The truth will set you free.
What evil thing have you done? You deserve to die, PigBitch #ACAB
Even . . .
Ooooh... I love a dirty woman. Will you marry me?
Shit.
Allison and a few other friends call, and even my stepdad, but I don’t answer any of them. With our mom now gone, I hear from Les no more than three times a year—on my birthday, Christmas, and Thanksgiving—and as far as I’m concerned, it’s a miracle that we have that much contact.
I need to think, but my phone screen pulls at me like an undertow.
I open Facebook to see more messages piling up. Strangers berating me, telling me I need to confess my sins and make myself right with God, not just the killer. That, of course, I deserve to die—that there is no way I didn’t do horrible things, if I was a cop.All Cops Are Bad ...#ACAB after #ACAB.
And about me, they’re right. I have no excuse. I did fall into the trap. Adhered tothe codeafter all.
Other messages offer condolences, addressing me like I’m their best friend and conveying how sorry they are this is happening to me. One person asks me what I plan to do with my Facebook page after the Confession Artist kills me, as if this issue would of course be top of mind. But suddenly, it is. I can’t help it—I envision my phantom self, living on virtually in bits of data after the Confession Artist manages to fire a bullet into my brain. My virtual heart pumping with each email and notification popping up for months and months, still trying to sell me everything the algorithmic fields suggest I buy.
It was the same with Sophie. Condolences mounted up after her suicide from people across the U of M campus and the town, too. People addressed her specifically and personally, as if she could write them back to thank them or could pop in a thumbs-up to acknowledge them. Hearts, praying hands, and happy faces peppered her page—a sad, hollow outpouring, after all the vitriol she’d endured. I tried to convince Wallace to delete her pages on Facebook, Instagram, and the then Twitter, but he didn’t know her passcodes. Neither did I.
When I looked it up, I found that you needed to provide a scanned photo of the death certificate to each of the platforms to either memorialize the page or have it deleted. Wallace neverbothered, and eventually, we quit visiting her sites, though I still get reminders about her birthday once a year and occasionally receive a shared memory photo.
Enough about the damn past,I berate myself, wanting to throw something like I wanted to in the car, anything—my phone, my laptop, a coffee cup—across the room. I shake it off.Time to get to work.
I’ve stood up from my kitchen table to go into my office when my phone makes a different, disconcertingping. I realize it’s the surveillance app, alerting me to movement on one of the cameras. It’s the one I set up to cover part of the driveway. I open it, expecting a furry creature, but instead, the dark shape of a human passes.
I jolt back, my blood rushing, my heart in overdrive. I grab my Sig on the kitchen counter. My hands have barely quit quaking after talking to Fiona, but my gun hand, at least, goes rock steady when I squeeze the stock.
I kill the lights in the kitchen and dining area. I don’t plan on giving whoever it is the advantage of a clear view into my home. I creep across the wood floor on tiptoes, trying to move as stealthily as a cat.
When I get to the front door, I stand between it and one of the side windows, hold my gun before my chest with a cocked elbow, and crane my neck and peer through the side of the window.
Beyond my porch light, it’s pitch black, like a dark blanket has been spread across everything beyond my little world. I squint and will my eyes to penetrate past the glow, past the shadows and shifting shapes of trees in the breeze, but I can’t see anything more.
I listen.
All is silent.
My old training comes back. I hold the pistol close to my gut with elbows bent and brace it with both hands, wrists firm. Scuffling footsteps make their way across my gravel drive toward the house.
The room goes airless. The walls of my living room feel like they’re closing in on me. I’m holding my breath.
As the footsteps reach my front steps, I hit the porch light and throw open the door.
Chapter 29
Gus
Gus got up at 5 a.m. for his day out in the woods. He checked the weather online so he and his men would know what to expect on the dirt roads. Fortunately, it was going to be a little dryer than it had been, but the mosquitoes would still be out in droves because there’d been so much spring rain.
It affected how he dressed for the day, although not that much. He still wore mostly the same old stuff—his steel-toed work boots, Carhartt pants, insulated flannel overshirt under his reflective vest—the get-up that Somer used to tease him about, calling him a Montana hick. And when he’d dropped her in Santa Monica, leaving her to go to the community college, she asked him to not wear a flannel shirt and boots—even though the ones he’d brought weren’t his work pair—on the day of the orientation.
Now, when he thought of that metropolis, his stomach lurched. It was all he could do not to vomit. Instead, he packed his box lunch, poured the strong coffee he’d made into his thermos, and headed out for the day before the sun rimmed the eastern mountains with rose-gold streaks.
The Benz Lumber logging roads were on the north end of the valley, not far from the ski resort. They were rutted out and filled withstanding water, but he and his men would plow through it. They had a lot of work to get done, and they’d already taken too many breaks on account of late-season snow followed by torrential spring rains that made the soil prone to rutting under the heavy equipment.
One of his men got a skidder stuck in the mud, immobilizing work for days. Plus, there was a clause in the Benz’s contract with the state that if any topsoil was disturbed enough to affect Whitefish Lake, all operations needed to cease until the soil dried and became stable enough not to filter sediment downslope.
