He climbed down from the loft, laced his boots, buttoned his jacket, and stepped out into the premature darkness of the afternoon.
On the way back to his Land Cruiser, he couldn’t stop thinking about Orson Thomas and Luther Kite, how they’d destroyed Andrew Thomas’s life.
A splinter of pity worked its way in.
Having grown up with all those terrible stories about Andrew Thomas, that manuscript was hard to believe. Maybe it was full of lies. But why would a man living in the middle of nowhere in assumed anonymity have any reason to lie? What if the monsters were really Orson and Luther?
He was running through the woods now, eyes watering from the cold.
When the idea hit him, Horace laughed.
But by the time he’d reached the Land Cruiser, he knew what he would have to do for his book.
Next time he came out here, he would drive right up to Andrew Thomas’s cabin, knock on the door, and politely ask the alleged serial killer for an interview.
12
BEN Worthington turns the deadbolt as Luther grins at him through a pane of glass. When the boy has opened the backdoor, Luther extends an arm from behind his back and unfurls his long slender fingers to reveal the coveted laser pointer.
“All yours,” Luther whispers.
The boy steps through the doorway onto the deck, bigeyed as his little fingers grasp what has been foremost on his mind since midafternoon.
Luther gently places his right hand against the back of the boy’s skull and his left palm flat against his forehead.
“You’re a bad boy, Ben,” Luther says, and twists his little head around one hundred eighty degrees.
The warmth of the house envelops him as he closes and relocks the backdoor. He stands in the kitchen holding the dead boy in his arms, the linoleum Kool-Aid-sticky beneath his feet.
The sink blooms with dishes.
The odor of burnt popcorn permeates the air.
Two greasy Tupperware bowls sit on the Formica table beside him, the unexploded kernels still pooled in the bottom.
The liquid crystal display on the stove turns to 1:39.
He hesitates, listening: the muted breath of warm air murmurs up through vents in the floor. A water droplet falls every fifteen seconds from the faucet into a slowly filling wineglass and in another room the second hand of a clock ticks just on the edge of audible. The refrigerator hums soothingly. As the icemaker releases new cubes into the bin, the sound is like a great glacier shelf calving into the sea.
Luther kneels down, stows the boy beneath the table. Then he moves on into the dining room, turns right, and passes through a wide archway into the den.
Plushycushioned furniture has been arranged in a semicircle around the undeniable focal point of the room: a gargantuan television with satellite speakers positioned strategically in every corner for a maximum auditory experience. A third Tupperware bowl has been abandoned between two pillows on the floor. Bending down, he scoops out a handful of popcorn and crams it into his mouth.
He walks to the edge of the hallway, eyes still adjusting to the navy darkness. The electronic snoring of the kitchen cannot be heard from this corridor of the house. But there are other sounds: the toilet runs; a showerhead drips onto ceramic; three human beings breathe heavily in oblivious comfort. Beneath this soundtrack of suburban sleep the central heating whispers on and on, safe as his mother’s heartbeat.
Luther stands in the hallway scraping chunks of popcorn from his molars, thinking, They need this noise. They would go mad without it. They think this is silence…they have never known silence.
He steps through the first doorway on the right, a bathroom. Opening the medicine cabinet above the sink, he takes out a box of grape-flavored dental floss. When his teeth are clean to his satisfaction he returns the floss to its shelf and closes the cabinet. Stepping back into the hall he tiptoes across the carpet into the first room on the left.
A black and orange sticker on the door reads “Private-Keep Out!” and below it in stenciled characters: “Hank’s Hideout.”
The room is tidy-no toys on the floor, beanbags pushed into the corners.
A dozen model airplanes and helicopters hang by wires from the ceiling.
A B-25 sits near completion on a desk. Only the wings and the ball turret remain to be affixed.
He smells the glue.
A bevy of Little League trophies lines the top of a dresser, each golden plastic boy facing the bed, frozen in midswing. Luther reads the engraving on the base of one of the trophies.
Hank’s team is called The Lean, Mean, Fighting Machine.
He won the sportsmanship award last year.
Removing his backpack, Luther lies down beside Hank atop a bedspread patterned with a map of the constellations. The boy sleeps on his side, his back to the intruder. Luther watches him for a moment under the orange gleam of a nightlight, wondering what it must feel like to have a son.
Because he’s dreaming, the boy’s neck snaps more easily than his little brother’s.
Luther rises, unzips the backpack. He takes out the gun, the handcuffs, the tape recorder, Orson’s bowie. The gun is not loaded. Silencers are hard to come by and under no condition will he fire a. 357 at two in the morning in a neighborhood like this.
Slipping the handcuffs into his pocket, he moves back into the hall and arrives at last in the threshold of the master bedroom where Zach and Theresa Worthington sleep.
In the absence of a nightlight the room is all shape and shadow.
He would prefer to stand here, watching them from the doorway for an hour, glutting himself on anticipation. But this isn’t his only project tonight and the sun will be up in four hours.
So Luther sets the tape recorder on a nearby dresser and presses record. Then he thumbs back the hammer on the. 357 and strokes the light switch with his latex finger though he does not flip it yet.
Zach Worthington shifts in bed.
“Theresa,” he mumbles. “Trese?”
A half-conscious answer: “Wha?”
Luther’s loins tingle.
“I think one of the kids are up.”
13
ELIZABETH Lancing couldn’t sleep. She’d gone on her first date with Todd Ramsey tonight and a spectrum of emotions swarmed inside her head, giddiness to guilt. Todd had taken her to a French restaurant in Charlotte called The Melting Pot. Initially she’d been horrified at the prospect of making conversation over three hours of fondue but Todd was charming and they’d fallen into easy conversation.
They started out discussing their law firm where Todd had just made partner and Beth had been a legal administrator for five years. At first they resisted the gossip but Womble amp; Sloop was a rowdy firm and the fodder was bottomless and irresistible. This transitioned into a brief exchange on their philosophies of employment and how neither of them knew anyone whose work afforded absolute fulfillment. They posited finally that the ideal job did exist but that finding it was such an excruciating chore most people preferred instead to suffer moderate unhappiness over an entire career.
Toward the end of dinner, as they dipped melon balls and strawberries into a pot of scalding chocolate, the conversation took an intimate turn. They sat close, basked in prolonged eye contact, and compared only the idyllic slivers of their childhoods.
Beth knew that Todd had been recently divorced. He was well aware that her husband had disappeared seven years ago through some mysterious connection to Andrew Thomas. But neither came within a hundred miles of the other’s baggage.
After dinner Todd took her home. It was eleven o’clock and cruising north up a vacated I-77, Beth watched the pavement pass, mesmeric in the headlights. Riding with Todd she felt foreign to herself in a fresh and frightening way. Like the start of college and autumn. Not a thirty-eight-year-old single mother of two.