He doesn’t want to, but he obeys. I’m alone with the voice on the phone, the link steady and waiting on the laptop screen.
“You don’t have to play,” Tyler agrees. “That’s a choice. Everybody makes choices.”
“So tell me what happens if I don’t click the link. I can’t play if I don’t understand the stakes.”
“If you don’t, Gwen won’t come home alive to her children.”
I knew that was coming. My muscles tense until my pulse throbs in my temples. “And what if I click it? What then?”
“Then you’re participating in the game, Sam,” he says. “Everything has consequences. Gwen’s guilty of killing people, after all. She killed her ex-husband.”
“She had to.”
“She helped him kill others.”
“She didn’t.”
“I’ve seen that she can do terrible things, Sam. When I gave her the option of killing someone kindly, or leaving them dying in pain, can you guess which one she chose?”
I can’t answer. My skin crawls. My right hand clenches the mouse, and the cursor is hanging right over the link. All I have to do is click.
“She’d rather think of herself as a hero,” the voice says. “So let’s find out if she really is. Are you playing, Sam? For her life?”
Lanny and Connor are at the door, breathless and scared. I put the cell phone on mute and say, “Lanny, go call TBI Detective Randall Heidt and tell him that I have a man on the phone who says he has your mother, and he’s threatening her life. Tell him to trace the call. I’m going to keep him talking. Go.”
She gapes at me for a second, then spins and runs down the hall. Connor is left standing alone, paler than ever. “Connor. Go call J. B. Hall. Tell her the same thing.” I unmute the phone when I feel like I’m ready to keep going. “Tyler, we talked. I believe we really, really talked. I helped you. I believed you. Come on, man, I thought we connected. When you were on that bridge . . . I know you really felt something. Something real.”
He’s silent for a long few seconds. Good. Keep thinking, keep the line open . . . “Everything I said to you was true. I didn’t want to lie to you. You’re not guilty of anything.”
“If you didn’t lie, that means you called me because you thought about jumping.”
“I think about it a lot. It’s hard, doing this work. Do you understand that?”
“No, Tyler. I don’t. But I do know one thing . . . You’re not like this. Or at least, you don’t have to be like this. You can change.”
“Someone has to find them,” he says. “These people need to be stopped. They need to be punished. And if the rest of you won’t do it, then I have to.”
I’m losing him. He’s looped back to his crusade again. “Tyler, please think for a second about your sister. I said we’d talk about her. Tell me about her. Tell me what she was like.”
“I don’t want to talk about her. You told me you felt like this once. That someone had to pay. You do understand, Sam, it isn’t a choice. I have to do this to make things right.”
I don’t know how to save Gwen. I don’t know how to stop an obsession like his; I couldn’t stop mine, not without time and real work and understanding. And Tyler . . . Tyler isn’t like me. I thought he was. That was my mistake.
My mistake could kill the woman I love.
“Please, Tyler,” I say. My voice is shaking now. “Come on, man, please don’t do this. She doesn’t deserve this. I’m telling you, she doesn’t.”
“It’s not my choice anymore,” he says. “It’s hers. And yours. Are you going to play, Sam? Because if you don’t, and you could have saved her—I know how that will feel for you. Next time it’ll be you on that bridge.”
He’s right. Oh God, he’s right. I don’t know if the kids are getting through, if anyone is working on this. But I have to try to keep him on the phone. Gwen told me he was at Salah Point, but if she was wrong, if he’s somewhere else . . . the phone trace can pinpoint him exactly. Save her life.
I swallow a terrible mix of despair and bitter rage, and say, “I’m clicking now.”
I tap the mouse button.
And I see Gwen. She’s standing, swaying, looking up at something I can’t see. I can’t tell where she is, just a room with shelving. And I can’t look at the details. She fills my world. “Oh God,” I whisper. “Oh God, baby.” She looks desperate, beaten, in pain. Afraid. I’m afraid that he’s brought me here to watch her die, and I can’t, I can’t let that happen.
“I’m going to ask you a very important question,” Tyler says. “Do you want her to live? No matter what?”
I say, “Yes. Yes.” There is no other possible choice.
“I thought so.” He sounds vaguely disappointed. “That was very predictable.”
I stare at the screen, unable to look away. Afraid to blink.
I’ve never wanted anything more in my life than to be standing with her right now.
27
GWEN
The lighthouse’s beacon, I realize now, is working, after all. It’s blinking steadily. Calling me right toward him.
I climb the steep hill, sweating, filthy with dried blood and mud and mold. Heartsick but resolute.
There’s only a single door on the bottom level, large enough that—like in the cannery—a forklift could be driven inside, if necessary. I reach for the doorknob. Hesitate. I look up, and the camera looks down.
“You asked if I ever found the man who took my sister,” Jonathan says through a speaker near the top of the door. “He never did it again. It took her four minutes to die, Gina. Four minutes.”
I don’t want to feel sympathy for him. I can’t. “Did you kill him?” I ask.
“I don’t kill people,” he says. He means it. “I’ve never
