eyes peered over the sill. After a few seconds spent scanning the back yard and glaring at Faye and Laneer, the little head dropped out of sight again.

“Somebody wishes we would go away and let her make an escape,” she said.

“She likes you, Faye. Anybody can see that. Do you think maybe you can get her to tell us what’s wrong?”

Faye wanted to say, “We all know what’s wrong. She just saw her mother buried alive,” but the words wouldn’t help Kali and saying them would be like punching Laneer in the gut. Instead she said, “I’ll do my best.”

“Don’t you want to tell the police about these people who might have hurt Frida?” she asked. “Armand? Mayfield? Linton?”

“You tell ’em. But also, you tell ’em to keep theirselves and their badges and their guns away from that little girl.”

Faye wasn’t exactly sure how she was supposed to do that. As soon as she told McDaniel that Kali had been outdoors at the time of Frida’s attack, he’d put that information together with the half-melted ice cream sandwich. Then he would immediately be on Laneer’s front doorstep, and he would be wearing his badge and carrying his gun. She wanted to say, “The police are here to help us. We need to let them do their job,” but she knew how naïve that would sound to Laneer.

Two little eyes rose again above a bright blue windowsill. McDaniel was busy gathering evidence and he’d said that he wouldn’t be gone long. Faye decided that she was willing to give Laneer a few hours, just until McDaniel came back that afternoon, to get the little girl to talk to him instead of to the police. But no more.

Chapter Eleven

He was falling, just as he always did, falling from the dizzy heights of a kill. A rush so powerful could not last forever.

One moment, adrenaline was pushing him along, adrenaline and all the other seductive brain chemicals. Dopamine, serotonin, endorphins—after a kill, he had no doubt that they were all pumping from every gland he had. They made everything fun, even the tedium of hiding his tracks. Even the fear. When the biochemical magic flagged, taking their rosy glow from his world, he remembered to be afraid.

It ate him up inside to imagine being caught. How would he explain himself to a policeman while standing beside a car’s open trunk, when the trunk held pieces of a shovel that had once been very bloody?

As he came crashing down, the paranoia settled on him like a black velvet cloak. Everywhere he looked, he saw people who surely must know that he had done terrible things. And beside them stood people who might not know, but they could guess.

What did the woman who found Frida know? Who was she, and what was she doing in Sweetgum State Park at the crack of dawn? She had no right to be there, not when he had been so careful to choose a place where he and Frida could be alone.

If she could have seen his face, and known it, then a detective would have come knocking on his door by now. But had she seen his body? Had she seen the way that he moved as he ran, the way his left elbow hung just slightly closer to his body than his right, just as it had since the last time his father beat him? The woman had to go. There was no doubt about that. He just had to find out who she was.

The idea thrummed inside him, an electric spark that was fresh and new. He had never committed a killing so close on the heels of another, but this felt right. The thought of killing this woman brought the lovely brain chemicals back.

He had no doubt that his victims left his hands and went directly to heaven. He chose them for their air of innocence, and surely paradise welcomed their purity. Perhaps this unnamed woman was as pure or, at least, perhaps she was pure enough. Paradise was probably waiting for her with arms outstretched.

Chapter Twelve

Faye’s phone rang. It was McDaniel, wanting to know if Kali was up.

“Not yet,” she sort of lied, thinking that a child who had been crouching beneath a bedroom window for hours was not technically “up.”

Since McDaniel left, there had been time for Faye to clean herself up in Laneer’s shower and change into a pair of pants Frida kept in his guest room. There had even been time for her to call Jeremiah and tell him that they needed to delay the start of their project.

When she emerged from the house after her shower, Laneer and Sylvia were right where she left them, and Kali was still lurking by the window. The four of them—Faye, Laneer, Sylvia, and Kali—had spent the entire morning like this. At noon, Laneer had gone inside to make some sandwiches, and the adults had eaten them while waiting for the child to get hungry enough to come out of her room. The detective had said that he’d leave them alone till after noon, and he seemed to be a man of his word, because here he was on the phone.

Faye wanted some privacy for her talk with McDaniel, so she walked around the side of the house.

“I can’t put you through to Kali, but I do have some information for you,” she said. “You’ll find two men who knew Frida down the street at the convenience store. Mayfield works nights. Linton works days. Laneer seems to hate Mayfield even more than Linton, despite the fact that Linton is Frida’s wife-beating ex-husband. Not sure if that’s relevant, but I thought you might want to know.”

Then she said a quick good-bye and hung up without telling him what he really wanted to know, which was that Kali was awake. The child just wasn’t talking to anybody.

As she pocketed her phone, she heard voices in the front yard. The top

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