Killman Creek (Stillhouse Lake Book 2) Read online

  OTHER TITLES BY RACHEL CAINE

  Stillhouse Lake Series

  Stillhouse Lake

  The Great Library

  Paper and Fire

  Ink and Bone

  Ash and Quill

  Weather Warden

  Ill Wind

  Heat Stroke

  Chill Factor

  Windfall

  Firestorm

  Thin Air

  Gale Force

  Cape Storm

  Total Eclipse

  Outcast Season

  Undone

  Unknown

  Unseen

  Unbroken

  Revivalist

  Working Stiff

  Two Weeks’ Notice

  Terminated

  Red Letter Days

  Devil’s Bargain

  Devil’s Due

  Morganville Vampires

  Glass Houses

  The Dead Girls’ Dance

  Midnight Alley

  Feast of Fools

  Lord of Misrule

  Carpe Corpus

  Fade Out

  Kiss of Death

  Ghost Town

  Bite Club

  Last Breath

  Black Dawn

  Bitter Blood

  Fall of Night

  Daylighters

  Stand-Alone Titles

  Prince of Shadows

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Rachel Caine, LLC

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542046411

  ISBN-10: 1542046416

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  CONTENTS

  1 GWEN

  2 LANNY

  3 SAM

  4 GWEN

  5 GWEN

  6 CONNOR

  7 GWEN

  8 SAM

  9 GWEN

  10 CONNOR

  11 GWEN

  12 SAM

  13 LANNY

  14 GWEN

  15 LANNY

  16 GWEN

  17 SAM

  18 CONNOR

  19 GWEN

  20 SAM

  21 CONNOR

  22 GWEN

  23 LANNY

  24 SAM

  25 GWEN

  26 SAM

  27 GWEN

  28 GWEN

  SOUNDTRACK

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1

  GWEN

  On the twelfth night since my ex-husband escaped prison, I am in bed. Not sleeping. Watching the play of light and shadow on the curtains. I’m lying on a narrow foldout cot and feeling every twinge of spring poking through the thin mattress. My kids, Lanny and Connor, occupy the two full-size beds in this midpriced motel room. Midpriced is the best I can afford right now.

  The phone is a new one. Another disposable, with a brand-new number. Only five people have the number, and two of them are asleep in the room with me.

  I can’t trust anyone outside that vanishingly small circle. All I can think of is the shadow of a man walking through the night—walking, not running, because I don’t believe Melvin Royal is on the run, though half the police in the country are hunting him—and the fact that he is coming for me. For us.

  My ex-husband is a monster, and I thought he was safely contained and caged, awaiting execution . . . but even from behind bars he ran a campaign of terror against me and our kids. Oh, he had help, some of it from inside the prison, some outside; how wide and deep it went is still in question, but he also had a plan. He maneuvered me, through targeted fear and threats, into the place he’d wanted me: a trap we’d survived, but only just.

  Melvin Royal stalks me in the brief darkness when I close my eyes. Blink, and he’s on the street. Blink, and he’s walking up the stairs of the motel to the second floor’s open walkway. Blink, and he’s outside the door. Listening.

  The buzz of a text arriving on my phone makes me flinch so hard it hurts. I grab for the device as the room’s heater rattles on; it’s loud, but it’s efficient, and warmth glides through the room in a slow, welcome wave. I’m grateful. The blankets on this cot aren’t up to much.

  I blink my tired eyes and bring the phone’s screen into focus. The message says Number Blocked. I turn it off, and put it under my pillow, and try to convince myself that it’s safe to sleep.

  But I know it isn’t. I know who’s texting me. And the double locks on the motel room door don’t seem nearly enough.

  I am twelve days out from rescuing my children from a murderer. I am exhausted, sore, and plagued with headaches. I am heartsick and tired and anxious and most of all—most of all—I am angry. I need to be angry. Being angry will keep us all alive.

  How dare you, I think at the phone beneath my pillow. How fucking dare you.

  When I’ve stoked my anger to a boiling, almost painful, temperature, I reach beneath my pillow and pull out the phone again. My anger is a shield. My anger is a weapon. I click the message firmly, expecting what it will hold.

  But I am wrong. The text message is not from my ex-husband. It reads, YOU’RE NOT SAFE ANYWHERE NOW, and it is followed with a symbol I recognize: Å.

  Absalom.

  Shock diffuses my anger, sends it flowing in hot, electric waves through my chest and arms, as if the phone itself lashed out. My husband had help—help manipulating us, help abducting my children—and Absalom was that help . . . a master hacker who manipulated me into the trap Melvin had planned for him. I’d dared hope that maybe with the end of that plot, Absalom wouldn’t have more to threaten us with.

  I should have known better.

  For a moment I feel a wave of sheer, visceral terror, like all the childhood fears of ghosts have been proven real, and then I take in a deep, slow breath and try to think through the impossibility of dealing with this . . . again. I am guilty of nothing more than defending myself from a man who wanted to kill me, who gained my trust over the course of years, and gradually led me to the place meant for my execution.

  But that doesn’t make the message on the screen go away.

  Absalom has someone else coming for us. The thought runs through me like a lightning bolt, dries my mouth, makes all my nerves fire at once, because it feels right. Something has been bothering me all these long days while we’ve been in hiding and moving for our safety . . . the feeling that we’re being watched, still. I’d put it down to paranoia.

  What if it isn’t?

  I try to get up quietly, but the cot creaks, and I hear Lanny, my daughter, whisper, “Mom?”

  “It’s okay,” I whisper back. I stand and slip my feet into shoes. I’m fully dressed in comfortable pants and a loose sweater and heavy socks, and I put on my shoulder holster and parka before I unlock all the security measures and step out into the chill.

  It’s overcast and cold here in Knoxville. I’m not used to the city lights, but just now they comfort me a little. I don’t feel quite as isolated. There are people here. Screams will be heard.

  I call one of the few numbers in my phone. It rings just once b efore it’s picked up, and I hear the ever-tired voice of Detective Prester of the Norton Police Department—the town nearest where we lived, no, live, because we will go back to Stillhouse Lake, I swear we will—say, “Ms. Proctor. It’s late.” He doesn’t sound happy to hear from me.

  “Are you one hundred percent sure that Lancel Graham is dead?”

  It’s an odd question, and I hear the creak of what is probably an office chair as Prester sits back. I check my watch. It’s after one in the morning. I wonder why he’s still at work. Norton is a sleepy little town, though it’s got its fair share of crime to deal with. He’s one of two detectives on staff.

  And Lancel Graham used to wear a Norton PD uniform.

  Prester’s reply is slow and cautious. “You got some pressing reason why you think he isn’t?”

  “Is. He. Dead?”

  “Dead as they come. I watched them pull organs out of his corpse on an autopsy table. Why are you asking at—” He hesitates, then groans, as if he’s just checked the time, too. “No fit time in the morning?”

  “Because it kind of freaks me out to get yet another threatening text.”

  “From Lancel Graham.”

  “From Absalom.”

  “Ahh.” He draws that out, and he does it in such a way that I am immediately put on my guard. Detective Prester and I are not friends. We are, to some extent, allies. But he doesn’t fully trust me, and I can’t really blame him. “’Bout that. Kezia Claremont’s been doing some digging. She says it’s possible Absalom’s not a he. More of a them, maybe.” I respect Kezia. She’d been Officer Graham’s patrol partner, at least some of the time, but unlike Lancel Graham, she’s fiercely honest. It had been a pretty devastating shock to her, finding out her partner was a killer.

  Not as much as it had been for me.

  My voice is tight and angry, for all that. “Why the hell didn’t you warn me? You know I’m out here with my kids!”

  “Didn’t want to panic you,” he says. “No proof yet. Just suspicion.”

  “In the time you’ve known me, Detective, do you find I am prone to blind panic?”

  He lets that go without a comment, because he knows I am right. “I still say it’d be better for you to come back home to Norton, let us protect you here.”

  “My husband turned one of your cops into a murderer.” I have to swallow a ball of sick fury. “You left Graham alone with my kids, remember that? God only knows what he could have done to them. Why the hell would I trust their safety with you?”

  I still don’t know everything about what Lancel Graham did when he abducted my children. Neither Connor nor Lanny will tell me anything about it, and I know better than to push them. They’ve been traumatized, and though the doctors had said they were in good health, and nothing more had been physically done to them, I still wonder what kind of psychological damage they’ve endured. And how it will bend them in the future.

  Because bending them, shaping them, breaking them is what Melvin Royal wants. It’s the kind of thing he takes a deep, unsettling delight in doing.

  “Any word about Melvin?” Mel, a little voice in me, timid and ghostly, still whispers. He never liked being called Melvin, only Mel, which was why I now make it a point to only use his full name. A petty kind of power is still power.

  “Manhunt is pretty heavy all over, and of those who broke out, about seventy-five percent are already back behind bars.”

  “Not him.”

  “No,” Prester agrees. “Not him. Not yet. You planning on running until he gets caught?”

  “That was the plan,” I say. “But that plan just changed. If Absalom has more people to send after us, then they’re going to find me for him. It’s what he wants. It’s why he’s out. Running just prolongs this nightmare, and it means I don’t have any control of my life. I’m not giving that up to him. Ever again.”

  There’s that squeak of his office chair again. This time I’m almost certain he’s leaning forward. “Then what the hell are you doing, Gwen?”

  He still calls me that, by my new identity, and I appreciate it. The woman who’d been known as Gina Royal, wife of an especially horrible serial killer, is gone, another corpse Melvin left behind him. She’s better off dead. I am Gwen now. Gwen isn’t taking any more shit.

  “I don’t think you’ll like it, so I’m going to spare you the details. Thanks, Detective. For everything.” I almost mean it. Before he can ask any more questions, I shut off the phone and stick it in my coat pocket and stand there in the moist, chilly wind a moment. Knoxville hasn’t quite shut down for the night yet, and I catch hints of music from passing cars on the street, see human shadows moving behind curtains in other motel rooms. A TV flickers across the courtyard, visible through cracked curtains. A plane passes overhead, slicing the sky.

  I hear the door to the room open, and Lanny steps out. She’s put on some shoes and her jacket, but beneath that she’s still in her pajamas. That relaxes a little anxious fist inside me. If she’d changed into her jeans and loose flannel shirt as well as running shoes, it would have been a sign she was afraid.

  “The brat’s still asleep,” she says as she leans on the rail next to me. “Tell me.”

  “It was nothing, baby.”

  “Bull crap, Mom. You don’t get out of bed and make outside calls for nothing.”

  I sigh. It’s cold enough that the wind drags the breath out in a faint, white plume. “I was talking to Detective Prester.”

  I see her hands tense on the rail, and I wish I could take this away from her, this fear, this constant and crushing sense of oppression. But I can’t. Lanny knows as much as anyone how dangerous our situation is now. She knows most of the truth about her father. And I have to rely on her, at the tender age of almost-fifteen, to bear up under that weight.

  “Oh,” my daughter says. “Was it about him?”

  Him means her father, of course. I give her a slight, hopefully reassuring smile. “No news yet,” I say. “He’s probably a long way from here. He’s a hunted man. Most of the prisoners who escaped with him have already been caught. He’ll be back behind bars soon.”

  “You don’t believe that.”

  I don’t. I don’t want to lie to my daughter, so I just change the subject. “You need to go back to sleep, sweetheart. We’re moving early in the morning.”

  “It is the morning. Where are we going?”

  “Somewhere else.”

  “Is this how it’s going to be?” Her voice is quietly fierce this time. “God, Mom, all you do is run. We can’t just let him do this to us! Not again. I don’t want to run. I want to fight.”

  She did. Of course she did. She was a brave kid who’d been forced to face ugly truths about her dad when she was just ten, and it wasn’t surprising that she’s still angry at her core.

  She’s also right.

  I turn toward her, and she twists to look me in the face. I hold her gaze as I say, “We are going to fight. But tomorrow you’re going to go somewhere safe, so I can be free to do what has to be done—and before you argue with me, I need you to stay with your brother and make sure he’s protected. That’s your job, Lanny. That’s your fight. All right?”

  “All right? You’re dumping us off on somebody else now? No, it’s not okay! Please tell me it’s not Grandma.”

  “I thought you loved your grandmother.”

  “I do. As Grandma. Not to stay with. You want us to be safe? She can’t protect us. She can’t protect anybody.”

  “I’m going to make certain she doesn’t have to. Meanwhile, your father will be watching me, because finding me is his top priority.” I pray that to be true. It’s a huge gamble, but there is a very limited circle of people I can trust to look after my kids. My first instinct is to take them to my mother, but I also have to admit it: my daughter is right. My mom is not a fighter. Not like us. And this is an entirely different level of danger.

  I don’t tell her yet, because I need to think it over, but Javier Esparza and Kezia Claremont have offered to guard my kids if I need them. They’re a formidable couple. Javier is a retired marine and runs a gun range; Kezia’s a police officer, tough and smart and capable.

  The drawback is, they live outside of Norton, and relatively close to Stillhouse Lake. That beautiful, remote place started out for me as a refuge, a sanctuary, but it turned into a trap, and now I don’t know that I can ever feel safe there again. We certainly can’t go back to our lakeside house; we’d be easy targets.

  Javier’s place, though, isn’t at the lake. It’s a remote, fortified cabin, and I intuitively believe that Melvin, and Absalom, would look everywhere but the place we’d just fled.

  “Are you leaving us with Sam?” Lanny asks.

  “No, because Sam’s coming with me,” I tell her. I haven’t asked him yet, but I know he will; he wants to find Melvin Royal as desperately as I do, for just as personal a reason. “Sam and I are going to find your father and stop him before he hurts anyone else. Before he can even think of hurting you and your brother.” I give her time to think about it, and then I say, “I need you to help me, Lanny. This is the best option we have, other than running and hiding again. I don’t want to do that any more than you do. Please believe that.”

  She looks away and, with studied indifference, shrugs. “Sure. Whatever. You still make us do it.” All the running we’ve done before has been necessary. It had been the right thing to do at the time. But I understand how terribly hard it has been on my kids to live in constant vigilance.

  “I’m so sorry, honey.”

  “I know,” she finally says, and having made that pronouncement, she gives me a quick, unexpected hug and goes back into the motel room.

  I stay out there for a while in the cold, thinking, and then I dial Sam Cade’s phone number and say, “I’m outside.”

  It only takes him about a minute to step out on the narrow second-floor walkway beside me; his room is right next to ours. Like me, he is fully dressed. Ready for a fight. He leans on the railing right where Lanny stood and says, “I don’t suppose this is a booty call.”

  “Funny,” I say, casting him a sideways look. We aren’t lovers. Not that we aren’t, in some ways, intimate; I think that eventually we might circle around to it, but neither of us seems to be in a hurry to get there. We have baggage, God knows. Ex-wife of a serial killer, constantly under threat from Melvin’s groupies, his allies, the baying hounds of Internet vigilantes.