AS ALISON MALVILLE DREAMED, black ants marched over her body.

Like an army of intimate invaders, they sought out the puckered folds on the buttons of her nightshirt and trooped relentlessly across the silk onto her damp skin. From her pillow, they climbed through the thick forest of her red hair, clung to her eyelashes, and explored the orifices on her face. She tasted them on her tongue. She inhaled and exhaled them through her nose. She drowned them in her tears as she cried. Unable to move, she screamed soundlessly as thousands of ants mounted her feet, her thighs, her torso, and her neck, violating the crevices between her limbs.

Wake up, her brain told her.

Wake up!

Alison flew upward in bed. Awake, she could still feel the ants crawling on her body, and she tore at her clothes, popping buttons as she stripped naked. She scrambled out of the tangled sheets and threw herself against the wall, rubbing and slapping her skin as if she could kill them. Finally, exhausted and sobbing, her chest hammering, she sank to the floor and hugged her knees.

Again. It had happened again.

She dreamed of the ants almost every night now. When she closed her eyes, there they were, waiting to slip out through the walls. They had even begun to march from her sleep into her waking life. She couldn’t escape them. Wherever she went in the house, she felt them massing in the ceiling, watching her like spies.

Alison understood what was happening to her. It wasn’t about the ants at all. It was about her husband. He was driving her into madness.

As she sat on the floor, she stared at the glowing clock on her nightstand. The time said six o’clock. There was no light through the curtains, but it would be morning soon, and she was already late. She’d failed. She’d meant to stay awake—to listen, to see what Michael did—but sometime after midnight, her eyes had blinked shut despite three cups of caffeinated tea. She’d slept heavily.

The ants had come back.

Alison got to her feet in a rush. Gooseflesh pebbled her bare skin. She lifted a robe off the hook on the back of the closet door and slipped her arms inside the sleeves and tied it at her waist. She removed the chair wedged against the doorknob, unlocked the bedroom door, and peered down the upstairs hallway, which was dark and quiet.

She smelled something odd in the stale air, blowing through the vents with the furnace heat. It was an essence of perfume. Hers.

She checked on Evan first. Her ten-year-old son slept in a bedroom that was crowded with monster posters thumbtacked to the walls. He was obsessed with old Frankenstein movies. Vampires. Werewolves. Unlike his mother, Evan was fearless, immune to bad dreams. She found him on top of the covers, his skinny limbs sprawled, his mouth open, and his messy mop of brown hair covering his eyes. She navigated the minefield of toys littering the carpet and stroked his cheek with the back of one hand. Evan murmured but didn’t wake up.

Alison heard something behind her. She spun, but there was nothing.

The ants.

She clutched her forearms as she hurried downstairs. The house was so cold and dry that the metal railing gave her a shock of static when she brushed against it. The ceramic tiles on the floor of the foyer were like blocks of ice, making her dance on her tiptoes. She passed quickly into the dining room, where the carpet was lush, but she grimaced as she cut her foot on something sharp buried in the weave. She bent down and kneaded the pile with her fingers until she located a triangular shard of glass, which she cupped in her hand. When she peered into the dusty shelves of their hutch, she saw that a Russian crystal tumbler—a wedding gift from her parents—was missing.

“Oh, Evan,” she breathed.

She didn’t have time to worry about the broken treasure. She continued to the rear of the house where Michael kept his private office. The door was closed, as it usually was now. The room was off-limits to anyone but him. Her husband claimed that Evan had been playing with his computer, but she suspected that Michael was more afraid of what she would find hidden in his personal files.

Pictures. Photographs.

She put her ear to the door, and she could hear him lightly snoring. He’d been sleeping down here, away from her, for several weeks.

Alison was relieved that he was still in the house. She told herself that her paranoia was just a dream, like the ants. That was how it worked when you suspected something you didn’t dare believe. You used every opportunity, every excuse, to tell yourself that you were wrong.

Michael was not a monster.

Even so, Alison knew that his being here now, in the morning, meant nothing. She’d slept most of the night, and in those hours, anything could have happened. She had to know the truth. She backtracked to the foyer, where the vaulted ceiling loomed over the entryway. Michael kept his keys in a ceramic bowl by the door, and she scooped them into her hand. She threw open the double front doors and ran outside. They lived in the country. She heard morning birds squawking in the spruce trees beyond the field. The fieldstones on the walkway were freezing. She could see her breath.

Michael’s black sedan was parked outside the garage. There were needles of frost on the windows. She put her palm on the hood, and it was cold, but in the twenty-degree lows overnight cars cooled down almost as soon as the engine stopped. She opened the driver’s door. The car was never locked; there was no need for locks here, in the middle of nowhere.

She remembered the exact number. She’d slipped outside to memorize the odometer before she went to bed. It was her lifeline.

Alison sat inside, wracked with shivers so severe she could barely hold the key and slide it into the ignition. She turned the key just far enough to jolt the electrical systems. The dashboard blinked to life in red and white lights. She leaned forward over the steering wheel to study the mileage, and her hand slapped over her mouth in horror. She read the number three times to be certain she wasn’t wrong.

The odometer had changed.

Thirty miles. He’d driven thirty miles overnight.

Evan sat at the kitchen table, slurping cereal from his spoon and turning the pages in a comic book. Alison heard the shower pipes overhead and knew her husband was awake. She was dressed smartly for work and wore an apron over her pink blouse to avoid spatter from the bacon in the frying pan. Michael liked a hot breakfast, and she still cooked it for him each morning the way she had for years, as if nothing had changed between them.

“Can I have some orange juice?” Evan asked.

Alison glanced at the boy. Her grim face softened. “Sure.”

She opened the door of the side-by-side refrigerator and grabbed a carton of juice from the top shelf, but when she shook it, she realized the carton was empty. She blew out her breath in frustration. It was a stupid little thing, but she couldn’t handle the little things today.

“Sorry, kiddo, no juice.”

“Oh.”

“Did you finish it and not tell me?”

“No.”

Alison gave her son the mock evil eye. “Because when you finish it and put the carton back, I don’t know to buy more, right? So you don’t get any juice that way.”

“I didn’t do it,” Evan insisted.

“Whatever you say,” Alison replied, but she was sure that Evan was the culprit. She returned to the bacon, which was blackening rapidly and turning from crispy to burned. She pulled the pan off the range, but the odor of the charred meat was strong. She was upset because she hadn’t had time to cook breakfast before getting dressed. Now her pants suit and her long red hair would smell of bacon fat, not her subtle French perfume.

“Is there anything else you want to tell me about?” she asked her son.

“Like what?”

“Like what happened to the crystal glass in the dining room? The one that was in the bureau you’re not supposed to touch?”

The boy gulped nervously. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, somebody broke it. I found the pieces at the bottom of the garbage bag.”

“Not me.”

Alison cocked her head in annoyance. “Evan, you remember what I always tell you? Mistakes are okay, but not lies.”

“I’m not lying.” He stared at her with big, sincere eyes and lowered his voice to a whisper. “I think a spitting devil did it.”

“What?”

“A spitting devil.” Evan held up his comic book, where Alison saw a caricature of a red-skinned devil leering from the pages with his tongue lolling out of his mouth. “See, they make bad things happen in the night, and the only way you know they were there is because they spit blood onto the floor.”

“Nice try,” Alison said.

Evan pointed. “Look, there’s blood! See!”

She studied her feet and realized that Evan was right. Tiny red drips of blood were dotted and smeared from the dining room across the kitchen floor. “That’s from my foot, young man,” she told him. “I cut myself on glass because someone broke my Russian tumbler and tried to hide it.”

“Not me,” the boy repeated. “It was a spitting devil.”

“We’ll talk about this more after school,” Alison told him. “Don’t think you’re off the hook.”

She didn’t like Evan’s excuses, but she didn’t have the energy to challenge him now. This wasn’t the first time recently that she’d caught him lying. As the relationship between her and Michael had grown strained in the past three months, Evan had felt the tension in the house and begun acting out. He craved their attention, even if it came with blame and discipline.

“Good morning,” her husband said from the doorway. He nearly filled the space with his tall frame.

Alison tensed and didn’t reply.

Michael Malville kissed the top of Evan’s head and tousled his son’s hair. She saw her husband out of the corner of her eye. He wore a sport coat and black turtleneck over gray slacks and polished dress shoes. It was his CEO uniform, classy but casual. When you owned the company, you chose the dress code. Michael had started his technology business a dozen years earlier, shortly after they were married, and he’d built it into one of the largest software development enterprises in the state. He worked with nerdy engineers who wore T-shirts and jeans, but he never allowed anyone to forget that he was the boss. You knew it by looking at him. Even now, when he’d laid off half his staff thanks to the recession, he never looked anything but perfect.

Alison knew looks were deceiving. Looks hid all the stress, the pent-up anger, the arguments, the secrets. She missed the early days when they struggled with no money in a small apartment in the city. Wealth hadn’t given them peace of mind.

“Morning,” Michael repeated as he stood next to her.

“Yeah,” she murmured.

“You sleep okay?”

“Sure.”

He put a hand on her shoulder, and she stiffened at his touch. Her rejection made him freeze. That was how it was between them now. Distant. Like strangers. She couldn’t bring herself to pretend anymore.

Thirty miles.

Michael picked up the empty carton from the counter. “No juice?”

“Someone finished it and put it back.”

He held up his hands defensively. “Not me.”

“It was a spitting devil,” Evan called from the table.

“Evan, be quiet,” Alison snapped. “Finish up and brush your teeth, so your father can drop you at school.”

The boy groaned and pushed himself away from the table. He handed his dirty plate to his mother and shuffled out of the room. Alison put a steaming plate of eggs and bacon in front of her husband without saying a word. She turned to the sink and made as much noise as she could with the water and pans to cover the silence between them. It didn’t work. When she turned off the water and dried her hands, she realized that Michael was sitting at the table, his breakfast untouched, staring at her.

“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“For God’s sake, Alison.”

“I said, it’s nothing.”

He hesitated, and his face looked pained. “I think you should see a doctor,” he told her softly.

“What?”

“A psychiatrist.”

“Are you serious? Are you really serious?”

“You need help.”

“You have no idea what I need,” she snapped.

“I’m worried about you. If you won’t talk to me, maybe you should talk to someone else.”

“I have to go,” Alison said, gathering up her purse and shutting down the conversation. “Evan broke one of our crystal tumblers. Talk to him about it. He lied to me before.”

“Okay.”

“He’s doing that a lot.”

“Can you blame him?” he asked.

“Are you putting this on me? This is my fault?”

“I’m putting this on us, but you’re the one who kicked me out of the bedroom. You’re the one locking me out of your life. You think I need this? You think I don’t have shit of my own going on, with my whole business going down the toilet? Do you have any idea of the kind of pressure I’m under?”

She heard the roar in his voice and saw it in his eyes. Rage whistled out of him like steam from a kettle. That was the real Michael. The Michael she’d come to fear, after years of loving him unconditionally. She didn’t know how she could have been so wrong for so long.

Whenever he was in the kitchen with her now, her eyes were drawn to the butcher block beside the stove, where she kept their Wüsthof knives. The slot for the big one, the carving knife, was empty. It had been empty for weeks, ever since the first report on the news. She hadn’t said a word. Not to anyone. Not yet. It was as if they were dancing silently, with him daring her to admit what she knew.

“I know all about your pressure, Michael,” she said.

Dead Red.

That was the nickname his uniformed cops had given the killer when the second red-haired body was found. It was a sick shorthand, and Jonathan Stride didn’t like it. He hated elevating killers by giving them names. It made them into myths and fed their egos. He’d ordered his cops to stop, but he was too late to contain the damage. The nickname had already crept into the newspapers, and everyone in the city of Duluth knew the man’s identity now. Dead Red.

The killer had struck again overnight. A third victim in two bitter months. Once again, the color of blood matched the young woman’s hair.

“I keep thinking that it could have been me,” the woman seated in Stride’s truck murmured out of the back of her throat. Her nervous breath fogged the windshield. “Sherry and I knew about those other girls. Who doesn’t, you know? So I did a dye job. I went from auburn to jet black. I figured it was a little cheap Clairol protection, but Sherry told me it was silly. She said she’d die before she dyed. We laughed about it. You know, better dead than red, right?”

Stride had seen witnesses in shock many times. You arrive at your best friend’s apartment to drive her to work, like any other day, and instead you wind up haunted for life by what you find. The smell of body and blood never entirely goes away. Murder writes on the brain in indelible ink.

He saw the woman trembling. He reached into the back seat for his leather jacket and positioned it gently over her shoulders.

“When did you last see Sherry?” Stride asked her.

“Around midnight. We were at a party at somebody’s house in Lakeside, but we were both pretty drunk, so we figured we’d leave before we threw up. I dropped her off here.”

Stride squinted through the windshield and wiped it with the sleeve of his flannel shirt. Sherry Morton’s apartment was in the basement of a century-old Victorian home on the steeply terraced streets near the university. She’d been a nursing student. Twenty-four years old. Pretty. Petite. The house with its chipped paint and loose gutters, protected by towering skeletons of oak trees, was now enveloped in crime-scene tape and surrounded by police cars shedding clouds of exhaust in the frigid air. It was midmorning under a slate-gray December sky.

“Did Sherry hook up with anyone at the party?” he asked.

The woman, Julie, shook her head. “No, I would have known if she did.”

“Did you see anyone leave at the same time as the two of you? Could someone have followed you?”

“I don’t think so. It was late, and the streets were deserted. I think I would have noticed another car behind me.”

“How about here at Sherry’s place? Did you see anyone hanging around outside?”

“I didn’t see anybody. I was pretty blitzed, you know. I shouldn’t have been driving at all. You’re not going to arrest me or anything, are you?”

“No.”

“I came by to pick her up this morning, and the door was open at the bottom of the steps. So I went inside, and—oh, my God. Oh, my God.”

The young woman dissolved in tears, cupping her face in her hands. Stride knew the image that was replaying in her head. He and his partner, Maggie Bei, had been among the earliest at the crime scene after the 911 operator used two words: Dead Red. They’d found Sherry Morton in bed, like the first two victims, dead of a cruel number of deep stab wounds. She wore an expensive designer blouse with bold horizontal stripes of yellow and green.

“I need to ask you about what Sherry was wearing when you found her,” Stride said.

Julie wiped her face with her hands, smearing her makeup. “What? Why?”

“Was that the blouse she wore at the party?”

Sherry’s friend looked as if she wanted to do anything but remember, but when she did, her face screwed up in confusion. “No, she wore a Sammy’s Pizza T-shirt at the party. We both waitress there to make money.”

“Do you recall seeing Sherry in that blouse before?”

“No, I guess it was new.”

Stride nodded without saying anything more. “I’m going to ask a policewoman to spend some time with you, okay? She’ll work with you on a detailed statement. This is probably going to take a while.”

“Sure.”

Stride squeezed her hand and climbed out of his truck, leaving his jacket around the woman’s shoulders. The wind roared up the hillside from Lake Superior and chewed at his face. He bent down to squeeze his six-foot frame under the crime scene tape, and his back complained as he straightened. With each harsh Minnesota winter, he felt his age in his bones. Fifty loomed large in front of him in the next year.

He met Maggie Bei at the concrete steps leading down into Sherry’s underground apartment. His partner, who was no bigger than a Chinese doll, pretended to be unaffected by the Duluth cold. She wore a short-sleeved T-shirt, and she had her hands casually jammed in the pockets of her jeans. Her three-inch block heels gave her enough height to rise to Stride’s neck.

“Makes me glad I grew my hair out,” she said, nodding her head at the apartment below them. “Bad season for redheads.”

Maggie, who had worn a bowl cut on her black hair in all the years he’d known her, had shocked him a few weeks earlier by dying her hair Easter-egg red. She freely admitted it was a failed experiment, and since then, she’d let her natural color come back with only a fringe of red as a reminder.

He’d witnessed the transition of Maggie’s hair from red to black from inside his matchbox home on the lakeshore, where they’d been sleeping in the same bed for several weeks.

That was another failed experiment, Stride and Maggie together. They just hadn’t admitted the truth to themselves.

“Her friend didn’t recognize the blouse,” Stride said.

“Yeah, the size doesn’t match either. It’s not hers.”

“So he brought it with him and dressed her in it after he killed her. Just like the others.”

“The blouses aren’t new,” Maggie added. “They’ve been hanging in somebody else’s closet. The sizes all match, and there’s a perfume aroma in the fabric. Very nice. French and expensive. This guy is dressing up his victims in another woman’s clothes.”

Stride saw a flush on Maggie’s golden cheeks, and she bit her lip when the wind blew. “Aren’t you cold?”

“I’m hot-blooded,” she told him. “You know that.”

He saw her sharp eyes studying him for his reaction. He kept a poker face.

“Did we get DNA?” he asked.

Maggie nodded. “Minute traces of spatter like at the other crime scenes. The EV techs think it’s hemoptysis. Perp, not victim.”

“So this guy is coughing up blood,” Stride said.

“Right. He’s sick, whether he knows it or not.”

Stride didn’t take much comfort in the blood evidence or in the possibility that the killer was sick. In whatever time the man had left, he could wreak plenty of havoc.

“I got a call from Ken over at the News-Tribune,” Stride told her.

“Another photo?”

“Yeah, he got a jpeg of the victim by e-mail. So did the TV stations. It’ll be on the noon news and in the paper tomorrow, but he wanted to give me a heads-up that the picture is out there. I told Ken to forward the e-mail to us.”

“We haven’t had much luck tracing the others. Whoever he is, this guy is tech-savvy. He knows how to cover his tracks.”

“Even so, it means taking a big risk,” Stride said. “Why send the photos? Why get the media involved?”

“Dead Red likes to take credit,” Maggie said.

Stride thought about the images that had been sent to the Duluth media after each murder. He remembered the faces. That was what everyone saw—the pale, pretty, murdered faces and the messy red hair. Dead Red. But you could see more than the faces in those photos. You could see each of the stolen blouses, too, enough that a woman who knew those blouses would recognize them.

He didn’t think that was an accident or a mistake. That was what the killer wanted.

“Maybe the photos are about more than taking credit,” Stride told Maggie. “Maybe this guy is sending somebody a message.”

Alison cracked open the window in her Prius, so she could blow smoke from her cigarette out of the car. She’d burned through half a pack since she left for work in the morning. Michael hated it when she smoked around Evan, but right now, nicotine was the only drug keeping her sane. Next to her, Evan read his comic book and hummed under his breath, oblivious to her stress. On most days, she talked to him about his schoolwork and his teachers after she picked him up, but he didn’t mind that she was silent today.

She drove fast. She was desperate to be home.

They lived ten miles north of downtown Duluth on forested land half a mile from a swampy lake. They’d handpicked the lot after weeks scouring the back roads, and they’d designed the house themselves with input from a local architect. Back then, she’d said it was her dream home. Michael told her she’d earned it for putting up with his long hours for a decade as he grew his business, and for scrimping in a too-small apartment longer than any other wife would have done. This was the payback.

For months after the house was done, she’d smiled with pride every time she marched up the flagstones beside the driveway. Her home was magnificent, with its natural oak exterior, its twelve-foot bay window fronting the woods, its towering gables on the roof line, and its mammoth rear deck overlooking the lawn that sloped toward the cattails on the lake. It was a place that would grow and change with them as they got older. In her mind, a house was never finished. That was what kept it alive. She had plans to add a pool where Evan could swim. She had plans to finish the attic, which was nothing but a labyrinth of cubbyholes and sharp nails now, into a loft and gallery where she could paint. She had plans to add a garden and fountains, making an arbor for the birds.

That was before everything began to change.

As the summer wound down, Michael’s technology business lost its contract with the state’s economic development arm to design and support predictive marketing software. For three years, the contract had been the largest single source of revenue in Michael’s company; then, with a swipe of the governor’s pen, it became a victim of budget cuts. In the teeth of the recession, the loss opened up a hole that the company couldn’t fill. Michael began laying off software engineers, downsizing half of his workforce. Several of the ex-employees banded together to file a lawsuit over theft of intellectual property. Others formed a start-up to compete head-to-head with Michael’s company. The business that had finally soared after years of struggle was now teetering on bankruptcy. Keeping it alive had become a day-to-day obsession for Michael. His ego rose and fell with the company’s fortunes.

Slowly, the troubles at work moved home and then spread through the walls of their bedroom. Like ants.

Michael blamed Alison. He said she was the one who had changed. At first, she thought he was right and that the problem was in her head. She felt like a mad dog, driven crazy by a constant, yammering tone on a frequency only she could hear.

Then the carving knife disappeared. Then the first photo showed up in the newspaper.

“Mom, that hurts,” Evan complained.

Alison had taken hold of her son’s hand and begun squeezing it harder than she intended. Evan was the one lifeline to which she could hold right now. He was this sane, calm, sweet little rock. Except when he lied.

“I’m sorry,” she told him.

She parked in their driveway and let them both into the house. She tried to remain calm so Evan didn’t see that anything was wrong, even though she was hyperventilating. Inside, the silent tone in her ears grew so loud she wanted to press both hands against the sides of her skull. She needed to go upstairs. She needed to run.

“Why don’t you watch TV?” she suggested to Evan.

“Okay. Can I have some pretzels and a Hershey bar?”

“Sure.”

Alison waited until he was settled on the couch. He started with cartoons, but she knew he would look for scary movies when she was gone. Anything with monsters.

“I’ll be in my bedroom,” she told him.

“Okay.”

He didn’t care. He didn’t realize that she wanted to throw herself through the bay window and fall to the ground along with the glass.

Alison backed out of the room. The tears burst through the dam of her face. She ran upstairs and into her bedroom, where she tore open the closet door and ripped at the collection of clothes. She opened every dresser drawer, throwing intimates, shorts, pants, socks, and nylons onto the floor, making a messy pile. She yanked dresses, blouses, and coats off hangars. She emptied the shelves. When she was done, the closet was empty, and she stumbled into the bedroom again, sinking to the floor and collapsing sideways onto her shoulder. Her red hair spilled across her face.

It wasn’t there.

It was gone.

“Mom?”

Evan stood in the doorway. His eyes were wide, and for the first time in his young life, she saw a glimmer of fear on his face as he stared at his mother.

“Mom, what’s wrong?”

Alison smiled, but it must have been a twisted, horrifying smile. She couldn’t muster anything else. “I lost something,” she said.

“What?”

“A blouse. I lost a blouse.”

“Oh.”

Evan got down on his hands and knees on the bedroom floor. He pushed his glasses to the end of his nose and crawled on the carpet like a bloodhound.

“Evan, what are you doing?” Alison asked.

Her son raised his head and studied her seriously. “Looking for blood, Mom. I already told you. You have a spitting devil.”

“I’ll be late,” Michael told his wife in a monotone, without bothering to apologize. “I don’t know when I’ll be home.”

He didn’t expect Alison to protest, and she didn’t.

“I’m going to drop Evan at my sister’s place,” she replied. “I’ll catch a movie.”

“You don’t need to wait up.”

“I won’t.”

She hung up on him, as if they were nothing more than roommates coordinating schedules. More and more now, they both looked for ways to run away from each other.

Michael felt fury bubbling in his chest. He knew he had a problem with his temper, and he needed an outlet to drain the pressure. As a boy, he’d been a state championship swimmer in high school, famous for his vicious competitiveness. Back then, he could put his face down and slash at the water to work out his anger, but it was not the same at the gym, without the race, the timer, and the crowd.

Instead, he caught his wastebasket with the toe of his shoe and kicked it into the wall, showering the office with discarded papers. It didn’t help. The plastic bucket was indestructible. He got up in disgust with himself and began to gather the trash.

It was not supposed to be this way. This wasn’t the bargain he’d made. He’d worked hard and built a business from nothing; he’d met and wooed a beautiful woman; he’d fathered an amazing son; he’d built a mansion that was a symbol of everything he’d earned with his labor. Now he was watching his achievements slip through his fingers, taken for no reason and through no fault of his own. His life was being stolen.

He was angry.

“Bad day?”

Michael saw Sonia Kraft in the doorway of his office, with an amused smile on her lips as she watched him on his knees, picking up discarded papers. She was the company’s general counsel. In the wake of the recession, her job had become as frustrating as his own. She shored up the dike of his legal woes, battling litigation and renegotiating contracts, but water kept bursting through new holes. The struggle had made them partners and friends. Over her shoulder, he saw that the rest of the office was dark. They were alone at night, trying to keep the company afloat.

“They’re all bad,” he said, not hiding his bitterness.

“I’m sorry.”

He sat down again and leaned back with his feet on the desk and stared at the ceiling. Sonia took a chair opposite him and crossed her legs, dangling a high heel from her stockinged foot.

“Alison?” she asked.

Michael nodded.

“Still the same?”

“Worse,” he said.

“That’s the last thing you need now.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Anything I can do?” she asked.

“No, thanks.”

“Well, I’m here for you, Michael.”

He wasn’t blind to her meaning. He’d made a mistake by sharing his anger and loneliness with Sonia as his relationship with Alison disintegrated. It gave them a secret bond, and she’d made it clear that he could take it wherever he wanted. He was tempted. Sonia was young—barely thirty—although she was already as much a shark as any older lawyer and twice as smart. She wore above-the-knee skirts and was casual about her sexuality. Sex was a prize for smart people working hard, she said, and it didn’t need to be anything more than that.

If he wanted her, he could have her. He’d never cheated, but he’d fielded plenty of offers. What made it different was that he was watching his world fall apart, and Alison was suddenly a piece of the wreckage, rather than his partner. He needed a release, even if it was fleeting and meaningless.

Sonia stared at him as if she knew what he was thinking.

“I wish I could cheer you up,” she said, “but it hasn’t been a good day for me either.”

“No?”

“No. We’ve had setbacks.”

Michael closed his eyes. Sometimes God poured it on like a flood. “What?”

“The patent litigation. It looks like someone hacked your home e-mails and gave them to the plaintiffs. You have to watch your temper, Michael. It’s not good. You said things about the judge.”

“Can they do that? Tap my Wi-Fi? Is that legal?”

“No, but they claim the material came from an anonymous source, so their hands are clean. Eventually, it would have been discoverable anyway.”

“So what did I say?”

“You questioned the judge’s intelligence. And his penis size. I’ve warned you about writing down anything that you don’t want thrown back in your face.”

“Oh, hell, no,” Michael insisted. “I did not say anything like that. Someone tampered with the files.”

“It doesn’t really matter. We can’t unring the bell with Judge Davis. It’s never good to make an enemy of the judge. He can make our lives miserable.”

“Is that all?”

“Unfortunately, no. Carl Flaten won’t go away either.”

“What now? I am so sick of that bastard.”

“Michael. Please. He filed a complaint with the EEOC. He says that the litigation waiver he signed when we terminated him is invalid because he was sexually harassed, and he’s alleging privacy violations in our HR department related to his insurance claims.”

“Who the hell harassed Flaten?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“He says you bullied and humiliated him.”

Michael slammed a fist on his desk. “Fuck Carl. We paid him a settlement to go away, so make the little creep go away.”

Sonia wet her lips with the tip of her tongue and sighed. “Enough, Michael. Don’t say things like that, and whatever you do, don’t write it down. It won’t be helpful.”

“I know. I’m sorry. This is not like me at all.”

“I realize that.”

Michael felt himself spinning out of control. A blood vessel throbbed in his left eye. His muscles tightened into knots. It wasn’t the company or the lawsuits. It wasn’t Judge Davis or Carl Flaten or Sonia. It was Alison. He was falling into a whirlpool, and his wife was nowhere to be found. He was alone.

“There are days when I want to kill someone,” he said.

Sonia smiled. “Don’t do that.”

She used long fingers tipped with red nails to push herself out of his chair. She was tall and sensual.

“Your shoulders are tense,” she told him as she came around behind his desk. “I have magic fingers.”

Stride found Maggie Bei waiting for him when he arrived at his lakeside cottage at nine o’clock at night. She sat sideways in his leather chair next to the fire, with her short legs draped over the armrest. A half-empty bottle of Shiraz sat on the carpet, and she twisted the stem of an empty wineglass in her hand. The red fringe of her hair fell across her eyes.

“Sorry I’m late,” he told her. “Did you eat?”

“You have two grapes and a hard-boiled egg in the fridge,” Maggie replied.

“Don’t eat the egg. It’s been there a while.”

Stride took off his leather jacket and bent down to kiss her on the lips. Day by day, he kept hoping it would feel more natural to do so, but it didn’t. The romance between them had grown awkward. Maggie felt it, too, and she rolled her eyes at him.

“I know I’m irresistible, but control yourself,” she said.

Maggie climbed out of the chair and stretched her muscles in a yoga pose. When she was done, she blew the bangs out of her eyes in a gesture that was casual and erotic. His partner was ageless. Her pretty Chinese face looked no different to Stride than it had ten years ago when she was thirty, but that was part of his problem. He’d always seen her as young. As a daughter or a friend, but not as a lover.

She stretched on tiptoes and kissed him the way it was supposed to be done. He felt himself respond with desire, but she broke it off.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

Maggie put her hands on her hips and arched her eyebrows seductively. “You want Chinese?”

“I could do Chinese every night.”

“Really? I think you’d get sick of it after a while.”

“No way.”

“I think you already are.”

“Maggie,” he said.

“I’m talking about dinner. What are you talking about?”

Stride felt his face grow hot with embarrassment. “How about I order us a pizza?”

“Whatever you want.”

Stride’s phone rang. He was grateful for the interruption. “This is Stride,” he said.

Dead air stretched out on the line.

“Hello?” he said. “Who is this?”

Maggie caught his eye as she sensed there was something unusual about the call. He punched the speakerphone button so they could both listen.

“This is Lieutenant Stride,” he repeated. “What do you want?”

Someone finally spoke. “I have a question.”

It was a woman’s voice, so soft and broken that it was almost inaudible. He heard traffic noise in the background. Whoever she was, she was speaking from a phone outside.

“You’ll have to talk louder,” Stride said. “I can’t hear you.”

“I have a question about—about the Dead Red case.”

“What is it?”

“I was wondering if there were things about the case—about the victims—that you hadn’t told the press.”

Stride eased down into the chair by the fire. Maggie squatted next to him, listening.

“Why?” he asked.

He heard hesitation. Breathing. There was fear in her silence.

“Please, I need to know,” she said.

“Know what?”

“The victims. Their clothes. Anything you can tell me.”

Maggie mouthed to him: It’s her. Stride nodded.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“I can’t say. Not yet.”

“If you have information about this case, you need to come in and talk to me,” Stride said.

“Please. I can’t do this unless I know for sure. I can’t be wrong.”

“About what?”

“Who did this.”

“If you think you know who’s responsible for these crimes, then tell me,” Stride said.

“You don’t understand. If I’m wrong—”

“Three women have been murdered,” he interrupted her sharply. “You need to tell me what you know. Now. Tonight. We’ll protect you.”

“This was a mistake.”

He heard it in her voice. She was ready to run. To fly away.

“Don’t hang up,” he said.

“Just tell me if there’s something else,” she begged him. “Anything. If I’m going to do this, I have to be sure.”

“That’s not how this works. You tell me what you know. That’s what needs to happen.”

“I have to go.”

He was losing her. She was on the other end of a thin thread, pulling away. Maggie waved at him and tugged at the tag on the back of her shirt. He read her mind immediately. When they weren’t trying to be lovers, they were in perfect synch.

“Wait,” he said. “Tell me one thing.”

“What?”

“Tell me what size you wear. Your blouses.”

He heard a sharp intake of breath on the other end. “Oh, no.”

“They’re yours, aren’t they?” he asked.

Something strangled emerged from her throat, not words, but a choked gasp of panic. She didn’t say anything more.

“Hello?” Stride said again, but the line was dead. She was gone.

Scalding water cascaded over Alison’s body. Her skin grew pink. Her wet red hair clung to her neck as she combed it backward and tilted her face into the spray. She wished she could stay forever in a cocoon behind the glass door, but even in her bathroom oasis, the ants found her. Where the water dripped in rivulets into the hollow of her back, she felt them on her body. They fought for traction on her slick legs and followed the glistening white trails of soap between her breasts. She couldn’t escape them.

They’re yours, aren’t they?

The policeman, Lieutenant Stride, had confirmed her worst fears. She’d known it all along since she’d seen the first photograph in the newspaper. Her clothes were disappearing from her closet and showing up on the bodies of murdered women. Red-haired women, like her. She was the missing link. Even so, knowing the truth, she couldn’t say anything. She couldn’t admit it to Stride or to herself. She couldn’t say the word.

Michael.

Alison turned off the water and toweled herself dry. It was late, almost midnight. He hadn’t come home, and they hadn’t talked since their brief conversation in the early evening. Evan was sleeping, soundly and innocently the way he always did, but Alison couldn’t close her eyes. She was afraid of the ants. She was afraid of what would happen overnight while she slept.

What if another woman died while she fought with her conscience?

She was naked and still damp as she emerged from the bathroom. The bedroom was lit only by the lamp on her nightstand, and it was gray with shadows. Something was wrong; she felt the disruption in the room immediately. Her nervous eyes flicked to the hallway door, which had been closed, and she saw that it was open now, letting in a triangle of light. Her closet door was open, too. She saw the darkness move and become a silhouette.

Alison screamed.

It was Michael. He was inside her closet. Her closet, which had been raided for clothes to dress his victims.

“For God’s sake, Ali,” her husband said, raising his hands to calm her. “Settle down, it’s just me.”

She was exposed and felt an urge to cover herself. This man had slept with her for more than a decade and knew the intimacies of her body better than she did herself. Even so, she swept her arms across the globes of her breasts and tightened her legs to protect her mound. He noticed immediately. His lips flattened into a scowl.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“What are you doing in my closet?” she hissed, her voice strangled. She found she could hardly breathe.

Michael came closer to her. He was still dressed for work, but his clothes were wrinkled, and his face was pale and tired. She retreated until her back was against the wall. She wanted to tell him to get away, to leave her alone; she wanted to admit that she was afraid of him.

“The squirrels are back,” he said. “I heard them on the roof. Take it easy, will you? I wasn’t trying to startle you.”

“I think you should go.”

Michael sat down on the end of their bed and ran his hand back through his hair in frustration. “We need to talk, Alison.”

“Not now.”

“Then when? This can’t go on. I’m not going to live my life on the other side of a door from my own wife. Don’t you see that? Sooner or later, there’s no coming back from this. I love you, but you’re driving me away.”

“I love you, too.”

The words escaped her lips before she realized she was saying them. It was true. That was the root of her terror and her hesitation. She loved Michael, and she didn’t want to lose him. She didn’t want to believe that what she suspected about him could really be true. Not him. Not her husband. Not a man who had slept beside her and made love to her thousands of times. Whatever she thought was happening, she was wrong.

She wanted him to convince her. She needed everything to be the way it was before.

Her arms fell down to her side, unveiling her body. He saw the opening she was giving him. Her husband crossed the short open space between them in a single stride and wrapped her up in his arms. She felt the easy grace as he held her, his hands roaming her back, his mouth on her lips, on her neck, and on the swell of her chest. He was tall and strong. She could feel his arousal, and she was aroused, too, like a swollen river pushing over a dam. She threw aside her doubts, and in the rush of passion, her suspicions seemed like crazy thoughts. They couldn’t be real; they were hallucinations. Like the ants.

Holding him, she buried her face in his hair to inhale his scent, but it wasn’t the musk of his body that she smelled. It was a woman’s perfume, wafting from him like sweat. Not her perfume. A stranger’s.

Alison stiffened and shoved him away, nearly making him fall. She felt like a fool to have trusted him. “What the hell did you do?”

He stared at her, hungry with desire. “I don’t understand.” And then, with his eyes cast downward at his clothes, as if he could smell the other woman in the room with them: “Listen, nothing happened.”

“Get out.”

“I told her no. I was vulnerable, but I wanted you. Doesn’t that mean something to you?”

“You bastard. Do you think I don’t know what’s going on?”

Alison ran into the bathroom and locked herself inside. He followed, pounding at the door. She felt the angry vibrations on the wood pulsing through her body. He shouted at her, and she shut her hands over her ears, not wanting to hear his voice. She wouldn’t be weak anymore. She wouldn’t let herself be dazzled by his lies.

She finally faced the truth. He was a monster.

Monsters had to be destroyed.

Alison parked exactly where she had the night before, near a convenience store in the industrial section of the harbor, close enough to the water to hear the great boats loading and offloading iron ore. She stared at the pay phone on the graffiti-covered wall near the broken door of the men’s toilet. Whoever had used it last had left the phone off the hook, and the receiver dangled on the end of its metal coil, swaying as the wind blew. The phone was ground zero for addicts looking to score drugs and hookers collecting hotel room numbers for tourists.

She didn’t want to use a phone anywhere near her downtown office where she might be seen. She wanted no way for the police to trace the call back to her. If she was going to betray her husband, she would do it anonymously. Sooner or later, the truth would come out, but not now. All she wanted was to hand them the name and retreat back into the shadows.

Michael Malville.

She studied the people haunting the parking lot, and her anxiety soared. Three twenty-something boys clustered by the neon lights of the store window, smoking and swearing as they shoved each other. A dockworker with his belly over his belt sauntered out of the open door of the toilet. He was unzipped, flashing his white underwear. An Asian hooker in a pink miniskirt and faux fur coat cased the men at the gas pumps.

Alison didn’t belong here. Her perfect home, her perfect life, was miles away, up on the hill, in the woods, by the lake.

She took a ragged breath as she got out of the car and lit a cigarette to calm her nerves. She felt leering eyes on her. She straightened her back and walked deliberately toward the phone, ignoring the loud whispers of the boys sizing up her body. The hooker winked at her and chewed gum and listened to her cell phone. Alison took the pay phone receiver in her hand; the plastic was sticky and crusted with dirt. She squirted disinfectant on a tissue and wiped it down, and she did the same with the keypad.

She wondered: could she do this?

Alison dialed.

“This is Stride,” he answered immediately, as if he was expecting his phone to ring.

She hesitated again, feeling her courage flinch at the reality of what it meant to make this call. She didn’t know if she could speak.

“I know it’s you,” Stride said into the silence. “Are you ready to tell me who you are?”

“You have to understand how hard this is for me,” she said.

“Three women are dead. It was hard for them.”

Alison felt as if he had slapped her, but he was right. She also knew there could be no anonymity for her. She couldn’t hide from what she was doing or keep her identity secret. She had to tell him everything. “The blouses you found on the victims,” she said.

“Yes?”

“They’re mine.”

“What makes you think so?”

“I had those same tops. All of them. Now they’re missing from my closet.”

“Who could have taken them? Who has access to your closet?”

Alison put her hand over her mouth. She couldn’t say it.

“Are you there?” he went on. “Who could have taken them?”

“Only one man,” she said.

“Who is he?”

She closed her eyes. “My husband.”

There was silence on the other end of the line. It was as if, hearing those words, Stride understood what it meant for her to say them. He recognized the terrible line she had crossed.

“You think your husband is guilty of these murders?” he asked.

Alison realized she was silently crying. Her breath could barely form the word. “Yes.”

“Do you have any other evidence to prove it?”

“There’s a knife missing in our kitchen,” she went on. “I noticed it was gone around the time of the first murder. I haven’t seen it since then.”

“Anything else?”

“His car,” she said. “It was driven thirty miles the night before last. The night that the third girl died. I checked the mileage before I went to bed and again in the morning.”

“So you already suspected him at that point?”

She could hear the accusation in his voice. And yet you said nothing. A woman was killed because of your silence.

“I didn’t know what to think,” she said.

“Is it just you and your husband at home?” Stride asked.

“Our son lives with us. He’s ten.”

“Does anyone else have a key to your house?”

“No.”

“This is a hard question,” Stride told her, “but do you have any idea why? Why would your husband do something like this? Is there anything in his past to suggest a violent personality?”

“Nothing,” Alison insisted, and it wasn’t a lie. Michael was no smooth pearl—he could swear, and he had a raw temper—but she’d never seen him as anything but a lover, father, and provider. They’d been happy.

“Then why?” Stride repeated.

It was the question she’d asked herself over and over for weeks. “I guess it’s me,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve pushed him away. I’ve been having problems.”

“What kind of problems?”

“Psychological problems.” Every night, I dream the ants are watching me from the ceiling.

“You did the right thing by calling.”

“That’s not how it feels,” she said.

Life would never be the same. Going forward, everything would be different. Everything would be worse.

Alison added, “I suppose you need my name.”

“That actually isn’t necessary, Mrs. Malville.”

“How do you know who I am?” Then in the silence that followed, she murmured: “Oh, my God, what did I do?”

Alison slammed the phone down onto the hook. She spun around in panic, but she had no chance to run. She found the Asian hooker and the man with the unzipped pants waiting for her. They had police shields in their hands. The three boys—not boys, but young cops—guarded her car.

There was nowhere to go.

“My name is Sergeant Maggie Bei of the Duluth Police,” the hooker told her. “Please come with us, Mrs. Malville.”

Michael Malville slapped his palms on the wooden table and cursed. “This is fucking insane. Do you hear me? It’s crazy. I want to talk to Alison.”

Stride and Maggie sat opposite Malville in the interview room in City Hall. Fluorescent light bathed the hard lines on the man’s face, giving shadows to his cheekbones and making his sweat glisten. He was an athletic, good-looking man, tall and strong.

Killers came in all shapes and sizes.

“That’s not possible right now,” Stride told him.

“There is no way Alison said I did this. No way.”

Stride was silent. He wanted Malville’s brain focused on his wife’s betrayal. The man had listened to his rights in stunned silence and, so far, he hadn’t followed the traditional suspect path of shutting up and calling a lawyer. Stride wanted to keep him talking as long as possible.

“If this is all a misunderstanding, we want to find that out as soon as possible,” Stride told him.

“It is.”

“Well, let’s go back to the dates of the three crimes. They all happened overnight. Can you tell us where you were on those nights?”

Malville rocked back in the chair and stared at the ceiling. He shook his head in disbelief. “I was home,” he said quietly.

“Was your wife home, too?”

“Yes.”

“Do you sleep in the same bedroom?”

Malville hesitated before answering. “Not lately.”

“Why is that?”

“Alison has been struggling. Something’s wrong with her.”

“Something?”

“She’s been having nightmares.”

Stride nodded. “So she doesn’t know whether you left the house or not on those nights.”

“I didn’t leave the house,” he insisted. “I slept in my office.”

Following a glance from Stride, Maggie slipped three photographs out of a large manila envelope. She pushed them across the table to Malville, who winced as he saw them.

“You probably saw these photographs of the victims in the newspaper or on television,” she said. “The killer sent them to the media electronically.”

“Did you trace the e-mails?” Malville asked.

“We’re working on that,” Stride said.

“My people may be able to help you. My engineers deal with those kinds of issues all the time.”

“So I suppose people working at your company would know how to defeat those traces, too?” Stride asked.

Malville frowned. “I suppose.”

“Does that include you?”

“Yes,” he admitted.

Maggie leaned across the table. “Do you recognize the clothes that the women are wearing in these photographs, Mr. Malville?”

His head cocked in surprise. “The clothes? No, of course not.”

“Are you sure?”

“How could I recognize the clothes? These women were strangers to me.”

“That’s not an answer,” Maggie said.

Malville sighed and pulled the photographs of the dead faces closer with his hand, touching only the edges of the paper. He studied the fringe of the blouses that were visible on their necks.

“No,” he said.

“You’re sure?”

He rubbed his hands over his face. “Look, I don’t know, Alison may have some tops that are similar. I’m a man. I don’t pay attention. Is that what this is about? These women are redheads with a similar taste in clothes to my wife? If that’s all it is, then I don’t appreciate your exploiting my wife’s fragile mental condition. She’s seeing things that aren’t there.”

Maggie looked at Stride, who nodded. “Your wife says these are her clothes,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“Her blouses. Taken from her closet.”

“That’s ridiculous. She probably misplaced them. Or they’re at the dry cleaner. I can’t find my favorite pair of jeans, but that doesn’t mean a killer stole them.”

“Each of the victims was also dabbed with perfume. It’s your wife’s perfume. I recognized it when I met her.”

“I’m sure lots of women wear her fragrance.”

“Did you know that a knife is missing from your kitchen?” Stride asked. “A large carving knife?”

“No.”

“Your wife says she noticed it missing around the time of the first murder.”

“She never mentioned it.”

“You see the problem we’re having, don’t you, Mr. Malville?” Stride asked. “We’re searching your car right now. Soon we’ll search your house and your office. Are we going to find that knife?”

Malville was silent.

“Speaking of your car,” Stride added, “your wife checked the mileage on your odometer before she went to bed the night before last. That was the night that Sherry Morton was killed.”

“So?”

“So she checked the car in the morning, and it had been driven thirty miles overnight.”

“What?”

“Thirty miles happens to be almost the exact round trip distance between your house and Sherry Morton’s apartment.”

“You’re lying. I don’t believe it. Alison didn’t say anything like that.”

Stride and Maggie stared at him, letting the truth sink into his mind.

“Look at the evidence, Mr. Malville,” Stride went on. “Your wife’s clothes go missing and wind up on the bodies of three dead women. A knife goes missing from inside your house. Your car is driven thirty miles on the night of one of the murders. Can you think of any explanation for what we’ve found? Anything that doesn’t point to you as the man who killed these women?”

Malville grimaced. “I can think of one possibility, but I must be wrong.”

“What is it?” Stride asked.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but there’s no other explanation that makes sense. Alison must have killed those women herself.”

They let Alison go before midnight.

She picked up Evan, who was already asleep, at her sister’s house, and she deposited him in her car without waking him up. Evan could sleep like the dead. She drove home, where the silence inside their house was like a cathedral. She knew what to expect in the morning. The police would come. They would paw through every inch of her house, touch her things, sweep through their personal lives, and carry away their secrets. Tonight, for one more night, she could be alone. For the first time in weeks, she could feel safe.

Without Michael.

She draped Evan across his bed and covered him, knowing he would kick off the blankets overnight. She watched her son sleeping and wondered how she would explain it to him. What his father had done. What the future held for the two of them. She realized she didn’t have any answers.

Alison undressed in her bedroom and put on her silk robe. She went downstairs to the kitchen, where she poured herself a glass of white wine to settle her nerves. She took it into the formal dining room and sat at the end of the oak table, as if she were hosting a party for a crowd of invisible guests. She set her wine on a coaster made of red-and-black colored glass, but she left it untouched. As she blinked, tears swelled out of her eyes.

She’d hoped she would feel better when it was done, but she didn’t. Guilt made her chest tight. Acid traced a fiery line up her throat. Under her robe, she felt the ants crawling all over her skin. They hadn’t left. They were still swarming in the ceiling.

What if Michael was right? What if she was insane?

“Go away!” she screamed at the empty room. “Do you hear me? Leave me alone!”

She grabbed her wine glass and threw it at the far wall. Sauvignon blanc spilled across the table like a river. The glass struck the wall and shattered in a spray of razorlike shards. Some of the pieces landed on the table and glittered like diamonds under the light of the chandelier. She stared in disbelief at what she’d done, tasting blood in her mouth as she bit her lower lip between her teeth.

She stood up, tipping the chair backward. She put both hands flat on the dining room table and closed her eyes, feeling herself breathe in and out. She knew what she had to do. Leave. Get away. Take Evan and go. She realized now that her hallucinations had nothing to do with herself or with Michael. It was the house they’d built. The house was haunting her. The house was evil. It had crept inside her husband’s brain and made him into a killer. It had begun to eat away her own sanity.

Get away.

She fled from the dining room without picking up the chair or attending to the broken glass. In the kitchen, she stood stiffly, like a statue, thinking about what she had to pack. She could stuff her entire life in a single suitcase, and it would still be half-empty. Suddenly, there was almost nothing from this place that she wanted to remember or preserve. She didn’t want the photographs on the mantle above the fireplace. She didn’t want the rings, the necklaces, the bracelets. She didn’t even want her clothes, because when she thought about them, she saw the faces of the dead women dressed in her own wardrobe. She would rather let a charity cart it all away.

She had no idea when she’d return, if ever. She would leave the house to the police. Without Michael, there was nothing here for her anyway. The life she’d known was gone, and all she could do was cut the threads that held her here and start over.

Her kitchen.

If she would miss anything, it would be the time they had spent here on holidays, with the smells of good food suffusing the air. All of them together. Evan reading his comic books. Michael typing on his laptop. Alison, rubbing spices on the roast and chopping up vegetables with an expert hand. She could dice an onion with a knife into perfect translucent cubes.

The knife.

Alison stared in disbelief at the kitchen counter. The butcher block for their knives sat at an angle to the sink, the way it always did. Each slot was filled. A black handle jutted out of the empty gash that had taunted her for weeks. None of the knives was missing. The carving knife that had disappeared was back again, as if it had never vanished, never cut into the bodies of three innocent women.

She began to doubt herself. Had it ever been gone? Had she imagined the missing knife?

What was happening to her?

Alison stretched out her hand with her fingers curled like a claw as she approached the counter. She hardly dared to touch the knife, as if it would disappear when she reached for it. But the handle was real and solid. She drew it out slowly, and as she hoisted the blade in the air, her mouth curled into an “O” of horror. The honed silver was covered over and crusted in streaks of dry crimson. It was a killing machine, bloody from its latest butchery.

“Mom?”

Alison spun in shock, expecting Michael behind her. She clutched the knife in front of her chest to protect herself. Instead, she saw Evan at the bottom of the steps, studying her with fear in his big eyes. She cried and let the knife fall from her fingers. It clattered to the floor.

“Oh, my God,” she murmured, running to her son and sinking to her knees. She gathered him up in her arms and smothered him with kisses. “Oh, Evan, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. What’s wrong? Why aren’t you sleeping?”

Evan glanced at the vacant hallway upstairs, where they could see the closed door of his bedroom. His face was grave and mature. He leaned into his mother and whispered in Alison’s ear.

“It’s the spitting devil,” he told her. “He’s here.”

Alison stroked Evan’s hair as she held him. “Don’t worry, honey, you just had a nightmare. You’re safe with me now.”

Her son shook his head firmly. “It’s not a dream. He’s real.”

“Did you read something in one of your comic books? Were you looking at them in bed again? I told you not to do that.”

“I’ve seen him,” Evan insisted. “He lives in my closet.”

Alison stared at her son in confusion. “Evan, sweetheart, what are you talking about?”

“He walks around at night,” the boy said. “I hear him coughing sometimes. I pretend to be asleep, but I see him in my room when he comes and goes.”

“Who?”

“The spitting devil.”

“Evan, I’ve told you not to make up stories like that. It’s creepy. You’re scaring me.”

“No, Mom, listen.” The boy cupped a hand over her ear and whispered again. “I think he wants to kill us.”

Alison stiffened with dismay. Cold needles traveled up her skin. “Kill us? Don’t talk that way. Why would you say something like that?”

“I’ve seen him with a knife,” Evan said.

Alison rose slowly off her knees, like a ghost coming out of a grave, and spoke to her son in a calm, soft voice. “You have to be honest with me now, Evan. You can’t lie or pretend, okay? This is very important. Did you really see a man with a knife in this house?”

“I told you. He lives in my closet.”

She stared at the door to Evan’s bedroom above her and tried to bridge the gap between what was real and what was not. Her son had a vivid imagination, fed by his voracious appetite for fantasy books. It was also possible that Evan had seen Michael carrying a knife out of the house and had made up a fairy tale to explain away his father’s behavior. It was a child’s defense mechanism for something he knew was wrong.

She would have been certain that the spitting devil in Evan’s closet was nothing but a bad dream if it weren’t for one thing.

The ants.

The ants living in the ceiling and in her nightmares. Watching her. Tormenting her. Like a million eyes driving her mad.

What if her paranoia was real? What if her brain had conjured the ants to send her a message? The same message over and over. You’re not alone.

“Evan, how long have you been seeing this man?” she murmured.

“I don’t know. Since the weather got cold.”

Since the weather got cold and the women started dying.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”

“I thought it was my fault he was here.”

Alison didn’t know what to believe. She saw the earnestness in Evan’s face and knew that he believed it. She bent down in front of her son again and gave him a reassuring smile.

“You stay here,” she told him. “I’ll make sure there’s no one in your closet. Okay?”

“Be careful, Mom. Don’t let him spit on you.”

“I won’t.”

Alison put Evan in one of the kitchen chairs and gave him several of his comic books from a stack on top of the refrigerator. She opened the utility closet and removed a heavy silver flashlight that had once belonged to her grandfather. With a weapon and a light in her hand, she climbed the stairs toward the dark second floor. At Evan’s door, she hesitated, but then she turned the knob and crept inside. She shot a cone of light around the dirty space, and the plastic eyes of stuffed bears glistened back at her. She stopped in the middle of the room, listening to the quiet. She inhaled but smelled only the cigarette she’d smoked in the car. Nothing felt out of place.

Evan’s closet door was open by six inches.

Alison opened the door with her foot and tensed. No one jumped out at her. No one spat at her. There were no devils. She examined every inch of the closet floor with the light and saw nothing but Evan’s mess thrown together in small mountains. The man with the knife was only a comic book villain. He wasn’t real.

She was almost sorry. She’d almost hoped it was true.

As Alison turned away, her flashlight beam swept upward and glinted on a small gold ring in the wall. Around it, she saw the outline of a square access panel, and she realized that one of the sliding stairways to their sprawling, unfinished attic was located here in the closet. She flinched at the odd coincidence that her son’s closet, where his spitting devil lived, led upward into space that loomed over the entire house.

It was a spying ground for every other room upstairs. Including her bedroom and her bathroom.

Standing in the closet, uncertain and afraid, Alison realized that something had changed inside her head. The ants were gone. They’d fled. For the first time in months, she didn’t feel them or hear them above her.

Maybe they had finally delivered their message; maybe she’d finally heard what her mind had been screaming at her.

Look upstairs.

She doused the light. In darkness, she tugged the gold ring, anticipating the squeal of the hinges on the access door. Instead, the door opened silently, as if the hinges had been freshly greased. She reached up by feel to unhook the laddered steps, and the steel structure slid smoothly down to the floor, creating a narrow, angled staircase leading to the upper level.

Alison listened again. She heard wind blowing through the peaks of the roof. The tunnel of air flowed onto her face. She put a bare foot on the lowest step, which was metal and cold, and she used her hands on the railings to climb upward. She ascended into blackness. When her torso cleared the hole, the wind became a gale. She shivered as she stepped from the ladder onto the plywood floor.

As she reached for the switch of the flashlight, she froze.

Behind her, someone coughed.

“Hemoptysis,” Maggie said to Michael Malville.

“Our guy coughs up microscopic particles of blood,” Stride added.

Malville thumped his chest with his fist. “Do I look sick? I’m a swimmer, for God’s sake. I swim one hundred laps a week. Do you think I could do that if my lungs were so weak I was coughing up blood?”

“No, I don’t,” Stride acknowledged.

“Then let me go. I didn’t do this.”

Stride shook his head. “Unfortunately, Mr. Malville, we finished searching your car, and our technicians discovered the same kind of microscopic blood pattern that we found in the homes of the women who were murdered.”

“That’s not possible.”

Stride pushed a photo across the desk, showing the steering wheel and dashboard of Malville’s car under a luminol spray. The dispersion of tiny blue dots looked like paint shaken from a brush.

“The blood at the previous crime scenes came from a male,” Maggie added. “It wasn’t your wife.”

Malville stared at the photograph. “Look, test my lungs. Go ahead. It’s not me.”

“Then who?”

“I don’t know. All I can tell you is that I’m the only man who has ever driven that car, and I don’t have any kind of lung condition.”

“Do you know someone who does?”

“Possibly, but it’s not like I do chest X-rays on my friends. I also don’t go around handing them my car keys.”

Stride leaned forward across the table. They were all tired. They’d been going back and forth with Malville over the course of several hours. “For what it’s worth, Mr. Malville, I’m not convinced you did this. Without the blood evidence at the crime scenes, you’d probably be in a cell now because of everything your wife told us. But we do have blood evidence, and that means a DNA test will rule you in or out. I’m guessing you’re right, and you’re healthy, and you’ll be ruled out. That doesn’t change the situation. We’ve got spatter in your car that matches the murder scenes, and if it doesn’t belong to you, then who the hell does it belong to?”

“There’s also the mileage overnight,” Maggie added. “If your wife is correct, someone drove your car to Sherry Morton’s apartment and back.”

“And there’s the missing knife in your house,” Stride said.

Malville frowned. “Unless you think my ten-year-old son taught himself to drive, there’s no one else in our house.”

“Who else has access?”

“I’m telling you, no one.”

“Relatives? Service people? Painters, plumbers, cleaners, anyone who could have taken a knife or copied your car keys?”

“No, no, no, there’s no one like that.”

“It wasn’t a ghost,” Stride told him. “Someone was inside your house. Someone drove your car.”

Malville gave a hollow laugh as he struggled for an explanation. “Well, my son thinks we have a spitting devil.”

“What?”

“Oh, it’s something he read about in his comic books. It’s a demon who lives in your house and does bad things.”

Stride’s eyes narrowed. “Why would your son think that?”

“He’s a boy, Lieutenant. Boys have active imaginations.”

“Maybe so, but have bad things been happening at your house?”

“Bad things? No, not really. Evan has simply been acting out more because of the difficulties between me and Alison. Yesterday he broke one of Alison’s collectibles and didn’t want to admit it. Little things like that have been happening for weeks. Rather than tell us he’s upset, he created a monster to take the blame.”

“What else has he done?” Stride asked.

“Lieutenant, I hope you’re not suggesting my son is a serial killer.”

“I just want to know what other problems you’ve observed in your house.”

Malville shrugged. “Food has gone missing. Cookies, cheese, leftovers. Evan has been in my office a couple of times, even though he knows he’s not allowed in there. My papers have been moved around. He’s been on my computer.”

“What if it wasn’t Evan?” Maggie asked him.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, could someone else be responsible for the things that have been happening?”

“I already told you, there’s no one but the three of us in the house,” Malville said.

“Are you sure?” Stride asked.

“Am I sure? What the hell are you saying?”

“I mean, is there any space in your house where someone could be hiding?” Stride asked.

“You’re suggesting a stranger could be living in my house?”

“Is that possible?”

“Well, we have an unfinished attic, but that’s crazy.”

“Not necessarily. It happens more often than you think. Homeless people will sometimes make a nest in an unused space and only come out when the family is away or asleep. The incidents you describe are consistent with that possibility.”

“You think someone could live in my house for months, and I wouldn’t notice?”

“It sounds like you did notice,” Maggie told him. “You just didn’t realize what it might mean. Has anything else happened that seems unusual?”

Malville opened his mouth to protest again, then closed it as he remembered something. “My e-mails,” he said.

“What about them?”

“Someone hacked my home e-mails. They got into my Wi-Fi and gave e-mails to the plaintiffs in litigation against my company. The other parties claimed the information came from an anonymous source.”

“Could someone do that from inside your house?” Stride asked.

“Sure.”

“If that’s true, it doesn’t sound like the kind of risk a homeless stranger would take,” Maggie said. “It sounds personal.”

“Do you have any enemies?” Stride asked.

“I run a business. When you do that, there are people who don’t like you.”

“Is there anyone in particular?”

“Take a number,” Malville replied. “I’ve had major layoffs because of the recession. People are suing me. Everybody’s got a grudge.”

Stride shook his head. “This is more than a grudge, Mr. Malville. We’re talking about someone capable of several brutal murders. Someone willing to destroy you and your family. Do you know anyone like that?”

Malville’s face, which was closed and confused, slowly came alive. A dark horror spread across his features. “There is one man.”

“Who?”

“His name is Carl Flaten,” Malville said. “He’s a software engineer. I fired him.”

“Why?” Maggie asked.

“Carl was brilliant but severely antisocial. A lot of the good ones are ‘rain men’—you know, like Dustin Hoffman in that movie?—but they’re mostly harmless. Not Carl. He sabotaged equipment belonging to co-workers he didn’t like, he used company technology to develop sick video games, he was abusive to our customers. I kept him around longer than I should have because he was a genius, but finally, I had to get rid of him. That was about three months ago.”

Malville paused, shaking his head, and then he added, “He had something wrong with him, too.”

“What do you mean?” Stride asked.

“He was sick.”

The cough rattled like the sound of death.

Alison spun, illuminating the corner of the attic with the beam of her flashlight. There he was. The spitting devil living in their house was tall and bony, like a walking skeleton, and his clothes sagged on his frame. She recognized the black turtleneck and jeans he wore; they were Michael’s. The man’s face had a sunken, ghostly pallor. His dirty-blond hair hung low on his forehead. He was young but looked old, except for glistening blue eyes that pierced her with a naked malevolence.

Behind him, Alison saw old blankets shoved together on the floor; they’d been taken from their closet. Remnants of food stolen from their refrigerator and freezer sat on a wooden tray. She saw a laptop computer fed by wires that climbed the walls and disappeared toward an electrical conduit. The bare beams of the attic surrounded him, and he’d stuck dozens of paper photographs to the protruding roof nails. The pictures flapped in the air currents that blew through the space.

She recognized close-up color images of herself. Naked, in and out of the shower. Pictures of her and Michael making love, from weeks ago, before she drove him out of their bedroom. Pictures of women with red hair, dressed in her clothes, dead from dozens of stab wounds.

He coughed again, and sputum bubbled up from his lungs and dribbled onto his mouth. He wiped it with his sleeve.

“You did it, didn’t you?” he rasped. “You turned him in to the cops. I knew you would.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“I’m Carl,” he told her. “Don’t you remember me?”

“No.”

“You saw me at your husband’s office dozens of times, but you looked right through me. I was a nonperson to a woman like you. I was invisible.”

“Carl Flaten,” she murmured, as her brain put together the pieces.

“That’s right. You won’t forget me again, will you?”

Alison did recognize him, although he’d wasted away from the man she remembered. She also knew the stories that Michael had told her about his sadistic behavior at the office. If he didn’t like you, he tormented you, like a boy with an insect in a jar. He could smell a person’s weakness and exploit it.

“My husband fired you? That’s what this is all about?”

“Oh, it’s about more than that.” Carl took a step toward her, and Alison retreated. “I used to watch you hanging out with him, you know. It made me sick. Michael had everything. Money oozing out of his pockets. Power to dictate everybody’s else lives. A kid to show off. And you. This beautiful wife he could fuck whenever he wanted. And what did I have? Terminal cancer, that’s what I had. You call that fair? I’m twenty-six.”

“You’re right, that’s not fair. I’m sorry.”

“Shut up. I don’t need your pity. I’m the one with the power now. An invisible man who controls your whole life. How does it feel, Alison?”

Carl Flaten laughed, and then he coughed so hard that his knees buckled. She took a step toward the hole, looking for a way to escape, but he reached into his front pocket and withdrew a corkscrew with a sharp, spiral point that he nestled between his fingers. From his rear pocket, he extracted an eight-inch saw with jagged, rusty teeth that had once hung on a Peg-Board in their garage. He blocked her way to the stairs that led down into Evan’s closet.

“Michael dumped me by the side of the road like garbage,” he told her. “The bastard thought he was better than me, even when he was making a fortune off my brain. He had everything, and he left me with nothing. I wasn’t going to crawl away and die like that. I wasn’t going to let him win. So I figured out how to commit the perfect crime. The ultimate revenge. I decided to steal his perfect life.”

“By killing innocent women?” Alison snapped. “You’re nothing but a sick freak.”

“Sick? Is that all you can say to me? My plan was brilliant. Like masterfully designed computer code. At first, all I wanted was to live inside Michael’s house and be a part of his life without him having a fucking clue. Then I realized I could have so much more. I could drive the two of you apart. I could kick him out of your bed. I could own his wife’s mind. Look at what I’ve done to you. I made you believe that the man you loved was a monster. I made you betray him. You did just what I programmed you to do, Alison.”

“I’m not one of your computers,” she told him. “I’m a person. So were the women you murdered.”

“Do you think I care about them? Do you think I care about you? I’m already dying.”

He took another menacing step closer. His left hand hoisted the saw high in the air. She knew what would happen next.

“Stay away from me!” Alison screamed.

She switched off the flashlight. The attic turned black as he charged her. She heard the thunder of his footsteps, and she ducked into a ball, causing him to spill over her body and fall hard behind her. She scrambled to her feet and sprinted toward the exit ladder, but as she did, she slipped on loose sawdust, and her legs shot out from under her. She tumbled forward face-first, gasping as the impact emptied her lungs. The flashlight rolled out of her grasp. Before she could get up, Carl landed on her back, and one of his skinny arms snaked around her throat.

The twisted point of the corkscrew punctured the skin on her neck. She gasped and felt a stab of pain and a warm trickle of blood. His mouth was at her ear; she heard the gagged noise of his labored breathing. He coughed from deep inside his lungs, spraying a mist over her face. She wriggled under him, struggling to throw him off her back, but he hung on fiercely, dragging the corkscrew into a deep gash across her skin.

Alison felt something else. Something worse. The teeth of the old saw landed on the bulge of her carotid artery. She felt it like a vampire’s bite. With one jagged pull, he could send her blood pumping like a fountain from her heart directly onto the dirty floor of the attic.

“Now I can take what’s left of his life,” he whispered. “His wife. And his son.”

“No,” she gasped.

Carl began to saw at her flesh, but then he froze. The light of the flashlight bathed the two of them, flooding their faces. Alison’s eyes squeezed shut as she was blinded. She heard a young voice only inches away, and her heart seized.

Evan.

“YOU DON’T SCARE ME!” the boy bellowed.

The beam of light streaked like a comet in the night sky toward Carl Flaten’s head as Evan swung the flashlight with all the strength he could muster in his two little hands. It landed with a sharp crack of bone on the side of the man’s skull, enough to deaden his grip and give Alison a chance to dislodge him from her back with a mighty upward thrust of her torso. The light disappeared.

“Evan, hide!” she screamed.

Alison heard Carl Flaten staggering toward her again, and as they collided, the two of them wrestled in the darkness. Her hands clawed for his eyes with her long nails. Her cocked knee pummeled his groin. In pain, he swung the saw blindly, and its dull blade slashed her shoulder, drawing blood. She dropped to the ground, and the saw whistled above her head a second time, barely missing her. She grabbed his ankle, trying to topple him, but his whole body arched upward as he prepared to chop the saw downward into the meat of her skull like a cleaver. She dove free just as the metal whipped through the cold air toward the attic floor.

The blade stuck there, buried in the soft wood. She heard its vibrations. Carl struggled to dislodge the saw, and she followed the noise of his ragged breath. She leaped forward with both arms outstretched, catching him with her fists in the center of his chest, driving him backward. Her momentum carried her with him, and they both seemed to fly, cascading downward until Carl’s body landed against the low, angled roof of the attic.

An abortive scream died in his throat. Then there was silence.

Alison scrambled free, waiting for the man to rise to his feet, but she heard no movement, only a nauseating gurgle from his chest. In a corner of the attic, Evan flipped a light switch, and she saw Carl Flaten wriggling against the roof beams, his body contorted at an odd angle. She instinctively jumped backward, but he was pinned there, like a butterfly in a collection. Trickles of blood oozed over his bottom lip. His eyes blinked frantically. His legs twitched, scraping along the dusty floor. When he freed himself, he couldn’t stand. He sank to all fours and pitched forward, squirming on his face and choking. Blood matted his head and shoulders.

On the wall, Alison saw the long, bloody row of nails that had penetrated his neck and skull.

She didn’t move.

“Evan, go downstairs and call the police,” she said quietly.

Her son was frozen, staring in fascination at the spastic motions of the man on the floor.

“Please, honey, go do it now,” she told him.

Evan nodded and climbed down from the attic, leaving Alison alone. She crossed her arms to quiet her shivers. She waited with the man in the attic, feeling the wind rustle her red hair. She waited, standing over him, until the jerking in his limbs stopped and he wasn’t moving anymore. She was still there minutes later, crying, paralyzed, when Michael finally appeared at her side, wrapped his arms around her, and guided her away.

Stride waited in the cold outside the Malville home as the medical team removed the body of Carl Flaten, shrouded in a white sheet. On the street, he saw Michael and Alison Malville loading suitcases into the trunk of a Duluth police car. Their house was a crime scene, but even if they could have stayed there, Alison Malville had made it clear that she had no intention of sleeping under that roof again. Some ghosts couldn’t be exorcised. Instead, Stride had offered to escort them to a downtown hotel.

“A lot of people are going to do a look-see in their attics and basements tomorrow,” Maggie said.

“Yeah.”

“No one wants to find out they’re living with a stranger,” she added.

Stride didn’t reply.

As the squad car passed them, he exchanged glances with husband and wife. Michael was in the front seat next to the officer driving them. Alison was in the back with her son. There was no anger on their faces. There was no emotion at all, only shock. The breakdowns would come later. Stride had been through his own near-death experiences in his past, and he knew that you couldn’t shake them off like a coat. They clung to you. They lingered.

“Do you think those two will be able to put the pieces back together?” Maggie asked.

Stride followed the taillights of the squad car until they winked out behind the trees. “Could you get past the idea that your spouse believed you were a murderer?”

“If they split up, then Dead Red won. He stole their perfect life.”

“Nothing’s perfect,” Stride said.

He watched the shadows of police officers and evidence technicians moving behind the windows of the house. The scene was secure, but the work would go on through the rest of the night. He had time to escape for a few hours.

“I’m going to try to get some sleep,” Stride told her.

“Good idea.”

“You coming with me?”

He didn’t know why he asked. The two of them had slept together in his bed for weeks. Even so, he knew her answer before she said it.

“Actually, I think I’ll crash at my place,” Maggie told him. “I need to get some stuff done there in the morning.”

“Okay.”

“Unless you weren’t talking about sleep,” she said.

“I was.”

“Yeah, I figured. Maybe tomorrow night?”

“Sure.”

But it wouldn’t be tomorrow night. It wouldn’t be ever again. Some friends were never meant to be lovers. They both knew it, and they didn’t have to say it.

No one likes living with a stranger.

“See you tomorrow, boss,” Maggie said.

Stride nodded. “Night, Mags.”

Alison and Michael lay next to each other in the dark, loosely holding hands. Evan slept peacefully on a roll-out bed in the hotel room, but the two of them were awake and silent. They’d been silent with each other for hours. She knew they had a long journey back, and she had no idea if they would get there. She didn’t even know how to begin.

“Can you ever forgive me?” she murmured at last.

Michael waited a long time to reply, but then he said, “Don’t do this to yourself now.”

She knew what he really meant: don’t do this to me now. Don’t make me choose. I don’t know if I can ever trust you again. You allowed yourself to believe something terrible and untrue. You lost faith in me.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“We both have things to be sorry about. I was ready to—” He stopped.

“What?”

“Nothing. Not now.”

“Please.”

Michael rolled over on his side. She could barely see his eyes. “I was ready to ask for a divorce. I was ready to cheat on you. I was ready to give up.”

“And now?” she asked.

“Now I know it wasn’t you, and it wasn’t me. We were both victims.”

He was right, but she wondered if that really changed anything. If someone killed you, or if you killed yourself, you were still dead. She opened her mouth to say more—to beg, to pray, to seek answers—but he put a finger at her lips and whispered, “Don’t talk.”

He was right about that, too. They wouldn’t solve anything in the darkness. Not now. Not yet.

Their two warm bodies molded against each other. It was strange and yet familiar to have him in her bed again after weeks apart. He was awake beside her for a long time, but eventually, she heard his breathing change and knew that he had fallen asleep. She wished she could sleep herself, but her eyes remained wide open. There were no ants. There was no spitting devil. Even so, she found herself staring blindly through the darkness at the ceiling of the hotel room, listening to the footsteps of innocent strangers moving above her.

BRIAN FREEMAN (www.bfreemanbooks.com) is an international bestselling author of psychological suspense novels. His novels include The Bone House, The Burying Place, In the Dark, Stalked, Stripped, and Immoral. His fifth novel, The Burying Place, was a finalist for Best Novel in the International Thriller Writer Awards. Freeman lives and writes in Minnesota.

Look for Brian Freeman’s new book, SPILLED BLOOD, in May 2012.