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“Can’t say that I ever kept tabs on the man. But I don’t know—five, six days ago?”
We told her he’d been shot while chasing Colin O’Hare and that the Special Forces operator had taken the children hostage and confessed to murdering Corey McGovern and his own uncle before he was killed by an avenging squatter.
Locket’s eyes widened. “That’s a crazy story. How are the kids?”
We said that Boog’s mother was bringing the kids to Chicago and then told her about Choir Boy’s stint in rehab.
“You’re smiling,” I said.
“Well, that’s all nice to hear,” Locket said. “Nice to hear that folks can actually get out of a place like this.”
I told her about Egon Bijan breaking into my house, holding my grandmother at gunpoint, and admitting to killing and burning the first victim and murdering Jeffrey Frost, the developer attempting to control the future of the Bridge to Nowhere.
“Well,” she said, “I’m happy to hear you all survived.”
“I appreciate that,” I said. “But the problem is, we still have two killings unaccounted for—Anna Bananas and the guy in the Audi. O’Hare denied killing them.”
She shrugged. “Bing Bang’s been known to lie through his teeth.”
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JOHN SAMPSON SMILED, NODDED. “Colin O’Hare was indeed known to lie.”
I said, “But honestly, Lainey, we don’t believe O’Hare was lying in this case. Did we tell you that we identified the body of the guy who burned here?”
“Yeah?”
John said, “He was a defrocked minister named Dylan Sentinel who had sexually abused women up and down the East Coast.”
Locket said nothing.
Sampson pressed on. “The first time I talked to you, you showed me that expired Kentucky driver’s license, and I wondered if it was real. When I took your shotgun, I had it run for fingerprints.”
She stared blankly at us.
“It took a while for everything to come together,” he continued. “But those prints came back as belonging to an Alice McCall. And then I found a complaint filed years ago in Atlanta against Reverend Dylan Sentinel by an Alice McCall.”
Locket said nothing.
I said, “I’m sorry about what Sentinel did to you, Alice. You’re aware that you were one of many, I assume?”
Her chin quivered. “Yes. And call me Lainey. Alice doesn’t exist anymore.”
Sampson said, “Okay, Lainey. I take it that you’re also aware that Sentinel skated on all charges despite multiple allegations from multiple women. It must have galled you to see him show up here, back to his old tricks, looking for new victims.”
The high troll of the north chewed the inside of her cheek. “I saw what he was doing with that girl Corey. I saw the way he was looking at Anna’s daughter, Emma. I confronted him.”
“And?”
“The bastard laughed at me,” Lainey spit. “And then he had the nerve to say he and I should go to the Fall Flower Motel and get a room, for old times’ sake.”
“So you decided to get rid of him by copying the murder of the first homeless man.”
Locket looked away.
I said, “You killed Dylan Sentinel, Lainey.”
She would not look at us. “I did. For all the right reasons.”
