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 basement. 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.