That last comes as a bellow, shockingly loud, and if he expects me to flinch, he will be damn disappointed. If I don’t do it at the range, at the kick of the gun in my hand, I fucking well won’t show him any weakness here. Good tactic, though. The police back in Kansas could have learned something from Detective Prester. He switched so effortlessly, so quickly, that I have no doubt he’d trained somewhere tough . . . From his accent, maybe Baltimore. He’s broken real criminals.
His problem now is that I’m not one of those.
I stare steadily at the photos, and my heart aches for her, this poor girl. Not because I’ve done anything to her, but because I am human.
“You took most of her skin off while she was still alive,” the detective says, softly, almost like one of the many voices I hear in my head. Like Mel’s voice, for instance. “She couldn’t even scream, because her vocal cords were cut. That’s a hell of a thing. Best we can figure, she was tied down at every possible joint, and her head clamped with some kind of leather band. You started at her feet and worked your way up. We can see the exact point where she died from the process, you know. Living tissue has a reaction. Dead tissue doesn’t.”
I say nothing. I do not move. I try not to imagine it, her terror, her agony, the utter pointless horror of what happened to her.
“You do it for your husband? For Mel? He make you do it for him?”
“I guess you think that makes some kind of sick sense,” I tell him, and I keep my voice just the same pitch, the same volume. Maybe Detective Prester has voices in his head, too. I hope so. “My ex-husband is a monster. Why wouldn’t I be, too? What kind of normal woman would marry a man like that, much less stay with him?”
He stares through me when I look up. I feel the burn, but I don’t move from the gaze. Let him look. Let him see. “When I married Melvin Royal, I did it because he asked. I wasn’t especially pretty. I didn’t think I was especially smart. I’d been taught my whole value to the world was making some man a happy little wife and bearing his children. I was perfect for him. An innocent, sheltered virgin who’d been sold the fantasy of a knight in shining armor coming to love and protect me, forever.”
Prester says nothing. He taps a pen against his notepad, watching me.
“The thing is, yes, I was a fool. I chose to be his perfect stay-at-home wife and mother. Mel made a good living, and I gave him two wonderful kids, and we had a happy home. It was normal. I know you can’t believe that; hell, I can’t believe that I did. But I went through all those years of Christmases and birthdays, PTA meetings and dance recitals, drama club and soccer, and nobody suspected a thing. That’s his gift, Detective. He’s really so very good at playing human that even I couldn’t see the difference.”
Prester lifts his eyebrows. “And here I thought you’d give me the battered-woman defense. Isn’t that the go-to explanation?”
“Maybe,” I tell him. “And maybe most of those women are victims. But Mel wasn’t—” I flash to that one moment in the bedroom when his hands tightened that padded cord around my throat, when I saw the cold, alligator menace behind his eyes and I’d known instinctively that he wasn’t right. “Mel is a monster. But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t be damn good at being everything else, too. How do you think that feels, knowing you slept with that? Knowing you left your kids with it?”
Silence. Prester doesn’t break it this time.
“When I looked into that wrecked garage and saw the truth, something changed. I could see. I could understand. Looking back on it, I saw the hints, the little things that didn’t fit and didn’t make sense, but I know there was no way I could see them at the time, coming from where I was, what I believed.” I take another swallow of the water, and the plastic cracks like a pistol shot. “After my acquittal, I reinvented myself, and I protected my children. You think I’d ever want to do anything for Melvin Royal again? I hate him. I despise him. If he ever shows up in the flesh, I’ll put an entire fucking clip of bullets in his head until there’s nothing left to recognize.”
I mean every word of that, and I know the detective has an instinct for the truth. He doesn’t like that, but fuck what he likes, I am fighting for my life. For the fragile safety I’ve managed to pull together.
Prester says nothing. He just studies me.
“You have no evidence,” I tell him finally. “Not because I’m some Hannibal Lecter level of clever, but because I didn’t do anything to that poor girl. I’ve never seen her before. I’m sorry for what happened to her, and no, I can’t explain why it happened where I live. I wish to God I could. I mean, Mel has followers who worship every word he says, but even then, I don’t know how he convinces someone to do that for him. He’s not Rasputin. He’s not even Manson. I don’t know what makes a person that sick. Do you?”
“Nature,” he says flatly. “Nurture. Brain injuries. Shit, the worst of them got no excuses at all.” He’s said them, not you. I wonder if he recognizes that. “Why don’t you tell me what made Melvin like that, since you’ve had such a close-up view?”
“I have no idea,” I say, and I mean it. “His parents were lovely people. I didn’t see them often, and they were always so fragile. Looking back on it now, I think they were afraid of him. I never realized that before they died.”
“Then what makes you rip up young girls like this?”
I let out a sigh. “Detective. I married a monster and I wasn’t clever enough to recognize it in time. That’s all I did wrong. I didn’t do this.”
We go around and around for about four hours. I don’t ask for a lawyer, though I think about it; the quality of help I’d get in Norton isn’t what I’d call promising. No, I’m better off sticking with the truth. For all his skill, Detective Prester can’t convince me of a lie. He might have managed it in the old, impressionable Gina Royal days, but this isn’t my first go-round, and he knows that. He has nothing. He’s got an anonymous call implicating me, and that could be from a troll who’s discovered my identity, or another person my ex has paid off to stir the pot. Still, his instincts are right . . . It’s no accident, this poor young woman being slaughtered in such a familiar way and dumped in the lake just beyond my home.
Someone’s sending a message.
It has to be Mel.
In a strange, uneasy turn, I actually hope it is, because at least I know Mel. I know where he is. But he has help, I think. Help willing to do exactly what Mel asks. And I won’t lie, that frightens me deeply. I don’t want to find Lanny dead next. Or Connor, slaughtered in his bed. I don’t want to die at the end of a wire noose, burning in unspeakable agony from being flayed alive.
It’s the wee hours when Prester sends me home. Norton is a ghost town, not a single other vehicle on the empty streets, and the deep night gets darker and darker as the squad car turns for the lake. It’s Officer Lancel Graham driving me—I suppose because that means he can head straight home afterward. He doesn’t talk to me. I don’t try to start a conversation. I lean my head against the cool glass and wish I could sleep. I won’t sleep tonight, or probably tomorrow, either. The photos of that murdered young woman will flare into horrific color against my eyelids, and I won’t be able to blink them away.
Mel isn’t haunted by his victims. He always slept soundly and woke rested.
I’m the one who has nightmares.
“We’re here,” says Graham, and I realize that the sedan has stopped, that somehow I closed my eyes and drifted off after all, into an uneasy doze. I thank him as he comes around and opens the door. He even offers me a hand out, which I take for politeness, and then I am unsettled when he doesn’t let go immediately. I can see him—no, feel him watching me.
“I believe you,” he says, which surprises me. “Prester’s on a bad trail, Ms. Proctor. I know you have nothing to do with this. Sorry, I realize it’s tearing up your life.”
I wonder how much Prester has said, and if the news about my other name, about Gina Royal, has started to leak already. I don’t think so. Graham doesn’t have the look of someone who knows about my ex-husband.