There's Someone Inside Your House

  He was wearing jeans and a LION PRIDE sweatshirt. They were splattered with turquoise paint—the same color that her mother had meant to repaint the kitchen chairs last spring. The same color that Katie had propped against the basement window that evening. She took all this in, in an instant, as she scrambled to her feet.

  He lunged for her. She ran toward the butcher block, reaching for the biggest knife as he stabbed her in the shoulder. When he yanked it out, she kicked him. David shoved her against the cabinets. His hands smeared her skin with red and turquoise. She was five foot ten, and so was he. Their weight was similar, and the same amount of adrenaline coursed through their bodies. But he was the one with the weapon.

  Katie kneed him in the balls as David stabbed her in the upper right abdomen. They both buckled over. The knife pushed deeper into her liver.

  She collapsed, frightened and crying. But oddly hushed.

  David peered over her. His question was curious, though his voice was dead. “Why aren’t you screaming?”

  Because I don’t want to wake up my brother and sister.

  When she didn’t answer out loud, he finished her off. He didn’t have time to wait.

  He checked her phone, which was still trying to connect to the police. David ended the call. The cops already knew he was in the area, and he was angry. He didn’t like having to rush. He sawed through the rib cage—stomping on the knife to help crack the bones faster—and ripped out the heart. He slammed it on top of the glossy college brochures that had been stacked on the table for months.

  Because Katie’s heart had been set on college.

  He was funny. Nobody seemed to get that.

  Lights flashed outside the kitchen window. Red and blue, one street over. He tugged off the sweatshirt. It wasn’t camouflage, but it had acted as camouflage. Nearly everyone on the street today had been wearing school colors. He threw it as he ran, and it landed on Katie—the Katie-husk—crumpled on the floor, no longer of use.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Makani and Ollie had waited, terrified, in the cereal aisle until Officer Bev had escorted them out. Chris had tried to chase after David, but he’d already disappeared.

  Makani and Ollie were interviewed and gave statements. Again. Now it was late, and they were back at the Larsson house, decompressing at the kitchen table and attempting to excise the horrendous image of Caleb’s grotesque prayer from their minds. Chris was on the phone in the next room.

  Ollie stared vacantly at the oven. “Maybe we should have chased him,” he said. “Maybe we could have caught him.”

  Makani’s knees were up in the chair. Her non-bandaged arm was wrapped around them, and her head was tucked down. She felt too broken to lift it.

  “He killed Caleb,” he said. “Not Zachary.”

  His words hung limply in the air between them. Out in the fields, the nighttime insects whirred and buzzed. The wind chimes on the front porch sang three notes.

  “I don’t think this is about bullying,” he said.

  She shook her head, but it was in agreement.

  “So, what the hell is it about?”

  It scared her to admit that she had no idea. She hadn’t realized that she’d taken a measure of comfort in at least knowing why she’d been attacked. There’d been a reason. Not knowing David’s motivation felt like everybody she knew was in danger again.

  A shadow fell over them as Chris stepped back into the light of the room. His face was white with disbelief. “There’s been another one.”

  The midnight sky wept in an unexpected drizzle. Chris moved his laptop, binders, metal ticketing notebooks, and food containers into the trunk of his car. Makani darted into the emptied passenger’s seat, and Ollie slid into the back. In the rearview mirror, his face was printed with diamond-shaped shadows from the metal dividing grate.

  They’d been at the house for less than thirty minutes. Chris had to return to work, so he was driving them to the hospital to stay with Grandma Young. He refused to leave them alone.

  Makani felt so exhausted that she wanted to cry, but she didn’t want to be left alone, either. As the endless rows of cornstalks rolled past her window—long corridors into murky blackness—she shivered with the unshakable feeling that David could be anywhere. Her lower legs pressed against the bulletproof vest resting on the floorboards.

  Chris noticed her shivering and turned up the heat. The windshield wipers swiped at a slow and steady pace.

  “She texted me this morning,” Makani said, remembering.

  He glanced at her sharply. “Katie contacted you? About what?”

  “She said she was sorry to hear what had happened to me, and she was there if I wanted to talk.” Another deadening inside Makani. “I didn’t text her back.”

  “Did you talk to her often? Was she a close friend?”

  “We weren’t friends at all. We were friendly. Sometimes we talked in class, but we never texted or hung out or anything.”

  Chris frowned. “So, why start texting you this morning?”

  “That’s just Katie being Katie.” From the backseat, Ollie dismissed the notion of there being anything odd or sinister behind it. “She was nice to everyone.”

  “Who found her?” Makani asked. They already knew how she’d been found.

  “Her mom.” It seemed hard for Chris to say it. “Apparently, she works the late shift at the hospital, and Katie wasn’t answering her phone, so she came home on her break to check in. Katie’s younger brother and sister were still asleep upstairs.”

  Makani used to shave her arms for diving. Now, her arm hair stood on end as she remembered a laminated ID badge. Kurtzman. The kindhearted nurse who’d given her blueberry yogurt and watched over her was Katie’s mother.

  “She couldn’t have known.” Chris sounded shaken. Maybe he was picturing himself in her place. “I doubt that she actually expected to find something wrong.”

  The rain ticked staccato against the roof of the car. Perhaps sensing that his brother needed to think about something else, Ollie asked him to repeat his knowledge of David’s whereabouts.

  After attacking them yesterday at Makani’s house, David had traveled upriver instead of down, which the police hadn’t predicted. Under the cover of night, he’d crept back into town and hidden inside the back room at Greeley’s, correctly guessing that everyone would be searching for him out in the countryside.

  He’d been right under their noses the whole time.

  At first, the police were flummoxed as to how he’d broken in, because none of the doors or windows had been damaged. But then Caleb’s uncle, the owner, recalled having to cut a new key for Caleb a few months back. His uncle had found this odd, because Caleb wasn’t usually forgetful or careless. The police speculated that David had stolen the key and entered the store as if he belonged there. It probably wasn’t the first time that he’d broken in. And the key probably wasn’t the only thing he’d stolen.

  Several members of the marching band, including Alex, reported that Caleb had practiced his speech inside the store, and then when he returned from delivering it to the crowd, he’d claimed that his hat plume was missing. It seemed possible that David had stolen it while Caleb was practicing and then used it to lure him back.

  “It’s still not clear why he didn’t kill Caleb before the memorial,” Chris said, keeping his eyes on the two-lane road. “Maybe because people would have looked for Caleb sooner? And we also don’t know—” But he cut himself off, with a glance in the rearview mirror at his brother.

  “Know what?” Ollie asked.

  Chris looked like he didn’t want to answer. “We also don’t know if David had more than one target inside the store.”

  Ollie’s tense expression showed Makani that the thought had already crossed his mind.

  “We do know that he stole a sweatshirt,” Chris said, trying to hurry past it, “which he left behind at Katie’s before jacking her 2011 Ford Fiesta. The sweatshirt was covered in blood and paint from her ba
sement. We don’t know what he’s wearing now. We still haven’t found his hoodie, and no one noticed him leave her neighborhood. Everyone was looking for someone on foot.”

  “So, he’s leaving town.” Makani wasn’t sure if she believed it. And even if it were true, it wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted to know exactly where David was. Until he was captured, she would never feel at ease again.

  A pair of headlights loomed through the rain in the distance.

  “What color was the car?” Ollie asked.

  “Blue,” Chris said quietly.

  The headlights grew closer. Makani’s heartbeat spiked, and Chris’s grip tightened on the steering wheel. It was impossible to tell anything about the car, except that it was small. Everyone held their breath until the car passed.

  Red. A Ford Focus.

  They exhaled. A minute later, there was a new pair of headlights, and their lungs tightened again. And then released. Tightened. Released.

  It was like that for the remainder of the drive.

  Grandma Young was asleep, heavily sedated. Makani and Ollie tried to sleep, too, taking turns on the comfortable recliner, but their brains were wired. As the night droned on, they watched the cars in the parking lot below and stared at the flickering television screen. It wasn’t a heavy storm, but it was enough to mess with the signal.

  The TV was set on the lowest volume above mute. For hours, CNN cycled between an airstrike in Syria, a group of missing hikers in North Carolina, and the latest murders in Osborne.

  Caleb Randolph Greeley Jr.

  Katie Teresa Kurtzman.

  Their full names were spoken aloud by strangers. The same atrocious clips of the same panicked citizens were replayed. The victims were turning into numbers, statistics that were being used to compare David with other notable serial killers. He’d obliterated two people within a three-hour gap and with a crowd nearby. It wasn’t just Makani; the entire Midwest had the crawling sensation that he was standing right behind them.

  But here, inside the hospital, it was even worse. Katie and her mom were the subject of every low-spoken conversation. It was impossible not to overhear the muffled crying coming from the nurses’ station. The choked sobs. The noses blowing into tissues.

  It was nearly daybreak before the talking heads had something to report. “Breaking news in the hunt for the Osborne Slayer,” a woman’s voice said.

  Makani’s and Ollie’s bleary eyes sprang open as the Latina news anchor continued, “You’re looking at footage from a truck stop near Boys Town, Nebraska, just outside of Omaha, at eleven o’clock last night. An unidentified driver called 911 after spotting a blue Ford Fiesta ditched on an embankment near the truck stop. When the police pulled the surveillance video, this is what they discovered.”

  Black-and-white footage showed a figure in a long coat walk up to a semi and speak to the driver through the window. Even though the outdated cameras made his movements jerky and pixelated, Makani could tell that the grainy figure was David. A nauseated chill washed over her. David climbed inside the truck, and it drove away.

  “As you can see,” the news anchor said, “the truck makes a right turn before traveling out of frame. It looks like the driver is headed back toward Osborne.”

  Makani glanced at Ollie. His face was a perfect reflection of her fear.

  “At this time, the police have not revealed the driver’s name, only that his tags were from Indiana. It is not yet known if he was aware of the hitchhiker’s identity.”

  That was it. The news rehashed the story from the top. David kept climbing into the truck, and it kept making a right turn.

  The killer kept going home.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  It was the eve of All Hallows’ Eve. The rain had stopped, but the asphalt was still slick with water and oil. A lurid sunrise—worthy of Hawaii—illuminated the sky. It was such an obscene contrast to the overhanging dread that it felt like they were being mocked.

  Makani and Ollie had slipped away from Grandma Young before she’d even known that they were there. Chris drove them back to the Larsson house. This time, Makani sat beside Ollie in the backseat. Their fingers were icicles as they grasped each other with all four hands. Despite the ideal opportunity to escape, David had chosen to come home. He’d tried to kill her and failed. What if he was returning to finish the job?

  “The truck driver was stopped just past Norfolk at twelve forty-five a.m.,” Chris said, filling in some of the blanks. “Must’ve been the only person in America who hadn’t heard about the manhunt. He claimed that he only listens to Christian talk radio, and they’ve been yammering about the new Supreme Court justice all week. He told the deputy that David was quiet and polite. He also said it looked like he was wearing a woman’s coat.”

  Despite seeing it in the surveillance footage, this last detail startled Makani.

  “My guess,” Chris said, “is that he’s still wearing the same bloodstained jeans and hoodie, and he needed something to cover them up. The coat probably belongs to Katie’s mom. The driver said he dropped him off in front of a farm near Troy.”

  Troy was only one town over. Alex lived on a ranch just outside it.

  “David told him it was his parents’ farm. We’ve already interviewed the farmers, but they were asleep. They didn’t see or hear anything unusual. The other neighbors are being interviewed now, and there’s a team searching the surrounding fields.”

  Makani and Ollie tightened their icy grips.

  There was nothing else they could do.

  The cold autumn air crackled throughout the countryside, electric with anticipation.

  Makani and Ollie were bundled inside sleeping bags on Chris’s hardwood floor. Heat whirred out from the registers. With the daylight, locked door, and armed police officer, Makani’s body finally succumbed to rest. Her dreams began heavy and empty, but, over the course of the afternoon, they struggled into existence. A sharp knife in one hand, a severed ponytail in the other. A hooded figure lurching out from behind a grandfather clock. She would fight these nightmares for the rest of her life.

  While the trio slept, strangers streamed in from out of town. Even more media, but also armchair detectives—online sleuths, some well-meaning and some not, jumping into ambitious action—as well as morbid gawkers, deceitful psychics, and drunk college kids, who thought it’d be a hoot to visit the famous corn maze. The displaced Sweeney Todd cast and crew had turned it into a haunted corn maze, and the Martin family would donate the weekend’s profits to the victims’ families.

  “Knowing he’s still out there just makes the maze a lot scarier,” a student wearing a scarlet ball cap with a cream N said, speaking to a field reporter. His fraternity brothers whooped behind him on camera. “Plus, you know. Charity.”

  Even the National Guard rolled in. They were to stand watch over the football game so that the townspeople would feel brave enough to attend. There were no parking spaces left at the school. The tailgate party had started early. The playoffs didn’t stop for tornado sirens, and they weren’t about to stop for a serial killer.

  And through it all, Makani, Ollie, and Chris slept.

  Chris’s phone rang when the sun was low on the horizon. Makani scrambled up to a sitting position against his bed, her bulging eyes on the door. It was still closed.

  “Yeah,” Chris said into the phone.

  Ollie scootched out from his sleeping bag to hunker down with Makani. He was careful not to sit on the side of her injured arm.

  “Shit.” Chris sighed. “Okay, yeah. See you soon.”

  Makani burrowed into the shelter of Ollie’s body as the phone thumped onto the bed above them. Chris released another sigh. “What is it?” Ollie asked.

  “Nothing. Nothing new,” Chris clarified. “Just . . . shouldn’t have slept so late.”

  “You need to go in?”

  “Yeah.” His feet swung over the edge of the bed beside Ollie. “So, I’ve gotta head toward Troy, which is in the opposite direction
of where you need to go. We’ll take separate cars, but we’ll leave at the same time. You guys are to drive straight to the hospital, okay? And you’re to stay there until I tell you to leave.”

  Makani and Ollie nodded.

  “I’m gonna check the house, just to be safe.” Chris stood, picking up his gun from the nightstand. “I’ll be right back. Wait here.” In the doorway, he glanced back at them. “Do you have your phones?”

  Their phones were already in their hands. They held them up.

  Chris vanished down the hall. Ollie’s under-eye circles were so dark that it looked like he’d been punched. Makani wished that she could touch his skin and heal it.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “No. Are you?”

  “No.” But he smiled, which made her exhale a faint laugh.

  Chris’s bedroom was as disheveled as Ollie’s. Bags from Sonic and the gas station were scattered everywhere, and heaps of clothing were piled in front of the closet. The clothes looked clean, though permanently unfolded. The only vestiges of his youth appeared to be the three dusty guitars hanging on the wall—one acoustic, two electric. Beneath them was an amp covered in coffee cups and mail.

  The upstairs floorboards creaked as Chris moved from room to room. Makani’s gaze snapped back to the door. “This is so messed up.”

  “The most messed up,” Ollie said.

  She held her breath as the footsteps continued toward the bathroom.

  “I mean,” he said, “I slept beside you all day and didn’t think about sex once.”

  Her head remained locked, but her eyes swiveled toward him.

  He grinned. “That was a lie.”

  The wooden stairs groaned as Chris crept down them. Makani shook her head, but she was smiling slightly. Their ears strained.

  They waited.

  Suddenly, a yell rang out, followed by a loud crash. Makani gasped and shrank as Ollie clung to her in horror. There was the indistinct sound of things settling to the floor.