Page 59 of Darkwater Lane (Stillhouse Lake #7)

“What happened to it after Madison was injured by it?” I notice how carefully she’s choosing her words, not saying that I stabbed her.

I shrug. “I dropped it. It’s probably at the bottom of the lake by now.”

She chews her lip in concentration. “They’re going to find it,” she says. “No way they’re going to let that go. When they do, whose prints will they find on it?”

“Mine.”

“What about Madison’s?”

I close my eyes, trying to remember those final moments with Madison. It all happened so fast and was so unexpected. I picture her there in front of me. Lunging for me in the water. Her hand wrapping around mine.

But did she touch the knife itself?

I shake my head. “I don’t think so.”

Victorinne grimaces. “That’s likely how Diakos was able to get them to hold off charging you. They’re waiting on that. Once they have proof you were the only one holding the knife, they’re going to pick you up for first-degree murder.”

She says it so matter-of-factly, like it’s obvious. I open my mouth to protest, but the problem is that I know she’s right.

“What do we do?”

“First, if you have any plans to marry Sam, I would accelerate those. Spousal immunity is pretty difficult to pierce.”

I flinch. I’m not getting married as a defense strategy. “Not an option,” I tell her succinctly. She studies me for a moment and then nods, accepting that she’s unlikely to change my mind.

“Second, you could try to cut a deal, but?—”

I cut her off. “No. No deals. I’m not admitting to something I didn’t do. Neither will Sam.”

“Technically, we could seek an Alford plea, where you don’t take responsibility but?—”

“No,” I tell her again. “You’re talking like we’re guilty. We’re not.”

She shifts in her seat, her fingers smoothing down her long, dark ponytail.

“I haven’t had a chance to give you my whole defense-attorney spiel, so let me do so now: I don’t care if you’re innocent, guilty, or all or none of the above.

My job is to hold the prosecution accountable.

If they have the evidence, and they crossed all their Ts and dotted their Is so that evidence is legit and admissible, there’s not much I’m going to be able to do for you.

At least not until the sentencing phase. ”

“But we’re both innocent,” I protest.

She looks at me a little sadly. “I really do wish that mattered. The problem is that innocent people go to jail all the time. Oftentimes, it’s due to ineffective assistance of counsel, so at least that’s one thing you won’t have to worry about.”

I consider her words. I appreciate what she’s saying, but I’m not sure how I feel about it. “I’m not sure I can work with someone who’s still questioning my guilt.”

She looks me square in the eyes. “Then find me evidence to prove your case, and we shouldn’t have a problem.”

When I get back to Sam’s hospital room, it’s the very early hours of the morning, and the hallways are quiet.

Sam is still asleep, his room dark but for the monitors surrounding his bed.

The doctor told me rest is the best thing for him right now—the brain has a chance to heal during sleep.

So, I take care not to wake him. Instead, I sink into the chair by his bed and watch him in the scant light, wondering how the hell I’m going to keep us both from going to prison.

This can’t be how it all ends. Madison can’t win. I can’t lose Sam, after everything we’ve been through. I can’t lose my kids. Being separated from them for the rest of my life would kill me.

I think through everything I know about Madison, reconsidering every conversation and interaction with the new understanding of who she really was and what she wanted.

There’s so much I still don’t understand.

How did she know so much? How was she able to break into our house?

How did she find Leo and have the time to murder him ?

If there’s one maxim to murder, it’s that the more complicated it is, the more chances there are for failure.

Madison must have fucked up at some point. No one is that perfect of a serial killer. Everyone makes mistakes, especially killers like Madison, who think they’re too smart and clever to ever be captured.

Melvin was the same way. The arrogance of that man! I shake my head, still marveling at how close he came to getting away with the bulk of his murders. Initially, he was only charged with killing Callie—that was the one victim they had.

Then, I’d stumbled across evidence of a storage unit he’d been keeping outside of town. Turned out, that’s where Melvin had been burying his secrets. That’s where he kept the trophies from his kills. He even had journals detailing each and every gruesome, torturous death.

He’d left us a roadmap to his depravity, and it’s what ultimately sent him to death row.

If only Madison had done the same. But I’m not holding my breath.

There’s no way she was stupid enough to keep incriminating evidence lying around.

It would have been too much of a risk. What if I’d gotten suspicious of her and decided to go digging?

What if I broke into her house while she was out, or got ahold of her computer during one of our recording sessions?

At the same time, a plan as involved and complicated as hers would require planning. It would necessitate documentation. So, where is all that paperwork?

A storage unit like Melvin’s, probably. But there must be a million of those in the country.

How in the world am I supposed to narrow it down?

I only found Melvin’s because he was stupid enough to list our home phone number on the rental application, and the company called when Melvin stopped paying the bills.

If I were Madison and wanted to stash things away where no one could find them, where would I go ?

When it hits, the answer is so blindingly obvious that I’m sure it can’t possibly be right. Except that I can’t get the idea out of my head. And I know the only way I’ll be able to move past this is to check it out for myself.

I grasp Sam’s hand and press it to my cheek, trying not to wonder how many times we’ll be able to touch each other so freely if either of us ends up in jail. I won’t let that happen. “I’m going to fix this,” I whisper, not wanting to wake him. It’s a promise I intend to keep.

It takes three flights with ridiculously tight connections, but I land in Wichita late that morning. Within an hour, I’m standing in front of the storage locker I visited only once before, but whose location is seared in my memory.

It’s the exact same one Melvin used: the same company, the same location, the same unit.

I admit I was surprised to find it still in use.

I guess part of me assumed that maybe the storage company would want to retire the locker used by one of the country’s most notorious serial killers.

Though, more than likely, I’m one of the few people in the world who knows this unit’s past history.

You’d have to dig pretty deep into the evidence presented at Melvin’s trial to find out about the provenance of this locker. It doesn’t surprise me that Madison did just that.

I study the unit, noting the combination padlock on the door. It’s the kind that requires a six-digit code, and I try some of the basics: 123456, 111111, 654321, but none of those work. With a huff of frustration, I crouch and stare at it for a moment longer before it comes to me.

I swivel the dials until they read 820724. The lock clicks open. I let out a laugh. Of course. The same number as Melvin’s gravestone .

My heart hammers with anticipation, causing my hands to tremble slightly as I tug the lock out of the D ring and pull open the storage locker door.

My mind slips back to a similar moment all those years ago when I first learned about this place and came to investigate.

It had been the middle of the night. I’d had no idea what to expect and was in no way prepared for what I found.

This time, though, I brace myself. The door clatters open, and the motion sensor light inside flickers on. It casts everything in a dull, sickly yellow. But it’s bright enough that I can see most of the locker with one sweep of my eyes.

The déjà vu is instant. The layout of the locker is almost exactly as it was the first time I visited: Stacks of plastic storage bins line the wall on the left side while the right side contains cubbies piled with a bizarre array of personal effects.

In the center, sitting on a table, is a neat stack of journals.

If I hadn’t known that Melvin’s locker had been emptied after it was turned over to the authorities, I’d have sworn this was his. The storage bins with trophies, the journals on the table, the cubbies. It’s all the same.

I nearly vomit at the recognition.

“How is this possible?” I ask out loud.

It occurs to me that they showed photos of Melvin’s locker at his trial, since it was where they uncovered evidence of his other murders. Madison must have seen them and copied them when setting up her own trophy room. It’s creepy as fuck and causes my skin to crawl.

The back wall, though, is different from Melvin’s.

There are two enormous corkboards mounted side by side.

One is covered with photographs of me along with dozens of notecards filled with writing.

In the center is a photoshopped image of Madison and me, side by side, our arms around each other like we’re best friends.

Partners in Crime is written across the bottom in bold Sharpie. I shudder at the thought and turn my attention to the other corkboard. This one is filled with photos of Sam. His eyes have been gouged out in every one.

I move deeper into the locker, careful not to touch anything, and take a closer look. Sam’s work schedule is pinned to the board, along with a list of planned flights. Several are circled in red, with names scribbled in the margins.

I recognize the names instantly: Cooper Kuntz. Forrester Blakeny. Devin Pedowitz.

All in Madison’s handwriting. In fact, all the notes pinned to the board are in her handwriting. I recognize it from the notepad she’d used to write down questions for our podcast interview.

Then I see another set of images that make me so nauseous I’m afraid I might actually puke. They’re photos of our rental house in Knoxville—the inside of it. The angles are a little weird, and it takes me a moment to realize why: They were taken from outside, through the windows.

I pull my sleeve over my hand to cover my fingers as I push the top several photos aside. There are dozens more, maybe a hundred. All taken over the course of weeks. Several are shots of the alarm system keypad in the front hall.

With a sinking stomach, I suddenly understand how she figured out our alarm code. She hid a camera and watched through the window, waiting for one of us to shift to the side just enough to get a view of our fingers punching in the code.

Once she got that, she had full access to our lives. She could come and go in our house as she pleased. My knees feel weak, and my breathing suddenly turns shallow. How many times did she enter our home without us knowing? What information had she gotten access to this way?

I think of my office, the window behind the desk. It would have been easy for her to hide a tiny camera up in the eaves. With that, she’d have seen everything on my screen. She’d have been able to watch me work, sort through Sicko Patrol, text Sam, check his work schedule.

She’d have even been able to watch me digging into her past after I called her—the hours I spent analyzing her Instagram account, tracking down her old college articles on my trial, all of it.

Still stunned by the revelation, I turn to the journals stacked on the table.

Keeping my hand tucked in my sleeve, I start flipping through them.

They’re filled with her dense, familiar handwriting, and it only takes reading a couple of passages for me to realize that they’re a complete fucking roadmap to everything.

I shake my head, nearly laughing with disbelief at the arrogance of it all. She wrote down everything: her obsession with me, her desire to prove herself worthy of being my partner, her plans to take out my enemies and set Sam up to take the fall.

It’s stunning. I wouldn’t believe it if Melvin hadn’t done the same damn thing. He’d had a table in this exact storage unit, the top of it covered with journals that chronicled every detail of every murder. It’s what eventually took him down.

The same way these will take Madison down.

Sam will finally be exonerated.

Will it be enough to clear my name?

That depends on the Norton DA. It’s going to be hard for him to get much sympathy for Madison’s death after all of this comes to light. A jury would be more likely to thank me than convict me.

I’m turning to leave, already pulling out my phone to call Mike to report to the FBI what I’ve found, when something on a shelf by the door catches my eye.

It’s a skull. I know immediately who it belongs to. Melvin fucking Royal. There are three neat little bullet holes in the forehead. I’m the one who put them there.

Gutierrez mentioned they’d recovered only partial human remains from our burned out rental. It would have been nice if he’d noted they were missing the skull. Clearly, Madison had kept that for herself.

My stomach roils with disgust at the sight, but still, I force myself to approach him. It’s the closest I’ve come to Melvin Royal since I shot him dead. I take a moment to consider him. To think about all the turmoil he’s caused in my life.

But there’s been good too.

I’m the one who’s thriving. I’m the one who gets to feel the love of an amazing man and watch my two incredible kids grow up and live beautiful lives.

I’m the one who survived. Who will keep surviving.

Who will do more than survive: who will live.

I smile as tears track down my cheeks. “I win,” I tell him.

Then I walk out the door, leaving Melvin in my past for good.