I move into the hallway, my flashlight and gun at eye level, moving them in tandem while I shuffle forward along the tile, surveying room after room — the kitchen, the foyer, the living room.
I stop. Listen. The house groans. The wind outside plays with the trees.
Now the attic bedroom. The only room left.
I try my weight on the first stair and it complains to me. I take every other step, crouched low, slowly transferring my weight onto each new stair like a spider approaching prey, keeping the light beam down.
My eyes are now level with the second floor, my body still below it. I listen for any sounds. There is no such thing as silence in a house. But this house, suddenly, is silent.
I take a step up into the attic, a large open space. I throw the beam of light onto a bed right in front of me, with the covers pulled back and a pillow indented in the middle. I swing to my left when something strikes me, sharp and violent, cracking me in the cheek, knocking me sideways to the right, sending fluorescent stars through my eyelids. The Maglite skitters across the floor, sending a crazy pattern of rolling circles of light against the wall. I remain standing but unbalanced, staggering, disoriented, and all I can think is—
Duck.
I drop to a crouch as a force propels itself at me, over me. Noah’s lunging tackle misses me, worthy of a SportsCenter highlight, but as he sails over me, his knees connect with my shoulder and we fall awkwardly. Noah’s momentum carries him to the corner, slamming him against the wall, while I land hard on my back, my head bouncing on hardwood, the gun no longer in my hand. Everything is dancing, but there’s no time. I get to my feet just as he does. He’s like a shadow, in a fighter’s stance in a dark room, the only illumination coming from the far corner, where the Maglite has rolled to rest and shines a wide yellow circle against the back wall.
My training comes to me by instinct, legs spread, knees bent, weight evenly balanced, fists raised. Noah makes a move toward me, but I jab with my left, connecting with his nose, straightening him up for a moment, then follow with my right hand, my knuckles catching on his teeth. His head snaps to the right, but he recovers quickly — more quickly than I would have thought — and lunges toward me, this time with his head down, not making the same mistake twice. My left leg shoots up for a kick, but I’m off my game, disoriented myself, and he’s too fast, too athletic. His shoulder plunges into my midsection and sends me spiraling backward, he along with me. We land hard and I lose my wind.
“Who are you?” he spits, straddling me now, his palms pinning my shoulders. “What the hell are — wait — you’re — you’re that cop—”
In the moments it takes me to recover my breath, I bring up my right knee and find my backup piece on the ankle holster. I remove it and shove it into his rib cage.
“Get off me now,” I say.
The pressure eases off my shoulders. My left arm free, I shove my palm against his chest and knock him backward, until I’m out from under him. I get to my feet with some effort, my gun trained on him, a tidal wave of adrenaline coursing through me.
“I didn’t know you were a cop,” Noah says, panting, touching the cuts on his face. “Aren’t you supposed to announce who you are?”
But I’m not a cop tonight. Tonight, I’m a niece. The niece of a dear, sweet man who was shot five times in the extremities and speared with a hot poker.
“You okay?” he says to me. “I’ve never hit a woman in my—”
“Shut up!” I hiss. I move a step closer to him. “You killed all of them. Say it. Say it right this second, right this second, or I’ll shoot.”
As my eyes adjust in the semidarkness, I see Noah more clearly, a man in his boxers, crouched at the knees; I see the whites of his eyes.
“I didn’t kill anybody,” he says.
I drive my shoe into him like I’m kicking a field goal, catching arms and knees and maybe his chin. I see him fall to the floor. I see other things, too. Uncle Lang, bobbing me up and down on his leg when I was a child. Tearing up at my cadet graduation, telling me how proud my father would have been—
Tears fill my eyes, screams fill my head, adrenaline fills my chest. I struggle to keep control of my weapon. “Admit you attacked him,” I say, “or die right now.”
I want him to defy me. I want to kill him. I want to shoot him the same way he shot my uncle, in all the places it hurts, maximizing his suffering, making him beg for his life, before driving a red-hot stake through his kidney—
“I’m not going to admit something I didn’t do,” Noah says with control, with calm. “You can shoot me if you want. But I don’t think you will. Because you’re a fair person. And deep down, I think you know—”
“Shut up! You... you took him from me... you took him...”
My entire body quivering, my voice choking off, tears rolling down my face, my breath coming in tight gasps, I lower the gun, then raise it back up, the screams in my head drowning out everything else.
“What are you talking about?” he asks.
I shuffle toward him, only steps away from him, both hands desperately clutching my gun. “Say it!” I scream.
But it doesn’t matter what he says anymore. I’m going to do it. I’m going to pull this trigger.
“I didn’t kill anybody,” he says.
My breath held tight in my lungs, I pull the trigger once, a single bullet, and then drop the weapon to my side.
21
I stand over the grave, the outlines of the freshly dug earth a tangible reminder of the funeral yesterday. It was a nice affair, with the police force in formal dress, a gun salute, the works. It was the very opposite of a private family ceremony, in part because Lang didn’t have any family besides me, but appropriate, too, because Lang was such a public figure, a giant in this community, the chief law enforcement officer for almost two decades.
Lang died in surgery that night at the hospital. The hemorrhaging was too massive, the doctor said. Too many wounds. Too much blood lost for too long.
Chloe Danchisin — Aunt Chloe — slides her arm inside mine and perches her chin on my shoulder. “He always loved this cemetery,” she says. “He bought these plots for us when we were first married.”
I blow my nose and take a breath. My throat aches from all the crying I’ve done over the past several days. “I... still can’t believe he’s gone.”
Chloe rubs her hand on my back, tiny circles. “It’s not fair to you, honey. It seems like just yesterday that Lydia died.”
Almost three years to the day, actually, that my mother gave in to the cancer.
“You know how much Lang loved you, don’t you?”
I nod but don’t speak. My throat is so strained that I don’t even sound like myself. My head is filled with a constant ringing.
“Oh, when he hired you to work here — he was so excited. He called me. We hadn’t spoken in over a year, but he called me to give me the news. He was like a giddy schoolboy.”
Despite the fact that I’ve shed enough tears over the last few days to fill a small lake, my eyes well up again. “I questioned his judgment,” I say. “I doubted his investigation of the Ocean Drive murders. I actually — I actually suggested that Noah Walker might be innocent.” I scoff at the notion in hindsight. It’s so clear to me now. Noah killed Lang so he couldn’t testify, and in much the same way he killed Zach and Melanie, and the prostitute in the woods. Different methods, but the same sociopathic brutality — maximizing their suffering, making sure they would bleed out in painful deaths.