“It’s kind of like what I imagine a plane crash would be like, although I hate to even say that, considering what my boyfriend does for a living. All those casualties, all at once. But with a crash, it’d be all kinds of physical injuries. Missing limbs, lacerations. With a mass poisoning, there wasn’t blood, but it didn’t make it any less horrifying, but it was different, you know?”
“Yes,” he said.
Maybe he could corner her in the kitchen before she went to the bathroom.
“Who would do such a thing?” she asked. “Why would someone want to do that?”
Angus shook his head.
“I just don’t know.”
Except now he did know, or at least had a pretty good idea.
When Barry Duckworth called to ask him what he knew about George Lydecker, who’d been found in Victor Rooney’s garage, he’d disclosed what he believed Rooney’s motive had been.
Payback.
Rooney may have been taking revenge on a citizenry that did nothing to help Olivia Fisher. Which meant the deaths of more than a hundred Promise Falls residents led right back to Angus Carlson.
He was having a hard time getting his head around that.
He wasn’t sure how he felt.
Angus was selective about those who had to die. He did not kill men. Men did not bear children. Yes, of course, they had a role to play in the reproductive process. But women were the ultimate givers of life. So all those men who had died the day before—it was a terrible thing. All the elderly, of both sexes. All the children, even the girls, who should have been entitled to at least a few more years.
It was wrong. So unnecessary.
That’s a very, very sick person, Angus thought.
He rejected the notion that he was somehow liable for all that. Every individual had to be held responsible for his or her actions. Like when some nutcase says a movie made him kill. Was it the director’s fault? The studio’s? Should the screenwriter be charged? No, Angus thought. It was the fault of that nutcase, plain and simple.
Wasn’t he willing to take responsibility for what he was doing? Of course he was. His mother played a role in his motivations, but in the end, it was up to him.
And right now, it was up to him to kill Sonja Roper.
She excused herself, walked down the hall, and disappeared into a room. Carlson heard the door close and lock. Seconds later, the sound of water running in a sink.
His cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He wasn’t taking any more calls. He wasn’t going to be tricked by Duckworth again. But it might be a text, and he was curious to see what it was.
It was, as he’d guessed it would be, Gale.
I love you. I need you. Please come home.
He shook his head sadly. That was probably Duckworth’s doing. Telling her what to write.
Angus turned his attention back to Sonja.
He could position himself on the far side of the bathroom door.
When she came out, she’d probably head back toward the living room. She’d exit the bathroom and turn left. He could wait to her right. The second she emerged, he could grab her from behind, pull her close to him, do it quickly.
Make the smile.
He got up, went down the hall. Stood against the wall just beyond the door. He could hear her moving around in there. A toilet flush. He reached down into his front pocket, where he kept the knife. It was an automatic, a blade just over three inches. One touch of the button and the blade would emerge. Short handle with a strong grip. Expensive. He’d hated throwing one away every time, but it was the prudent thing to do. In the case of Olivia Fisher, imperative.
You didn’t want to be caught with a bloody knife on your person.
He took the weapon from his pocket, extended the blade.
Inside the bathroom, no more running water. He sensed she was ready to come out.
He was ready, too.
And then it hit him.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
He needed to have done more than mute his phone. He should have turned it off completely. Duckworth might be trying to track his location.
Angus reached for his phone with his free hand, and as he did, it vibrated again.
Another text.
He decided to look at it before powering the phone down.
It was another one from Gale. It read:
Im pregnant.
SIXTY-THREE
Duckworth
“WHAT did he say?” I asked after Gale sent her most recent text message.
“He hasn’t said anything,” she said.
When Gale told me she’d learned, three weeks ago, that she was expecting a child, I thought maybe the news would be enough to jolt Angus Carlson into coming back to the house.
“Wait,” she said. “He’s writing something. Here.” She turned the phone so I could see it.
I dont believe you.
Gale typed: It’s true. Please come home.
Another stretch of time without a reply. Maybe a minute, which felt like an eternity in the world of texting. Then: Dworth made you say this.
Gale replied: He wanted me to tell u. But it is true. Have known for 3wks. Afraid to tell u.
My cell phone rang. It was Chief Finderman.
“We have an approximate location on the phone,” she told me.
“Where?”
“Klondike Street. Near Rossland.”
“If they can pinpoint it any better, let me know,” I said. “Start having cars focus on that neighborhood. I’m heading there.”
“I hope you’re wrong about this,” Rhonda said.
“Me, too,” I said, but wasn’t sure I meant it. If Angus Carlson was our serial killer, I wanted him caught. If it reflected badly on the department, and Rhonda Finderman in particular, so be it.
I finished with Rhonda and looked at Gale, who was still staring at her phone. “Anything else?”
She held the device up to me. Angus had written: Should have told me.
“Tell him the two of you need to talk about it. Right now.”
She tapped. I heard the whoosh.
“You’re coming with me,” I said.
“Where are we going? Do you know where he is?”
“Roughly,” I said.
“Just tell me what it is you think he’s done,” she said, not moving. “You kept mentioning those women who’d been killed. Did Angus make some kind of mistake? Did he screw up the investigation? Is that why you’re mad at him?”
I thought maybe she’d already figured it out, but was clinging to the hope that her husband wasn’t a killer.
“I need to talk to him about those investigations, yes,” I said.
Gale swallowed hard. It looked like a marble working its way down her throat. “You think it’s him.”
“I don’t know that,” I said.
“It might be him,” she said.
“Gale.”
“He said something to me last night. Just before we went to sleep. I could tell he was thinking about something. He said he’d been talking to a nurse at the hospital, that she was getting married soon, that they wanted to have kids.” She paused. “How it made him sad.”
I felt my blood starting to run cold. “Did he mention a name?” “No.”
“Anything else about her?”
Gale shook her head. Suddenly, she let out a short scream. Her phone had buzzed in her hand.
“It’s Angus. He says he has to think.”
I’d already stepped out front. I called the hospital, asked to be put through to the emergency ward. Someone picked up and said, “Emergency. Nurse Fielding.”
I identified myself. It took a little convincing, but she finally remembered me from when I was there the day before. “I’m trying to track down someone who works in the ER who was there yesterday—”
“Everyone was here yesterday,” she said.
“This nurse probably was in her twenties or thirties, dark hair, and she might live on Klondike Street.”
“Oh, that’s probably Sonja,” Nurse Fielding said.
“Sonja? Can you spell that? And do you have a last name?”
She spelled the first name, and then said, “Roper.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Is she there today?”
“No, she did a double and a half yesterday.”
“Do you have a contact number, and an exact address?”
“Hang on a second.”
While I waited, I said to Gale, “Anything else from him?”
“No,” she said.
I had my notepad out, waiting for Nurse Fielding to report back. A few seconds later, she came on.
“Okay, Sonja lives at 31 Klondike,” she said.
Shit.
“And do you have a number for her?”
She gave me one. “I think it’s a cell,” she said. “I don’t think she has a landline.”
I ended the call and said to Gale, “Let’s go.” On the way to the car, I dialed Sonja Roper’s number.
SIXTY-FOUR
WHEN Gale texted him the news that she was pregnant, Angus became so fixated on the phone, staring at the words, that he lost track of what he’d come to Sonja Roper’s house to do.
How could she be pregnant?
How could Gale have betrayed him that way?
Angus wondered, first, whether she was telling him the truth. But if she was, how had it happened? Of course, no method of birth control was one hundred percent effective. But he thought they’d been careful, unless Gale was deliberately not being careful.
He slipped the knife back into his pocket, wrote Gale back, accusing her of lying, then said she should have told him as soon as she’d known.
What would he have done had he known? he wondered.
Would he have killed Gale?
No, no, he wouldn’t have done that. That was unthinkable.
He’d have had her go to a clinic. He’d have made her terminate the pregnancy.
He was almost sure that was what he would have done.
Except . . . now he was overwhelmed with the idea that he might actually be a father. That a child of his was growing inside Gale.
How did that make him feel? In the first few seconds after she’d texted him, he was angry. Then confused. Then—
The bathroom door swung open.
Sonja Roper stepped out, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, hair wet. Her feet were bare.
“Shit!” she said when she realized Angus was hovering right by the door, phone in hand. She jumped, spun around to face him, and backed her way into the living room. “What were you doing there?”
“I was . . . I was just on my phone. Texting.”
“Why were you hiding outside the door there?”
“I wasn’ t—I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“What kind of creep are you?”
“I didn’t look in. I didn’t try the door.”
“Look, I don’t know what questions you’ve got, but you should leave.”
“My wife is pregnant,” he said.
“What?”
“She just texted me. She’s pregnant.”
Sonja, bewildered, said, “Well . . . that’s just great. But it doesn’t explain why you were creeping around outside my door.”
“She didn’t tell me. She’s known for three weeks.”
“I guess you should talk to her about that,” Sonja said. “Like, right now would be a good time.”
A cell phone began to ring. The sound was coming from the kitchen.
“Don’t answer that,” Angus said.
“Excuse me?”
“I said don’t answer it. We have to talk.”
“Get out,” she said as the phone continued to ring. “I want you out of here right now.”
Angus slowly started walking down the hall toward her. “What do you think I should do?” he asked her.
“What?” Sonja said, glancing behind her with each backward step she took.
In the distance, the sound of sirens.
“What should I do about my wife being pregnant?” He looked at her plaintively. “I’m not sure how to handle it. It’s all feeling a bit overwhelming. There’s only so much one person can do. I came here to solve one problem, but now another’s overtaken it. But is it a problem?”
“You’re off your nut,” Sonja said, turned, and ran.
She pushed the front door open with both hands and burst out of the house as though there’d been an explosion as two police cars raced up the street, lights flashing, sirens wailing. Sonja waved her arms as she ran across the lawn.
Angus came out the door after her, but once on the front step he stopped. He saw the cars screaming toward the house.
He got out his phone and texted to Gale: Guess I will come home now.
He stared at the screen as the police cars screeched to a halt out front of the house.
Coming to you, Gale wrote back.
A female officer was out of the first car. Sonja Roper was talking to her, pointing to Carlson.
“Detective Carlson!” the officer said. “Are you Detective Carlson?”
He typed: Ok.
Then he looked up and said, “Yes, I’m Carlson.”
Another car, plain black without markings, rounded the corner.
Carlson recognized it immediately as an unmarked Promise Falls police car. He was pretty sure that was Barry Duckworth behind the wheel.
With Gale in the seat next to him.
Gale threw open the door as Duckworth brought the car to a stop.
“Gale!” Duckworth said. “Wait!”
But she wasn’t going to wait. She ran past the marked cars, ignored the female officer’s call to stop, and ran directly to her husband. He stood there, waited. She got to within a foot of him, and when she stopped, he smiled.
“Maybe it’s a good thing you didn’t tell me,” Angus said. “I don’t know what I might have had to do.”
Gale suddenly went weak and dropped to her knees in front of him.
SIXTY-FIVE
Duckworth
RHONDA Finderman sat in on the interrogation.
Angus insisted he did not want a lawyer. Once he’d signed off on that, and we were ready to record his statement, he told us everything, with plenty of corroborating detail.
About Olivia Fisher, and Rosemary Gaynor, and, most recently, Lorraine Plummer. There was a murder in Cleveland, too. Once I had the details on that, I’d be getting in touch with the Cleveland police so they could move that one to the solved column.
Angus explained to us how he was saving unborn children from a life of misery.
“I screwed up with Rosemary Gaynor,” he said. “I didn’t realize she already had a child.”
“And it wasn’t her child,” I pointed out. “Rosemary Gaynor couldn’t have children.”
He grimaced, looking like a kid who’d gotten only an A when he was expecting an A-plus.
Chief Finderman didn’t say a word through the whole thing. Bad enough that one of her own was a serial killer. This was the man she’d moved up to detective status. I didn’t envy her when she went before the cameras on this one.
“I want your thoughts on something,” Angus said at one point.
“About what?” I asked.
“Well, it’s about Victor Rooney and the poisoning of the water. I want to know if you think that’s my fault.”
“I don’t think my opinion on that matters, Angus,” I said.
“No, really, I’d like to know. I value your opinion.”
“Why don’t you tell me if you think it’s your fault?”
“At first, I thought maybe it was. But I think Victor has to own it. It was his decision. Regardless of what I did, or those other people who did nothing, he made the choice to do what he did.”
“I see.”
“You don’t agree?” he asked.
“Like I said, my opinion doesn’t matter here,” I told him. “But let me ask you this. If you hadn’t killed Olivia Fisher, would more
than a hundred people have died in Promise Falls this weekend?”
Angus Carlson gave that some thought. “I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Thank you for your kindness toward Gale,” he said.
“Sure.”
Angus shook his head slowly and sighed. “Given that what’s done is done, I hope it’s a boy.”
Finderman and I left Angus in the interrogation room to confer.
“What a mess,” she said. “And please don’t say it is what it is.” “That’s not one of my sayings,” I said, steering her toward the coffee machine. “But it’s kind of apt.”
“God, Barry. One of our own.”
“It’ll be bad,” I said. “We just have to ride it out.”
“I’m the one who has to ride it out. You found a killer. I promoted one.”
“You think we might try to find a silver lining here?” I said, grabbing two mugs, glancing into them to ensure that they were at least remotely clean. “We caught a serial killer. We’ve solved three homicides. And maybe another one or two for the folks in Cleveland. Did you notice, when I asked him about his mother’s death, how uncomfortable he got? I think they should be taking another look at that, too.”
It was difficult for Finderman to see an upside at the moment, but she tried. “In the course of one day you’ve found the guy who poisoned the town’s water, and exposed a multiple murderer. Christ, they’ll be making a movie about you.”
“You heard anything about Rooney?” I asked, pouring coffee into the two mugs. I held up the container of cream, but she shook her head. I handed her a mug.
“He’s in the ICU,” Rhonda said. “That fire truck hit him good. But he’s far from a goner. They think he might regain consciousness before too long.” She took a sip of the coffee. “I’m always amazed that this is not terrible.”
I nodded. “Let’s hope he’ll be as forthcoming as Carlson was about why he did what he did.”
Rhonda turned her back to the wall and let it hold her up. “I’m beat, but you look about a hundred times worse.”
I smiled. “Yeah. I’m tired.”