Keeping the crime scene clear was the hardest part—they didn’t just need the room analyzed, they needed the corner of the parking lot where we’d left Simon Watts, and all the space in between. Mills and another agent named Rebecca Sutton were working with the local police to collect as much evidence as they could, but guests and tenants kept poking their heads out of the other motel rooms, asking what was going on and were they allowed to leave and who had died and were they in danger and a million other questions. If the police didn’t get to them fast enough they just walked out, right past the crime-scene tape, demanding to know if they were under arrest. Mills and Sutton set the local cops to interviewing them as quickly as possible, getting their IDs and statements on record, while the two agents talked to the motel manager, trying to get contact info for any guests that weren’t in their rooms. I, meanwhile, was unceremoniously handcuffed to a pipe in Agent Sutton’s bathroom. I would have been offended, after promising Mills I wasn’t going to run away, but once again he knew me too well. I’d been lying through my teeth.
The pipe I was chained to ran up through the floor and into the bathroom sink, and it was solid enough that I eventually gave up trying to move or break it. Instead I took stock of my situation, studying as much of the room as I could see. I wasn’t actually in the bathroom, per se, just next to it—the motel room had a tiny tiled room with a toilet and a shower next to a kind of alcove with a sink and a mirror. Next to that was a small, doorless closet, which led out into the main room. If I stretched as far as possible I could just peek around the corner of the wall to see a small desk, a dresser with a flat-screen TV, and beyond that, the door and a curtained window. There were two beds as well, but I couldn’t see more than an inch of each. I knew from when I’d been led in that Agent Sutton had laid out her suitcase on one of the beds, apparently preferring that to putting any clothes in the dresser.
The sink and bathroom, on the other hand, had a few resources I might be able to use. Sutton had cleared out her personal belongings, including a safety razor—I don’t know what they thought I was going to do with a safety razor, but they’d kind of made a point of it, so whatever. Her toothbrush, had she left it, might have been a lot more useful: I might have been able to file it down or break it in half to create a sharp point, not so much to stab someone as to try to pick the lock on the handcuffs. I doubt either would have worked, as I’m not exactly a master thief. I really need to learn how to pick a lock.
Of the objects they did not take away from me, there was little I could use. I had two plastic cups, individually wrapped in thin plastic bags. I had travel-size bottles of shampoo and conditioner, and a small bar of white soap. I had an empty black garbage can, about the size of a fast-food bag; it was pretty flimsy plastic and probably wouldn’t work well as a weapon, but you never knew. Maybe I could snap that into usable, bladelike pieces? Maybe, but I didn’t know how that would help me. Unless I planned to straight-up murder both agents—and somehow managed to kill the first one without alerting the second—hurting them in any way would only make my life harder, not easier. And I didn’t want to kill them, anyway. They were only doing what they thought was right.
What did I want? I could try to leave Lewisville again, but where would I go? More importantly, I didn’t think I wanted to leave anymore. Yes, I’d decided to leave before, but then Mills had found me and told me that he’d known I would run, and I didn’t like that. It made me feel dirty, to think that I had a reputation for running away from problems. Sure, I was running from the FBI and half a dozen other agencies and groups that wanted me, but I didn’t think of myself as a runner. I fixed things, didn’t I? I made things better, no matter how much it hurt me in the process. And yet here I was, the guy who runs away from stuff. I didn’t want to be the guy who runs away from stuff.
But I didn’t exactly want to be the guy who lives forever in top-secret government custody, either. There had to be a middle ground. “The guy who slips away from the feds but sticks around to stop the Withered” felt like a good thing to be, but I had no idea how to actually pull it off. I didn’t even know where the Dark Lady was, let alone how to kill her. And who knew how many other Withered she’d managed to gather. Assu couldn’t be the only one.
Thinking about other Withered reminded me of the feral woman out in the desert, and at that thought my arm seemed to throb again, and I realized I’d never cleaned the wounds. Soap and water were the only things I had, but in this case that was exactly what I needed. I ran the tap until it was just shy of being too hot to touch, and then stuck my right arm in it and winced at the pain. My left arm, cuffed to the pipe, was too far to reach, but I eventually managed to wash the long, bloody scratches on both arms by soaking the one and then crouching so I could rub both arms together. It took a while, and I got pretty soaked, but at least I was reasonably certain I wasn’t going to get an infection. I turned off the water and sat on the floor, blowing out a long, exhausted sigh, and watched a cockroach scuttle across the linoleum in front of me. Okay, so maybe I still wasn’t super clean. At least I felt a little more clearheaded.
I didn’t squish the cockroach; most people would have, but I had a rule. No harming living things, even if those living things were roaches. Sorry if that’s gross. We all do what we must to survive.
I stretched myself out to full length again, looking into the main room, hoping I’d see something I missed. The desk had a phone, but it was a few feet out of reach, and who would I call, anyway? The police were already here, and they weren’t on my side, and I didn’t know anybody else’s phone number. Maybe if I could reach the lamp I could use that as a weapon, but again: what would be the point? I needed to escape, not hurt anyone. I looked at the rest of the items on the desk: a little binder with hotel info; a plastic card explaining how to use the pay-per-view; a notebook and a pen; a coffee maker—
—wait. A pen. The first thing I’d seen that I might be able to use to pick the lock on my handcuffs. But the desk was still out of reach. I stretched again, reaching my arm as far as I could, grinding my face into the wall to gain even one more inch of distance, but it didn’t work. My arm wasn’t long enough … but my leg was. I looked around for the cockroach, didn’t see it anywhere, and laid down on the ground, stretching my legs toward the desk. I was just able to hook my foot around the nearest table leg, and pulled it toward me, praying that it wasn’t nailed down or stuck to the wall. It came about a foot toward me until something stopped it—probably the cord from the phone or the lamp or the coffee maker, or maybe even all three. I managed to get both of my feet around it now, locking it between my ankles, and pulled it toward me with all of my strength. It gave abruptly, flying toward me as whatever had been holding it back suddenly broke or came loose; the lamp fell backwards off the far side, crashing against the floor and shattering the bulb.
I had to be fast. I climbed to my feet, grabbed the pen off the desk, and began picking it apart to get at the useful bits inside. It was a clicky pen, which meant it had a spring and various little plastic pieces; the spring was too soft to work, and the plastic too thick or too short. I stared at all the pieces for a second, then dropped the outer casing on the floor and stomped on it, over and over, until I managed to break it. It came apart in jagged, pen-length shards, and with my teeth and fingernails I managed to carve one of these down into a shape slim and pointy enough to fit into the keyhole on the cuffs. I probed the lock carefully, trying to feel it out, wishing I knew more about it. People in movies picked handcuff locks all the time—was it really possible or was that just a Hollywood thing? I felt resistance in several places, but couldn’t get any of the inner mechanisms to move.
The motel room door rattled; someone was coming in. I shoved my makeshift lock pick into the waistband of my pants and started fiddling with the broken pen bits instead; there was no way to hide what I’d done, and whoever was coming in would obviously take away my tools, but if I focused on the wrong tools maybe they would, too.
Agent Mills was talking as he came into the room:
“… call headquarters again and request—oh, for crying out loud. John? What the hell are you doing?”
“Don’t come back here,” I said calmly, “it’s a surprise.”
One of the agents pulled the desk away from the entrance to my alcove, and then Sutton stepped around with her gun aimed straight for my center of mass. “Drop it.”
“I just said don’t come back here,” I told her. “At least Mills listens to me.”
“He’s trying to pick the lock with a pen case,” said Sutton loudly, and then she motioned toward me with the gun. “I said drop it!”
“Put it down, John,” said Mills from around the corner; the entry was too small for both of them to stand in. “You can’t pick handcuffs with a pen case.”
I kept working on the lock, though the fragment in my hand was too big to actually accomplish anything. “She can’t shoot me, I’m too important.”
“Ugh,” said Sutton, “I hate him already.”
“Use your Taser,” said Mills. Sutton smiled, holstered her weapon, and pulled out her stun gun instead.
I stopped working. “Are you really going to tase me?”
“Are you really going to let me?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Let you or make you?”
“It’s definitely ‘let,’” said Sutton. “I’m in a really pissy mood, and I would absolutely love to pull this trigger.”
I paused, then put up my hands. “What is it with you guys and stun guns?”
“Good choice,” she said. “Now put all those pen pieces in the garbage can and, while you’re at it, all that stuff on the counter, too. Then hand the can to me.”
I scraped up the broken pen bits, feeling the hidden fragment bite into my waist as I moved, and put them in the garbage can, then stood up and dropped in the plastic cups as well. I put my hand over the soap and stopped, looking back at her with a question: “Can I keep the soap?”
“You can’t keep anything you actually want,” said Sutton.
“I hate soap.”
“Put it in the can.”
I rolled my eyes. “You feds get so uptight when one of your friends is gruesomely murdered, geez.” I dropped the soap in the can, made a big show about looking for anything else, and then handed the whole thing to her. She took it carefully, keeping the stun gun trained on me with her other hand. I held up my hands to show her I had nothing left, and she shook her head. Whatever patience she had left, I’d worn it out.
Why did I always do that?
“You can’t pick handcuffs with a pen anyway,” said Mills. “You need a bobby pin.”
“Hey, can I borrow a bobby pin?”
“Can I shock him?” asked Sutton.
“Just ignore him,” said Mills. “He’s just trying to get under your skin.”
“Please don’t say it that way,” said Sutton.
“Sorry,” said Mills, “I wasn’t thinking.”
Sutton walked out of my field of view, and I thought about the dead agent just a few doors down, in the other room. I softened my voice. “Did you know him very well?”
“Don’t talk,” said Sutton.
“Agent Murray,” I said. “I’m very sorry. He seemed … well I guess I never met him. But I’m sure he was … nice?”
“Is this you being sensitive?” asked Mills.
I smiled, though no one could see me. “Yeah, I kind of suck at it.”
“Why are we talking to him?” asked Sutton.
“Because he’s been here longer than we have,” said Mills, “and he’s really kind of terrifyingly good at our job.”
“How good?” asked Sutton.
“According to the timeline I’ve pieced together,” said Mills, “he got into town about the same time we did. And while we piddled around and got some clues and whatever, he found and killed a Withered, all on his own.”
Sutton whistled.
I couldn’t help but smile again, even if it wasn’t entirely true.
I heard them sit—a creaking chair and a settling bed—so I pulled out my hidden lock pick and started working again, as quietly as I could. “I’m sorry about your friend,” I said. “Are you going to let me go so I can stop anyone else from being killed along with him?”
“Agent Fletcher Murray was a friend of ours,” said Mills. “I only met him a few weeks ago, but Sutton’s known him for much longer. He was a good agent, and a good man.”
“So, let me go,” I said again.
“What can you tell us about the Dark Lady?” asked Mills.
I sighed. “I take it that’s a no.”
“Sorry,” said Mills.
“Then why should I help you, if I’m just going to get locked up?” I said. “Shouldn’t I get something out of it?”
“You get the knowledge that the killer is stopped,” said Sutton. “If the profile he wrote up on you is correct, that’ll be enough.”
I dug into a new area of the lock, feeling carefully to see if it worked. “Oh, Mills, you wrote a profile on me? That’s sweet.”
“Who’s Mills?” asked Sutton.
“That’s what he calls me,” said Mills.
I stopped, looked up, then shook my head. “I knew you gave me a fake name,” I said. “Agent Sutton, what’s his real one?”
“Why’d you give him a fake name?” asked Sutton.
“Just messing with him,” said Mills.
“You’re both idiots,” said Sutton. “We have an actual adult job here, do you realize that?”
“Let me guess,” I said. “You’re … Max Grit. Wally Washington. Jehoshaphat … Hamsterlicker.”
“Fletcher is dead!” shouted Sutton. “Will someone please start taking this seriously?”
“My name is Sam,” said Mills. The room went silent. “Sam Harris. I didn’t want him to know because that’s his father’s name.”
I felt my face go inert.
“John used to call himself the Son of Sam,” said Mills—or Harris, I guess. “It wasn’t a big thing, it’s not like he was trying to emulate David Berkowitz or anything, he just … he had that connection to his father. And it’s virtually the only connection he has. And names have power, so I figured it was best to just leave mine out of this.”
“They don’t have power over me,” I said, but it was only a whisper. It was shocking to me—embarrassing to me—how profoundly just the mention of my father could affect me. I hadn’t seen him in years, so why did this bother me so much?
Sometimes I think the only way I’ll ever have peace is to just find my father and kill him.
“You should have told me you gave him a fake name,” said Sutton.
“I know,” said Harris, “but I didn’t want to make a big deal of it.”
I got back to work with my plastic lock pick.
“John,” he said, “you can call me whatever you want.”
“I’m good,” I said.
“You ready to talk?”
“I said I’m good,” I repeated. It well after midnight and I still hadn’t slept, but I didn’t want to. I hadn’t been able to solve this on my own, but I always worked better with someone to bounce ideas off of. Max or Marci or Brooke. If I could get them talking and figure this out, maybe I could get the info I needed and then slip out when no one was looking. I took a breath. “Ask your questions.”
“We want to know about the Dark Lady,” said Sutton. “The man in the parking lot, Simon Watts, kept talking about her. It was practically all he could say.”
“He didn’t kill your friend,” I said.
“Oh no?” asked Sutton. “And how do you know that?”
“He wasn’t bloody,” I said. “Anyone who did that much damage to someone would be covered with blood, but he didn’t have a drop on him.”
“He had blood on his shoes,” said Agent Harris. “The rest could have been caught by a smock or a jumpsuit.”
“Did you find one?” I asked. “I assume you’ve checked his car and the garbage and everywhere else?”
“We haven’t found it yet,” said Sutton, “but that doesn’t mean we never will, and that doesn’t mean he’s innocent.”
“Simon Watts tried to drown me a few days ago,” I said. “He may have also drowned Kathy Schrenk. This kind of ritualized corpse is not his MO, and it’s not the Dark Lady’s.”
“So, she told him to stay here to throw us off,” said Agent Harris.
“He’s definitely some kind of a message,” I said. “It just depends on what she knows about who’s chasing her.”
“Well, we know about the Withered,” said Sutton.
“Yes,” I said, still probing at the cuffs, “but does she know that you know? If she thinks you know nothing, then she’s probably trying to hand you an open-and-shut case: blood on his shoes, acting deranged, boom. Another visionary killer locked up, and you all go on your way, and she carries on unmolested.”
“But what are the odds of that?” asked Sutton. “It’s more likely that she knows everything.”
“Everything, everything?” I asked. I found a part of the lock that seemed to move when I levered the shard of pen against it and tested it cautiously. “If she knows about everything, then this is a declaration of war. She can’t be handing us a suspect because she knows that we know that it can’t actually be either of the obvious suspects: it’s not Watts and it’s not the Dark Lady herself.”
“How do we know it’s not the Dark Lady?” asked Agent Harris.
“Because you have me,” I said. “And I know how she and her … thralls, or whatever … actually function. Like I told you—they came after me once already. So, because I am here, I can tell you what I know, and she wouldn’t bother trying to misdirect us after that. Which means she’s calling us out.”
“Like Rack did in Fort Bruce,” said Sutton. “Find the investigators and target them directly.”
“That’s why I asked for backup,” said Agent Harris. “We need all the help we can get.”
“No we don’t,” I said. The mechanism in the lock felt like it would probably work—all I had to do was push on it and it would pop open. Which would probably make an audible click, so I had to wait for the right time. I kept the plastic lock pick in exactly the right place, waiting, and kept talking. “You’re not thinking this through. That was the scenario where we assume she knows everything, but I don’t think she does. I don’t think she knows you have me.”
“Come on,” said Agent Harris, “how could she not know that?”
“Assume she’s done her homework,” I said. “She knows about Rack and Fort Bruce. She obviously knows that I exist because she sent Watts to drown me. And she definitely knows about you because A) the FBI’s been hunting the Withered for decades and B) you’ve been asking about me all over town. If she has even one mind-controlled thrall on the police force, she knows that you’re here and that—this is the key—you and I are not working together. All she saw today was you looking for me and me leaving town. And by the time we got together Agent Murray was already dead. Even if that homeless woman in the desert is one of her thralls and is somehow reporting back to her, a murder like that takes a long time, and whatever message the Dark Lady was trying to send to us was already in place.”
“Yeah,” said Sutton, “I can see where you’re going with this. If the Dark Lady didn’t know we had access to your information, then leaving Watts here to misdirect us is the most plausible scenario. He tells us he did it on her orders, and we have no reason to doubt him. Which means she’s trying to make it look like she did it, which … means she probably didn’t. What?”
“So there’s another Withered,” said Agent Harris. “The Dark Lady is covering for someone else.”
“Exactly,” I said. “But why? Why try to hide that there’s another Withered in Lewisville?”
“Because concealing information is always valuable,” said Sutton. “Why did Jehoshaphat Hamsterlicker here try to hide his real name from you? Deception is valuable for its own sake, especially in a war.”
“First,” I said, “I love you. Second, I don’t think it’s that easy. And even if it is, we shouldn’t be content with an easy answer. Yes, she’s gathering an army, but is she ready to start a war? The only other Withered we know for sure she brought here was Assu, the fire guy, and he’s dead. This … this almost feels like Rain’s trying to throw us off while she gets some more pieces in place.”
“Rain?” asked Agent Harris.
“The Dark Lady,” I said. “That’s her name, or at least a name she’s known by.”
“Why would she try to throw us off by painting a target on herself?” asked Sutton. “There’s no way.”
“But she did,” I said. “And we have to consider that. Profiling a killer isn’t about denying what doesn’t make sense, it’s about finding the circumstances where the parts that don’t make sense actually do.” I paused. “What if the other Withered she’s covering for was not acting under her orders?”
Agent Harris grunted.
I nodded, though they couldn’t see me. This made sense. “If she really wanted us to think this was her, she would have tried to make it look like one of the others; like a drowning. That’s what brought you to Lewisville in the first place. But she didn’t, which might mean that the killing was not sanctioned, just like Minaker wasn’t sanctioned. It was another Withered, acting without oversight, drawing undue attention where it shouldn’t be drawn. She had to do something to throw us off, and Simon Watts was a half-measure—the best she could do under the circumstances. So, there’s an uncontrolled Withered in the mix, and that is very, very not good.”
“You’d rather have them working together?” asked Agent Harris.
“The Dark Lady is gathering an army,” I said. “Two Withered working together would be frightening, I’ll grant you, but who knows how many we’re going to get by the time she’s done. And if she can’t control them, who knows what’s going to happen. Assu came because she called him, but he wasn’t in any hurry to buckle down and start taking orders. There could be dozens more, all in one place, and all just as uncontrolled and dangerous as whoever killed Agent Murray.”
“So what else do you know about her?” asked Sutton. “All we’re doing is scaring ourselves—we need solid info that we can actually act on.”
I nodded again. “Her name is Rain, like I said. ‘Run from Rain.’”
“Run from Rain,” said Agent Harris.
I looked up. “You’ve heard that before?”
“What?” he said. “No, I was … just thinking about something else. We’ve got the old transcripts from Elijah Sexton, the Withered you questioned in Fort Bruce, and on one occasion, talking about Rack, he grouped him in with another Withered named Ren. Rack and Ren.”
“Wrack and Ruin,” said Sutton.
I froze, terrified by the implications that my brain was slowly working through. “We need to get out of here.”
“We can’t leave,” said Agent Harris.
“What do you know?” asked Sutton.
I stood up. “Our historian in Fort Bruce, Nathan, he theorized that Rack was an original name—not a title, like some of the Withered used, but the old, old, ten thousand-year-old name that Rack had had back when he was still human.”
“Still human?” asked Sutton.
“They started as humans and gave something up to become Withered,” I explained. “We still don’t know how they did it, but Nathan’s theory is that Rack as a proper name eventually became the proto-Indo-European word for king. Rex and rey and who knows how many others. That he was so powerful so long ago that our word for a ruler is literally just his name. And I was so distracted by Rain meaning ‘rain’ that it never occurred to me it might mean ‘queen.’”
“Reina,” said Sutton. “Regina. Damn it all to hell, Sam, this isn’t just a Withered—it’s the Withered queen.”
“We can’t leave,” said Agent Harris.
“The soldiers are still a few hours out,” said Sutton. “I’m going to call them off. If there’s a mind-controlling demon queen in town, the last thing we want are a bunch of guys with guns.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Did I tell you that I love you? You’re officially the smartest FBI agent I have ever worked with.”
“I don’t want to,” said Agent Harris.
“You don’t want to call them off?” asked Sutton. “Are you kidding?”
I stretched out to try to look around the corner. “You didn’t call them off in Dillon and look what happened.”
“I don’t want to,” he said again.
“Agent Harris?” said Sutton. “Sam, are you all right?”
My heart skipped a beat. If he didn’t look all right, and he was saying the things he was saying …
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said. “But the Dark Lady says I have to.”
“Sam!” shouted Sutton.
And then someone fired a gun.