Page 38 of Darkwater Lane (Stillhouse Lake #7)

It’s hard to acknowledge how deep his influence over me goes. I keep trying to sever every single tie to him and my old life, but for each one I cut, I only find more .

Maybe it’s a fool’s errand. Perhaps I’ll never truly be able to break free of Melvin Royal.

I close my eyes, letting the desperation of that thought wash over me.

Wouldn’t he laugh to see me now? To know how much I still think about him. How large a role he still plays.

“No,” I say out loud. I snap my head back from the window and stand tall. Melvin can’t laugh at me anymore , I think to myself with a smile. Because he’s dead, and I’m the one who killed him.

Once I’m settled in my office with a fresh cup of coffee, I close the door and boot up the computer. Most of my personal things from my office in Knoxville remain in boxes stacked in the corner. I keep meaning to unpack them, but some part of me still wonders how permanent this move will be.

I’m torn. Stillhouse Lake has always represented hope and possibility to me. There are good memories here, tangled with the bad. It’s easy here to remember the optimism I felt as we painted the rooms in this house, repaired the roof, and put on the new deck.

I felt the possibility of a home here. A future. This is where I took a stand. Refused to run.

I don’t miss the irony that I’m back here again, taking another stand against the Lost Angels and those who have persecuted us over the years. Hopefully, this time around we’ll find lasting success.

With a sigh, I move to the stack of framed photos leaning against the wall and flip through them until I find the one of Melvin’s grave. It’s an unassuming shot. To anyone else, it would look like an unimpressive—if somewhat macabre—cemetery landscape. Only I know this place as Melvin’s grave .

Or so I thought.

Someone else figured it out. The same person who tracked down those men who’d harassed me with threats and warnings online.

But why? Why steal Melvin’s body? Why leave pieces of him at the crime scenes?

Doing so ties the murders together and exposes the killer to much greater liability if they’re caught.

At my computer, I pull up the list of names I sent Kez, along with the details of each man’s death.

I make a list of dates, then start combing through my calendar.

Several are easy to provide alibis for. One was a night I was out surveilling a client and I have time logs plus timestamped photos throughout the night.

Another was an event at Connor’s barn, and I have a dated photo of the two of us posing by his favorite horse.

A third I have receipts from a food delivery service.

They’re not airtight alibis. A prosecutor could argue that we had the food delivered as a ruse and weren’t actually home.

But still, it’s something at least. Which is better than some of the other dates.

They were nights of little import. Nothing on the calendar—likely nights home with the kids, no receipts I can point to as evidence of where I was.

Our security system only keeps recordings for a month, so I can’t pull video showing me arriving home and never leaving.

Still, I find enough to make it pretty damn clear I wasn’t involved in any of the men’s deaths.

Since it’s early and the kids are still asleep, I switch over to our shared family calendar and start working on Sam’s whereabouts on those dates. The first two are difficult, as he was out of town for work. When he’s flying cargo, it’s not unusual for him to be gone for several days at a time.

Except the more I look into it, the more I realize that it wasn’t just the first two dates he was out of town for.

It’s all of them. Which is weird, but it only means that I can’t provide an alibi for him.

It shouldn’t be a problem. The upside to him flying on those dates is that there will be flight manifests and logs proving where he was.

I start pulling that information together for those specific work trips, collating flight numbers and destinations. However, the more I dig into his alibis, the more uneasy I grow. Sam flew to Boise, Idaho the day before Salem Adams was found murdered in his home. He lived outside Boise.

A coincidence, surely.

Sam flew several trips to Akron, Ohio the week Forrester Blakeny was killed in a suburb outside the city.

Another was murdered in Indiana and another in Michigan while Sam was in Detroit.

How the fuck is this possible? By the time I finish compiling all the information, I sit back in my chair and stare at the sheet of paper in shock.

Every single one of the deaths lines up to a time when Sam was not only out of town for work but also somewhere near the victim. Not only does Sam not have alibis for those dates, records place him disturbingly close to the victims.

I refuse to believe he had anything to do with the deaths. I know Sam. He’s not a murderer.

I will do anything to protect my family. Anything.

It had been one of his last texts to Leo Varrus before he was found murdered in our house. Sam had shown it to me after his arrest.

The detectives working Leo’s murder had copies of those texts. Messages that gave Sam a motive to kill not just Leo but also the sickos who’d been stalking me and my kids for years.

I think of the other morning when he caught me resuming Sicko Patrol.

He hadn’t seemed surprised, which makes me wonder how long he’d known I was back at it.

A small voice in my head wonders if perhaps Sam targeted the worst of the sickos for me.

To ease the tide of hate coming at us in some sort of twisted way—or at least eliminate the most egregious of it.

I stop myself before that thought takes hold. It’s impossible. Sam isn’t a cold-blooded killer.

That’s not what the police think. Gutierrez is probably already convening a grand jury to bring charges against him.

I drop my head into my hands as a sense of despair washes over me. This has all become so much larger and more complicated than before. It doesn’t just paint Sam as a killer, it makes him look like a serial killer.

I feel sick to my stomach.

I can’t just sit on this information. There’s a serial killer out there. I need to tell the FBI so they can track this guy down before he kills again. But as Kez noted last night, Sam and I will be their first suspects.

Sam will be screwed. Unless I can give them someone else.

I immediately think of Rowan.

Someone would need access to Sam’s flight schedule to set him up like this. Rowan’s a hacker. She could have easily broken into his company files.

Unless she found a way into our system instead. If she gained access to our network, she would have known exactly when Sam was flying, and where. She also could have hacked our security system.

My stomach churns, anxiety threading through my veins. I text Taylor. She’d been the one to set up our system in the first place, putting in the firewalls and VPNs to keep our data secure. But what if there was a gap somewhere?

Gwen

Can you run a check on our computer system?

She answers instantly—I’m pretty sure she never sleeps either.

Taylor

Sure. Any particular reason why?

Gwen

I think someone accessed Sam’s flight schedule. I’m trying to figure out if the breach was on the work end or our end.

Taylor

On it. Report back soon.

As she works, I stare at the photo of Melvin’s grave. His bones tie everything together. If I can figure out who robbed his grave, I can figure out who killed all the sickos and who’s setting Sam up to take the fall.

There’s so much about this I don’t understand, but one question keeps getting stuck in my head: Why Sam? Someone has gone to huge, elaborate lengths to set him up. Why? Clearly, they want him to suffer. It has to be personal.

Again, I think about Rowan and her rage at Sam for what she considers to be him abandoning his sister by sleeping with the enemy. It’s inconceivable that someone could channel so much energy into revenge. It never brings closure or absolution. It won’t bring Callie back.

It only turns her into a killer. Into the exact kind of monster Melvin Royal was.

What a fucking waste.