them turned toward me. “What happened, dude?” I couldn’t see his mouth moving underneath his wiry gray beard.
I shrugged. “I just got here. Is there another motel in town?”
“Naw, just the Sunset, but that’s a really nice place.”
I smiled while he gave me directions, then thanked him and climbed into the car. I couldn’t go back to the Sunset. Yin knew about it.
I pulled out of the lot and headed away from town. I would have to sneak around the roadblock and find a room at the next exit, whatever it was, and come back for my car when I’d gotten some sleep and food.
A green pickup drove toward me. Hadn’t the roadblock been put up yet? Had the mayor decided not to call it in because of the festival?
The car in front of me was a Volvo station wagon packed to the windows with loose laundry. It was about a hundred feet ahead when its brake lights came on. I slowed down, too. My iron gate twinged, but that seemed unimportant.
The Volvo stopped. I slowed to parking-lot speed, the twinge in my shoulder growing stronger. After a couple of seconds, the Volvo did a three-point turn and drove back toward me.
I braked and took out my ghost knife. The driver was a bird-faced old woman who didn’t glance at me once. She simply drove past me toward town with a pained expression on her face.
Weird. I took my foot off the brake and started toward the highway again. The first flare of a headache started, and I slowed again. I couldn’t remember why I was driving out of town. It didn’t make sense. Washaway was where I needed to be.
I stopped in the road. There was a reason I needed to leave, but I couldn’t remember what it was. A beer truck came up the road toward me, but it stopped about a hundred and fifty feet away and turned around. I watched it drive away.
I touched my iron gate. It was throbbing, but there was no one else around, not even other cars.
I saw a blue tarp on the side of the road. I got out of the car, leaving the engine running, and walked into the weeds. There were actually several tarps. The closest was the smallest, and I knelt beside it, my headache growing stronger. The edges were tucked underneath the object it was covering. I took out my ghost knife to slit open the top, then thought better of it and just pulled it back.
It was a little girl. I won’t describe her in detail, but she’d been beaten and strangled to death many hours before. She did not have a white mark on her face. I tucked the tarp under her again.
When I pulled back the tarp on the next one, I found Clara’s red-gold curls. I didn’t need to see more.
I stood and backed away, my head pounding. The other tarps were probably Isabelle and the rest of the Breakley family. I could have pulled them all back to see if Biker was there, or if the gunmen had been brought down from the Wilbur estate, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to look at more dead faces.
Sue and Big Bill had obviously brought the bodies out here and laid them by the side of the road. That seemed perfectly logical to me. The tarps would protect them from animals, and while it didn’t make sense to take them out of Washaway, they had to be put
I headed back to the car, instinctively understanding that I would feel better if I went back to town. I did a three-point turn and drove back toward the fire and the trucks. My headache eased and my iron gate stopped aching.
But I still didn’t have anywhere to go. It wasn’t safe to stay at the B and B, and the motel was gone. There were empty houses I could break into, but they were all crime scenes. Besides, I didn’t really want to sleep in the Breakleys’ bedroom tonight, knowing what had happened there.
If I couldn’t sleep, I needed to find the predator quickly. I needed a plan.
I drove through town and pulled up in front of Penny’s house. The pickup was still against the tree, but her front door was closed. Both had been surrounded with yellow tape. At first I thought the mysterious sheriff had finally arrived, but when I got closer I saw it was caution tape, not police tape.
I went inside. The house was dark, but the entry to the kitchen was lit by a nightlight. The police scanner was still there. I turned it on to make sure it worked, then pulled the plug and tucked it under my arm.
Something rustled behind me. I took out my ghost knife and crept into the living room, hoping I was about to catch the sapphire dog by surprise and not Penny’s cats.
It was neither. Little Mark lay on the couch, sleeping peacefully. His head was covered in a big white bandage.
It looked like the same bandage the paramedics had put on him. Obviously, they hadn’t taken him to the hospital. I could have taken him myself, but that didn’t make sense; I couldn’t leave Washaway. I needed to stay, and Mark probably did, too.
I left by the front door without waking him.
I needed to find a place where I could work on the scanner and connect it to the Neon’s electrical system. Something private and well lit.
As I drove through town, Steve’s Crown Vic came toward me in the opposite lane. He pulled left, blocking the road but giving me enough room to brake. A second car, a rusted Forester, stopped beside his.
He climbed out and came toward me. I could see he was angry. “I thought I asked you to stay at the Sunset.”
God, I hated that whining voice. “I didn’t have a choice. Can we leave it at that?”
The Forester’s driver door opened and a short, plump woman climbed out. At first I thought it was Pippa, but as she stepped into my headlights, I saw that she was a black woman with Coke-bottle-thick glasses and a long, quilted yellow jacket. I guessed she was yet another member of the neighborhood watch. A man climbed out of the Forester behind her. He was a fat little cowboy with a Wilford Brimley mustache.
