’ll follow up on the call that came in from the marina. Kid says he’s seen something ‘freaky’ down there. You handle the sex case. You handle those better than I would anyway, conflict of interest or not.”

Chapter Fifty-eight

April 6, 10:50 a.m.

Key Peninsula

Kendall Stark caught her breath when she laid eyes on Max’s drawing on top of Principal Al Judson’s desk. Judson was a stoop-shouldered man of about fifty-five with sparse white hair. He had the sour demeanor of a man with indigestion or one who longed for any other job than the one he held.

“You can see our concern,” he said.

“I do,” she said, meeting his gaze before looking back down at the paper.

It was a mostly black-and-white rendering, although there were splashes of red in three places. Max, who was left-handed, had smudged some of the imagery. It showed a woman supine on what Kendall figured was a bed. The drawing, with its mix of perspective, had a kind of surreal look. Next to the woman, at the foot of the bed, was a man standing. He was holding a knife. Like the woman, he was nude. Between his legs was a depiction of a penis.

There were splashes of blood on the blade and at the point where the female figure’s two legs converged.

“What’s with her arms?” she asked. “It looks like they’re tied above her head.”

“Sick, isn’t it?” Principal Judson said.

“If it is what we think it is,” Kendall said.

“Maybe it’s from a video game,” the principal said. “I know they have an Xbox, because the boy traded games and got in trouble for it.”

Kendall nodded at the possibility, although she’d never known an Xbox game to have such abhorrent imagery. She wondered if Cody had seen such things.

“Or maybe some porn he saw when an adult carelessly left the TV on,” Al Judson said.

“That’s more than porn,” Kendall said, her expression grim. “But I know there has to be an explanation.”

There was another detail that eluded the detective for a moment because it was so faint, as if it had been erased or smudged away.

The woman on the bed wore a crown.

Kendall said nothing more as she took the paper and rolled it into a tube. She put it inside a glassine bag and marked her initials, the date, and the Castile surname. She made her way toward Max in the nurse’s office.

Max looked on the verge of tears when he saw that she was carrying the drawing. His teacher had her hand on his shoulder.

“Everything will be all right,” she said.

He didn’t say anything.

Kendall patted the paper-covered examination table. “I need you to sit up here so we can see eye to eye. Okay?”

The little boy hopped up on the table, tearing the paper covering and looking embarrassed about the ripping sound.

“I didn’t do anything,” he said.

“Max,” Kendall said, “where did you get the idea for this drawing?”

Max looked away.

She didn’t want to lead him with questions designed to get a response that she could later use in court. Inside, she hoped that what Max Castile had drawn had absolutely no basis in reality. At least, not at his house. Maybe some kid had brought some filthy photo from home and he had drawn the image from memory.

“Who is the man?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

Kendall wasn’t getting anywhere.

She decided to press a little, “Is this something you’ve seen?”

“I don’t know.” He started to cry, and she lifted him off the table and held him.

“It’s okay,” she said softy. “We’ll take care of this. We’ve left messages for your mom and dad. We’ll all figure this out.”

Kendall went back into the principal’s office to call Child Protective Services. While she waited to be connected to a caseworker, she thought of the antique rolling pin that had been used as a device of torture and how the name Castile had come up in the case before. She knew that something evil had been going on in the Castile home, and the innocent little boy in the principal’s office had seen it.

Chapter Fifty-nine

April 6, 11:15 a.m.

Port Orchard

The headline on the front page of the Lighthouse, left on the dock by a boater, piqued Trey Vedder’s interest, which was unusual. The teen almost never read a newspaper or cracked open a book. The closest he ever came to a piece of paper was when he sat on the toilet or when he picked up trash around the marina. But then, as he sat smoking on a bench overlooking the marina, the headline of this particular piece of newsprint beckoned to him:

Marine Fiberglass Clue in Cutter Case?

The article, by Serenity Hutchins, related the news first announced by the Mason County Sheriff’s Office, then confirmed by Kitsap County ’s coroner:

Particles found on two of the victims indicate they’d been aboard a watercraft, most likely pre-1979, when composite materials were altered because of government regulations…

Trey dialed the Sheriff’s Office and, as instructed, waited. A half hour later, he stood and nodded in the direction of a well-dressed man who parked his BMW in front of the marina. It was Josh Anderson, wearing charcoal pants and an Eddie Bauer pullover. The investigator hurried in the young man’s direction.

“You Trey?” he said.

The teen stood. “That’s me.”

“You see something we should know about?”

Trey pointed to the article with a motor oil-stained finger.

“I don’t know if this is anything, but there’s one guy that kind of creeps me out. Follow me.”

The pair started walking down the ramp to the slips where a hodgepodge of boats-sloops and power, new and old-were moored. Barn swallows that had started nests in the covered moorage skimmed the glass of Sinclair Inlet. The air was heavy with the smells of diesel, creosote, and briny water.

Trey told the detective how he’d observed what he thought was strange behavior with a particular boat owner.

“He lied to me big-time last year. Said he was fishing when I knew he hadn’t been.”

Josh sized up the kid. He looked as if he’d skipped his weekly shave, the beginnings of goatee shadowing his chin.

“You mean poaching?” he asked.

Trey shook his head. “I mean lying.”

“I’m listening.”

Trey took a deep breath and started talking about the encounter with the bucket of bloody water, how the boat’s owner had taken the craft out the day before Carol Godding’s body was found in Colvos Passage and the same day Marissa Cassava’s headless body was recovered near Anderson Point. He checked the marina log against the dates in the newspaper article.

“I checked the harbormaster’s log on that,” he added. “He fueled up those days too. It’s right there in the log.”

There are lots of people who would like to help the police solve crimes; many are devotees of CSI and other series about forensics. Josh wondered if Trey was one of those people. Statistically, he was way too young. But with the way those kids at Sedgewick Junior High had put Skye Hornbeck’s photo on the Internet, there was no telling what young people would do for attention.

“I was working the night before that lady was found. You can check my time card.”

The kid hadn’t told him anything significant yet, and he was already planning a stint on the witness stand. “No need for that right now,” Josh said.

“Okay. But you can. Anyway, I was working that night and the skipper of that boat-” He stopped and pointed at the old cabin cruiser. “That’s the guy’s boat. The Saltshaker.”

The old Sea Ray wasn’t exactly a thing of beauty. Its hull was dingy, and the canvas covering over the stern was tattered and cracked.

“Anyway, he and his wife, and his boy were hauling something heavy-you know all wrapped up.”

“Yes,” Josh said, now prodding.

Trey shifted his attention back at the detective. “It looked like a body. You know, all wrapped up in a brown plastic tarp.”

Josh reached for a cigarette as they stood on the pier next to a NO SMOKING sign.

The teenager played with the zipper of his hoodie. “I asked Sam if I could help. I mean, they were struggling. He refused help. When they came back, the tarp was folded up, and they carried it off. I thought maybe they tossed some trash into the Sound. You’d be surprised how many do that.”

“I guess I would be,” Josh said, his interest swelling.

“I read the article today in the paper about the fiberglass. Fits that old piece of crap,” he said, looking once more at the boat.

You’re quite a detective, kiddo, Josh thought, but didn’t say so. “What’s this Sam’s last name?”

“ Castile,” Trey said. “His wife is Melody. She’s kind of a bitch too. But nicer than he is, that’s for sure. I felt sorry for their kid.”

Josh felt adrenaline course through his lean body. Castile. Melody Castile . Serenity’s sister and her husband.

Without taking his eyes off the boat, he reached for his phone.

“Kendall, you know how to get to the Castiles ’ place on the peninsula?”

“On my way now.”

“ Castiles have a boat. Kid here at the marina puts Sam Castile in the water when our vics went missing.”

Kendall turned her SUV sharply, nearly missing her exit on to the highway. “The Cutter doesn’t work alone,” she said.

“The wife’s part of it.”

“I’m afraid so. And, Josh, I’m afraid we’ll find Serenity there, too. I hope we’re not too late.”

Serenity, bound on a mattress, could feel the presence of another naked body next to her. It was a girl, a familiar face. Her blond hair was matted with blood. Her eyes were slits, fluttering slits.

It was Paige Wilson, and she was alive.

“Melody!” Serenity called out.

No answer.

She turned toward Paige and tried to nudge her with her shoulder.

“Are you okay?”

It was a stupid question, but in the moment, it was the best she could do.

“Paige, are you okay?”

Paige murmured something unintelligible.

Alive.

Serenity could not tell if it was dark or light outside. She could not be certain how long she’d been unconscious. Her wrists hurt. Her feet felt like they’d been weighted down with something.

“My pretty bitch,” came the voice from the foot of the mattress.

It was low, husky, and horrifyingly familiar.

“I’m going to enjoy you. And you’re going to enjoy me.”

She knew it was Sam.

“Melody, get me out of here. Your husband is a goddamn freak!”

There was no answer from Melody.

“It’s just you and me,” he said. “You’re the one I’ve been waiting for.”

He touched her inner thigh, and she screamed.

“I like a fighter. Carol was a fighter. Skye and the others, not so much.”

Serenity didn’t seek clarification. She knew who he was talking about. She started to speak to her sister, but she felt herself slipping into darkness. She fought it, but her strength failed her. As blackness came, she heard the sound of an electric drill pulse and saw the glint of a rhinestone tiara.

“She’ll have that crown on when they find her,” Sam said. She heard him fish for something in a box next to the mattress.

“I need two molly bolts, goddamn it,” he said. “Who has been messing with my stuff?”

Chapter Sixty

April 6, 2:40 p.m.

Key Peninsula

Kendall and Josh parked the SUV and BMW on the road outside the gate. They’d arrived at the location in the woods within moments of each other.

“The video cam is a phony,” Josh said, getting out if his BMW. “Serenity told me that Sam Castile is one of those guys who’s more into looks than reality. Wants the world to see him as some big deal instead of just an average guy.”

“Let’s leave the cars here,” she said.

The pair walked quietly along the bracken-fern-fringed driveway toward the log-built home. The scene was eerily quiet with the kind of heavy, oppressive stillness that comes in the spring when the Northwest’s cool marine air loses out to the season.

“Her car’s not here,” Josh said, looking around.

Kendall crept up to the glass panes of the garage door and peered inside.

“Oh,” she said in a whisper, “yes it is.”

The missing reporter’s familiar car was parked inside. Up in the rafters, Kendall caught a sliver of yellow.

Carol Godding’s canoe.

Inside the Fun House, a muted alarm had sounded.

Melody Castile peered out the window of the back bedroom, where she’d been reading a magazine. Sam had been firm in his demand that she should just sit and wait. He’d call her to the mattress when he was good and ready. No matter what she heard, the only command that she should heed would be his words to join him.

She looked through a hole scratched in the foil covering the window. She craned her neck. It was like peering through the scope of a rifle: She could see only what was directly ahead. There were no peripheral cues. She caught only a fleeting glimpse of the sheriff’s detectives and hurried down the hallway. She opened the door to the darkened room, where she found an oily and sweaty Sam next to her sister, now gagged with an athletic sock.

“Sam, someone’s here. The police, maybe-I don’t know. But someone’s here.”

The smell of the sex, oil, and sweat nearly made her vomit. For a second she felt a twinge of sorrow for Serenity.

But only for a second.

“Jesus, bitch!” Sam said, looking at her, then at Serenity and Paige. “Finish her!” He stood up, his penis erect and protruding from a leather getup, part jockstrap and part chaps, designed for the wearer’s pleasure alone.

“No,” she said.

“Prove your love to me, bitch.”

Melody hesitated, then took a step backward. “No, she’s my sister.”

“She’s a loser. You’re a loser. Deal with it. Do as I say! I’ll do the beauty queen.”

Melody stood frozen, no reaction on her face.

“Do you hear me?” He balled up a fist as if to strike her.

Not again. Not anymore.

There were three things she could do: She could run. She could fight him. She could do as she was told.

Serenity’s eyes were submerged in tears. She twisted her wrists and her feet, but she could hardly move. She was trapped. Her sister-her only sister-was standing over her with a box cutter in her hand.

“Cut me a piece of her,” he said.

“I…I…” Melody pushed the lever that extended the blade and dropped to her knees.

Chapter Sixty-one

April 6, 3 p.m.

Key Peninsula

There was a dark prescience, A sense of foreboding that frequently came with the job. Kendall had felt the fear of what they might find on the Castile property the instant she stepped out of her car. Guns drawn, she and Josh circled the rooms of the house in the woods. It looked so mundane. Hunting and fishing paraphernalia hung on the peeled-wood logs of the walls, but the rest of the décor seemed bland and so average. Like an average family lived there.

By then both investigators knew that Sam, Melody, and little Max were far from average.

They heard a crash coming from the mobile home on the side of the property, and they followed each other outside. Smoke streamed from a window.

“Calling for a fire unit,” Kendall said, making the notification.

“There’s no way any responders are getting out here,” Josh said, going for the garden hose. “Probably should let the dump burn,” he said.

Kendall went up the steps toward the door, which was ajar.

“Help me! Help me!”

The smoke roiled at her, and Kendall got down on her knees. She turned and called to Josh over her shoulder, “Someone’s trapped inside! I’m going in!”

Josh dropped the hose and ran in the direction of the mobile.

“Help!”

The voice belonged to Serenity.

As she made her way inside, Kendall heard the back door of the mobile slam against its cheap aluminum frame.

“Josh! Go around the back! Castile is making a run for it!”

Kendall began to cough from the smoke, but she crawled deeper into the mobile. Accelerant of some kind had been used to set the fire. The fumes were from gasoline or turpentine. She’d recalled the workbench she’d seen while peering into the garage: rows of paint, bales of wire, nails, cleaning solutions…She put her hand over her mouth and nose to stifle her choking, but the smoke was already inside her lungs. She was sure that if she started hacking, she’d have to stop, and whoever was trapped would surely die.

Where was the fire unit?

“We’re in here!”

This time the voice was not familiar.

Crawling on the floor under the blanket of black, acrid smoke, Kendall propelled herself in the direction of the back bedroom. In the dim light, she made out the figure of a woman frantically trying to free another from bondage.

“Dear God,” she said, “are you all right?”

“Please, get us out of here!” Serenity screamed.

Melody, whose face appeared bloodied, shouted, “Get all of us out of here!”

For the first time, Kendall noticed that Serenity was not alone on that mattress. The body of Paige Wilson, curled in a ball, was next to her.

“Oh, God,” she said. “Paige! Can you hear me?”

Kendall helped Melody undo the straps that pinned Serenity to the mattress. Finally free, the reporter got on her hands and knees, then pulled herself up and stood. Her mouth moved, but nothing came out at first-it just opened and closed without emitting a sound. Her body was red with blood, but she had not been cut. Dried tears streaked her cheeks.

Kendall, tears rolling down her cheeks, hooked her hands under Paige’s arms and started to drag her.

“Help me!” she said to Melody, who stood still in the thickening smoke.

“Oh, yes,” she said, grabbing Paige as Serenity stumbled in front of them.

The four made it outside, heaving and coughing, their eyes stinging from the fumes. Kendall removed her jacket and put it over Paige, checking her pulse.

Good.

She felt the teenager’s rib cage rise and fall with her breath.

Alive.

Paige’s eyes fluttered, and she moaned. Her face was scratched, her body red and sore from the ordeal, the terror of which, Kendall knew, would never, ever leave her.

On either side of her forehead two X’s had been inked with a Sharpie.

They watched the conflagration blow out the mobile’s windows as it sent a toxic black tower roaring into the treetops. Kendall retrieved a blanket from a porch swing and wrapped it around Serenity’s shoulders. The reporter still had not said a word.

Her sister was another matter.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I had no idea Sam would do this. I had no idea about any of this! I thought it was some kind of game.”

Kendall looked up from where she knelt beside Paige.

“A game? What kind of game leaves four women dead?”

Melody was making crying sounds, but no tears dripped. “Look, you have to believe me. I had no idea what Sam was doing.”

Serenity, clearly in shock, had barely said a word as she stood shivering. Her eyes, now alert, darted in the direction of her sister. Melody loosened her grip on something she was holding, and it fell on the gravel driveway.

Skye’s yin and yang necklace.

“How could you,” Serenity finally said.

Melody took a step back, away from the other women. “How could I what? You have no idea what I’ve done.”

“I hate you, Melody.”

Melody looked over at the burning mobile.

“Get in line,” she said.

Kendall drew her gun once more. “Don’t even think about running. Get down. On the dirt. Now.”

The wheels turned as Melody weighed the detective’s order.

“Down, now!”

She dropped to her knees, her expression grim. But cool, given the circumstances, oddly so.

Serenity reached for the necklace, the glimmer of the hammered silver turned black by the flames, and it swung like a pendulum.

Paige opened her eyes and let out a scream that mixed with the sound of sirens through the smoke. And although there were a hundred questions swirling through Kendall Stark’s mind, two thoughts pushed their way to the forefront.

Where is Josh? Did he stop Sam Castile?

Josh had never lost sight of Sam, now clad in a T-shirt and faded blue jeans and scrambling over the forest deadfall toward the road, a couple hundred yards away. Josh had drawn his weapon, and when he yelled at the man to freeze, Sam Castile did something remarkable.

Sam stopped and put his hands up in the air.

“So you got me,” he said. “Big deal.”

“Big deal for you,” Josh said, a little out of breath, adrenaline pumping through his veins. “Drop to your knees.”

“That sounds like something I’d say,” Sam said, a smile breaking over his sweaty face.

As he ran his hands over Sam’s frame to ensure that he carried no weaponry, Josh recited the Miranda rights.

“Wonder if your little girlfriend made it out okay.” Although the words were uttered with sarcasm, Sam’s gape held no emotion. His eyes were as lifeless as buttons, unblinking, unfeeling. “She’s a hot little thing.”

Josh cuffed him with plastic restraints that he’d pulled from his coat pocket. “I wonder if you’re going to be on the receiving end of the needle at Walla Walla.”

“You and I are not so different, you know,” Sam said.

Josh tried to let the remark pass as if he hadn’t even heard it, but it was hard to do. Just the idea that he was anything like the piece of scum he’d just picked up made him even angrier. He didn’t ask all the questions he wanted to. He worried that Kendall might not have made it into the mobile in time to save Serenity.

“We both like using a young thing now and then, right?” Sam said with a wink.

Josh thought about it for only a second before he punched Sam in the gut, sending him to the ground.

“I’ll have your badge for that,” Sam said, choking for air.

The detective relaxed his fist. “Oh, I don’t think so, pal. It’ll be your word against mine, and I have a pretty good idea who they’ll believe.”

Melody stood mute, barely looking at anyone as the responders arrived-more visitors in that hour than in the decade she’d lived there. Smoke and steam spun high above the trees as local firefighters emptied their sole water tank. Paramedics hovered over Paige and Serenity, who were placed in the back of the ambulance. Paige was given oxygen, but Serenity refused it. She was bloodied and bruised, but her expression was resolute.

“I can drive myself home,” she said.

Kendall patted her hand. “No, you can’t. Not after what you’ve been though.”

“I want to talk to my sister.”

“She’s in custody, Serenity.”

“I want to know what has been going on here.”

“There’s time for that. But not now,” Kendall said.

The ambulance doors shut, and the red and white vehicle began to pull away as Josh returned to the driveway. Sam and Melody Castile were on their way to booking. Josh looked the worse for the wear, his slacks torn by blackberry vines, his face bleeding from minor scratches from vegetation incurred during the pursuit.

“She’s going to be okay,” Kendall said, following his eyes to Serenity.

“She’s tough, isn’t she?” he said, trying to reel in his emotions.

“She is.”

The pair stood for a minute before heading back to their vehicles and the mountain of paperwork that faced them at the office.

“They did this together,” Kendall said. “Sam and Melody.”

“She’ll say she was abused.”

“They always do. And maybe she was. But honestly, her own sister?”

Josh thought of the Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka case in Canada. He didn’t bring it up because he knew the outcome and it chilled him. Karla and Bernardo had raped and murdered Karla’s sister, Tammy. Karla testified against Bernardo and eventually found her way to freedom. The idea of a man and woman joining forces to commit debased acts was hardly unheard-of: Fred and Rosemary West had raped and murdered as many as a dozen girls-including their own daughter-in Great Britain from the 1960s to the 1980s.

But this was close to home.

“I feel sorry for the little boy,” Josh said.

“I’m not without hope there. He sent us here with his drawing,” Kendall pointed out. “He knew what he was doing.”

“I wonder what will happen to him?”

“He’s got family,” she said.

Chapter Sixty-two

April 7, 9 a.m.

Port Orchard

They were on opposite sides of the glass partition separating good from evil, the yin and yang of the justice system. Others were facing each other through the transparent wall as well. Some were husbands talking to wives whom they still stood by; some were fathers trying to understand the error of their ways as they spoke with delinquent daughters. The glass was an inch thick, a good insulator of sound. So despite the fact that one could look into the other’s eyes and talk, they had to use a telephone. Intimacy was reduced, but safety ensured. That pretty much summed up the way visitors’ row at the Kitsap County Jail had been designed. Only once had the glass been damaged: when an angry inmate used the receiver instead of words to make a point, leaving a spiderweb of fissures.

Serenity studied her sister as she reached for the phone.

“You doing all right?”

Melody’s eyes were cold. Colder than usual. “What kind of a question is that? I’m not doing all right at all.”

“Melody, I can see that. Tell me what is going on.”

“Is this for the paper?”

“This is for me.”

“I’m not speaking to anyone without a lawyer. I’m not stupid, Serenity. I mean, I’m not going to be stupid anymore.”

“Melody, please.”

Although Melody looked directly at Serenity, there appeared to be nothing warm and alive behind her eyes. Not even a glimmer of the sister she thought she knew.

“Everybody does what they have to do to survive,” she said. “Let’s leave it at that.

“What about Celesta, Skye, Marissa, Carol…Paige?”

Melody’s eyes looked increasingly distant, no longer holding any trace of recognition. She was like an empty vessel, devoid of emotion, love. It was as if her soul had been replaced by something cold, mechanical.

“You know the beginning and the ending, Serenity.”

“I think so. I guess so.”

“You want to know the middle, don’t you?”

Serenity nodded.

“Everybody does.”

“Tell me,” Serenity said, her eyes welling with tears. She knew that the woman on the other side of the glass was no longer her sister. She was an imposter. A shape-shifter. A thief of all of her memories.

“What do you want to know?”

“I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

Serenity bolstered herself on the counter and gripped the phone. “You didn’t, you couldn’t have been a participant in this. Not really?”

Melody’s eyes flickered for a second, and Serenity wondered if her sister had come back. In that flash of recognition, she allowed herself to believe that Melody had found a core of humanity stirring somewhere deep inside herself.

The wheels of memory seemed to whirl behind Melody’s eyes, but she remained quiet.

“The bitch has escaped!”

Melody Castile could barely contain her rage. She was mad at her son, at herself, at Sam, but mostly angry that Carol Godding had disappeared into the woods. None of the others that had been their playthings had ever dared to try to escape. No one left the Fun House alive. But this woman, the divorcee from Port Orchard, had done the impossible.

“You take the car,” Sam said. “Go up the road to the culvert. That’s the only way she can get out of here. I’ll follow on foot. I’ll get her and take care of her.”

Melody ran into the house, grabbed the car keys, and bolted back outside as Sam vanished with a Maglite behind the Fun House. In a second, Melody was behind the wheel of the silver Jeep. She cursed the damned gate as she spun the car around the driveway, then got back out of the vehicle to unlock and fling open the annoying barrier. There was no need to go back and lock it. She didn’t expect that she’d be gone that long.

Within five minutes, her headlights caught the image of the ghostly white figure of a woman on the side of the road. Melody tried to identify what she was seeing.

Was it a doll? A mannequin? Or was it someone’s little girl? A girl like she’d once been…

She swerved around the woman, as if to allow a hitchhiker extra room.

For safety, always give those walking on the shoulder at least a fifteen-foot cushion, came to her mind.

Melody thought of what her father had said when he taught her how to drive. She remembered how her face had stung when he slapped her for knocking over the road cones used to practice parallel parking.

She pressed the ball of her foot against the accelerator and circled back. The car skidded on the gravel and stopped; Melody swung the driver’s-side door open as fast as she could, as if slowing down for even a moment would break the momentum of what she was bent on doing.

She lunged for Carol, who’d slumped onto her bloody knees.

“Get up,” Melody said.

“You,” Carol said, crying. “Why you?”

“Because,” she said. “If not you, then it will be me.”

Carol’s face was smeared in dirt and blood, making the whites of her eyes look larger in the darkness. Wide, full of terror.

“Please! I won’t tell anyone!”

Melody stiffened and drew back. She turned in the direction of the woods, behind the cowering woman.

Branches cracked, and Sam emerged. His face was a mask of rage. Melody snapped back into the moment and grabbed Carol by the hair.

“For you, babe,” she said, summoning her nerve.

Sam said nothing as he bathed Carol’s body in the glow of his flashlight. She had dissolved into a shivering mass of blood-streaked flesh.

“Good girl,” he said to his wife. “Now finish her.”

Melody pulled on Carol’s hair, lifting her bowed head.

“Don’t hurt me. Please let me go! You don’t want to do this!”

Sam played the light over Carol’s terrified face.

“I can’t,” Melody said.

“You can, and you will.” He produced a hunting knife from his pants pocket and handed it to her. “Finish her!”

“No, I won’t. I can’t, Sam. You do it. I’ll help you, but I can’t do it myself.”

Sam arched his brow and shrugged. It was as if Melody’s reluctance, her passivity, warranted some kind of show of strength.

He grabbed Carol by the neck and strangled her. Still alive, she slumped into the gravel.

“She’s ready. Do it,” he said.

A moment later the blade was buried in Carol’s neck and blood pulsed from the gash, sending a fountain of red into the beam of the headlights.

Serenity looked into Melody’s empty eyes. She tried to summon some kind of conviction that what her sister was saying was true. Melody had told Serenity a sanitized version of what had transpired, leaving out the Fun House. Leaving out the fury in which she drove to find Carol.

Leaving out the fact that she’d seen her on the side of the road.

“Then what happened?” Serenity asked.

Melody broke their mutual gaze.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I never saw her. I only did what Sam wanted me to do. I looked for her, but there was nothing else. Nothing at all.”

Behind the glass shield, Melody was about to hang up the phone when a glimmer of alertness came to her eyes.

“I can’t say that I’m sorry,” she said. “I know that you want me to. But I did what I did for a good reason. At least, I thought so at the time.”

“How could you, Melody? How could you have gone along with him?”

The semblance of understanding had vanished.

“Who said it was Sam’s idea?” Her eyes now had no spark. “Besides, you played a role in this thing too.”

Serenity was struck mute, her mouth half open in incomprehension.

“You knew there were other victims,” Melody said. “And you knew ahead of time.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do. I told you.”

“You never told me anything. Your sick husband called and bragged about what he’d done.”

“Funny, that’s not how I remember it, Serenity. I was the one who called you when you did that story about Paige Wilson and the food bank.”

Of course Serenity remembered the call.

I’m going to pick up your little beauty queen and take her for a test ride, the caller had said.

“You never called me.”

Melody clipped the phone between her chin and shoulder and ran her hands over her hair.

“You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? You could have warned her. You could have stopped it, but you were too busy screwing that detective of yours and trying to find a way to use this story to launch yourself out of Port Zero.”

“That’s a lie,” Serenity said, eyes glistening.

Melody smiled at her sister, set down the phone, and turned away.

Serenity pounded her fist on the glass, and Melody spun around.

“Don’t say a word,” she mouthed. “Don’t ever say a word.”

Melody shrugged but wore a satisfied look on her face.

Serenity watched her sister follow an officer in a blue uniform down the corridor that led to the jail’s cellblock. Her orange flip-flops could be heard through the glass. In a moment Melody was gone.

Gone forever.

Josh Anderson and Kendall Stark were waiting outside the jail’s visitor reception door when Serenity emerged from her visit with her sister. She wore jeans, a cardigan, and no makeup. She was still very pretty. Bandages concealed the wounds on her wrists.

It was obvious that the encounter with her sister had shaken her.

“Well?” Josh asked.

Serenity dabbed at her eyes. “Nothing. She told me nothing.”

The time for tears had long since passed. She knew then that she’d unwittingly played a role in the selection of some victims. Most had been featured in the pages of the Lighthouse.

“You don’t look like you’re okay,” Kendall said, putting her hand gently on Serenity’s shoulder.

She looked at her and nodded. “I’m fine. I just wish she would have told me something,” she said.

The three walked across the parking lot toward the back entrance of the courthouse. It had stopped raining, and the air was filled with the scent of motor oil and wet asphalt. A seagull circled overhead. Jurors dismissed from a case filed past. One, a heavyset woman in a crocheted sweater and capri pants, glanced in their direction, wondering if they were somehow connected to the same trial. The woman carried a paperback novel about a serial killer to pass the time. She wondered if she’d see the three in court and hear their story. She nodded in their direction, and Kendall smiled back.

“How’s Max?” Kendall said.

“Better than I’d be,” Serenity said, as if what had happened to her in the Fun House was inconsequential.

Josh held the door open, and the two women went inside.

“You’re holding up pretty good,” he said. His tone was a little longing, and he knew it. But it didn’t matter.

“Considering. I guess so,” Serenity said, not allowing herself to be affected by Josh’s emotions. She couldn’t go there yet. Too much had happened. Too much still needed to be done. “I’m going to petition the court to let me take Max. He’s a good kid. I’m all the family he’s got.”

“Raising a child isn’t easy,” Kendall said, speaking from her heart and from the experience of having a child with special needs. A psychologically damaged child like Max Castile would come with a load of baggage.

“He’s got no one else but me,” Serenity said.