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She shakes her head. “Parents can be so dumb.”

I nod with a bemused look. “Yeah, and if you ask me,” I say, “they don’t get smarter with age.”

That cracks her up and as I wait for her to print out the receipt I pick the lone banana from the remainder of the tragic little fruit bowl set aside for Diamond Members—of which I’m not, having never stayed there before. I don’t really like bananas because they make my tongue feel itchy, but I’m getting tired of apples. A second later, I’m out the door and driving toward Leanne Delmont’s childhood home in a neighborhood yet further south of Seattle in Tacoma. I’m pretty good at being a reporter, I think, and I wish that I’d taken more than three business cards from Tracy Lee’s little holder. And it turns out that I’m not a halfway bad driver either. At least, no one is honking at me to go faster any more.

When I arrive my jaw drops. The Delmont residence grabs the edge of a cliff that overlooks the city of Tacoma and the surprisingly pristine looking waters of Commencement Bay. It is by far the biggest and nicest house that I’ve ever seen outside of a magazine. The front door is huge and all glass. I wonder how anyone could keep such a thing clean. Hayden with his dirty little fingers would make a mess of it in about two minutes.

Hayden
. His third day alone. I worry about him. So small. So trusting. And I’ve abandoned him. I want to call him. I need to. But I can’t. At least I don’t think it is a good idea. I don’t know if he and Aunt Ginger are really safe. I could be wrong about my father. He might be watching them too, as he tries to find me.

A woman with spun gold hair and big diamond earrings answers the door. I recognize her immediately. Leanne’s mother, Monique Delmont, was in all the papers. After her daughter’s disappearance and murder, she found purpose in creating and funding a victims’ advocacy group that eventually led to more stringent laws against habitual offenders.

Like the monster that police and prosecutors said killed her only child.

This advocacy group had made life much easier for me. Last night I simply called their number from the motel and arranged to meet with Mrs. Delmont. She told me she’d be happy to help with my article.

“We must never forget our victims and all they’ve gone through,” she said before hanging up.

The gleaming hardwood floor echoes under the heels of her designer shoes as she leads me to a cozy seating area in the corner of a great room that is full of understated elegance. The room is larger than the last two houses our family lived in. She offers coffee and some amazing almond cookies and I am grateful for something other than fruit and granola bars. I know I should stop and have a proper meal, but I can’t. I am running out of time.

She looks at me closely. The look on her face is strange. Sweet. Concerned. I haven’t seen that kind of look in my direction in a long time. If I have, I didn’t acknowledge it. I keep the shell pretty secure.

“Are you all right, dear?” she asks.

I wonder what it is that she thinks is wrong with me.

“Excuse me?” I say in the kindest, most nonthreateningly, attitude-free manner in which anyone could ever utter that pair of words.

Her eyes are deep blue and full of genuine concern. She looks down at my hands. “You’ve chewed your nails to the quick,” she says.

I look down. My fingernails
are
nearly gone. I hadn’t realized that I’d been gnawing them to the point of oblivion. I wonder what other ways my anger, anxiety, fear, and need for revenge is manifesting itself. I feel I am changing in ways that I both welcome and revile. Chewed nails are on the reviled side of the T-chart that makes up my life’s pros and cons.

“It’s just this story,” I say, noticing that one of my fingertips is wet. Have I been chewing my nails in front of her? How could I be so unaware of myself? What
is
wrong with me?

“It has been a long time, but it still hurts me deeply too. I try to keep busy. I try to help, but in the background I still see my Leanne and her father on the sailboat, smiling, having the time of their lives. She went missing from the marina and I play that day over and over.”

“Of course you already know this because of your work, but you’re not alone. All homicide survivors feel that way.” As the words tumble from my lips, I notice her face tighten. I was trying to be thoughtful, but it came off as condescending. I reel back in my words with the only thing that I can think of. I lie to her.

“My sister Courtney was murdered,” I say. “I grieve for her every day.”

Monique Delmont’s face relaxes. She rests her hands on my knee. “Well then, we’re in a sisterhood of unending grief,” she says.

I don’t want to be in any such sisterhood. I want to be in a sisterhood of vengeance and retribution. All of her meetings, her fundraisers, her local talk show appearances, haven’t added up to anything. Not really. As long as the killers breathe in the same air as we do, victims’ families are never free.

We talk about the article I’m supposedly writing and then burrow into the specifics of her case. Apart from the reference to the sailboat, Mrs. Delmont doesn’t mention her husband once in our time together. I don’t know if they’re divorced or if he’s dead. I don’t ask. I don’t think I can take one more bit of the hurt that visits the parents of dead children.

Her gaze is directed out at the waters of Commencement Bay and the tankers and the parade of tugboats that plow through its deep blue waters. She talks about the hell that became her world when Leanne disappeared and was found twenty-two days later in a gravel pit and quarry near Issaquah, Washington. It was hard to pin down exactly what had killed her because there were so many attacks on her body. She’d been beaten. Burned. Stabbed. The medical examiner who testified at trial said that what had been done to the sixteen-year-old was “the most heinous and barbaric attack” she’d ever seen inflicted upon another human being.

When I deplete her tray of cookies, she gets more. She is as nice as she’s beautiful and my questions, I have no doubt, are torturous at best. It’s like pulling the wings off a baby bird, but I carry on. I need to find out what my mother saw in terms of a link between her abduction, Megan’s, Shannon’s, and Leanne’s.

As I already know, the case was attributed to Arnold Cantu, a serial killer who plagued the Pacific Northwest for more than a decade. Like many of his kind, Cantu preyed on a particular type of victim—the blonde, slender, pretty. Leanne was the youngest of his victims and the only one not abducted from a college campus in his murder-spree—a spree that spanned eight terrifying years. At first, Mr. and Mrs. Delmont resisted the notion that their Leanne had been brutalized and killed by Cantu. She was too young. She wasn’t a college student. When it came out that there had been a period of time when Leanne had run away from home and crashed at a house not far from the University of Washington campus in Seattle, they stopped their insistence that she did not fit Cantu’s victim profile and began their focus on victims’ rights.

“Those were really hard times for us, dear,” she says. “I was embarrassed about some of Leanne’s choices and I didn’t want the world to think I was a bad mother. I made it sound as though she was a selfish, indulgent girl who didn’t follow rules whatsoever. Now I am revolted by my characterization of my daughter, but that’s how I felt. She was a wild girl from a privileged background. She never thought of anyone but herself.”

Her heels play like raindrops as she walks over to a portrait of her daughter. It’s propped on the grand piano among other family pictures.

“This is the last photo we ever took of her,” she says. Her tone is wistful. She runs her fingers along a thick braid of gold chains that flow from her neckline.

For the first time, I notice Mrs. Delmont’s fingernails are bitten too.

I gently, reverently, touch the edge of the gilded frame.

“She was beautiful.”

And she was. In the photo, Leanne Delmont sits on a massive driftwood log at Point Defiance Park, an irony not lost on her mother. Or me. She looks over her right shoulder at the camera with a wary, but somewhat shy pose.

I move my gaze from the photo to Mrs. Delmont.

“When did you say this was taken?” I ask.

She takes a breath, remembering. “The week she went missing. She and her father moored off the point and took the skiff in for a picnic.”

I take a deep breath. Then I ask, “Did she have a tattoo?”

Mrs. Delmont looks at me with a searing gaze.

“How did you know that?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I just wondered.”

She knows I’m lying, but she doesn’t press me for more.

“Yes, that awful tattoo. A heart with a 16. She must have gotten it right before she disappeared. Barely healed. I haven’t thought about it in years. Of course, no one knew about it. Another girl, years ago, called me about that very thing. I don’t know why, but I denied it.”

I get up to leave. It’s an awkward retreat. But I know that the other girl who called her was my mother. I know that Leanne’s killer had marked all of his victims. It was gross and disgusting like the way a dog pees on a bush to remind others that the shrubbery is his domain.

“Just who are you?” Monique Delmont asks as I ricochet my way from the great room to the front door.

I don’t answer. Not because I’m rude or ill mannered. But because I don’t really know.

Chapter Thirteen

Cash: $20.

Food: Three apples and a banana from the front desk. Six or seven almond cookies.

Shelter: Best Western Motel, Kent, Washington.

Weapons: Gun, scissors, ice pick.

Plan: Get a grip on what I need to do.

THE RED MESSAGE LIGHT BLINKS
at me as I throw myself on the bed neatly made by the woman I stole tip money from this morning. That doesn’t feel particularly good. As the events of the day sink in, I know one thing for certain—I cannot stay here another night. Despite the fact that I’ve already paid for the room, I have to get on the move. I need to find Alex Rader. I’m all but certain that Mom’s carefully scattered breadcrumbs have taken me as far as I can go. I know now without any trace of doubt that the three girls plus Mom were linked by the actions of a very sick man.
My father
. I get that. I don’t need to run around playing reporter to find out any more about that. There’s nothing to find. I ignore the blinking light as I lay out my weapons. The gun, the bullets—those were gifts from Mom. I also have the scissors I bought at the drug store in Port Orchard; the ice pick taken from my aunt’s house. Joining my pitiful arsenal is a bottle of Xanax that I liberated from Monique Delmont’s medicine cabinet when I used her bathroom. It isn’t a poison and I can’t imagine exactly how the drug would help me when I intend to put a bullet through the very center of bio dad’s forehead.

Maybe the Xanax is something I need for myself?

In order to kill him, I have to know where he lives. I unfold the Western Washington map taken from the brochure rack in the lobby. I already know that Alex Rader is not listed in any online directory—somehow he’s managed to elude any kind of an internet trail. I’m guessing that’s because he’s connected to law enforcement and they have people on staff to—in the irony of all ironies—ensure that he’s safe from the creeps he’s sent to prison.

I go over the events as I know them.

Shannon was taken on Saturday, July 6th and found ten days later, on Tuesday, July 16th. She had been dead for a while—maybe as long as three days.

Megan was taken on Saturday, July 13th, and her body was found twelve days later, on July 25th, a Thursday. She had been dead a few days.

Leanne was likely taken on Saturday, July 20th and her body was found twenty-two days later, on August 11th, a Sunday. She was pretty badly decomposed, likely a result of the warm weather that hit the Seattle area. I’d seen another article from the same date when scanning the material online at the North Bend library. It featured a Bellevue couple that had painted their brown lawn green in protest at HOA restrictions on watering in their exclusive neighborhood.

It passes through my mind that some people have no ability to measure what’s truly important. I’m not sure I do, but I think I’m on the right track.

It dawns on me then that I don’t know for sure when Mom was abducted, but I know it had to be
after
Leanne’s vanishing. I’m thinking Saturday, July 27th. Alex Rader, it seems, had kept his Saturdays very busy during that particular month of July. In addition, I think that there may have been an overlap in the victims. I remembered Mom’s note about Leanne with a shiver.

I saw her.

Maybe Mom wasn’t the only one who saw another girl wherever it was that he’d kept them?

WHEN I CAN NO LONGER avoid the staccato strobe of the blinking light, I pick up the phone and it goes to voicemail immediately.

“Ms. Lee, this is Debra Blume. I was going to try your office number, but I remembered you said you were staying at the Best Western. I need you to call me back as soon as you get this message.”

The tone in her voice is anything but calm.