Chapter

Five

As soon as it’s light out, I walk down the path to the guesthouse Cole had converted into an office for me. Because after I’d gotten the axe from Napa State, I couldn’t do it anymore. It being much of anything. Getting dressed. Driving. Sitting in the mind-numbing funeral procession of traffic with nothing to do but think (before I discovered the magic of heavy metal). I didn’t tell Cole I couldn’t be a therapist either. Not even here. Steps away from my front door. But after the office had been empty for months, he got the idea.

My skin hums with that early morning buzz as I unlock the door and cross the threshold. That chronic-sleep-deprivation-two-shots-of-espresso-empty-stomach high. And it hits me like usual. The smell of paint and new carpet and overpriced furniture. Like the regal leather sofa in the corner that regards me with contempt. It understands why Cole left me. You didn’t even try, it says.

I make my way to the unfinished room in the back—my real office—empty save for the one unopened box I’d brought from Napa State and the two-thousand-dollar ergonomic chair Cole had insisted on. I’d wheeled it in from the office the day after he’d split. The day after he’d found me here at 2 a.m., muttering to myself like one of my patients.

I can’t sleep anyway, I’d said. As if that explained it.

There’s not much space left on my wall of suspects, but I find room at the periphery between photos of Tyler—Dakota’s jock ex-boyfriend—and Cole. As cruel as it had felt to post it there, to watch Cole’s eyes well when he’d sighted it, then harden to ice, I had my reasons. Never mind that the police had ruled us both out. I know better than anyone. The cops get it wrong sometimes. Way wrong.

I tack up the note I’d scrawled early this morning—Boyd Blackburn, Grieving Parents Group. Says his sister knew Dakota from AP English—along with the public records report I’d uncovered online, after forking out thirty-five bucks. Turns out Boyd is likely a thirty-two-year-old student at ITT Tech who lives in Cuttings Wharf with a fifty-eight-year-old woman named Martha. His mother, I’m guessing. According to Facebook, he has exactly twenty-three friends—none female, with the exception of the aforementioned Martha—and is employed part-time at Reptiles ‘R’ Us. Photo evidence indicates he’d attended Comic-Con 2014 dressed in full Stormtrooper regalia. Which makes him awkward and lonely and, therefore, a prime suspect. I never said my methods were logical.

I sigh and plop down into the gel seat that’s supposed to keep my butt extra comfy while I ponder which of these assholes killed my daughter. But I can’t look away from the Shadow Man. Because most of the wall is taken up with him. Whoever he is.

A few months back, I’d even paid off an administrator at Napa State to find me a copy of the 1989 psychological profile created for the FBI by our former chief psychologist. It told me Shadow Man was a white male between the ages of twenty-five to forty. Possibly former military or police. With unbridled rage toward women that he probably managed to conceal well in his day-to-day life. So, in other words, any number of men. What a waste of five hundred dollars.

With a firm push, my chair rolls across the smooth hardwood and stops with a thump against the wall. I reach up and snag the last article, published eight months ago in The Napa Valley Register. Eight long months. Cole had been gone for twelve. Life marches on for everyone but me. The caught fish, skinned and mounted, glass eyes affixed in dry sockets. With nowhere to go and nothing to do but read the same speculative bullshit the detectives expected would satisfy me.

The Shadow Man Returns After Twenty Years, Claims Another Victim

In a statement to the media on Friday, the Napa County Sheriff’s Department, accompanied by agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, confirmed long-standing speculation that the 2016 unsolved murder of fifteen-year-old Dakota Roark is being investigated as the work of the Shadow Man, the prolific serial killer who terrorized the Napa Valley throughout the better part of two decades. Authorities had speculated that the Shadow Man, who has been linked to the murders of sixteen young Caucasian women between 1976 and 1996, was deceased or incarcerated due to his lengthy cooling-off period. Other experts posited he may have changed his patterns, targeting victims like runaways or prostitutes, victims who would not be missed.

Peter Jacoby, Chief Psychologist at Napa State Hospital, which houses the criminally insane, said, “It’s unusual to see a cooling-off period of this length, but it’s not unheard of. For example, Dennis Rader, known as BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill), committed ten murders during a span of approximately thirty years. Joseph DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer, was arrested more than thirty years after his last known murder. We don’t yet fully understand this peculiar phenomenon, and it certainly flies in the face of what we do know about most serial killers. They are often compulsively driven to kill and to kill again.”

Investigators cited key similarities between the Shadow Man’s early crimes and the Roark murder, including the location of the young girl’s body, which was discovered in the same forested area of Lake Berryessa as Susanna Donnelly, the Shadow Man’s first known victim. All of Shadow Man’s victims disappeared from Napa or Solano Counties, and many of the bodies were recovered in varying states of decay near Lake Berryessa. Autopsy results indicated victims’ bodies, including Roark’s, had been burned following death. Detectives declined to comment on additional similarities due to the sensitive nature of the ongoing investigation.

I stab the pushpin back through the widening hole at the top of the newspaper clipping—take that, Dr. Jackass—and tack it back to the wall. Peter Jacoby had walked me off Napa’s grounds himself and sent me on my way with a patronizing I hope you get the help you need, Mollie, his sweaty little hand resting on my arm like a warning or an invitation. Because I’d tried everything to feel alive again. Even self-destruction. Screwing Peter in his office or in the staff dormitory where he’d stayed when he was on call. Of course, Cole had other words for it when I’d confessed to him. Most of the four-letter variety. As if he had the right.

I stare at my suspect wall until the ink blurs. Until the whole damn thing is a shadow man. Luciana’s voice teases me, mocks me: Don’t you think you’re due for a change?

My face flushes, and I start to sweat. Lungs clamp shut. Brain goes on lockdown. Everything stops but my heart, which scampers on without the rest of me to destinations unknown.

Out. I need out.

I lumber past the disdainful sofa and across the haughty wool rug with its pretentious hand stitching. And finally, through the front door and into the glorious air, which I suck up unapologetically.

I’m still taking it in like a starving child, too fast to savor it, when I hear the growl of a motor up the drive. The separate drive Cole had graveled for me and marked with a fancy sign pronouncing me ROARK PSYCHOLOGY SERVICES. The drive that’s never been traveled by me or anyone else. Except maybe a fox or two.

Too weak to move, I sit on the front step and wait for whoever it is to turn around.

But now I’m nose to nose with a brown Cadillac and its old-man driver. Beneath his cowboy hat, his face is more stricken than mine. Gray and swollen, the same as my mother’s at the very end. He pushes the door open, and his snakeskin boots meet the ground. A strange thought passes through my head like a cloud over the sun. He probably skinned that rattler himself.

“Are you lost?” I ask him, hearing myself from a million miles away. I sound almost normal.

“Don’t think so, Doc,” he says, leaning against the door to stand. “But I don’t feel so good. I haven’t driven in a while. Usually, I take that Senior Shuttle.”

He staggers toward me, a tired wind-up cowboy. One step, then two. Then one more. He reaches out a shaky hand before he quits entirely, bends over, and upchucks right there on Cole’s quarry stones.

I should help the old guy. Make sure he’s okay. But I can’t stop looking at the hood of the Cadillac. The ornament there. The red-and-yellow crest between two crescent halves of a wreath.

Because when you squint it’s not a wreath anymore. It’s a sickle.