Keller races to Ella. She removes the duct tape covering her mouth.
Ella’s words come in rasps. “There’s a man, Mr. Steadman stabbed him.” She’s hyperventilating. “He lured Chris inside … he hit him so hard.”
“Slow down,” Keller says, taking an exaggerated breath through her nose and releasing it from her mouth.
Ella mirrors her. “Mr. Steadman, he’s not who … He’s been pretending…”
Keller yanks at the tape binding Ella’s wrists. It’s too tight. She looks around the garage, spots some pruning shears. She races over, scoops them up. She cuts the tape from Ella’s wrists. Hands her the shears to cut the tape around her ankles. “You get free and you get out and run. Can you do that?”
Ella nods.
Keller moves away from the car, toward the door. Steadman slammed it shut, but it’s open now, the interior dark. She hears a distant shuffling. Raising her weapon in a double grip she aims into the house. If she has a clear shot, so does he. The next instant she pays the price for being a second too slow. A piercing agony splits through her chest just under her shoulder. She slams against the garage wall.
Pain, excruciating pain. Her eyes move to the source of the agony. What in the holy fuck? An arrow is protruding from her.
Keller doesn’t know why there is an arrow, or why Steadman is so good with it, but she does know it’s silent. And lethal. And the bastard was aiming for her heart.
She sees Steadman through the door, nocking in another arrow. She gets off a shot and he retreats inside the house.
The pain is coming in waves now and is threatening to overwhelm her. She grits her teeth. She won’t let it happen. I should wait for backup. But Atticus is inside. If he’s been stabbed, he could be alive. And there’s Chris Whitaker …
She drags herself back to Ella, who looks completely paralyzed by fear.
“What are you still doing here?” Keller whispers. “You need to get out now.”
“But Chris is in there.”
“I’ll get him. You get out. Head up to the corner, out of sight. Help is coming. Wait for them. Bring them here.”
Keller helps Ella to her feet and pushes her toward the garage door.
Keller then takes the shears and cuts off the back end of the arrow with the tail feathers. She can’t angle the shears around to her back to snip off the head, so that’ll have to stay along with the part that’s inside her, keeping her from bleeding out.
She’s back at the door and inches her way into the house, gun barrel up and ready. She finds herself in the kitchen now, running on instinct, smelling blood. Too much blood.
She sweeps her gun unsteadily from left to right, her breathing coming hard. The pain is severe. It’s impinging on her vision, pulsing light and dark.
“Atticus!” she cries out.
There’s a noise from upstairs.
She moves to the living room. On the mantel are photos of Steadman. He’s in hunting gear. Posing with a dead lion in one shot. A slaughtered elephant in another.
What in the…？ How can this be the same man adored by his students? The support system for Ella all those years. She thinks back to the Whitaker file, the key evidence, the knife found in the locker at the school where Steadman works. The phone in Jesse Duvall’s hospital room, where Steadman visited her. Katie McKenzie, pregnant by an older guy. A controlling, obsessive older guy. Katie didn’t flunk out of driving school, she quit to get away from her instructor. She thinks of Hannah Sawyer fighting with her big sister about a secret; a relationship with an older man. Someone who listened, spent hours alone in a car with her, made her feel special.
She hears movement upstairs again.
Then something terrifying happens, some Silence of the Lambs–level shit.
The lights go out. The place is pitch-black.
CHAPTER 70
KATIE
DECEMBER 31, 1999
“You can’t do this to me—I can’t go on without you.”
“We’ve been through this, Dale. It’s for the best. For both of us,” Katie says. They’re tucked behind the video return receptacle in the parking lot. They’ve been there for nearly ten minutes. She needs to get back inside. But he’s acting erratically. One minute penitent, the next aggressive, raising his voice, angry.
“If this is about what happened—the baby—it’s in a better place. It’s better off with—”
“She,” Katie says, “she’s not an it.” She says this with more edge than she’s ever used with him. Katie hadn’t given the beautiful pink bundle a name. She hadn’t earned the right to name her. But the couple had named her: Jessica Marie Duvall. Not that she’ll tell him that. She remembers writing her name on the note. Dear Jessica. The strange feeling of writing to someone you love more than your own life, but who you’ll never see again. It was a condition of the adoption, that they’d give her the note when she turned eighteen.